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sc94597 on 26 December 2014
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outlawauron said:
sc94597 said:
outlawauron said:

They've made one great game ever, a couple of good games, and some meh games. Not sure how you can make that strecth unless you're giving them credit for all partnerships (Brawl, SRT, etc).

They fit right in with Tri-Ace, Namco, and From Software.

What was SE's great (internally developed) game last generation? Level 5 had DQIX, but what did SE bring to the RPG space that was great? Only game I can think of is TWEWY, and that wasn't an example of the great budgets you were talking about. If you look at Square Enix on metacritic, the highest reviewed games in the past 5 years were final fantasy, dragon quest, chrono trigger remakes/ports to IOS and non-RPG's from Eidos. I think that was spemanig's point. Despite SE's illustrious history, they did very little great last generation and it wasn't their high-budget endeavors that they were acclaimed for, while Monolith Soft with Nintendo's modest budget created their "one great game." SE's last "great" high-budget role-playing game was in the PS2 era, on the other hand. The best Japanese developed RPG's of last generation were developed by Monolith, Atlus, Level 5 and From-Software on relatively modest budgets - not Square-Enix's largesse. It seems to me that as long as a developer has a stable budget source and freedom (which were Monolith's problems) the size of the budget matters very little in what they can achieve other than some sacrifices in aesthetic choices (whether to use CGI vs. in-game cutscenes for example.) 

I never mentioned just last generation, but I still would pick Square. Even my love affair with FF13 and FF14 aside. There's plenty more that they were involved that were a lot of fun like Crisis Core, War of the Lions, KH: BBS, Dissidia, Lord of Vermillion (JP only), 4 Heroes of Light, and Type 0. It's harder to compare a publisher/developer to a sole developer, but it's not like Square wasn't producing good games last generation. All of the above (and Last Remnant arguably) are better than Project X Zone and Disaster: Day of Crisis (ie. 2 of the last 3 games they've developed). 

Spemanig mentioned last generation though. From your post it seemed to imply that a RPG developer needs an A-tier budget to produce multiple great Role-Playing games and only Level 5 and Square-Enix are capable of those budgets on a consistent basis. However, the opposing point was that despite having these huge budgets Square-Enix wasn't anywhere better off in producing these games than other developers (I would give the trophy for last generation to Atlus, to be honest.) I ,  in particular, wasn't commenting on the good games (Monolith has produced more good games than bad, its entire Xeno meta series being quite solid and Baten Kaitos and Soma Bringer were "good".) I was more commenting on the great games, which you mentioned Monolith only produced one (I'd argue Xenogears and Xenoblade are two great games.) That made me wonder what was the "great" game, not just good game, that Square-Enix produced last generation? Atlus had Persona, Monolith had Xenoblade, From Software had Souls, and Level 5 had Dragon Quest IX (which honestly I do think SE should be given some credit as well.) The only Role-playing game by Square Enix that seemed to get universal praise was TWEWY.