Square-Enix has really been on a roll as of late

[Riachu]

cwbys21 said:

memory2zack said:
I wouldn´t call FFXII: RV a great game, nowhere near that. But me, as a fan of Ivalice played it of course. Eventually a remake of FFVII will come true, but the right time (assemble the original team) and experience with next-gen consoles is needed.

I do agree that SE is on a roll. The original Squaresoft always produced first class games, but had a rather bad international marketing. Enix was always publishing good games in Japan, but never succeeded internationally. When these 2 companies merged together things started to go bad, as many veterans left and the new company was mainly focused on making quick cash-ins rather than good games. Right now SE has found a good balance between quality, quantity and mass-marketing and its in-house and external studios have risen dramatically in quality, but also in numbers as well.

Actually, what happened was Square made The Spirits Within and lost 100 million dollars on it. That put Sakaguchi in the dog house at Square and because they weren't big enough to take such a loss they sold off part of their business to Sony and then merged with Enix. Sakaguchi decided to leave rather than work on nothing projects while being in the dog house. That $100 million loss caused FF11 to become an MMO to get the monthly revenue and since it was rumored to have around 1 million paying customers at its peak, it did just that. Also because of the losses from the movie they decided to make FFX-2 because they would be able to reuse a lot of stuff from FFX. I realize lots of people didn't like that game, but I haven't met one in real life. All the spin offs we have seen from there are probably because FFX-2 sold so well, as do most of the spin offs. If people will keep buying it, it would be bad business to stop making them.

 FF11 was always meant to be an MMO and was being planned before The Spirits Within bombed.  Square and enix merged because Square was going to go bankrupt while enix were publishing Star Ocean 3 which was not only one of the biggest JRPGs in Japan at the time but the game itself cost a lot of money to make