OTBWY on 18 September 2018
| pokoko said: When the PS1 first released, I was a Nintendo fan. That is to say, I thought I was a Nintendo fan. I associated the exclusive games on Nintendo systems with Nintendo themselves. No one knew at the time that much of that had to do with Nintendo forcing developers into exclusivity in North America. As it turned out, I was more a fan of third-party games than those developed by Nintendo. Kind of ironic that Nintendo's own actions would cause me to realize that. At first, I wanted and expected Nintendo to crush Playstation. Nintendo owned the North American market and seemingly had complete control of developers and even retailers. However, Final Fantasy 6 was by FAR my favorite game at that point and the TV commercials for Final Fantasy 7 made my jaw drop. It became the main reason I bought a PS1 (the first major purchase of my life, made from Birthday and Christmas money and probably a lot of help from my mom). Turning traitor, though a bitter pill at first, turned out to be a fantastic decision for me, as the PS1 became my favorite console of all time with franchises like Final Fantasy and Suikoden. People talk a lot about console manufacturers being arrogant but I don't think anything will ever touch Nintendo during that period. I remember a Square employee saying that the impression he had was that Nintendo wasn't troubled much over losing Square. They thought they had control of the market and it's likely they figured companies like Square would come crawling back. As for Square, they've fallen, over time, from being my favorite developer to a company I don't really care much about. Besides their games, one of the things I dislike about them is the old-fashioned way they dole out exclusives in order to curry favor with the console manufacturers. |
Well, Square is a company that has changed a lot over time, from NES to SNES, to Playstation (turning into Square Enix) and then multiplatform more or less. It is a very different company from the nineties at least. Also the biggest change came after the huge flop that was the Final Fantasy movie (not Advent Children). It almost bankrupted them. It is all there in the article.
