Hiku said:
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. |
Your experience sounds a bit similar to mine. And Suikoden 2 ended up being my favorite rpg to this day.
Though I didn't get a PS1. Rather I played PS1 games on my friend's consoles, and which is how I got to play games like Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9 and Tactics. (Usually I would borrow someone's console to play through a long RPG)
By the time FF7 came out I had never played a Final Fantasy game before that. I had played some other rpgs, like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. But not a Final Fantasy games. In spite of that, I was very interested in the title.
At some point throughout Nintendo 64's lifespan, probably when Playstation 2 was announced, I decided my next primary console would not be a Nintendo console, but a Sony one.
I would buy a Nintendo console as a secondary system later on. Or so I thought, each generation. But for one reason or another, I never ended up getting a Nintendo home console again.
Final Fantasy played a part in my decision to switch over. And the backwards compatibility of the PS2 let me catch up on all the games I missed out on. (Suikoden 1 and 2 were among them.)
But like you, I realized that I was primarily interested in third party games. For N64 I pretty much only bought Nintendo or Rare games. Because the third party games that would normally be released on a Nintendo system, as they were on the SNES, were released on Playstation instead. And as good as Nintendo's games are, they're just one company, and didn't scratch my itch when it came to certain genres like rpgs and fighting games, which were my two main favorite genres at the time.
Square Enix are no longer my favorite developer though, and I don't blindly look forward to their next new rpg as I used to. They've been hit and miss for me since FF12. But some times they're able to blow away my expectations, like with Nier: Automata.
Final Fantasy 7 coming to a Nintendo home console makes me feel nostalgic about everything that happened up until this point. But it's not the mark of everything returning to the way things were before N64. We're actually still in a similar situation to back then, where the mainline new Final Fantasy games are not being ported to Nintendo's home console. At least not yet, but I'm not holding my breath that we'll ever see FF 15 and FF7 Remake on there, for technical reasons, just like 20 years ago.
Though the importance of these Final Fantasy games are not as they were 20 years ago either. So it's not a big deal.
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