I was a gigantic Square and Enix fan growing up - so much so that I imported a lot of their games (importing was fairly normal for fans in the 90s).
With the Square vs Nintendo thing, I felt more burned by Nintendo than Square in the long run. Nintendo as a hardware manufacturer began to feel very cult-like with their whole “Dream Team” class of second party developers, and later totally dissing RPGs as a genre alongside RPG fans - as almost justification for the use of expensive cartridges (which was really felt by European gamers considering our N64 games cost anywhere between 30% to 3 times as much as brand new PSX games). In addition, Nintendo’s cult-like fans got very cunty toward RPG fans (especially Square fans); and considering I mostly hung out on Nintendo forums - I found myself in constant defensive arguments for liking FF7, FF8, Xenogears, and more. So yeah, I had a bit of an antagonistic relationship with a lot of Nintendo fans during the N64 and Gamecube era despite considering myself one. It was like being on the wrong side of the wall.
Then in the Wii and DS era Nintendo fans lightened up significantly.. But there was still this “Square was only good until the end of the 16-but era, and FF9 because it is kind of like Crystal Chronicles” element in the Nintendo fan base that survived from the Gamecube era... but for the most part, a lot of Wii and DS fans were also fans of FF7, 8, and Xenogears, and that had been a very rare thing during the N64/Gamecube era.
I hope these releases really end that hostility once and for all, because I think a lot of Nintendo fans missed out on some phenomenal games as a result of their dogmatic biases and game anti-fandom.
I’d LOVE to see more Square back catalogue stuff, including their gameboy RPGs which IMO are incredibly under appreciated (especially Final Fantasy Legend 2).
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
