Final Fantasy, A historical perspective by a fan of Final Fantasy and Nintendo.

[Final-Fan]

I pretty much agree with Shadow1980.  I was a bigger fan of the N64 and its amazing first/second party offerings, but I was fortunate enough to have a PS1 as well—I mainly remember it as my RPG machine.  My family is middle class (not upper middle class) and my brother and I were able to get a "two kids, two systems" policy.   Each of us was the primary owner, so to speak, of one system, so that probably kept fighting over them to a minimum.   In 1996 we changed from a Nintendo/Sega family to a Nintendo/Sony family.

I'm skeptical of the comments that the hardware of the N64 was part of the schism beyond the obvious CD/cartridge issue.  It is fairly well known that the N64 has a lot of hardware advantages over the PS1, though the PS1 had some advantages too, notably in the sound chip.  It was also significantly easier to develop for, which I suspect has a lot to do with the comments in that article considering the systems hadn't even come out yet at the time they are talking about.  Either way, I seriously doubt that any hardware differences made even a quarter of the difference that CD vs. cartridge did to Square.  Square's vision for its flagship games was becoming increasingly focused on cinematics and other things the limited storage of the N64 cartridges just couldn't accomodate, so they had even stronger reasons than most to jump ship.   The rest is history.  

Last edited by Final-Fan - on 26 September 2018