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SanAndreasX on 14 April 2020
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Spike0503 said:
SanAndreasX said:

It's possible to depart with a company on amiable terms, but if you poach some of the company's other talent after you leave, you can make a safe bet that any goodwill you had when you left will be gone no matter how amiable the original parting was. At the time, Dragon Quest still made a lot more money for Nintendo than Final Fantasy did. So I can definitely see Yamauchi being disappointed but accepting over Square leaving but going apeshit over the idea that Square took Enix with them.

It would be nice to get some perspective from Yuji Hori (DQ producer) or Keiji Honda (Enix president who still holds an honorary chairmanship at Square Enix) on why Dragon Quest VII was moved beyond the usual speculations of low CD-ROM costs and whatnot. Keeping DQVII would have made things much more evenly balanced between N64 and PS1 in Japan, though it wouldn't have made a difference in the US. At least Nintendo would have had a major RPG to appease US N64 owners who were complaining about N64's almost complete lack of RPGs, and the difference in Japanese sales would have enticed more Japanese devs to stay on board with Nintendo.

Yes but FF was important to Nintendo in the US market. The move to PS alone without including the Enix thing had to ruffle some feathers, specially on Yamauchi who was supposedly specially petty on these sorts of things.

That's the way I read it anyway. I can agree to disagree with you.

Retrospectively, yes. Again, at the time, not so much.  Yamauchi could be petty (and according to others who knew him, like Henk Rogers of the Tetris Company, he could also be a sweet guy if he felt like it), but he was also very myopic and Japan-focused in a lot of ways, and RPGs were one of those things he was culturally myopic about. At the time, they were a niche product in the US. Nobody believed in them in the US. They tended to be expensive to localize but gave poor returns on the investment. Bernie Stolar, the infamous Sega of America president, started out as president of Sony Computer Entertainment when the PS1 launched, and he had the same anti-RPG attitude at Sony that he did later on at Sega, saying that RPGs would never sell enough to be profitable. Had he still been president of Sony in 1997, FF7 probably wouldn't have been localized unless Square did it themselves, and they'd have been on their own as far as marketing. He kept Arc the Lad out of the US until years after he was gone. For its part, Nintendo took a loss localizing Earthbound (though the advertising campaign didn't help any), and Yamauchi would have been looking more at Dragon Quest sales numbers in Japan than Final Fantasy sales numbers overseas, as well as the much greater fan loyalty DQ tends to inspire compared to FF. Sakaguchi has said on numerous occasions that FF6 was an expensive sales flop outside of Japan, mostly when Western fans ask him why it doesn't get localized more often, so I doubt Yamauchi expected VII to do any better overseas.