| Spade said: Couldn't ask this to happen to a more deserving publisher. Poor SE, they don't have a Western studio to blame when it flops |
Ironically, the west kind of is to blame with this one I think, at least partly. This isn't truly a Japanese game, Square Enix got some crazy idea to fuse eastern and western game design philosophy into a single game. The studio that developed the world, the combat, etc., is Luminous Productions, who last made FF15; however, the writing team is all western, consisting of Gary Whitta (Star Wars: Rogue One, After Earth) as the lead writer, Amy Hennig (Uncharted 1-3), Todd Stashwick (co-wrote the cancelled Amy Hennig EA Star Wars game), K-Michel Parandi (an indie French film director and writer), and Allison Ryhmer (worked on the scripts for shows such as Greek, Shadow Hunters, and Chasing Life). The composers for the music are also western, Bear McCreary (God of War 2018, God of War Raganrok, CoD Vanguard) and Garry Schyman (Destroy All Humans series, Bioshock series, Middle Earth: Shadow of series). The main character is an American from New York City who gets sucked into the fantasy world the game is set in, and alot of the character design looks more western than Japanese as a result.
It was just a bad idea imo, trying to fuse east and west into a single game. Whenever Japanese games take too much influence from the west, they are often hated (Resident Evil 6 is a good example, the devs said they were heavily influenced by Call of Duty, which is why the game ended up being more action than Survival Horror and had an over-the-top story like most CoD games do), whereas many of the best Japanese games are built for the Japanese audience first and foremost, for instance Persona 5.
