Final Fantasy XVI - State of Play

[outlawauron]

haxxiy said:

I mean... the 'series original gameplay' has been gone for over 20 years now, more than half of the time Final Fantasy has existed. It's not coming back.

From I to IX, a whole nine games, Final Fantasy followed the same-y copy of Dragon Quest's 1986 turn-based combat. By the end of the century, it was already irrevocably outdated and braindead compared to almost every other game in the market. So the surprise is that it lasted as long as it did, not that it changed in the end.

Even GameFreak, the least talented among all Nintendo's first and second parties by a country mile and targeting a constantly renewing children's audience with Pokémon, innovates more in gameplay terms than Square did in their classic years...

I don't really think this is a very fair statement. FFI and FFII plays drastically differently. Whether or not you think FFII is a good idea, it's certained played differently lol. FFIII's introduction of the job system added depth and options that largely didn't existed in JRPGs of the era (and was greatly improved upon in FFV).  FFIV introduced the ATB system that became the foundation for dozens of JRPGs in the SNES+PS1 era (and even still today).

The technological limitations of the time were by far the greatest restriction to the what they did with the series.