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The Fury on 17 March 2024
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Otter said:

I do think think people underestimate the impact of titles & labelling of the games.

A lot of people simply aren't interested in messing with a franchise so deep into it's sequels. Especially a narrative driven one where the average Joe assumes they're connected. A lot of us grew up with FF in its prime but gen Z grew up with XIII saga, a whole bunch of bad spin offs and XV.

Then as far as the remakes go, naming them Remake & then Rebirth does zero favours to the marketing. Just call it part 2, part 3 lol. I actually think VII Rebirth success is less of a issue, I think it was probably one of the cheaper entries in recent memory (less than 4 years development, just above 3 if we count from Intergrade DLC). It's more what it means about appetite for the franchise as a whole.

We don't have numbers but it looks like it performed maybe slightly worse then XVI (+6% in the UK, - 30% in Japan, probably up a tad in US similar to the UK)

As someone said a soft reboot would be good. Maybe a naming convention by theme instead of number. Zero spin offs to avoid watering down the brand. Slightly smaller scope entries (30hour story, essentially VII Remake length more story) with the same scale of visual/audio production as we're used to. Unified production platform so developers are not starting from scratch. VII, XVI & Forspoken are built in completely different engines. A game like VII for example could of benefitted from Forspoken terrain navigation system. Back to exploring turn based/tactical combat a way to diversify.

haxxiy said:

Final Fantasy nowadays is a boomer franchise. It had the oldest average player age of all franchises polled in a Nikkei inquiry - in their 40s, and that was years ago. It's not renewing its user base in any meaningful way.

No young new player is going to hop in a medieval humorless RPG with 16 in the name, or the middle game of a trilogy, itself the remake of a 30-year-old game, that requires playing a lot of the Compilation to fully understand what is going on. If SE are even a bit market conscious they would reboot the series (no more numbered entries) with a more jovial design (Genshin Impact or Zenless Zone Zero-like) and make it PC/Switch 2/PS5 multiplat from day one.

Oh, and stick with the ATB from the 7 Remake games in the future since that is the most acclaimed of their gameplay loops. FF games have changed too much in the past - if a person liked 10, 12, 13, 15, or 16, there are no other games in the franchise like those for them to play.

I honestly do not believe the naming convention is an issue and numbering isn't either, well I have my own issue with numbers and will explain in a mo.

In a day and age when we get umpteen amount of yearly sequels of CoD or Assassin's Creed, all for intents and purposes "sequels" that do not follow on from the last game but are set in a world of the same mechanics. Also, Persona 5 is the best selling Persona game ever by a long way. Did people get confused there too? Expecting to have to play the first 4 games first to understand 5? I do not think the mass of gaming audience are so stupid to think they need to play 15 sequels to understand FF16.

Obviously times change and gaming habits change. The millennials who grew up with certain genres and games are still here wanting to buy and play those games but a younger audience need to be appealed to as well right? But they aren't buying games like Final Fantasy or the Witcher and their parents aren't buying them for Christmas, they are playing (F2P) Fortnite and taking the mick out of each other for having default skins. :P

The number thing I think is different, a numbered sequel thing is fine but I do think they should have called FF11 and 14 "Online" or some appropriate things and not had them as mainline numbered entries because people like me, geeks, don't count them as 'mainline' titles.

And let's not stick with the ATB from FF7R. "ATB" in that is bad when you don't control an character and has practically zero use for MP. The sooner this franchise gets rid of "stagger" the better, easily one of the worst mechanics in video games in decades and it's still around.

In the end, what can help FF, I don't know. I know what I want from the series but it's never going to happen again. I don't think a number is the issue, I think it's regular main line titles not releasing enough.



Hmm, pie.