I'm quite alright with Square Enix's handling of Dragon Quest this gen, but Final Fantasy has been awful this gen. How about making a game that follows basic design principles and stop announcing stuff 6 years from when it comes out.

Microsoft wouldn't be a good fit, they struggle to use the studios they have now, so a company as big as Sqaure Enix would just be a huge burden for both of them.  Sqaure could take this whole industry by storm if they wanted to, they're just to stupid to do so. Stop pumping money into projects that are obviously not going to work out, make sure you don't have four or five games with five years of development under their belt and just focus on doing what your good at.

If Microsoft wants to go after the Japanese market, then it makes sense for them to buy Square-Enix.  Unless one wants to believe, "If Microsoft does poorly in region X, they should not bother with it", buying Square-Enix would make sense.  I am NOT saying they should do this, mind you, just the reason you stated is all the more reason for them to buy Square-Enix.

First things first. Microsoft needs to get their own first parties in working order.

They have a long way to go before they should be thinking of making more big purchases to mess up.

Or not even make, when they should have. I'm lookin' at you, BioWare.

After that, sure, whatever. But give us reason to believe you won't mess SE up if you do buy them.

Too little. Too late.

They failed to ride the Wii wave when they had the chance.

yep missed it by a mile

yea this is true if they want to improve more in japan buying square -enix is perfect sense for microsoft

Are you loco in the head boy?  Microsoft owning SquareEnix would be the same as killing them.  The vast majority of their market is in Japan.  If they were forced to only be on XBOX360, that would 1) Cost them more money to develop games and 2) Drop their sales even worse than now.

All SE needs to do is stop focusing on FINAL FANTASY FINAL FANTASY FINAL FANTASY and start focusing on the series that actually produce a profit (Kingdom hearts, Dragon Quest, Chrono).  As well as making new IPs, which tend to get the most sales on the HD consoles.  And this sounds like exactly what they're looking to do, finally.

SE is in this hole now because they spent literally half a billion dollars in advertising games like FFXIII, FFXIV, FFIV DS and FFTactics PSP.  All which underperformed expectations.  They should be focusing on more targetted advertising for Kingdom hearts, making Dragon Quest more popular internationally and making new games.

Also, I doubt SE will even consider talking to Microsoft.  They're making the bulk of their money on DS and Wii (mostly from Kingdom hearts and Dragon Quest).  If anything, your hypothetical question would be better asking if Nintendo would buy them.  And while I never think that would happen, it has more evidence than MS since Nintendo has second party connections with Brownie Brown and Monolith Soft, both of which were once development groups for Square Enix.

Even if Dragon Quest X comes out on the eve of Cafe, it'll still most likely sell at least 3-4 Million in just Japan.  Considering Cafe will also play Wii games backwards compadible, there's little problem of that.  But of course, you'll probably see a good 500,000 or more people buy a Wii just for that game.  People bought systems for Dragon Quest VI, VII, VIII and IX.  There's little evidence the trend won't continue for X.

It comes down to Quality...it's like an earlier poster said, make better games I'll be more inclined to buy. I find it hilarious that the level of Square's quality in their games dropped significantly when they started making their games with a more western focus...it lost the uniqueness in their titles. But whatever hopefully like Sony back in 06 they learn.

no im not local and you dont see how microsoft funding would help square out alot and also microsoft could help square learn to develop sooner , shorter dev time but obviously you dont see that