Those are expectations! Not actual sales. I've seen people read this wrong all day. None of the above shipped that many.

I do think that people here over estimated Wada's influence and underated the company mindset as whole. We dont have a KH3 because Nomura has the team held hostage on the approaching 7 year VS Xlll, How long did it take FFXlll team to finally get the game out? 4,5 years? FF14 is a disaster that will never be mended and that was announced around beginning of the gen also. Then lets not forget the SO4 decision. If you take a closer alot of SE vet devs take forever to get something out and when its out it does live up to the expectations that THEY set for it. SE issues are much more then just wada

Hopefully things turn around for SE. We have missed them.

Good riddance.

This news itself is essentially meaningless. Its a half written story it all depends on who overtakes him. I see someone has been appointed but if hes like minded to wada no change. they need a developer to take over not a suit.

Even so, I don't think that's all on Wada. Nomura has had *plenty* of time to work on FFVersus XIII, I think some of the fault has to be on him. 

He's also taken Final Fantasy and turned it into some ridiculous Japanese J-POP/Boy Band bull s*it with every character having 2000 zippers on their costume. The franchise has become silly and stupid. 

I also call "BS" on FFXIII "being delayed a whole year!" because of the 360 version. LOL. Excuses, excuses. That's just something bitter Sony fanboys tell themselves because they couldn't deal with the multi-plat announcement (more people might be able to play the game ... oh no!).

Yeah, but there's only so much you can do when the majority of your team are off working on other projects. First they were tasked on FFXIII and within a year or so they were fixing FFXIV (which is no small feat). I doubt they've even had a full 2 years of proper development time, which for an RPG is nothing.

As for the character designs, I strongly suspect the marketing department at SE influences that more than anyone. Even Nomura probably gets handed a design spec from the marketing team and has to work within those confines. Just look at how they added the 2 useless characters in FFXII, all for the sake of appealing to the Japanese teen demographic.

Whilst the 360 development probably didn't help matters, from what I've read (on Gamasutra a while back, I think) FFXIII was in development hell well before the 360 announcement. They had artists churning out assets but didn't have a coherent game in place until they made the demo for the FFVII Advent Children Complete Blu-Ray in Japan. That was about a year before the Japanese release.

I think this quote mostly sums it up:

"Nowadays, Wada proactively tries to play as many Western games as possible — for example, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 — and provides comments about these games to Square Enix's staff."

(from this, but shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia)

Like with Resident Evil, Final Fantasy turned into a franchise that chased after the western audience, and fans of the series are never going to like that because these series didn't become the juggernauts that they are by pandering to western tastes - at least, in my opinion, they were created for Japan in Japan but had a broad enough appeal that they could reach both markets.  By specifically targetting the west, they removed all that made them special in the first place (and this is coming from a guy who loved XIII-2, too!)

He seemed aggressive with other business models as well, which traditional gamers are never going to be fans of.  MMO's are fine; but not as mainline entries in a series and not as a resource guzzling part of the business that causes multiple other projects to be delayed because of failure.  iOS is a growing market but your average VGChartz user probably isn't going to be all that interested in it.

Then there was the whole multi-platform of FF XIII debacle.  To be honest, my opinions about that aren't as extreme as some other people's, but I think it's evident if you play the game (and no offence, because I know you like it) that it has been pieced together from numerous different ideas; which makes the final game just feel really disjointed.  Story threads build up but lead nowhere; it feels distinctly like a game of two halves (linear corridor game -> monster hunter clone).  It gets rid of a number of traditions of the genre/series without any good reason.  Whether all this stemmed from shifting it across to 360 as well as PS3 - I have no idea.  Probably not, but still.

There's also just been the way he's handled other games.  Like Versus XIII.  Nomura clearly wants to work on this title but it appears his team has consistently been shifted around to other projects because of the failure of FF XIV and some obsession with padding out the "Lightning" arc of games.  Kingdom Hearts has been splintered off from a mainline-console series to lots of sidestories on handhelds, which no-one really asked for.  Stuff like that.

The one good thing that happened to Square Enix this past generation is Eidos; and even that seems to be (from the business side) like a bit of a disappointment, at least in their own eyes.

Just my take on things, anyway.