Funnily enough, you'd find Japanese gamers (and even a few western ones) arguing that it was Enix that bailed Square out, and that the Enix side has only gotten better in recent years. You do have to take into account that Japan has an unprecedented love affair with Dragon Quest, of course...

I've never understood this mentality that Square has gone to the dogs. I admit, the fact that there are already something like five or seven titles for Final Fantasy XIII alone is more than a little disconcerting... but before that, what was the problem, exactly?

You know...you wouldn't expect it, but I'm one of the few posters on this forum who really likes Square-Enix, still, and feels they've gotten a bad rep.

I think that FFXII was amongst the best in the series, and I feel that most of their large talent has moved towards the long-term development of XIII and Verses. They certainly don't put out masterpieces as often as they did in the PS1 days, but game development takes longer now, and game designers are being spread out between platforms in order to collect money over many titles, rather than several big tentpole titles. FFVII:CC and FFTA were both fairly good games, and the FFIV remake was remarkable.

Just...hold off your hating before you've seen XIII, Verses, and SO. S-E has a ton of development teams working for it. We haven't seen stuff from the really amazing ones yet, this gen, like last gen, their quality is always present in their tentpole titles, Same for Square and Enix franchises.

TWEWY, FFIV, and Core Crisis are 3 of the best handheld games this generation. So, yeah, I really like Square-Enix. They aren't the best developer anymore, but they are a very good one, and they have a few tricks left up their shoe.

The thing is: FFIV is a port and FFVII:CC is a spin-off. They deserve credit for TWEWY. I really think the fall of sony may be part of the problem because back then they could simply just release everything on ps2 and wait for the best. Now they really have to spread their efforts and reach out to different platforms and learn different architecture because PS isn't what it used to be. Looking back now, it almost feels like sony carried the entire Japanese gaming industry on it's back and now that they fallen, we get so many articles about how Japan's gaming industry has fallen behind. Coincidence? I think not.

They've lost some key talent... really though i blame it on Wada as the head of the company.

It's the same reason the Enix side of SE has been coming up short a bit since the merger.

They've been going downhill since the early PS1 days honestly.

Mizuno was a much better manager of talent from the making good games side.  Not as much on the "lets make mad profit by focusing a lot of our resourcse on cash in remakes." however.

Enix DID bail out Square.   At the time of the merger afterall Enix was worth more.

The problem was they let Wada be in control and regulated Fukushima to an honorary role and stuck Honda under Wada for some reason.

It's Square's crappy executives that are dragging down the game quality and abundance.  Well that and the HD consoles and them falling down the rabbit hole of trying to make the most impressive movie like graphics they could.  (Which after the Spirit Within almost destroyed their company, you'd of thought they'd of learned the lesson that graphics aren't the most important aspect of an RPG.)

@Pristine: FFIV DS was not a port.

it was a remake then. Still not a new game

Granted, but it wasn't developed internally by Square, either.

Also it was the best thing they put out since 2005.

The Final Fantasy III and IV DS remakes were developed by Matrix Software (the dev team that made Alundra on the PS1), while they seem to be seeking outside help with the Dragon Quest DS remakes as well (ArtePiazza is the dev team working on those). That's certainly understandable though, as they probably want their main teams working on their new flagship titles (FFXIII/Versus, the portable Kingdom Hearts, among others).

Anyways, I think Square-Enix started going downhill when they realized they could try to cash in by making spin-off after spin-off of their popular games. Did we really need so many spin-offs of the games that were in the past? You would think they would've learned not to make another movie after The Spirits Within bombed, even though they tried to milk the FFVII name for the second big release (it was a mediocre movie, too).

They should be concentrating on creating new IPs, as well as releasing games to bring back older "franchises." Yes, I know they tried their hand at releasing another Brave Fencer game, which was average or so, but they could concentrate on one for maybe the Wii or something (the PS1 Brave Fencer was quite the awesome game). Although they may have lost a lot of big names within their company, they aren't doing too bad.