I think it´s more matter of  resources and the limits of the hardware / not fully optimized engine.

Doubt it. Tri-Ace couldn't see all the problems with Til the End of Time either. The back tracking, painfully long dungeons, and consistently cheap boss battles couldn't have all been because of hardware limitations. The not fully optimized engine goes along with the idea they can't see crappy design decisions.

Tri-Ace usually doesn't seem to see what they are making when they make it, which is sort of good, but can cause a world of bad.

I was talking mainly about the 3 discs instead of 1 (hardware limitation) or 4 (lack of resources) and the halved resolution during battles (a mix of all 3, mostly an engine issue though). SO4 seems not to have any backtracking, never played SO3 and never will. I find it ugly and the story is supposed to be bad with bad plot twists. Otherwise the long dungeons is typical of Tri-Ace. Both VP and SO series have that and I really like it tbh. I doubt they will ever change this to these 2 franchises since fans like that (I do at least). Making an awesome engine is far from easy and especially for japanese developers that started too late with HD development. It´s great leap from IU to SO4. I wasn´t expecting groundbreaking graphics anyway, none of their games have that. They manage to pull out the most of the hardware each generation and with a few expections they have succeeded.

They've progressed a lot with the engine, IU went gold... 6-7 months before SO4?

Now let's hope SO4 sells well, with a mint engine ready Tri-Ace could pump out some nice games.

How about a Valkyrie Profile with the SO4 engine?

That'd be sweet =)

C'mon SO4, SELL LOTS!

That´s what I actually want.

@Soriku: Crystal Tools is not their engine. They´ll have to start from 0 to study it. Since they have an engine of their own, which was made by themselved and it´s not a bad one, they should really stick to it. You´re generally are more proficient in something you made yourself than something they give you to work on.

memory, exactly.

Even if people want to say a 8.0 is underwhelming for SO4, it's still a big improvement from IU, which was the same engine.

It's not as big of an improvement as....Eternal Sonata to Tales of Vesperia, but ES>ToV's improvements were entirely focused around better gameplay, storytelling and the 'intangibles' that an engine really doesn't change. Of course, it also had an extra 6 months of development time that SO4 didn't get after IU launched....Maybe that's part of the issue?

At any rate, I think that it'd be dumb to not re-use the IU/SO4 engine for a few more games, and MS should be privy to ask that of Tri-Ace and the Square Enix team. If you have the engine already there for an RPG, you should be able to drastically reduce costs.

So we should get:

Valkyrie Profile 3
Radiata Stories 2

Or a new IP.

"Eternal Unseeing"