From Riot of Blood on my wall:

So what you're telling me is that they're doing the shotgun method of creating games?  They just produce so many and hope that at least one of them is a hit?

Are you actually defending that?

If so, if they've already made their hit, are you defending someone who would be dumb enough to hope for another hit?  That's like trying to win the lottery twice.

Wouldn't it be better for DQ, a series that hasn't really evolved from the NES days to fail instead? Despite how bad FF12 ways and how mediocre most of SE's offerings have been of late at least their other series have tried to have a bit of innovation.

He's saying that FF is generally shit and you're giving it too much credit.

His taste is even more vile than yours.

haha thats almost funny but in a sick sort of way i kind of agree with it. Maybe just a bit. Then again i never really cared for FF.

I haven't played much of the DQ (only played DQVIII) games but aren't those supposed to be good?  If something is good, it doesn't need too much a change.

@twestern. Alright, I've had enough of this shit. We know you don't like FFVII, we know a lot of people (on hardcore forums only, thank god) are the same way. But just let it go, it's been 11 fucking years. We're all tired of this, so just let it go and move on. Shoot, just look at what happened last year: FFXIII lost it's exclusivity, but guess what? You don't here anyone complaining or hardly even talking about that anymore. They've moved on, so should FFVI fans. This includes you twestern...

Well, that's your opinion. Ask around and you'll find many people liked Final Fantasy 9, 10, 12, and even 11 and X-2 (I say "even" 'cause I don't consider them main series, at least that's me).

For me Final Fantasy 12 took the franchise in the right direction, gameplay-wise, world design-wise, screenplay-wise. The early stuff I've seen from XIII worries me a little in that it may turn out to be a step backwards to a Final Fantasy X kind of game, I hope it's just an early impression (not that it would be awful, but as I just said, it would be a step back)

Maybe you're still to enamored of super-deformed characters and the light-comedy of the classic FFs. I guess there is a specialness about it and I appreciate it a lot as well since my top 2 Final Fantasy games are VII and VI. But those gems are in the past and we can only hope we'll see another one like them someday. It's definitely not about one aspect of the game, art-style, graphics, gameplay or writing, but a great combination of all these aspects what is required to match the greatness me appreciate from our beloved franchise.

It's my opinion that after the success of VII, it's been very difficult for them to produce at the same level of quality for every aspect of their RPGs. I personally hate Final Fantasy 8's writing, characters, villans and heroes, but I loved the gameplay which is precisely what FF9 lacked for me where on the contrary it had better writing, incredible setting and design, although hideous character design (except from most of the heroes), story was not very special either. Then it comes X, the best gameplay since 7 (in my opinion), the setting was quite good, the writing was stronger than the previous 2, and now we had voiced characters (which didn't turn out as well as hoped, but it was the first one), but the characters weren't written so well, the story became tiresome (although the main concept was great), you just couldn't love it for the plot.

Final Fantasy 12, I think it's what a Japanese developer like Square needed to set itself apart from the tired anime-themed JRPGs most japanese companies are about. There's nothing wrong with anime or super-deformed characters, but there's a time and a place for everything and specially today a Japanese videogame company must produce games that help them restore their status in this industry. I think SE hopefully won't dissapoint.

edit: May I remind you, not all early Final Fantasy games were "gems". Final Fantasy 1 was great, it was the first and there's no need to explain a lot, it was magical. But then came the second one, and even the third one which showed some kind of more dedicated writing and evolution in gameplay, however those were not very good games and if you played them on the NES you'll find it hard to disagree with me. If you do disagree, you may want to look at them again (on youtube perhaps), those games were lacking for their time. Final Fantasy 4 was great for its time (quite butchered in the US version if I may say so), and so was FF5 which was the true gem the US SNES never got. FF4 didn't age that well, it was a shy attempt in writing, although for some reason its character staff was more endeering than 5's. FF5 although still stuck in the same old Crystal plot, it did wonders for the franchise with the best writing and deepest gameplay that paved the way for the 16-bit masterpiece FF6. SE with FF7 and every FF after it seemed to have made a commitment to raise the bar high for JRPGs, they just don't please themselves doing more of the same, they like to explore new things, they have no real set formula. It's hard to please everyone doing that, and probably it's a very risky business model too. It's just hard. They set out to reinvent the franchise in every game you could say. Not many developers do that or even achieve a great level of success while doing it. They've been doing that for over 20 years now. That's admirable.

It's so ridiculous that Square hasn't gone back to all of the things they had right with FF6. You had a great high fantasy/steampunk setting, a sweeping operatic soundtrack, a cast of dozens of empathizable characters, and an equipment and magic system that finds the right balance between allowing you to customize characters while still giving each character distinct core mechanics.

Every character (save two filler characters) had a likable personality and reasonable motivations. There isn't one single character that all of the fans say they like, there are half a dozen. And since most equipment can be used by multiple characters, you can put all of your best overpowered items on your favorite character to make them the badass you know they're meant to be.

I've played VII, VIII, and IX and none of them come close to that. They aren't even in the same league.

IF FFXIII is anything like FFXII I really really want it to bomb HARD, I mean FFXII is the worst FF game I have ever played.

The only thing that can save FFXIII and S-E for me after years and years of delays is if the game have some kind of turnbased battlesystem from FF1 - FFX.

I agree with you 100%. I think they need to stop working on 20 games at a time. They need to put their best people in a group to create good games. All their work lately has been reviewed very Low. All they do is remake FF 1,2,3,4 on Ds. They sucked the hell out FF7's Name i've Movies,action games and more. I kinda do also want FFXIII to bomb but kinda don't aswell.

Good Post!!