Comment Re:Let's wait and see (Score 0) 152
The high end titles have suffered (13 and 14) because there has clearly been a lack of development focus on them. It's clear that Squenix's emphasis has been on bad-to-middling handheld titles, like the (entirely pointless) Dissidia games, the Kingdom Hearts handheld titles and rubbish like Crystal Chronicles on the Wii. The company was doing just fine right through to FF12 (which was difficult to get into, but pretty awesome when you did).
Then you must have an agenda, because the problems of FFXIII have absolutely nothing to do with technic. They have to do with game direction, which is completely independant of which console you develop for or if you master every bit of the console or not.
Basically, you're coming into this thread talking about problems that aren't there (at least for FFXIII).
The lack of town in FFXIII has nothing to do with SE having Wii, DS or PSP devkits, or with the games they made for these platforms.
And the Enix part of the company is doing just fine on DS, with Dragonquest IX being (for now) the best 3rd party sales ever on a game platform in Japan (more than 4 millions sales in Japan alone).
Contrast that with the fact that FFXIII is the main numbered FF (which is not a MMO, aka traditional FF) with the least sales in Japan (less than 2 millions sold in the last Famitsu top 100 released recently).
If SE followed your advice, they would be dead by now. FFXIII was in development for a loooooong time and cost a LOT of money.
It really only is with the advent of the current hardware generation that their output has gone to hell.
It's symptomatic of wider Japanese gaming, I think. Outside of a few exceptions, Japanese developers have never really got to grips with the PS3, 360 and the modern PC in a way that the West has. As a result, I think Japanese console games now lag behind their Western counterparts to roughly the same extent that they led them by in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation.
So the last sentence was your hidden agenda.
Your last sentence is wrong BTW. Nintendo alone proves you wrong on all counts.
Japanese console games are far beyond their western counterpart just by counting Nintendo alone.
The main problem of this generation is money, greed and graphics.
This generation, western console games look like they're more advanced (I didn't say better) because it's more occidental to put lots of money on the table to do grandiose games. Japanese are far more conservatives. The problem is that there's no market to sustain these games (except on Wii and DS), and the consequence is that dev studios are dying left and right, and those that are not dead yet are posting losses after losses every quarter. Lots of big publishers died or are dying this gen.
The only reason why japanese console games seem to lag behind is because they at least saw a little better the obvious outcome : their death if their game doesn't work.
And it's symptomatic of most publishers (both western and eastern) this gen : not supporting the market leader with grandiose products. The writing was on the wall since 2007 really.
For Square Enix and Final Fantasy, I guessed the outcome in 2007, seeing how they were handling FF and DQ, with FF getting all the push by SE, leaving DQ behind, but I was sure Dragonquest was the one that would come to the front and survive, if only just because Yuji Hoori was doing the right choices (like putting his next DQ on the leading platform as always, which was the DS). While the Square part of the company was doing nonsense like putting FF on the loser consoles just for "the graphics". This showed right away that FF was going in the wrong direction. The MMO FFXIV only confirmed this fiasco in a spectacular way.
It's sad really, when Xenoblade is a better FF than FFXIII, but it doesn't have the brand name to sell as much, not even a tenth of what FFXIII sold. FFXIII is still a financial success I think, though not as good as SE hoped I think, as they're already in trouble, despite FFXIII and DQ IX last year.