What caused Square Enix to lose its mojo? These guys used to be a titan. I remember seeing ads for Final Fantasy X on mainstream television.
>>741665172Their overreliance on being the "good looking game" bit them in the ass when "good looking games" these days take a decade to develop
>>741665172Sakaguchi and Uematsu took all the heart and soul when they left. Their stories/characters and music is what FF what it was. Look at FFX-2, the first game made after they left... it had good gameplay but everything else about it was lame, soulless, and terrible.
>>741665374sakaguchi hasn't made a good game in 20 years and that's not for lack of trying.
>>741665374>>741665492Was Fantasian any good?
>>741665172They let retarded niggers like Hamaguchi and Nojima be in charge of their main franchise instead of getting dragged onto the street and shot like the useless subhumans they are.
>>741665172https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUXVOfdGE4ohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3jgGmeyqMU
>>741665172overly investing in "Final Fantasy 7 RRR"
>>741665172>What caused Square Enix to lose its mojo?the merger with enix
They went on a downward spiral but FF fans kept buying FF games anyways instead of propping up another studio thats doing good jrpgs so their jrpgs floundered while the shit FF games still kept up with sales
>>741665172Woke Lmao and the DEI hires that created him
>>741665983Spirits Within is a better Final Fantasy than anything they have put out in the past 15 years.
>>741665172Mistwalker's games are great. If you like Square's classics, then get and play Fantasian today! The game is genuinely splendid. A true Final Fantasy game.
>>741665712It's amazing.
>>741665172Do you realise how many years they have been shitting out crap?
>>741665172When Sakaguchi left it was the 7/8/10 part of the company that moved up in seniority. You look at the credits for all their worst received projects since then, and barring FFXIV1.0 you'll consistently see names like Toriyama and Nojima and Nomura in lead positions.
>>741665172>What caused Square Enix to lose its mojo?Square Enix never had mojo>>741666063
>>741665172attempting to continue to cash checks on their past successes about 10 years after that good will ran outin addition to the entirety of the franchise's reputation being staked on an mmo 3/4 of the fanbase won't touch due to it being an mmoand the last great FF game came out 25 years ago
>>741665712Yes, that poster is gay, retarded, and probably brown since he obviously doesn't play games.
>>741665172Spirits Within lost them tons of money and Enix bought them out to sabotage them from the inside.
>Nomura can make good games like TWEWY>instead he says >Disney baby games with retarded gay stories are my life's workthe company has no tard wranglers. Even someone like Takahashi who does good work needed his wife to tard wrangle him and with her being retired I bet his games are going to all be worse than XBC 2
>>741665172I saw ads for Forewoken on fucking NFL broadcasts.They definitely knew their target demo lmaoooooo
>>741665172Combination of factors.1. They completely fumbled video games' entry into the normiespace. the 360/ps3 era was so fucking crucial to a dev's longterm success in the industry, and they wasted it on 3 fucking games where the protagonist's name is now literally synonymous with "character nobody likes but the devs are forcing anyways"2. Length of modern dev cycles is just absurd to the point where they just don't attract a new audience. From the time I was born to the time I finished highschool, 7 non-mmo non-spinoff final fantasy games came out. I was talking about final fantasy games with friends when I was in fucking grade school. From when I finished highschool to now (about 15 years, to be clear) there has been two (2) mainline final fantasy games. It is a literal generational fumble in that they just fucking failed to release any fucking games for a new generation to care about (and the ones they DID release were mid)3. They are stuck in the past. They think looking good is still all you need to make a video game popular, when arguably that is either simply the baseline, or something you don't even need to begin with. Within the space of modern games, final fantasy games are painfully generic, wholly lacking in the special sauce that makes a game compelling. They don't have the focus on character writing and interaction that makes some of their contemporaries stand out. In the one aspect they tried to modernize, their gameplay, it is... okay. Their shift to action games has largely failed to attract an audience who cares about that because they still want it to appeal to a general audience, so their action gameplay is painfully bland, which is obvious to anybody who has a preference for that style of gameplay, and obviously puts off the people who would prefer menu combat.
>>741666882https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPaMm9pjl5Ewhat was the intended audience for this?
>>741665172They wanted to appeal to wider audiences instead of catering to the fans that made them successful. You know, how every game company does
>>741665172I think they fell off when they made FF8, each game before it felt like they were pushing the envelope, and they knew when and where to apply marketing expertise. Final Fantasy 1 came out in the US, then 2 and 3 in Japan, then 4 would be Final Fantasy 2, nice jump in tech there. Then of course FF6 deserved an american release too. Then they played their cards right migrating to the Sony Playstation to turn FF7 into the biggest game ever.We arrive at 8, and then 9, they just weren't special. It's the equivalent of if they *didn't* skip 2 and 3 in america. They should have released FFX as FF8 in america IMHO. In laymen terms they got lost in the weeds, thinking we needed simple iterations, in a franchise that thrived on evolution. By the time we get to FF7 remake I think we can all agree it should have been marketed as a brand new game trilogy, and not a remake of a prior one.
>>741666093Based Monolith Soft.Xenoblade Genesis will destroy FF7 Gaymake.
>>741665172>What caused Square Enix to lose its mojo?They took an ESG pledge and now can't right the ship even if they wanted to. Locked in for life promoting wokeness.
>>741666851>TWEWYBasically flopped twice.
>>741668647Yeah. Or committing to their craft in the genre. But you could argue that they stuck to their lane decently enough. I wouldn't but meh.
They have activists nowdays.They kicked the last videogame designer time ago.
>>741665172They fired, or at least let their tard wrangler go.
>>741669751It sold pretty well on the DS, lil' gupNobody told them to make a sequel so many years later and then not market it
>>741665172Their Ethics Department full of genuine faggots and trannies sunk their whole reputation in about 5 years. The kind of people that went back and patched out Young Tifa's tits. They're just suing YouTubers now who criticized FFXIV demanding public apologies, taking down videos, and a fine.
>>741665492And? That doesn't mean he wasn't vital to Square's talent. Tom Fogerty never did as well solo after he left CCR, but he was the main driver behind their success. Man creative endeavors are collaborative, and losing a collaborator is often both devastating and results in projects becoming poorer for the loss.Sakaguchi hasn't found a team that has led him to critical and commercial success after he he left Square, but his loss for Square is immediately obvious to anyone being honest in their appraisal of Square's output.
>>741666851All the KH games have been succesful. The problem is that they don't let him work on what he wants.
Xenogears /thread
>>741666820It's 2026, and people still think spirits within is what caused the merger.
>>741670546The sequel sold around 1 million or so and was declared a flop despite beating the predecessor, those are numbers so pathetic that its a wonder how it even got a sequel.
>>741665172Uh, bro?https://www.thegamer.com/square-enix-tops-metacritic-publisher-rankings/
>>741674143If the game recoups its' budget then the game is a success. Anything else is soulless shareholder shekelstein bullshit.
>>741674356>If the game recoups its' budget then the game is a successThis does not apply to literally anything that is sold. If it only sells just enough there's clearly no demand for any more like it.
>>741665172Crystal Tools
>>741665172Pokemon released and btfo of their $500,000,000 budget movie game with pure gameplay and 4 shades of grey. Not wanting to compete they pushed harder into movie games nobody else could (or cared to) make.They thought they knew better than the founder and pushed him out. The resultant faggotry of japanese office culture and 16h days surrounded by only men finished them off. They can never admit they were wrong. You can see it with Stranger of Paradise which is a great game and did exactly what they have been trying to do; so of course they will never allow anything like it again.
One bad CEO after another.Not firing faggots or demoting them that put the entire company where they are today and instead just moving them onto the 7R games.Big ass list of dead mobile games.Wasting lots of money.Retarded expectations.
>>741671050I think KH stayed good throughout its existence as a franchise because it’s Nomura’s pet project with next to no corporate meddling. Both Square and Disney let Nomura do his own thing with it and it paid off.
>ctrl+f nomura>only 2 results>ctrl+f kingdom hearts>one result lying about them selling well and one result lying about it being goodNomura is the problem; he is the sole problem for SE, and KH is a fucking embarrassment to the industry and vidya as an art form as a whole. You fire Nomura, can KH and tell Disney to fuck off, and you return to Squaresoft levels of quality literally overnight. Get the guy who made Stranger of Paradise and put him in charge.
>>741675283Why would you get rid of KH when it consistently sells and has an autistically dedicated fanbase who will buy every entry that comes out?
>>741675654because it doesn't sell well, is a critical embarrassment, and the fanbase shouldn't be catered to since they're all manchildren.
>>741675283who's gonna tell him?
>>741675690>a 20+ year old franchise that has regular releases and is relevant enough to have its protagonist appear in Smash Bros is an underperforming franchise. KH has been one of Squares most popular IPs for a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to continue it after Nomura retires.
>>741675875Its been almost a decade since KH3 arrived and we're just now getting news about a sequel. The game flopped.
>>741675928Technically, we had a bunch of mobile games inbetween because Square became really obsessed with the mobile market for whatever reason.
>>741665172FF13 hit, 14 saved them and became their money ticket, so they started falling for every scam and half assing everything.Including actually investing in their moneymaker which is only just recovering from a dogshit expansion that required SE's fucking CEO to go on stage and apologize for their shit.We'll see if things start turning around.
>>741665172Square-Enix NEVER had it in the first place. It was SQUARESOFT that made everything good. As soon as the merger with Enix went through it all went to shit.
>>741665172didnt they make nier? havent seen that one culturally surpassed yet
>>741665712Not particularly.
>>741665172You are confusing Square Enix with SquareSoft
>>741665172They stopped producing chill normie games with gpod stories. And trying new art and story styles
>>741674940Pokemon is on a different plane of existence entirely. You can't compare it with anything else.
>>741672734Correct, it was too good compared to FF they didn't know what to do
what MMOs do to a company...
>>741666236>blank is a better than anything they have put out in the past 15 years.>blank is a better than anything they have put out in the past 20 years.people LOVE to say this but it means nothing because there hasn't been anything good since the early 2000s
>>741666236it was trash back then and it is trash today
>>741666063>>741666646Yes, Square Enix did not even have an ounce of soul and creativity compared to Squaresoft. Squaresoft were truly titans in the 90s forward and the merger with Enix ruined everything. TWEWY was one of the few good things that came out of Square Enix, rest is mediocre and not worth mentioning.>>741667946I would also like to mention that Square Enix had the Capcom problem where they went full in on Western style of games and studios. They purchased Eidos Montreal and IO interactive and instead of allowing them to make more Deus Ex or good Hitman games, they made that dogshit Marvel Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy game shills pretended it was good, and Hitman Absolution which everyone conveniently forgot, then they sold them off. Just constant mismanagement after mismanagement.
>>741675928they take too fucking long to make any game. doesn't help that Nomura was like "ok i need to finish the final fantasy 7 remake trilogy first" and fucked off until just recently
>>741665374>Sakaguchi and Uematsu took all the heart and soul when they left.Not just them. They lost a lot of talent.While I'm not a fan of Xenoshit, Takahashi himself is experience and talented and losing him in the late 90s after Xenogears was the beginning of the end for them. Soon after Takahashi they lost Sakaguchi and after that they started losing their experienced and popular devs one by one.By the the 2010s SE was virtually empty.
