Veks posted:

So what you're saying is that Yoshi-p should be CEO.

Sunning posted:

words words words

Square Announces Final Fantasy X Spinoffs, Company Restructure to take place posted:

In other announcements made in the meeting, Square has revealed changes in their company in order to cut development costs.

Reported by Bloomberg, while Square formally took a development style where teams were formed and dispersed per project, developers will now be fixed into divisions. Source codes and resources will be shared for efficiency, and employees will receive varying bonuses depending on the profit of their division.

By settling developers into groups, Square also aims for the developers to re-use the titles they have developed, making game development more cost efficient. Development costs- originally 2-3 Billion yen, are expected to fall to 1 Billion yen.

Interview with Uematsu posted:

1UP: What made you finally decide to leave Square altogether? Was it just that you wanted more creative freedom or you didn't want to be tied down to Final Fantasy projects specifically? Or maybe you didn't like the direction the company was going in when they merged with Enix? What made you want to break out and form your own company like Dog Ear Records and Smile Please?

KY: [In Japanese] This is probably the question that everyone wants to ask the most...

NU: [In Japanese] The answer's not going to be that exciting.

KY: [In Japanese] I haven't even asked it yet. [Laughs]

NU: It's not exciting at all. I don't even know if you're going to be convinced with it. It's because the SquareEnix office moved from Meguro to Shinjuku.

1UP: Uh-huh.

NU: And I never really liked the Shinjuku space, and I was so comfortable being in Meguro. Where [Reiko and I] live is actually farther away from Meguro, so to go to Shinjuku and make that commute even by car would be over an hour, and it just wasn't the right place for me. I felt whenever I stepped out of the station in the center of Shinjuku, I felt I lost direction, and it's always crowded and you can't breathe the clean air. Compared to Meguro, that wasn't the environment that I wanted to be in.

1UP: I accept that answer.

NU: One alternate answer I can give that would make it a bit more legit and business-oriented is that as I moved up the ladder and it became more of a seniority thing, I got pulled into a lot of meetings during the day, and I never got to spend time focused and concentrating on making music. So being grabbed in different directions and not being able to spend time within the company to make the music, I lost the concentration. My decision was "do I want to stay at a company that's going to require a lot of non-creative time" or "do I want to continue to make music?" So continuing to make music was what I wanted to do and what I decided to do.

1UP: That's the answer that all the artists inside of us want to hear.

NU: But the truth is the first answer. It didn't feel right walking into the office because there was so much going on. It was never a relaxing area.

1UP: Why did they pick Shinjuku? You look at a company like Konami, and it's amazing how often that company moves. They want to stay in the trendiest, coolest building no matter what. Omote-sando Hills to Mori Tower to Tokyo Midtown. And where does Square move? They move to the [Pfizer] building in Shinjuku. I don't understand that.

NU: Well I heard from [Yoichi] Wada-san, president of Square Enix, that he took a couple of locations to a fortuneteller, and that person Pao-san, a Taiwanese person...

1UP: Not your dog.

NU: [Laughs] Not my dog. And that person said the Meguro space was not going to bring any fortune in the future of the company, so that person pointed at Shinjuku. That's why he decided to move it there. But I heard this directly from Wada.

1UP: Maybe that's the guy responsible for making all the different versions of the games.

NU: I thought remakes were a no-no just in Japan, but I guess you guys are not really liking the idea of remakes, huh?

Interview with Uematsu posted:

1UP: With Blue Dragon, to talk about something very "now," I know you said your creative approach remains the same, but since this was a super big project. One, it was an Xbox 360, which is obviously not very successful in Japan, but because it had Sakaguchi-san's involvement, it became a very big deal worldwide. It was kind of a rejoining of many creative powers. Was there any sort of special approach you took to creating the score for Blue Dragon?

NU: I knew and was already told that I was going to be able to use pretty much all and every component of the music that I made whether it was going to be performed by an orchestra or using a synthesizer, so there were really no barriers or boundaries. In that sense, everything felt really good. It felt like a perfect match for all the musical notes to come into play and fall into the right place that I imagined, so there was nothing that I really wanted to adjust or take back nor did I have to make any adjustments after everything was put into place. The process that I was used to, before making Blue Dragon, was that all the musical components were sort of installed inside the hardware and having to have to make things work and make things fit. So it was a different approach from what I was able to do with Blue Dragon.

The more recent Final Fantasies, like the ones after Sakaguchi-san left Square, there are a lot of different opinions when completing and finalizing the entire story and scenarios, so I felt like it wasn't purely a Sakaguchi title even though it carried the name Final Fantasy. Blue Dragon, being done and written and solely handled by Sakaguchi, brought back a lot of memories of when we first started working on Final Fantasy. I felt like it was going to make sense for me to work on this title as well.

***

1UP: Back on the topic of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within specifically -- you know, there was a lot of excitement leading up to the release of the movie, and I was at a couple of the media events and also the fan events, which let me witness sneak previews of the fan reaction, which was so overwhelmingly positive, and it seemed like such good times. But after Spirits Within came out...I guess it just wasn't the right time or the right place -- North America.

The consumer reaction, how many people went to go see it, wasn't very much, and it became a big financial failure for Square, and despite how much Sakaguchi-san had done for Square, it was this project that kind of led to his eventually leaving the company. Looking back, do you think that was a sad moment, especially considering how much he had done for the company and where he had brought the company? Japanese companies in general seem to be quick to look for a scapegoat whenever something doesn't go right. How did you feel about what happened with Sakaguchi-san?

NU: [Long pause] No matter what happens in the future with the company of SquareEnix and with the individual Sakaguchi, one thing that's not going to change is that he is the father of Final Fantasy. He made the series. And it was a difficult time when he left Square -- at that time it was still Square. As an individual myself, as someone who creates content, not purely for business purposes or making money or gaining profit from something I create as a content creator, it's really hard to say this, but I really don't think Final Fantasy should have been made after Sakaguchi-san left the company. Square the company owns Final Fantasy the property, so it's really up to them what they decide to do. But me personally, that's what I thought when he left the company. And I think at the same time that they started to change the direction of the company. We weren't sure who was in charge of what. It meant a lot of things if we look back at that time when he left and maybe soon after he left. There were a lot of changes, and it was probably a turning point for the company. I don't know if there has been another turning point within SquareEnix the company, but that was definitely a moment that meant a lot of different things.

1UP: Companies like this, entertainment companies, are always in it to make some kind of money because without making money you can't continue to produce and create new entertainment, but would you say that when Sakaguchi left Square, would you equate that to something like when Walt Disney died? Because after Walt Disney died, it changed from Walt Disney Productions to the Walt Disney Company. It acquired more of a corporate mentality as opposed to this -- I don't want to say a family business necessarily -- but it turned it from something that seemed a lot more...it had a humble human element in Walt Disney Productions; you know, there were real people behind it. It wasn't just a faceless corporation. When Walt Disney died, it became the Walt Disney Company and it acquired a corporate feel and maybe it lost something. It lost some of that innocence. And Disney as a corporation just started cranking out annual animated movies to capitalize on the public's thirst for cartoons and family entertainment, and it became much more of a business. Would you say that sort of transformation took place because before there were individual Final Fantasy games, and now they come like five at a time. Final Fantasy XIII times five.

NU: You know, the example of when Walt Disney died and became corporate, now that I've left the company, I can't really say, "Yeah, it's completely changed." It's probably better to ask someone who went through that change with Sakaguchi-san leaving, what they think of the company today, but in my opinion -- and I hope that Sakaguchi-san feels the same way -- is that we did treat each and every Final Fantasy as a birth of something, as a great product that we believed in. All we really wanted to do was to be able to express a very simple belief of friendship or family love or just love in general and if that becomes something that is going to be bought by money and can easily be a base for making a successful business, I just want that to be sold in that manner. Like, this was going to be a boxed package that was going to make money. That's not -- as one of the creators of the games that we worked on -- that wasn't necessarily our purpose. So that's the line that we always have between the business side and the creative side of the business. But all I hope for is that with the people who are still at SquareEnix, I hope that they still have that belief in them, and I wish that they would continue to execute their jobs and projects in the way that we were able to do back then. It's not a MasterCard slogan, but it's priceless. The work is priceless. And I hope that everyone continues to hold that belief.

I don't know if this is going to be a good example, but if blood sells, that doesn't mean I think every single game is going to need blood because they think it'll make money. That's just easy to say in words, but it's not really why it should be in the game. There still has to be a very deep and important substance there to create that blood, and if it needs to be there, it needs to be there. But we're not going to make a game just based on blood and violence because it sells.

Veks posted:

So what you're saying is that Yoshi-p should be CEO.

Cake Attack posted:

Wii had Xenoblade, The Last Story and Fire Emblem (also Arc Rise Fantasia lol).

Wii U will have Xenoblade X and SMT x FE.

e: So basically the only RPGs are Nintendo's own RPGs, since they own Monolith now.

The Black Stones posted:

Yoshi-P should be in charge of all their RPG's from now on.

Sunning posted:

Lessail posted:

Vivi was dead the whole time and I had a zombie scare with Dagger, but I did it!

The White Dragon posted:

Great! The question now is, do you think the was ending worth it?

Evil Fluffy posted:

When SE merged there was celebration that soon all RPGs would be as good as Chrono Trigger. Unfortunately all their RPGs ended up more like ET the Video Game.

Sunning posted:

It's a very complicated question to answer in that hindsight is 20/20. At the time, the combined power of two leading Japanese publishers seemed like a surefire way to not only dominate the Japanese gaming industry but also become a global publisher who compete with EA and Activision. However, I think there were clear signs that the synergy was not there between the two companies and that a change in company culture was occurring which would affect the quality of their future output. I don't think the merger was necessarily a bad idea but the internal politics leading up to the merger negated much of the benefits and drove them down a very dangerous road. I'll try my best detail the environment in which the merger occurred and why it had a drastic impact on the future of the company:

It started when Enix approached Square in 2000 about a possible merger. The motivation for Enix (a much smaller publisher, yet productive, relative to Square at that time) was that many of their games were developed by external developers, they had a hard time consistently creating hits outside of the popular Dragon Quest games, and they weren't able to easily launch in overseas markets. On the other hand, Square was in a very strong position. In their financial statements, Square felt that they would domestically overtake Dragon Quest in the future because Final Fantasy was developed in house and had global appeal. Nevertheless, they were open to the idea of a merger.

Naturally, they argued over the specifics of the proposed merger for a better part of a year. Square was in a dominant position in that they were growing consistently and going from strength to strength. The year 2000 was a very strong year for them in that they launched several successful games and announced several key games at the Millennium Event.

Nonetheless, there were some internal issues regarding the Final Fantasy brand. FFIX had not performed as well as the previous FF game. FFX was initially headed to be a PS2 launch window title with Playonline functionality but would miss the ambitious deadline and lose its online functionality. FFXI, an online MMO, was a big gamble in that they went on a huge hiring spree to get the necessarily talent and technological know-how for the game and the Playonline network.

At the time, Playonline was supposed to be a social network linking all of their future games which made it a very significant project. So there was motivation to merge with a rival and pool their resources since game development was becoming more risky. Of course, the fact that Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within severely underperformed expectations changed the dynamic of the merger.

First of all, the failure of Square Pictures/Spirits Within did not cause Square LTD to agree to merge with Enix in order to save the company. The merger was going to happen anyway and TSW's failure actually delayed it. Instead, we can say that that the failure of TSW lead to heated politics within Square which had a drastic impact on the company's management, business strategy, and how they approached the merger.

Square was actually back to profitability (fiscal year 2002) before the merger occurred. This was due to several reasons. Strong sales of FFX in North America/Europe and the release of Kingdom Hearts helped them beat their forecast. The partnership between EA and Square continued to be a success with Square publishing EA games in Japan. Sony brought a roughly 20% non-voting stake (worth over $130 million at the time) as a cash injection to help jump start their R&D. It was mutually beneficial since Sony was reliant on future Square titles to boost PS2 sales. In addition, Yoichi Wada, who joined in 2000 as the CFO, took over duties of then CEO Suzuki at the end of 2001 in order to get them back into profitability.

Wada moved up the ranks since Square's management had lost faith in Suzuki and Sakaguchi's decision making. I should mention that the board was largely trying to get the blame off themselves for approving this catastrophic plan. Sakaguchi could not get approval of an expensive movie studio in Hawaii and the development of a feature length CGI movie without the full support of the board. All of them got sucked into the late 90s hype about digital actors replacing live actions. They thought a game company would have an advantage over movie studios i nthis regard. Namco was another company at the time that was looking entering production of feature length digital movies. So the blame was disproportionately leveled against Suzuki and Sakaguchi but that's corporate politics for you.

Wada implemented a number of cost cutting measures behind the scenes. Games were cancelled, resources were consolidated around key brands, there was a push toward re-using game assets to save costs (FFX-2), and a significant restructuring happened. There were probably other drastic measures we’ll probably never know about.

Suzuki lost his position as CEO but remained within the company (and after the merger) with a powerless role as 'special director.' He would leave Square-Enix in 2005 and later taunt his former company on twitter for being a failure. So I guess he got the last laugh.

Sakaguchi must have known the direction management was going towards since he registered Mistwalker as a company in May of 2001. He probably didn’t want to spend his twilight years as a powerless figurehead in the company he helped create. While the failure of TSW was significant, Sakaguchi was largely the driving force in Square being a competitive and forward thinking company. I believe the loss of Sakaguchi and the lack of suitable replacement is largely why Square-Enix had such a difficult time competing and retaining their talent.

For example, Sakaguchi poached Yasumi Matsuno from Quest and let him make Final Fantasy tactics. After playing Ultima Online and other Western MMORPGs, he pushed to make FFXI into an online RPG. He and Shinji Hashimoto also took the risk of giving Tetsuya Nomura the director role for Kingdom Hearts and supporting his vision. He was behind many of the company partnerships with American publishers which lead to a sharing of technological know-how, localization deals, and other benefits.

In short, Sakaguchi had an eye for talent and managed them very well by giving them opportunities. He also made sure the company was up to date on technological and gameplay advances. He may not have been the best game designer but he was a very experienced producer who could serve as the link between the business aspects of game development and the actual creation of games by development teams. I always found it to be an interesting coincidence that the main FF games started undergoing severe development problems around the time he left.

In the chaos of TSW's failure, the balance of power in the proposed merger shifted away from Square and caused internal conflict within the company. There were already disagreements over stock ratios and prices but the TSW's failure gave leverage to Enix in this deal. So, the fear of Enix backing away led to a lot of power being consolidated around Wada as CFO who would quickly get them back into an attractive stock. It wasn't enough just to be profitable since they lost the image of a strong growth company after shuttering Square Pictures.

When Wada came into power as the new CEO of Square-Enix, he wanted the company to be a global publisher on the level of EA and Activision. His planned involved having 8-10 big titles simultaneously in development at a time so each fiscal quarter would have a major title buoying it. In order to do this, he looked for any major growth opportunity that appeared and seized it.

For example, he brought arcade company Taito for $500 million. It was an incredibly expensive acquisition and did not synergize well with the company. While the purchase of Eidos brought a lot of Western talent and technical know-how, they lost a key piece of the deal. The Arkham series went to Warner Bros. Games who was one of the prospective buyers for Eidos. So SE lost Eidos’s biggest IP after paying a premium on the acquisition to beat Warner Bros. He also consolidated resources around a few key brands in order to spread the expenses of the larger marketing budgets he approved. I feel this is why the Final Fantasy brand slowly lost its prestige over time since quality control was not strong as it used to be.

A lot of people think Wada was some tyrannical CEO who constantly interfered in the development of their games and caused problems for its designers. However, much of the evidence we have suggest he was fairly hands-off and gave bigger and bigger development budgets to the producers/directors who built the company. Essentially, Wada gave them the rope which the development teams used to hang themselves.

He didn’t start getting heavily involved in pushing deadlines until 2009-2010 when projects were going off the tracks and he faced constant pressure from investors to deliver results. Even if he didn’t come from a game development background, a good CEO should be active in addressing the challenges his developers face rather than just throwing more money and manpower at it. The problem of not being able efficiently manage large teams happened during FF12’s development but it continues to plague them to this day. Maybe Wada was needed to help cut costs after TSW’s failure but his strategy as CEO of SE was incredibly risky and the company paid a heavy price.

Analysts at the time saw the merger as inherently advantageous to Enix. Enix would greatly benefit from the international distribution, internal resources, and access to their partner's know-how. On the other hand, Square would benefit very little in addressing strategic weaknesses through this merger. As with any merger, there would be a period where company cultures would clash, productivity would slow down due to poor communication, and the inevitable redundancies would take place. However, it seems they never properly synergized after being together for years. Enix hasn’t been able to take advantage of Square’s resources and successfully transform Dragon Quest from a regional powerhouse to a strong global brand.

So to summarize, while the merger sounded good in concept, the actual implementation was flawed. They lost one of their most experienced and forward-thinking producers and did not replace him with a suitable talent. The strengths of each company didn’t necessarily complement each other. They added a lot of bulk to the company that made it slower and able to readily identify trends. Their new CEO came from a business background and may have been unable to address the technological challenges of an entertainment company. He aggressively grew the company and did not consider factors such as project management, ballooning development costs, changes to company culture, and talent retention. In short, they overestimated the strength of the merger and underestimated the human cost of becoming a mega-publisher who could compete globally.

forbidden lesbian posted:

what's your favorite final fantasy

Rei_ posted:

So I'm, I think, halfway through FF13. I just beat Barthalandus and I'm now in the Fifth Ark area. I'm having a really easy time with boss battles, but it's actually like, regular fights I'm having a lot of trouble with. Like, what really effective Paradigms I should be using to make combat easier in general? What should I be opening with, because I find I'm using Lightning/Vanille/Fang and opening with Solidarity (Com/Med/Sen) but I always wind up swapping over to Combat Clinic (Sen/Med/Med) in a panic.

I also have NO idea what I'm doing with the gear upgrading. Like none of my accessories have been upgraded at all because I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the weapons effectively still.

I'm definitely going to beat it. I'm really enjoying everything but the combat part.

Rei_ posted:

So I'm, I think, halfway through FF13. I just beat Barthalandus and I'm now in the Fifth Ark area. I'm having a really easy time with boss battles, but it's actually like, regular fights I'm having a lot of trouble with. Like, what really effective Paradigms I should be using to make combat easier in general? What should I be opening with, because I find I'm using Lightning/Vanille/Fang and opening with Solidarity (Com/Med/Sen) but I always wind up swapping over to Combat Clinic (Sen/Med/Med) in a panic.

I also have NO idea what I'm doing with the gear upgrading. Like none of my accessories have been upgraded at all because I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the weapons effectively still.

I'm definitely going to beat it. I'm really enjoying everything but the combat part.

Levantine posted:

You should open battles at that point with a Saboter and a Synergist - get your buffs up, lower the enemies then switch to your COM/RAV/RAV or whatever you do to pour on damage. It may seem like too much time to do debuffs/buffs but they have the overall effect of reducing battle time.

Rei_ posted:

So I'm, I think, halfway through FF13. I just beat Barthalandus and I'm now in the Fifth Ark area. I'm having a really easy time with boss battles, but it's actually like, regular fights I'm having a lot of trouble with. Like, what really effective Paradigms I should be using to make combat easier in general? What should I be opening with, because I find I'm using Lightning/Vanille/Fang and opening with Solidarity (Com/Med/Sen) but I always wind up swapping over to Combat Clinic (Sen/Med/Med) in a panic.

I also have NO idea what I'm doing with the gear upgrading. Like none of my accessories have been upgraded at all because I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the weapons effectively still.

I'm definitely going to beat it. I'm really enjoying everything but the combat part.

Rei_ posted:

I'm really enjoying everything but the combat part.

Zero Star posted:

Huh, I seem to have picked up two Festivalist dresspheres in X-2. One from Brother after the first mission in Luca, and the other for winning a fiend arena tournament.

Endorph posted:

It was like they were afraid it was too weird of a plot point, or that making major NPCs not unquestionable good guys would confuse people, so they just hid it as best they could despite it being one of the main plot points.

Lessail posted:

merge the gf memory loss, child soldier, and norg stuff together better imo

Mega64 posted:

Cid Kramer is the worst Cid in the series.

Artix posted:

For starters, Light/Vanille/Fang is...okay? Biggest thing I can see is that you don't have a Synergist and you're double-dipping on Saboteur. If you're committed to that party, I would go with a Paradigm deck something like:

Relentless Assault (L-R, V-R, F-C)
Combat Clinic (L-M, V-M, F-Sen)
Delta Attack (L-C, V-R, F-Sen)
Matador (L-R, V-Sab, F-Sen)

And then two paradigms of your choice to complement them. Assassination (L-R, V-Sab, F-Sab), Aggression (L-C, V-R, F-C), Solidarity (L-C, V-M, F-Sen), or Smart Bomb (L-R, V-R, F-Sab) are all decent choices, depending on your needs and who you're playing as. You probably want to start in Delta Attack, and then switch to either Relentless Assault if you can finish a fight quickly, Combat Clinic/Solidarity to heal up as necessary, or Matador/Assassination to drop some debuffs.

Alternatively, switch out Vanille for Hope, which gives you one of the best, most balanced parties in the game (and because you could really use a Synergist). Also, don't worry about upgrading your poo poo because it's really not necessary at all unless you're going for the postgame stuff and you have to really like the combat system to do that. You should look into setting up some Synthesized skills though, because those can help cover up for a lot of shortcomings.

E: Also, don't bother pouring any CP into secondary roles, the costs skyrocket really really quickly and you'll get way more returns out of your main roles.

Endorph posted:

The FF5 Cid is pretty lame, too.

dude789 posted:

Having both Saboteur's isn't too terrible because Vanille and Fang fullfil such different roles as Sabotuers (Vanille is more about increasing damage dealt, whereas Fang is more about crippling enemies to reduce damage received.) That team is pretty frail though so swapping out one of the characters for Snow might be pretty helpful. I went through the game with a main team of Fang, Snow and Vanille, and I usually had a pretty easy time. In general though it's best to start with an offensive paradigm to gain momentum early on and then swap to a defensive one once you need it. From there you can buff yourself/debuff the enemy so you can endure their attacks and regain enough offensive pressure to eventually stagger them.

WickedHate posted:

V Cid got his brain used by the alien invaders in the anime sequel.