Cognition Dissemination: Bi-Annual Fantasy

Square
Enix certainly has good intentions in their desire to make a new, mainline
Final Fantasy game every one to two years, according to franchise producer
Yoshinori Kitase. It is, after all, the schedule the franchise used to release
in before development hell became commonplace for the development of every new
installment. They began having serious internal issues as of Final Fantasy XII for various reasons,
which spilled over into Final
Fantasy XIII and is currently crippling Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Type-0
suffered from this as well, though mainly because the development team was
split between that and The 3rd Birthday.
Final Fantasy XIII-2 seems like an
aversion to this, but that might be because most of its assets were discarded
ones for FFXIII.

 

The company
started to realize things went awry after Final
Fantasy X-2’s release in 2003, and now they want to go back to a time when mainline
installments didn’t come with a plethora of drama behind closed doors. (Not to
say that games before XII didn’t have any, of course, but development periods
really heated up beginning with that game. In the wrong way.) The thing is,
they may find this harder than they think. High-profile video games are harder
to make than ever with rising budgets and production values, and a bi-annual
schedule for, on average, 30-40 hour JRPGs could be disastrous in terms of fan
reception.

Well, they can’t reuse FFXIII assets forever.

Sure, while
a frighteningly sizable portion of fans veer towards the “fandumb” side of things,
the other (clearly not as vocal) side takes a logical approach to criticism and
can express some potential problems with this plan. While anyone who says
FFXIII was a bad game is being needlessly hyperbolic, no one will deny that it
has some problems due to a plethora of misperceptions of the markets they
wanted to appeal to. FFXIII was made with the intention of having a Call of Duty-like structure since that
franchise was (and still is) the most popular in west. What they didn’t realize
is that a good portion of the audience that was looking forward to it either
(a) had no interest whatsoever in CoD or (b) played CoD, but doesn’t play FPS
titles and JRPGs for similar experiences.

 

Fortunately,
they seem to realize where they went wrong with Final Fantasy XIII-2, which
fixes a lot of problems fans had with its predecessor. The question is: will
everyone rubbed the wrong way by the first game’s flaws consider giving this
game a try? It will probably sell fine considering its budget, but probably not
as well as XIII. In other words, it will likely have the same drop-off in sales
as X to X-2.

 

The bigger
concern here is Final Fantasy XIV. You
don’t even need me to tell you that its release was a complete disaster,
the result of a company desperate to get their MMO on the market before World of Warcraft: Cataclysm dropped
regardless of its unfinished state — and they paid the price for it big time.
But now they’re trying to make amends by redoing certain sections of the game
so they’re more palatable to, well, anyone who expected a good MMO from it in Version 2.0. The problem is that the
number of MMO’s that have successfully rebounded from a disastrous launch
currently stands at a whooping zero. This might the big FF release they’ll be
focusing on for next year — it’s Q4 2012 for PC, and Q1 2013 for PS3.
Apologies to anyone who expected it to be Versus XIII.

 

Final
Fantasy is in for a wild ride in the future, and hopefully it becomes a
franchise nearly everyone can appreciate again. The overall game development environment has changed dramatically since the last time they were on such a schedule (which was almost ten years ago). A straight bi-annual schedule with two different teams using two different sets of assets would be a good idea — similar to the aesthetic differences between Final Fantasy VIII and IX. Of course, the question is “Will they do this?” Well see!