Iaian said: Then FFXIII came along and nobody on the dev team knew what the game was going to be until about a year before release. There's a post mortem on it on the internet somewhere and it is an amazing read. They had zero direction at all. The fact they scrambled together all the art assets, mechanics, a world, and a barely coherent story together in a year is utterly ridiculous. That they managed to come up with one of the series' best battle system (second only to FFX's I feel) in the process is a goddamned miracle.
Wipwned said: So, I have to ask, how in the world FFXIII qualifies as the best combat system given the ridiculous number of flaws present in design?
CaButler said: On the subject of the Crystarium... And hell, he includes the weapon system, just for fun.
Zubis said: No you're not the only one,
dn said: http://images.wikia.com/finalfantasy/images/f/fa/Square_Staff_Circa_1994.gif Take a look at this. This is why pre-FF7 Square put out consistently well-recieved material, despite frequently being bug-ridden and frankly poorly written. They were a close-knit group of friends, almost family, who put the enjoyment of the gamer ahead of the company dollar. They understood that the company dollar would naturally follow on its own if they put out games that people loved.
dn said: http://images.wikia.com/finalfantasy/images/f/fa/Square_Staff_Circa_1994.gif Take a look at this. This is why pre-FF7 Square put out consistently well-recieved material, despite frequently being bug-ridden and frankly poorly written. They were a close-knit group of friends, almost family, who put the enjoyment of the gamer ahead of the company dollar. They understood that the company dollar would naturally follow on its own if they put out games that people loved. Then Enix came along and swallowed them, and now they have no fucking idea where they're going or what they're doing. Good games are flukes now, or done by separate companies elsewhere in the world. They've been missing the point for over a decade, too busy trying to include things for everybody on the face of the earth, and not completing any of it or injecting an actual sense of soul in it. FFX was probably the last game that felt cohesive. I liked XII, but it has glaring problems which stick out like black plague bubble blisters, and then there's XIII. They've fucked up every Mana game since Legend. Let's not even get into Kingdom Hearts. Square doesn't even know how to properly estimate sales; if 3 million is still too low, you have a budgetting problem. At the end of the day, they're going to need a complete overhaul to fix their problems, and a major scaling down, and possibly less high management oversight. That's what hurt FFXII so bad.
