Square Enix admits to slow production pace

It's not even the fact you take too long, it's the fact you take too long then come out with a colossal turd like FF 12. Which frankly, gives me zero hope that 13 will be anything better (specially after the demo footage).

Imagine all the games that could have actually been good had the developers had more time/funds and less interference from management (who want everything as generic and politically correct as possible).

Take Jericho, for example. With better level design and more substance it could have been a good shooter, not the dull, soulless experience it ended up as.

They seem to have no problem spinning out remakes all the damn time. i love them but i have FF1-4 on my portable systems in the time it took them to make FF12 and part of 13

O RLY? all the games i'm anticipating from them come out late this year or sometime next year. why is that? they really need to kick it into high gear, lest the become the next 3d realms.

The days of a GOOD jrpg are behind us and it's very sad. XII was an absolute debauchery of what FF is all about, XIII will be just as bad or god forbid WORSE.

FFX was definitely the last of the series to catch my eye at all, X-2 was blasphemy, XI was...well...lets not even start with that. Granted nothing will ever touch IV, VII, VIII, and, IX in all their glory. Whether they make a FF VII remake or not, it still holds and will always hold as the single greatest and utterly flawless game to ever come off the shelves of a store.

Square needs to a)get back whatever magic they lost after IX and b) get to work on that FF VII remake because I refuse to buy a PS3 without it, especially without the backwards compatibility anymore.

Give me Legend of Legaia, FF IV, and so many other amazing titles...you can keep FF XIII and their dumb as hell character models (i mean c'mon...a guy with a chick inside his hair??)...I'll save my 60 bucks...oh wait...my 360 bucks.

PS2 or bust

Pff, it seems its allways "cool" to hate on the good ol rpgs.

You people complain about cliché walking characters, but you yourselves are allways using cliché arguments. If its about ff7, eveyone says theyre fed up and dont wanna a remake and bla bla bla.
If its about, people, say its the worst and bla bla bla (worst? worst was ff12 and x-2, not 8! 8 was one of the best)

Ill be around here expecting more criticism from people that never developed a game, yet, can allways find time to criticise hard work and creativity from others.

Its as though one would criticise a painting from Toulouse-Lautrec complaining that he was "short" enough to not be able to paint...dumb shit ppl...dumb shit

In the uper argument, I meant to say *"if its about ff8"

Wow. What's with all the hate for XII? I enjoyed that game lots. Not the best of the Final Fantasies, but certainly nowhere near the worst.

Your not taking nearly as long as 3D Realms, so you could do worse. ; )

Well, should be interesting to see what the future of Eidos and their franchises will be.

1- SE, why would you put so much effort into restraining your devs? You know that you'll make the money back and then some.

2- VIII, X, X2, XI, and XII did not suck. They tried different things. You might not like it-- that's ok, FF doesn't use the same storyline, so it's not like you're missing much by one game sucking. They all had battle systems that were radically different from previous games-- and that's what FF has been doing since the SNES. FF8 had a weak story, but that's because they tried to do something very different (a romance story more than a save-the-world story). The battle system (drawing, GF) was broken in some ways, but again, that's because they were experimenting.

ATB was an attempt to bring the excitement of Real Time to Turn Based combat. X, X2, XI and XII have all had different attempts to improve on that. X had the CTB, which was a way of taking the time-sensitivity of ATB, but combining it with the ease-of-use and patience of a turn based system. I personally didn't like FFX's story, but it depends on what you look for in a story.

I'll admit I haven't finished FFX2 yet, but its battle system was an attempt to go in the other direction, to make ATB more active. I haven't finished the story yet, and I'm not a huge fan of it, but it has very strong characters, which suits it better in a way.

FFXI's battle system was another take on a more active ATB. It works pretty well, and has plenty of innovations throughout. The story is superb, although it takes a lot to get into. It has a very unforgiving difficulty curve, although that's been improving. You can dislike it for being an MMO, but if you get over the online part it's a damn fine game.

FFXII was basically a modified version of FFXI's battle system, with the big innovation of the Gambit system. Lots of people don't like it, which is fine, but you don't have to use it if you think it makes the game too easy. The story was very slow paced, and love-it-or-hate-it, but the world has a lot of depth to it.

There are things you can dislike in all of them, sure, but you could find problems in any game. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with any of them.

It's nice that they're actually taking responsibility. Yes gamers, a delay can ACTUALLY be due to bad time management and professionals not getting their jobs done in time, a "wait until it's done' attitude does NOT help. Would you do your job well without a deadline? Would most people? It's the same logic for game developers.

in other news, EA admits to releasing sequels

Final Fantasy VIII was the best! I'm not saying VII was terrible, I remember playing it and enjoying it, but looking back the characters sucked. Cloud was a puss, Barret had the oh-so-practical machine gun for a hand thing going on, Yuffi was annoying as shit and Red IX was a talking dog for fuck's sake.
The only cool one was Vincent but even he wasn't as cool as Irving the sniper. VIII ruled, bitches!!!

Final Fantasy fanboys are the only ones that fight themselves. I think we can all agree that X-2 is the worst and further proof that you should never make a direct FF sequel on the main franchise.

Now kiss and make up. It's still a topnotch franchise compared to just about every other franchise ever created.

Bow.

P.S. The first FF you played is the best FF in your opinion (that no one really gives a shit about) 80% of the time.

It's an issue of hype rather than of them taking too long. In Crystal Bearers' case, they revealed the game about 2 years before development really started on it. Something similar probably occurred for XIII

A little bit of discipline on their part would resolve the illusion that these games take longer than they actually do.

I don't mind waiting for a quality production, but I really don't need 20 million mini-games that only the Japanese understand and that I need a strategy guide to figure out (to date FinalFantasy games are the ONLY games I need strategy guides for). I don't have all the time in the world to explore every crevice of a 2-5 disc game.

i do appreciate when devs have time to finish games cause we can tell when they are rushed. but at the same time, no matter how good the game is, if i have to wait 4 to 6 years to see anything after an announcement than i usually have a really hard time justifying it as "worth the wait".

what i don't get is if they know how long they take to make games, and they want to work on multiple projects at the same time (further slowing the process), then why do they feel they need to announce it as soon as they start? i say you should announce a game a year tops ahead of when it will actually drop. only other reason i can see for devs announcing games 4 years ahead of time is for the short jump in stock activity after an announcement. not really fair to the gamer though.