Is Final Fantasy Too Big To Succeed?
Square Enix is disappointed again
Final Fantasy isn't selling well, at least not as much as Square Enix wants it too. Despite back-to-back massive entries in the long-running RPG franchise, which even with big flaws were popularly received by both fans and critics, we've entered another speculative doom-spiral around the publisher and its most iconic series. Why can't the company that transformed the imaginations of a generation of SNES and PS1 players get its shit together? Rob Fahey at GamesIndustry.biz blames it partly on Final Fantasy's relentless "appetite for reinvention" driving it into an identity crisis.
"Ironically, even as Final Fantasy seems to struggle with both an identity crisis and a sales slump, JRPGs more generally are actually in pretty good health," he writes. "Flagship genre titles like Persona and Like A Dragon are very different to what Final Fantasy has become – likely having only a fraction of the development budget, for a start, but embracing their genre roots in ways that have delighted fans while also helping to control development costs to some degree."
I think one of the problems for Square Enix is precisely that it doesn't want Persona 5 or Yakuza: Like A Dragon-sized hits, each of which sold less than their respective Final Fantasy counterparts at the time, though not by much. It wants Final Fantasy to be a hit that transcends the confines of the genre and fandom as it used to dependably do in the past when any new sequel was a top five defining game for a PlayStation console. I have supplied a chart to illustrate this point. Ten million copies sold is a big hit. Twenty million sold is a massive hit. Skyrim and The Witcher 3 are just unparalleled outliers.
It’s probably fair to say timed exclusivity really hurt the initial momentum of FFXVI and FFVII Rebirth. More people play games on PC than console, and while Xbox sales have been terrible this console generation, my guess is that the first 10-20 million Xbox Series X/S sold go to hardcore players who buy lots of games and Final Fantasy would sell better there than people like to act. I also think the Nintendo Switch being a dominant platform this console generation and not being capable of playing either game doesn't help, especially when the drop off in Xbox sales hasn't been made up for with increased PS5 sales.
Here is my theory of the case. In the past, Final Fantasy has used incredible graphics to try and overcome the more limited appeal of in the weeds RPG design. It may be that the franchise has hit the point where that's actually a net-drag, not just preventing new entries from being on weaker but larger install bases, but also distracting from more novel gameplay and storytelling. Both Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 have proven just how many players will show up for games with dense systems and challenging mechanics as long as they're in the service of something that feels fresh, novel, and expansive.
For Square Enix more broadly, what it needs to do is pretty clear: make better games. It's been flooding the zone the last few years with JRPG remasters and remakes, as well as sequels, spin-offs, and one-off experiments in series and genres that I, a superfan, am fascinated with, but which have not felt relevant in years. There are games like Foamstars and Chocobo Racing whose clinical monetization strategies murdered any lasting possibility of fun. In addition to overwhelming a small but lucrative player-base with too many intriguing but middling releases, it often feels like the incubation process at Square Enix is just throwing spaghetti at a wall and then running with the first thing that sticks for more than a second or two.
Visions of Mana is a good recent example of this. The long dormant franchise used to be an important supporting pillar to Final Fantasy during the SNES and PS1 days. Square Enix had been slowly trying to lay the groundwork for a revival with ports of the best games in the series and a remake of Trials of Mana, which wasn't previously localized in the West. And then it farmed the latest installment out to a NetEase studio for its maiden voyage. The results are not terrible! Visions of Mana is a pretty game with a big world, solid combat, great music, and a neat job system that has some genuinely cool ideas in it.
But the game also feels overly ambitious for its likely budget and scope. It's made up of big, yawning open world zones with too few battles and little to discover in them. Side stories consist of mostly perfunctory fetch quests. The broad strokes of the story are compelling but the character banter is weak and interrupts all too frequently to no apparent end. And the progression economy of leveling up, unlocking new abilities, buying better gear, and building up your party's power feels very uneven.
In the end, there's an air of Genshin Impact, action MMO-lite slop about the whole thing, which is not to denigrate the hit gacha game so much as the cavalcade of underbaked copycats that have come after2. Visions of Mana far cry from the taught, laser-focused, meat-and-potatoes construction and refinement of the original Secret of Mana. Granblue Fantasy: Relink, which is streamlined to a fault, did a much better job of channeling that energy this year. I would have loved to have seen the Mana motifs–a magic tree, elemental spirits, cute monsters–wrapped around that game's Monster Hunter-lite structure instead and tight arcade action feel instead.
More importantly, Visions of Mana feels like another game burdened with unrealistic expectations. NetEase closed the studio that made it the same day it came out. Instead of building on the game's strengths and weaknesses for a more distinct, substantive, and polished sequel, Mana seems likely to be uprooted again and either put back on ice or tossed to a new team that has to start over again mostly from scratch. And Square Enix wonders how it became a mono-franchise publisher.
Live Service Interrupted
Throne and Liberty is the new NCSoft MMORPG that came out in South Korea last year and recently arrived in the U.S. by way of Amazon Games. The game had huge Steam concurrents initially but players are divided on whether it's just another flashy but soulless grind or if there's more than just a byzantine progression system powering its appeal.
There's a debate about whether it's really pay-to-win, because even though you can spend on microtransactions to buy gear and boost XP the really meaningful upgrades are still locked behind end-game stuff. What's not in dispute is that there's multiple paid battle passes, including one for your character's normal leveling process.
One thing that sets Throne and Liberty apart is that it's a free-to-play MMO that's also on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, where there are a lot fewer options for that. A less fortunate distinction it has on console is the controls are a mess and the D-pad frequently bugs out. The Xbox store is full of 1-star review complaints and Reddit has multiple guides for how players can bring up an "emergency cursor override" when they get stuck on the menus.
Final Fantasy XIV has a notorious, neverending housing shortage. Plots are so hard to come by that the game has a lottery to decide who can get them. The latest round just ended with players finding out in the days ahead whether they got lucky. The game has also put a moratorium on home demolition for residents of certain North American servers following the horrific damage caused by Hurricane Helen. Residencies usually get destroyed and recycled if players haven't visited them in the last 45 days.
But the housing market inFFXIV doesn't matter if nobody can log into the game. The game has experienced 11 outages in the last two months due to DDOS attacks. While it's not clear what's responsible for the massive uptick, players are getting sick of it. Unlike many other online games where it's a bummer and a nuisance, FFXIV fans actually pay directly for subscription time to play and some of them are now calling for refunds.
Destiny 2 faces an epidemic of crouch spamming. In PVP modes players will rapidly do squats to scatter their hitbox and throw off their opponents. While sweaty try-hard might actually bother to do it manually, more often players use macros, third-party programs, or other external means to automate it. Last week, Bungie announced it will address the problem with a cap on the number of crouches per second (CPS).
"This limit is something that can be tuned, and because a tactical crouch or two during an engagement is an expression of skill and not something we want to discourage, we verified in our playtesting that our first pass was set so that it would be difficult to tell a limit existed if you were crouching at a normal cadence," the devs wrote. "However, our goal is to reduce the amount of untargeted crouch spamming, done either manually or via macros, encountered while playing Crucible, and we can further change the value as needed to prevent this behavior."
The Simpsons: Tapped Out (TSTO) is calling it quits. After 12 years the EA mobile game about building and maintaining your own version of Springfield through constant, Farmville-type dopamine hits. The game will be removed from app stores on Halloween and go offline in January. People who have been playing for years are freaking out and begging EA not to pull the plug. "Please don't destroy this," wrote one player on Facebook. "I've been playing so much recently, it brings me so much joy!!"
"Don't end the game 12 years got me thru so much and release all characters I'm missing a few," wrote a second. Others are saying goodbye to the towns they spent a decade building, through school and college, marriages and divorces. Fans on the game's subreddit are worried about the future of their community. Recommendations for what to replace TSTO include Family guy, Goosebumps: Horror Town, SpongeBob Moves In! and Fallout Shelter. "Without sounding bitter, I don’t want to invest anymore time in a similar game if it’s just going to shut down somewhere down the line," wrote one fan who does finally sound tapped out.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League received its season three update that adds a new playable character Lawless (Zoe Lawton) who happens to be Deadshot's daughter. The third character added since the game launched, her traversal ability is a gadget that lets her manipulate gravity and fall in any direction. The new season also adds a mission that takes place in an alternate reality Gotham. The free update debuted to less than 300 concurrents on Steam. That's less than half of Concord's max.
Players still lurking on the official Suicide Squad Discord mostly can't seem to believe why Rocksteady Studios would invest so much time in adding a character no one knows or cares about. What diehard players do seem pumped about is a patch that finally fixes a bug that was mysteriously erasing Codex entries since the game came out. "Time to get back into the grind this weekend," wrote one player on Discord. "The game is soo dead waste of money and download," wrote the person immediately after them.
XDefiant, on the other hand, is definitely not dead, the executive producer recently promised. "I just want to quickly address the status of the game. i.e. is the game dying?" wrote Mark Rubin in a September blog post that raised questions already answered by his blog post. "No, the game is absolutely not dying." It was a very unusual moment of candor from the former Infinity Ward man who worked on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare during its heyday.
Rubin seemed to be responding to a report by Insider Gaming claiming XDefiant was on borrowed time and bleeding players. Or maybe it was the players on the subreddit complaining about being unable to find matches. It did not help when Ubisoft admitted to investors that the free-to-play, class-based FPS is struggling. It's apparently banking on a resurgence when season 3 arrives in December. By that point it will be directly competing with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
Patch notes
Elden Ring patch 1.15 fixed a bug where "Rellana, Twin Moon Knight would sometimes perform unexpected actions when interacting with objects in the battle area." She was getting caught on chairs and skipping to her second phase early.
Starfield update 1.14.70 makes it so 9,999 is no longer the max damage that can be displayed. Also "healing items now preview the amount of health restored."
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess's latest title update has capped the maximum number of sorcerers that can be used to speed up the cooldown for its map-nuking magical summon.
Zoochosis patch 1.01 "Fixed the issue where a mutated moose, tranquilized with two darts during the first phase, would kill an animal after the player returned to the train." The indie horror game came out last week and is full of weird bugs.
Stellar Blade update 1.007 made the game even more horny or, in the language of the patch notes, brough "visual improvements of conflicts between EVE's body." Players have done rigorous before and after testing to reveal all of the changes, from wind blowing up the cyborg's skirt to her breasts getting smooshed together when she bends over.
What they're saying
"I think in the future, there will be many things that are like a hybrid of movies and games. But of course, the business side of things are also important, so you have to time it right. I don’t want to be in the red, but I don’t concentrate on making big profits; I just want to be the first one to do something." – Death Stranding director Hideo Kojima
"Heihachi has numerous illegitimate children. I doubt if he remembers Reina very accurately." – Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada
"We are an entertainment company. As such, our objective is not to endorse any specific agenda." – Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot
"This year, more people are playing with Xbox across all devices in Asia than ever before. We've seen the largest number of Xbox console players in the region to date." – Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer
"We didn't think there was an option to just leave [PS5 Pro support] on the table. But we are getting great support from Sony in terms of helping us figure out what we're going to do with that. – Monster Hunter producer Ryozo Tsujimoto
"No one knows when anything is going to come out, what quality it will be—including our players—and it terrifies everyone...When every game is a Schrodinger's Box, why not over invest into a few titles and hope for the very best? It's something that we have become very used to doing. It is not how the industry existed forever. It is where we are now." – I Am Your Beast developer Xalavier Nelson Jr.
"One of the manifestations [of that change] we're seeing right now is that a lot of games are released with high budgets, and they're not selling nearly as well as expected whereas other games are going incredibly strong. What we're seeing is a real trend where players are gravitating toward the really big games where they can play with more of their friends." – Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney
"You can also choose a male or female [version] of the protagonist, but we cannot write it as 'choose from Male or Female;' it became 'Type 1 & Type 2.' I wonder who the heck are going to complain about 'Male and Female?' I don't understand." – Dragon Quest designer Yuji Horii
Five games to play this weekend
Interesting, I thought if anybody is having a blast it will be Final Fantasy, but I guess it's not all sunshine and rainbows for them either