What it needs is a sequel, that takes place 40 years later and the game starts with a 73 year old haggard Steiner dutifully making his way back to the kingdom on foot to warn them about a threat. In this game Zidane would only be 56! He doesn’t need to be the main character either. I’m thinking an eclectic mix of ages. At some point you run into the most bad bitch Eiko who is now 46 and a boss lady mage supreme.
Quina is in the game and looks the exact same.
And! Fixed camera angles in some areas. Maybe all.
I seriously doubt the series is going away anytime soon. The biggest thing that makes Final Fantasy what it is to me is change. Every game tries new things. I think we hear harsh criticism of every new entry because people are passionate about the series, and it’s hard to see it go a direction that’s counter to what pulled you in in the first place.
Haven’t they been undergoing a generational handoff for a while now? Maybe not as soon as Nintendo started, but it’s not like the series didn’t shuffle directors a few times anyway since Sakaguchi left.
The shifts seem to be getting more drastic. 9-10 was relatively minor with the return to proper turn based and a different turn order, and it spiralled from there to new interesting takes.
Anyway, a Yoko Taro entry would go so hard, dude. Just get the guy a dedicated battle designer lol. I wanna see a Final Fantasy game that goes way off the beaten path. Long timers would hate it, but I’m all in for something weird.
Ultimately, I think this is what I want, too, because letting a game get weird means there’s faith in the vision. That sort of creative boldness is part of the series’ DNA in my eyes, and the last few mainline entries feel like they’re lacking some of that confidence, preferring to play things safe. It probably says something that what feels to me like their most confident new Final Fantasy in recent memory is the Remake project, which itself is still based on treading familiar ground
Even the Remake project has some weird issues like 16 does with the absolutely terrible skill trees. Someone over there thinks their games need these. For the love of God, someone stop Squeenix from making skill trees!
There’s an interview out there where Yoshi-P says he told the 16 directors to not worry about Final Fantasy conventions and to make the game they want to make, so 16 was trying all kinds of things to various levels of success, but at the end of the day, the story is a real Final Fantasy-ass story. It feels like they were afraid to whole-ass some things and I totally get that. I find myself holding back in writing/drawing/whatever all the time and I don’t even really have an audience, or shareholders. At least you got Ben Starr absolutely killing it in that one.
I doubt the corpos over there have the guts to let Yoko Taro loose, but it sure would be entertaining.
I think a lot of this in XVI’s case comes down to the fact that they took a team that only really knew how to build MMO content with a very strict assembly-line style production queue and told them to make a big-budget single-player game, to be honest. The team couldn’t have confidence in what they were trying to do because they didn’t have the people on board who knew how to actually do it
Almost from the ground up, FFXVI is a single-player version of FFXIV’s Main Scenario, from quest structures and cutscene blocking to the encounter design and the writing. Normally, this sort of thing happens in the reverse, with a single-player development team being tapped to make a live-service one, so in that respect the game is sort of fascinating, but the experience of playing it was almost painful at times due to how little they were willing to step away from the comfort of FFXIV’s design pipeline. (Either that or they weren’t allowed to, which is honestly the possibility that seems more likely to me, based on what we know of how development on FFXIV operates today)
That seems a reasonable guess to me. I always thought it was weird that CBU3 was developing two games at once like that. There must have been a lot of external workers, collaboration with other interal teams, and some crazy crunch.
FFIX is one of the few games in the series I’ve never revisited. I liked it a good bit, but I just don’t have the patience for it. It’s got two trivial flaws with combat that occur so frequently that it makes the game irritating. Sitting around for about a dozen seconds waiting for each combat to initiate gets old fast. I also feel compelled to steal every boss’s treasure and attempting to steal 30 times every boss fight really kills the flow. I’m pretty sure that’s “fixed” by a fast forward feature in the remaster, but I’ve played enough RPGs on emulators to know that fast forwarding completely takes my mind out of the game.
It’s not something we’re ever likely to get, but I would love some in-depth reporting on how CS3 actually operates these days. We know a fair bit about how they shipped A Realm Reborn, but things after that are far more unknown. I’ve long worried about how hard they’re being worked over there given FFXIV’s status as the company cash cow
It’s Japanese work culture so I assume it’s pretty crunchy all the time. I want to believe an indefinite work schedule would reach healtht sustainability at some point but that’s not exactly how the games industry works. I’d similarly like to know about internal Nintendo studios.
FFXVI is the campaigning with Liz Cheney of video games
I haven’t played IX so I can’t really speak to that but I always thought VI would be a good candidate for a remake, so I’m a bit sad they didn’t go that direction. Two of the things VI could use some sprucing up with are
The combat is fine but not outstanding
The massive party hardly interacts with each other - I have no idea what kind of conversations Strago and Celes have or Gau and Shadow have etc.
A nice 4K visual upgrade… An insane Kefka voice performance… You could even split the game into two parts at the halfway point and it’d feel more natural than FFVIIR’s splits… It all seems very plug-and-play to me
FFVI’s party size really is one of its greatest weaknesses. I’m not sure I really want SE to turn the massive-scale remake thing into a trend, though: it feels like if they go that route they’ll just be re-making most of the series for the next 40 years and I’d like a few more new Final Fantasies before I die!
If they do any more of them, though, I don’t see any other game in the series as having enough pull to actually be worth the investment on their end other than VI—and even then, I’m not actually sure it would sell enough for them, since even VII Remake seems to have barely met expectations if at all
I actually think if they do another VII remake level event they’ll do X, but I also think if they do this again they won’t bother with the trilogy thing anyway after it seems to have reached a point of diminishing returns for them in terms of sales (unless it’s exploded on steam which may be the case idk)
I like the VII remakes but I kind of thing it’s for the best if this is the only one. Sure give IX a new coat of paint since the HD console ports can make it look pretty ugly but besides that, whatever
A friend of mine is doing a low level play through of ff6 and we were joking that if they remade it the opera scene would be 15 hours long.
That game is great but its really sparse on the dialog and super snappy and that fast pace is good. I think a remake would have a lot of trouble with that. I do like the idea of revisiting that world but maybe more of a remake in the way movies are remade instead of the way games are.
