After months of hearing about how Final Fantasy "needed" to become Devil May Cry because RPGs are dead, watching Buldurs Gate succeed and FF16 fall short of expectations is kind of cathartic.

Edit: I'm aware this Square's projections, not actual sales. The point still stands that they made a shift in genre thinking they would unlock a wider audience than they got. Then a shit ton of think pieces and reviews and FF14 fans came out spouting this nonsense about how turn based RPGs are old hat and Square NEEDED to abandon it to hook modern gamers.

Then Boulder Gate drops and proves every single one of them wrong, while Square is wondering why they fell short.

Maybe releasing exclusively on the Playstation but not pc or Xbox wasn't the brilliant idea they thought it was 🤔

Which Squeenix game has ever met their expectations? Weren’t they also super disappointed with Tomb Raider and Hitman even though they moved millions of units.

It seems that SE is severely out of touch with the current state of the industry and where they are positioned.

I've played every mainline FF1-12, couldn't finish 3, beat 15, and went into this blind.

Outside of the 10% of spectacular moments, this was just so incredibly bland. I've never skipped cutscenes in a game before and I did that for the last 15 side quests.

Gear upgrading was pointless, exploration led to absolutely no secrets or purpose to do so, combat was praised early on as amazing but it felt like mash attack + wait for cooldowns. They removed all status effects and even elements of magic, again I know the "reasoning" for this but it's just made things more and more basic.

Marlboro spits on you, no consequences but damage

Cast fire on a bomb, pure damage, element means nothing

And locking hard mode behind ng+? Let people decide what mode they want, not everyone wants to spend 50 hours on a game which is too easy just to play it at a level they'll find engaging.

I found this game to be wholly forgettable which is a shame because I really tried to go into it with no expectations.

Has square ever met any of their expectations? They always seem to over estimate everything. Any time they have a game release, it's always followed with an article about how it didn't meet sales expectations. You'd think if company leadership is that far off from expectations over and over, they'd re-assess, yet they never do.

According to Squeenix, what was the last game that actually managed to "meet expectations" according to them?

Removing the RPG elements from Final Fantasy will do that.

People seemed to enjoy this game, but it seems like they had a budgetary look at expectations; spend millions on the intense CGI action scenes and voice acting, get tens of millions back. It even seemed to come forward in their interviews that they “needed” this one to be epic and unmissable.

I’ve never felt that’s a winning approach to games though. Comparing to XIV, you just never know when your major hits are going to come forward.

I will say this much; Shadowbringers and Endwalker felt like that creatively exited the theme of building up to a fight against an unknown and evil god, and had very strong story themes to their conclusion. Sometimes the final boss still registers as a “god”, but that’s not the reason you’re fighting them.

I’m excited to buy it when it comes to PC, but my single-player rpg backlog is long already. I’ll probably end up waiting for a sale, which shouldn’t take too long if articles like this keep coming.

This will be my first single player FF since 10. I love XIV, so it seems to me that the hype of using the XIV team on this game wouldn’t add a huge amount of value to a PS5 exclusive release when the majority of XIV players are on PC, and others are still on PS4. It’s not like PC enjoyers and PS4-content players are going to go buy a PS5 just to play it early. They’re waiting for the port, then they’re waiting longer still for the port to be fixed.

Thats surprising. FF16 is great

They really need to take a step back and remember why people enjoy the franchise. I enjoyed the characters and the gameplay but they keep changing it. 12 was the beginning of the end of turn based combat. I still like 12 but give us a mainline turn based game. It can be fun and people will like it. Just make good characters.

I just couldn't get into 16 at all, and this is from someone who loves everything right from the NES up to and including FF13 and 14.

Xenoblade has filled in the gap FF has left for me in many respects.

while I enjoyed playing it, it did get a bit tedious near the end, and fully keeping up with the story involved spending as much time in menus reading stuff as playing the rest of the game, 11 hours of which were cutscenes. edit: near the end I just couldn't be bothered and started skipping all cutscenes and dialog just to be done with it.

There is no single piece of media that has had more impact on me throughout my life than the Final Fantasy series. I enjoyed the first half or so of 15 so much that I thought for sure it would be my new favorite game of all time. It devolved into such a shit heap that I couldn't even bring myself to play it post updates & DLC. It along with KH3 has left me sour on all of Square's modern releases. I was pleasantly surprised by FF7 Remake and will play FF16 at some point. Even a mediocre Final Fantasy is better than what 15 gave us.

So that may explain their recent commitment to release games also on XBox.