Let me be clear: I did not intend to suggest, in my piece last week calling the Final Fantasy series dead, that the breast-physics fanservice system present in the next game in the series represented the tipping point at which the storied role-playing game series suddenly flatlined.
For me, though, it was a wake-up call, a clearing of the last remaining clouds from my mind, of any vestige of hope that I may have had as a longtime Final Fantasy fan. Somewhere inside me was still some small feeling that Final Fantasy was just in a prolonged slump, that the decline in quality and sales of the last few games was due to Square Enix struggling greatly with the perils of next-generation game development, that somewhere deep down it knew what worked about the Final Fantasy series in the first place and it was just looking to get a handhold and start climbing again.
But the longer this goes on, the clearer it becomes that these games we're playing now are not temporary setbacks in the plan, they are the plan. We're not playing stopgap games that are keeping us from the "real" Final Fantasy; these games are the real Final Fantasy now. If you love them anyway, you are a member of a shrinking group. If you are still holding out hope, I recommend you stop; it is over.
I expected (and got) some lively Twitter and comment-section discussion about that story, but what I didn't expect were a variety of lengthy rebuttal pieces, ranging from sober to downright vitriolic (see: US Gamer, Pixels or Death, Stay Classy). What all of them had in common (besides strong disagreement) was that they pointed out that I presented very little evidence to bolster the key assertion.
As regards that particular piece, that's true. But I've been writing about the slow decline of Final Fantasy over the last decade, much of it here on WIRED. So if you're craving a recap of the last 10 years, here it is (and you asked for it).
The Original Creators Are Gone
Final Fantasy was originally a collaboration between director Hironobu Sakaguchi, musician Nobuo Uematsu and illustrator Yoshitaka Amano. This is no longer the case. Sakaguchi was essentially ousted from Square Enix after his Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within feature film proved an expensive flop. Amano was not asked to design the characters after Square switched to 3-D, polygon-based artwork on PlayStation in the mid-90's. Of the three, Uematsu has stayed closest to the series, although he quit his job at Square to go freelance and as of late has scored only the Final Fantasy XIV massively multiplayer game, not Final Fantasy XII, XIII or any upcoming games.
The series' early success was largely the result of this team of extraordinary talent; Sakaguchi had a gift for telling compelling stories in the restrictive 8- and 16-bit game formats, Uematsu was unparalleled at generating hours and hours of memorable chiptunes to score the action. The selection of Amano to create the game's concept art and character designs was the most avant garde move of all since his willowy, ethereal illustration style would seem at first glance to be simply incompatible with videogames that had to draw their characters with a handful of chunky primary-colored pixels. Instead it worked exceptionally well; Amano would go on to say that the in-game artwork served as a symbol, meant to evoke the player's imagination, the feeling of interacting with one of Amano's impossible visions.
This is not to say that if these three creators were to reunite tomorrow they would necessarily produce another Final Fantasy as critically acclaimed as the work they did decades ago. But the staggered departure of Amano, Sakaguchi and Uematsu means that whatever creative impulses were driving the series then are gone now – so why expect anything to revive them?
(Lots of people mentioned that they liked Final Fantasy XII on PlayStation 2. Directed by Yasumi Matsuno. Who has also quit.)
The Games Are a Mess
In relaunching the Gaming Intelligence Agency a few weeks ago, Andrew Vestal – with whom I first became acquainted when he maintained The Unofficial Squaresoft Home Page, for which I penned this editorial in 1997 – wrote about Final Fantasy V. He did find, playing the 1995 game again, that his feelings about the game now had changed. Only they were for the better rather than the worse: What seemed to him to be a lackluster Final Fantasy then turned out to have a wealth of undiscovered gameplay genius buried underneath it now. I sincerely doubt the same will be said of Final Fantasy XIII, a linear series of narrow corridors filled with battles that can only be played one way and that pose little to no difficulty for the player for the first, oh, 25-30 hours of the game.
I have pointed to Final Fantasy X-2, both at the time of its release and now, as a focal point for The Moment Things Started To Go Wrong for the series. I don't mean it's a Bad Game like Final Fantasy XIII is. I mean this: Up until this point, Final Fantasy stood out from other games that had several sequels because each entry in the series was a wholly unique world, a new setting, a new cast of characters, new gameplay systems. Some were better than others, but they weren't sequels like other games were sequels. Final Fantasy X-2, in some respects, wasn't even as novel as the average videogame sequel. It was largely conceived not as a way of continuing a story that had more juice left in it but as a way of reusing assets, of sending the player back on a victory lap of all the places they'd already visited in Final Fantasy X, remixing those people and places and selling another game at full price. Not even standard videogame sequels did that.
Moreover, the game seemed to have been conceived also as pure fanservice, taking the original game's female characters, making them the stars of the show and giving them skimpier outfits. Reasonable people can disagree on the results of this but it was a sharp left turn for the direction of the series' plot lines. It felt more like a straight-to-video sequel to a great movie, not a strong successor. I think at the time I compared it to Caddyshack II: funny movie, you could say, but no Caddyshack. Serviceable, not standout.
Final Fantasy X-2 did not define the series going forward, not entirely. Final Fantasy XII, made by a different team, didn't fall victim to any of this and was highly praised. Players that didn't like it probably felt that it demanded a great deal from them immediately: If you enjoyed leisurely making your way through previous Final Fantasy games without having to think too heavily about strategy, you were in for a rude awakening the first time you ventured outside a town in XII and got slaughtered. That made its appeal somewhat narrower, but those who liked it seem to like it all the more for its challenging nature.
No, the problem with X-2 is that it taught Square Enix that a Final Fantasy product with all the corners cut away would still sell. And thus began the Great Cheapening. People liked Final Fantasy VII? Great, let's make a PSP prequel, a chintzy mobile phone spinoff, a convoluted straight-to-video movie sequel and one of the worst third-person shooter games ever. Final Fantasy IV considered one of the great masterpieces of the 16-bit age? Sweet, let's reuse all those old sprites and hack together a disappointing, unnecessary sequel.
The Final Fantasy name on a product used to stand for quality always, now it stands for quality sometimes. Final Fantasy X-2 was the breaking of the seal, a recognition that Square Enix could use the name without doing any of the work. And it was only after years of such beatdowns and the release of Final Fantasy XIII that, upon the appearance of the inevitable Final Fantasy XIII-2, I played it for an hour or so and was just defeated; it was the first major console release of a Final Fantasy game that I just couldn't bring myself to play.
Fortunately, for critical commentary I have Seth Schiesel, who gamely battled through both entries for the New York Times. Here's the Zagat's version of his review: Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a "barely coherent narrative wormhole" that "makes little effort to let you know whether you’re making progress," does not "engage the players' sense of tactical enjoyment" and will leave you "disheartened by its barrage of frustrations."
I should also point out that it is taking Square Enix forever to make even these mediocre products. Final Fantasy XIII was shown off at the 2006 E3 Expo and did not release in Japan until December 2009 – and it was the Japan studio's first game on PlayStation 3. Final Fantasy Versus XIII, now renamed Final Fantasy XV, was announced the same day and is still far from release.
It's important to be wary of viewing the past through rose-colored glasses, but the inverse is not necessarily true either. Sometimes – often! – the older stuff really was better. (Imagine saying with a straight face to a Star Wars fan that the new trilogy really is great, and that they're just irrational, and it's not for you anymore, et cetera. Is that the most compelling explanation, or the last feeble line of defense?)
Sales Are Dropping Accordingly
It is very difficult to nail down the exact worldwide sales of any videogame. Publishers often tout how many units they have shipped into stores of a particular title. The NPD Group once released exact figures of the number of copies of games that have been sold through to consumers, but when contacted by WIRED for this story an NPD representative said that the research group no longer gives individual sales figures to the press.
The best data set I can find is from the Japanese market, where Famitsu and Media Create have independently tracked and reported sales of individual titles for years. Here are the most recent life-to-date sales figures for each, from Famitsu's rankings as archived at geimin.net:
- Final Fantasy VII: 3,227,291
- Final Fantasy VIII: 3,501,588
- Final Fantasy IX: 2,707,301
- Final Fantasy X: 2,323,463
- Final Fantasy X-2: 1,960,937
- Final Fantasy XII: 2,322,329
- Final Fantasy XIII: 1,904,313
- Final Fantasy XIII-2: 860,514
So the general downward trend is clear. X-2 and XIII failed to crack the 2 million mark. But what's mostly troubling is the precipitous drop between XIII and XIII-2. Sales dipped a little between X and its sequel, but the fallout was not nearly as bad. Earlier this year, a Final Fantasy producer confirmed that the big drop was duplicated elsewhere in the world, and offered a variety of improbable reasons why it might have happened. Nobody ventured to say that it was probably because the last game stunk and far fewer people were willing to drop $60 to find out if the next one was as bad. Fool me twice, shame on me.
And as you get further and further away from the big console games, Final Fantasy-branded products go from divisive and disappointing to just plain bad. The critical responses to Final Fantasy Dimensions, Final Fantasy Airborne Brigade and Final Fantasy All the Bravest speak for themselves.
The Bright Spots Are the Exception, Not the Rule, and Aren't That Bright
Those who disagree with me point out that there have in fact been some good products released with the Final Fantasy name on them. I think this is damning the series with faint praise; the brand that used to mean "the very pinnacle of quality" now means "hey, best case scenario, there is an alright game in here." Theatrhythm, the music game for Nintendo 3DS that lets you play along to Final Fantasy tracks while looking at nostalgic pictures from back when the games were good, is certainly amusing. But when you compare the actual musical gameplay to something like Elite Beat Agents, it's not in that league. The music and the gameplay feel a little loose, a little disconnected. (Why not have, I don't know, Harmonix make it, instead of a developer that had never created a music game before?) It's not bad, just not as good as other examples in the same genre. Sure, the music itself is fun to play along with – but that's all something created by someone else, 20 years ago.
Are people enjoying the beta of the reworked version of the Final Fantasy XIV MMO? That's what I hear. But a beta is not a game, as those who got into Star Wars: The Old Republic found out. Redesigning Final Fantasy XIV to get the game to the point that players do not actively hate playing it is just step one; the bigger challenge – which some in the online gaming space think is close to insurmountable – is to keep delivering enough content so that players will continue to pay a monthly fee. This is really a separate issue than what we've been discussing thus far, but it's important to point out that the MMO space may not be a guaranteed pathway to riches for Square Enix post-Final Fantasy XI.
Can Anything Be Done?
If you're in the shrinking group of people satisfied with the current slate of Final Fantasy products, let me not get in the way of your fun. But if you're among those who are disappointed by the direction of the series and hoping it'll make a comeback, and the feeling you enjoyed about the previous games injected again into new entries in the series: Let's stop worrying about it. What you liked is gone, replaced by something else. Look elsewhere for your entertainment (I still recommend Ni no Kuni).
If Final Fantasy keeps going this way, it only has worse days ahead of it; the idea that people will keep sinking money into a worsening slate of Final Fantasy products is preposterous; no hot gaming brand lasts forever and in fact few even make it this long. But at the same time, it is of course entirely possible that Square Enix, at some point, could produce a killer game with the Final Fantasy name on it that does gangbuster sales. That would require a brand new outlook, though. It would perhaps mean giving the Final Fantasy name to a totally new game from a different development studio with bold new ideas and a better track record.
I think that at some point, this will happen. But for this to happen, it would require Square Enix to accept what many of us already realize: The path it is on with Final Fantasy is a dead end. It cannot just keep trying the same flawed things over and over again, expecting different results this time just because. In other words, it can only turn things around once it accepts that Final Fantasy is dead.
