What happened to Square?
It can't be their merger with Enix. Pre merger Enix had amazing games.
What happened to Square?
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>Sakaguchi left
>Takahashi left
>The Chrono guy left
>the company was putting out games that made normies drop their jaws from the EBIN CGI so they cluttered their games with an unnecessary focus on graphics so they have been suffering from long dev times, unfinished hallway sims ever since
>put their only competent director and writer on an MMO (to be fair the writer only proved herself as competent last year)
>through circumstance and 2000s edgy Naruto weebs propping him up, one of the company clowns, Nomura, aquired a reputation as a genius rivaling Kojima or Taro or Kamiya when even Kojima is 3 levels above him
>FFXIV 1.0
They haven't made anything good since and including XIII
square was on the verge of going bankrupt and despite Yamaguichi being rude about people who play RPG's, square made a desperate plee to put Crystal Chronicles on the Gamecube.
The stuff that caused them to become "bad" was going on before the merger. Mostly management (Wada) treating the talented developers like crap and killing many IPs to put money into ever increasing Final Fantasy projects. Series like Mana, SaGa, Chrono, Xeno and so on were getting the shaft. And the talented people who worked on those were told to either jump on the Final Fantasyband wagon or leave. Half of them left.
Despite having some of the best selling and most popular games on the market, they were still in debt. So they merged with Enix who absorbed their bad debt. Then the sole owner of Enix retired and left the company in the hands of Wada...the guy who ran them into the ground. And surprise surprise, the next decade, SquareEnix started to have a lot of the same problems. IPs were gutted to put more money and manpower into bigger and bigger Final Fantasy projects. And all of them (XIII, XIV and XV) all had massive problems.
Wada finally got kicked out around 2015. And notice that since he left, they've started rebooting old IPs and making a lot of new ones.
Most of their talent left years ago. Sakaguchi left with people and made mistwalker, and Takashi left with people and made monolith.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
Not joking. That movie almost bankrupted the company. A lot of the talent bailed out when they thought the ship was going to sink.
The same thing happened again when they thought it would be a good idea to outsource FFXIV development to China and the first version of XIV tanked. Talent left, never came back even though Square again recovered.
But none of their talent had success after leaving Square.
In Sakaguchi's case that's because of a platform mismatch with his audience (no jrpg sold well on xbox) and zero marketing.
Dumping all of their resources into Final Fantasy and putting the people in the company with the least amount of talent and competence in charge of all of them so they always end up being embarrassing bombs. The company still makes good games but they're always extremely low budget with absolutely no advertising. Final Fantasy killed the company.
This. Also, S-E isn't really that bad as of now. They've been involved in good and great games. It's FF that's mostly filled with big blunders. Haven't checked out FFVIIR1 tho, looks good for a FF.
They really, really wanted to become an animation company with that film. Then it tanked, and they were left making more games, which is traditionally less prestigious than making movies in Japan.
Monolith has been the backbone of almost every single major success for Nintendo in the last decade, their games have been doing great, and they've recently doubled in size.
I'd say Takahashi and the rest of the holdovers from Square working at Monolith are doing just fine.
>Xenoblade Chronicles isn’t a success
user....
Xenosaga was an abject failure.
They didn't really want to become an animation company. Moreso an arm of Sony pictures. And it happened anyway. They did CGI work for a number of movies even when Spirits Within failed. Hell, they worked on a documentary web series recently.
He said for Nintendo you dipshit nerd.
>Monolith has been the backbone of almost every single major success for Nintendo in the last decade
They didn't work on Animal Crossing, Fire Emblem, Mario Kart 8 and so on. Only BotW and Xenoblade. And the Xenoblade games were niche successes.
Square was fine until they shit the bed with the movie and destroyed the budget on one chick's hair and basically fucked themselves. They haven't been the same since
>almost every single major success for Nintendo in the last decade,
Nahhh. They're a good second party dev but they're not "behind" Nintendo in that regard.
Dont worry. Some brave user is sending them to prison.
To quote somebody I know:
>Enix ate Square and Square poisoned Enix from the inside out.
Except they did
www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/04/xenoblade_studio_monolith_soft_actually_helped_out_with_animal_crossing_new_horizons
I'd say that The World Ends With You was the last SquareEnix game that tried anything new and succeeded. SquareEnix couldn't release games on the HD consoles in a timely manner and that killed their potential.
Xenosaga also had it's most recent game 14 years ago.
Not to mention, Episode I was very successful, actually. What screwed over Xenosaga was corporate meddling by Bamco that fucked over Episode II (and by extention, Episode III, since nobody wanted to buy it after how shit II was)
Nintendo regularly takes people from Monolith to work on their own titles, with the most recent one being Animal Crossing.
monolithsoft.co.jp
For example, Xenoblade 2 was made by a skeleton crew because most of the staff at Monolith was busy making Breath of the Wild.
Horrible analogy. The combined company is called SquareEnix, but it's run entirely by Square employees. Enix basically dissolved as a company.
>They didn't work on Animal Crossing
user, I...
And where do they hide those games? I sure enjoyed the last 2 front mission games, the last 3 tomb raider games, the last deus ex, all the FF shit and who could forget (checks steam because I forgot the name) LEFT ALIVE !
>But Kingdom Keks!
They made the best game of 2018 Octopath Traveler
They made best game of 2019 Shadowbringers
they made the best game this year in FFVIIR
sound like to me they're on a roll
Not really squeenix, actually the game is outsourced, squeenix just had nomura overwatching and did publishing. Same deal for bravely but different director.
Octo a shit. Bravely Default is 300 times the game Octo pretends to be.
>They made the best game of 2018 Octopath Traveler
That’s a stretch
Hey, at least Kingdom Hearts is still the best of the new Square bunch.
>Bravely Default is 300 times the game Octo pretends to be.
Yeah. Let me fight the same fucking bosses 300 times to progress.