Mikey - 04 Jul 2007 09:21
The history of Final Fantasy and Square
Next Generation are certainly on a Final Fantasy high today with 2 excellent articles about the genre of games. If you are fan it's worth a read and here are a few snippets to whet your appetitie:
As the 20th anniversary of Square’s monster RPG series approaches, we take a careful look at what is happening to the Final Fantasy legend...Image It can be hard to separate fantasy and reality. There’s a great story about a development studio on the financial brink, its star director ready to call his current game his last, throwing everything they had left at a fantastical plot.
On occasion, it has overreached itself. The huge investment in the CGI film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within saw the collapse of Square Pictures when it bombed, and necessitated drastic action: a merger. But it was appropriate that, of all the possible partners, Squaresoft and the Enix Corporation combined in 2003 to form Square Enix, the company now responsible for several of the biggest roleplaying licences in videogames.
Ever since the original NES games, Final Fantasy’s visual excellence has been such a given that it is easy to be blasé about its achievements, from the adoption of Mode 7 graphics by FFIV to the astonishing FFXII. And although there are inevitably poorer titles in the series, the overall standard is such that there is arguably no other RPG series of comparable quantity and depth to the Final Fantasy core titles.
But these same games mean that the Final Fantasy name is no longer a guarantee of exceptional quality, and as the use of the brand diversifies and diffuses it is difficult to see how Square Enix can stop it becoming even more devalued. Dirge Of Cerberus, for example, is only one of (currently) three titles based around FFVII: what kind of relationship can these games have to the classic original? Their inspiration may be from a common source, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the results will complement each other.
