Square-Enix: Their decline into relentless mediocrity and my perspective
We're not even six months into 2012 and I can say with complete assurance that I've never known such a long string of disappointments in the 20 years of playing games I've got behind me.
In fact that's not quite right. I've had worse strings of disappointments on things that actually matter, people in general and such, but that's besides the point. When it comes to the fantastically easy to vent upon games industry the disappointment is so much more consistent and harder to dismiss because unlike a lot of life's other disappointments it's a choice to spend time and money on gaming.
It's like the choice to spend time with someone and become friends only to find out that one day they're not interested in the same things as you any more, conversation falls away and then they deny changing and insist you're the problem and then you end up chopping them up and wearing their bum as a hat whilst dancing in the pale moon light...well it's not quite like that but it certainly is a bugger to have faith in something only to have it tested over and over to breaking point. Forget about the bum hat thing and keep reading.
"What do you mean exactly?" those less inclined to patience when reading might be asking their computer in a somewhat fruitless attempt to communicate with me. I'm talking about the lazy, condescending behaviour of the games industry towards its consumers that has, since the inception of the current console generation, become consistently worse and worse. I can only speak for myself, as is the case for any writer*, so it's companies I grew up following and formed somewhat childish attachments to that have made me so jaded. Now I'm really falling out with gaming in general I figure I'll vent a little on the subject and see if this alternative view might provoke some actual thought instead of the usual glad handing and me-tooing that typical opinion pieces garner.
(*Alarm bells should ring when you read someone referring to themselves and their audience as one entity or discussing a community and then trying to speak on it's behalf kids.)
Depending on response to this I'll go on to cover other companies and their strings of screw ups as I see them, but for now I'll leave it at Square-Enix and their decline into pandering, hand holding twaddle. Like all people from my generation discussing Square-Enix's history, there's only one place to start...
Final Fantasy 7 wasn't my first RPG unlike the seeming hordes who cut their teeth on it. I'd already tasted sweet stat based JRPG in the form of Shining Force but it was that game that put Square-Soft on my radar as a young teen. For the next ten years or so the company released game after game that cemented them in my mind as purveyors of the very best entertainment around, let alone JRPGs. The less said about Ehrgeiz and Chocobo Racing the better methinks. In spite of occasional missteps they were my favourite game makers for a very long time.
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