TKO Creations

In 1997, I bought an original first generation Playstation in order to play Final Fantasy 7 specifically.  That was not a throwaway expenditure for a freshman college student.  I had been enthralled with the series since the time it used an entirely different numbering system for the North American releases.

I even played Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest and for the most part enjoyed it.  I have a fanfiction in which I create an entire unique Final Fantasy world.  So yeah… I was (and to a degree still am) a fan of the series, and was ready to bend over backwards to acquire at the time it’s latest entry, intrigued by the promise and potential that it had.

I was not disappointed.  It remains, to this day, one of my favorite games, and I respect how it had no small part in the legitimizing of video games (and of RPGs especially) as a story-telling medium.

So, surely, I should be ready to do the same on the day that the highly-anticipated remake of that all time classic releases to the general public, right?

…

Eh… not exactly.  There is a very strong chance I won’t get it (or its future episodes) at all, even when the exclusivity deal drops and the PC version is released.

And no, it’s not because I’m some “classic gamer” irate that it’s being chopped up into parts, or that Square-Enix dares to change it.  I’m actually glad that they are remaking it rather than take what would have been the easy money of just remastering the original title.

There’s plenty about the original game that has not particularly aged well, which I am glad to see Square-Enix seems to understand.  It sounds like the updated Wall Market and Honeybee Inn were a successful alteration that needed to be made for the game to not be rather offensive to today’s audience, to put it mildly.  It gives me confidence that other parts of the game will get a suitable repainting job as well.

No, the long and short of it is that I simply do not trust today’s Square-Enix business side of things, and there’s little that they’ve done to assuage me on that score.  The lack of any sort of roadmap as to just how many parts this game will be in, or whether it will have Playstation 4 support through it all is not very confidence boosting.

I’m especially wary because it shouldn’t be hard to have a roadmap in place.  We’re dealing with an already existing framework.  It’s not like this team is developing it whole cloth as they go.  That they don’t know just how many episodes this title is going to be parceled into is because they don’t want to know.  They want to ride this train as long as they can get away with over as many console generations as possible.

I have little desire to get locked into a Kingdom Hearts scenario, where meandering story-tellers waste over a decade rehashing a mess of a story and still haven’t resolved its most salient plot points because the series is such a damn money maker.  I have little interest waiting years as multiple directors repeatedly scrap everything a la Final Fantasy XV because it has to be an 8-million copy seller just to break even.

Come back to me when you’re willing to be straight with us about what you’re doing, Square-Enix.  Until then… I’ll save my money and my frustrations.

This entry was posted on April 10, 2020 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Grumblings with tags Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy 7, Square Enix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.