Japanese gamers on X discuss why classic titles like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quests are less popular among the country's young people.
It’s honestly kinda crazy how long some games spend in development. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is a perfect example of something that should’ve been quick but ended up being so bloated and took forever to make.
FF7Remake was announced in 2015, got stuck in development hell for a bit, released 2020. The sequel released 2024. The third one still hasn’t been teased yet. How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story? I loved the first remake but dropped the second one, I just didn’t care about the story as much as I did ~5 years ago.
Remember the FFVII tech demo they showcased during the PS3 reveal. Good chance FF7 remake has been in development since then, but got shelved because FF15 development became a train wreck
I mean…basically FFXIV’s Dawntrail expansion. But even then, a lot of their side dungeons and such have been referencing events/worlds from other Final Fantasy games via some multiverse theory.
Isn’t it true for the developers as well? If the game development lasts 5 years, you have quite a different team and ideas by the end compared to when you started.
AAA expectations are astronomical, AAs take some extra time to keep up, and indies that actually make it take the time to do their own thing, otherwise they’re almost certainly part of the vas, unseen sea of failed indies.
Also, oldschool game dev was toxic. It had some serious crunch culture, just to start. But I think it also attracted talented devs into “sweet spot” dev team sizes; not too big or too small.
And now, if you do software and want to make any money or provide for a family… well, you don’t do game dev. And that phenomenon has gotten worse and worse.
I thought ff7re (the second part of the remake) sucked ass compared to ff7r (the first part.) The first one felt like a cool modernization of ff7 that still felt like the same game at its core, but the second one felt like complete focus-grouped buzzword filled nonsense. And the most annoying fucking element ive ever seen in a video game, birds that would constantly fly around your screen squawking and generally just being a nuisance until you went and completed their little meaningless side objective. Even the combat aspect felt like a bad monster hunter clone rather than a final fantasy game
i also loved the first one, despite being cut way too short.
i’m playing through the second one, and it feels like a ubisoft game with the climbing tower bullshit and pointless collectible kinda stuff scattered around.
i get that they needed to fill up the open world since the old one was empty but what a shitty way to endlessly stretch just a little bit of gameplay. might as well have given us the full story already.
if i wanted assassin’s creed i would be playing assassin’s creed instead.
Big agree on the ubisoft and assasins creed points. I’m also “playing through the second one” right now, though I’ve been on the Junon area for a month or two now, and I also haven’t opened up the game in a month or two. I just don’t think I’m ever finishing that game, which feels wild to me given the absurd amount of time I’ve spent playing and replaying the ps1 original. I’m just about as much of a simp for that story/those characters as a person can be
FFXIV funds everything else and now everything sucks. They don’t make fun games anymore. Remake took so long I don’t even care to play anymore. First one had me hyped. Second one I haven’t even touched.
Remake took so long I don’t even care to play anymore.
I was going to buy the remake until I found out it was only partly done. Now that it has been six years and it still isn’t out, I’m pretty sure I’m just not going to bother.
They’re really not, but different people have different tastes. And the fact that’s it’s broken up and is taking about 15 years to finish pissed off a bunch of the general public.
The real reason is probably more that I was not a fan of early 3d stuff in general. The camera was kinda crap, the controls didn’t feel great when walking around, etc. Not just an FF thing, either; this was for games as a whole except for racing games. I hated Starfox as well (coming from the Amiga world, some stuff felt like going backwards).
Being able to suplex a train, though, was a nice bonus.
I actually wanted to play one of their games but you had to create a wholeass account with authentication (I think a phone number). Yeah, too much effort to entertain so this decline is a positive for me.
We can but it generally looks and controls like crap on modern screens. It has aged worse than many tank control games like Resident Evil.
Lots of people just wanted a nice graphical update with some quality of life improvements. I’m sure that shouldn’t take a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete.
Elden Ring is hardly “aged”. L DLC in the last 12 months. There are modern Sonic and Pokemon games and they hit a short cycle time.
The “can wait 6 years” is the whole point. They aren’t waiting. They aren’t getting attached enough to bother waiting. That’s literally the whole point of the article. Did you read it?
I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.
Honestly, what I miss most are the low budget straight-to-handheld spinoffs that used to flourish in that space. Handhelds especially felt like a space where developers weren’t afraid to go wild with experiments, because development cycles were cheap and quick. But that attribute started to show cracks in the 3DS era, it was inevitable that this would no longer be sustainable when all of the budget had to go into bigger and bigger and bigger console games, while next generation handhelds also got more expensive to develop for too. There wasn’t room for these quick and dirty side projects anymore.
Absolutely 100% I’ll take this trade every day of the week. Graphics got as good as they ever needed to get during the X360/PS3 era. Obviously better is better, but theres a limit to how much you can actually do. Putting the costs aside, we’re properly entering the uncanny valley with some games now, where they almost look realistic enough to be real but its not quite right. The slightest glitch and it scares me a little. When an eye starts rolling funny or something. Even that aside, theres diminishing returns. When youre running fast and looking in as many directions as possible to see if theres movement on a ledge, it really doesnt matter one little bit if the hair has full shadows and has realistic physics.
A lot of that quick and dirty space is in indie dev hands now and they’re doing wonderful things. Things like Window Wars or Inscryption or the recent very successful tactical cat breeding game Mewgenics
Edit: author of Mewgenics is shit who accepts shitty people. Leaving due to all the below comments but advise skipping the game.
I’d pirate Mewgenics if you’re interested in it. Dipshit edgelord author used Ethan Klein and Chris Chan for VO work in the game, then justified it with some lame centrist fence sitting. Incredibly tone-deaf response for a game literally named after eugenics, so fuck him.
“I understand we live in a time where a meow from someone who has different beliefs as you is scary and frustrating, confusing and controversial…” McMillen said, “but it felt interesting so I decided to explore it. Also, I should probably point out that I don’t share the same opinions as, well, probably any of the people we included. If I only included people who share the same exact opinions as me, I’d be the only one meowing in the game.”
Being pro-murder isn’t a difference of opinion. What a fucking psychopath.
The only reason I even checked out a game named “Mewgenics” was because it was Edmund. I put up with his (literal) shit in Isaac because both it and this game are very well designed from a gameplay perspective. Not gonna reward putting murderers, rapists, and genocidal zionists in a game about doing cat eugenics though.
They’re just doing meow sounds for the cats. It’s not even worth the controversy he caused by doing it. Could have literally recorded himself meowing as he suggested and no one would have known or cared.
RPGs got worse for me as soon as they shifted to adding VAs for every line. FFX (1&2) were the last Final Fantasy games I played all the way through. (FFX-2: would not play again even though the combat system was better). I’m fine with voice acting, but I liked when I could read dialogue and advance it accordingly.
If you ever get the itch, I thought XII was better than X. But if you didn’t like X, you almost certainly won’t like any of the XIII series or XV. I haven’t played XVI or VII remake yet
And yeah X-2 was pretty bad. Of the ones I’ve played I think I’d only put XIII-2 behind it
To me, 12 was the start of the downfall. Make it less like a classic JRPG and more like an MMO. Got rid of the strategic turn based battles in favor of watching your characters just do things. It led directly to 13, which to me was by far the worst thing to ever happen to Final Fantasy. It was also the moment I realized that I must be weird as hell, because reviewers kept panning the story as overcomplicated (which is basically what I live for) and praising how unique that awful battle system was.
Ah, yeah tbh I forgot that was the first that wasn’t turn based. I just remembered loving the characters, plot, and environments.
So guess the battles were so pointless I forgot about them. Maybe after the success of Expedition 33 square enix will bring back turn based. At least as an option? Please?
Doubtful. When they remade FFVII they waved their hands around about there being a menu and said “Look! It’s just like the original!” despite the fact it’s NOTHING like it at all. They’re going to gaslight everyone about their bad, flashy effect game systems rather than give classic fans what they want.
I feel this way too. I just want games with at least PS2 level graphics and I would be happy if it meant they came out sooner or were more fun to play. The obsession with realistic graphics is unrealistic especially with AI buying up all the ram and gpus.
I think back to early 2000’s, I was playing the Jak and daxter games all throughout elementary to highschool with a decent amount of replayability. Same with metal gear solid. And these were pretty fleshed out games worth the money back then.
Kingdom hearts was the first time I got fed up with development hell.
A few years ago I was hit with the sack of bricks that is all Donkey Kong Country games being released one year apart. I have vivid memories of playing the second game for a very long time and then multiple times after while imagining what a third game would be like and you’re telling me that was only one year? There’s no way those games would mean so much to me if we had only had one per console generation.
Also, and I’m just throwing this out there, maybe the circlejerk of nostalgia bait for Gen X/Millennials means fuck-all to younger people in general because it’s the nostalgia of their parents, not their own thing?
Like, aren’t we seeing this in so many different properties? As time marches on, interest wanes? Nobody cares about Marvel movies anymore. Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore. The most hardcore fanatics tend to be older and had the originals, which were literally original content, as things they grew up with. Part of the mystery and excitement of them was how much was left unexplained. Seriously, the Clone Wars was this mysterious fucking thing when it was just an offhand comment by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope. Now we have entire TV series dedicated to the background of the Clone Wars. Mystery gone. The first season of The Mandalorian brought back a sense of mystery to the series and then promptly dropped it to mix it in with every other piece of Star Wars memorabilia.
Young people want their own stuff that they’re growing up with, they don’t want rehashes of the shit their parents obsessed over.
Look at the continued interest in Adventure Time spinoffs, for example. Adventure Time first came out when I was just shy of 29. It would be fodder for the children of people just slightly older than me. It was also enjoyable for older folks who enjoyed silly fantasy, which gave it wider appeal. It persists more because it was an actual original thing that some people grew up with.
We live in an era where copyright that lasts 100 years after authorial death has broken corporations brains and they are scared to death of anything original in case it might not be a clear moneymaker. Letting interest in a new property grow over time is almost unheard of in the Netflix era of two seasons and then fuck you, it’s over. So even when new properties are explored, most aren’t given enough time to mature into something that becomes truly nostagliac for a younger generation.
If corporations want people to be as invested in long-lived series, they have to allow the option for new, interesting series to take the stage. Is it really a shocker that people are over games that started in the NES era? That young people want stories and ideas that reflect the world they live in, not the one their parents grew up in? Young people absolutely lose their shit over Undertale and Deltarune, both games made by a single auteur developer. Pokemon, referenced in the article, were sleeper hits that took time before they became an absolute craze.
I’m in my forties, and I constantly talk about how the world our parents brought us up to live in was dead before we were born. It’s the same but at an accelerated pace for kids these days. The world we know and are trying to prepare them for no longer exists. Our stories and nostalgia become meaningless for our kids because it doesn’t speak to their experiences.
Yeah, I was thinking that recently when I realized I’ve known
the crazy plot twist in Star Wars
(Luke’s daddy issues)
for as long as I can remember.
I’ve also known
so many iconic characters and scenes
(Yoda, R2D2, Chewbacca, the metalkini, C3PO, when they boop the Death Star etc.)
before I was even old enough to watch the movies, too.
I’m sure they’re cool movies, with lots of cultural relevance, but they’ve been spoiled in every possible way for me, specifically because the older generation loves them so much that they can’t shut up about them.
I think that’s the big difference. In a single console generation like the PS3 you had Naughty Dog put out Uncharted 1, Uncharted 2, Uncharted 3, and Last of Us 1.
For the PS4 they put out Last of Us 2, Uncharted 4, and Uncharted Lost Legacy.
And for PS5 nothing.
Games aren’t released often by individual studios anymore. The ones that stay part of the public eye frequently release games like Call of Duty or have a live service model like GTA V that has people keep playing like it is Fortnite. Or keep releasing sequels like Pokemon does as opposed to 1 or 2 releases a console generation.
You aren’t wrong but I also think people tend to forget just how much of what we grew up on were remakes and rehashes of stuff even from the radio era. Especially the cartoons that we watched as kids, so much of that was just recycled jokes and such with some jokes for the adults of the day thrown in too. Even Star Wars was an homage to the serials of the 30s-50s like Flash Gordon, which itself got an 80s remake (with an excellent soundtrack by Queen). The remakes aren’t new they are just more obvious.
Yeah and they largely all fucking suck ass for about the last 5 years.
There’s a difference between slop that appeals to an imagined ‘median consumer’ that will make a boatload of money, and ideas that are actually unique and new and captivating.
Regardless of what you or I think of quality, the median consumer is consuming them. Star Wars is still making a hell of a lot of money, it has not faded from cultural relevance in the slightest.
On the nostalgia front I just want to say I’ve never been into metroidvanias and never played any kind of metroid game before, I tried metroid zero mission an hour ago and I’m already hooked. These games are just genuinely good. Not dunking on newer games I play those a lot too, just saying not everything new is better and I’d love to see some kind of happy middle ground.
Nobody cares about Marvel movies anymore. Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore.
I want to agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but this is very much not true. Regardless of whether you or I like the new stuff, those franchises are still making tons of money, and that does include younger generations.
The article mentions asking kids which is more popular, Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and all the kids answered Pokemon. That’s a franchise that’s slightly younger than FF and DQ, but not by much, it’s still much older than all those kids playing it. So the real question that needs to be unpacked here is: why are some franchises able to continue appealing to new audiences, while others get reduced to nostalgiabait for those that grew up on them?
There were many decades between the proliferation of home phones and cell phones. During that time many people may be away from home and need to contact someone over the phone. Payphones were installed in public places that anyone could use to meet that need. They took change in exchange for minutes using the phone.
Far easier to rehash a known moneymaker than to take a risk come up with something original. Some people might point at the multiple tens of thousands of games on Steam as evidence there are people making new games that are original, but if you compare the relaitive few that take off vs the popular franchises’ success it’s pretty obvious that rehashing works. Plenty of new games languish and never really get anywhere.
Young people want their own stuff that they’re growing up with, they don’t want rehashes of the shit their parents obsessed over.
If only children had the perspective to know alternative choices exist and they should hold out for something better. This assumes young people can control the media they are fed. It’s more likely that the generation making content for them confuses nostalgia for childhood and the audience doesn’t like the iterative/derivative product.
Same for elder scrolls or gta. Kids today get 1, maybe 2 games of their favorite series before they have to do adult things. The only teams releasing on a quick schedule are the shit mobile games.
HL3 problem is that they want it to be as groundbreaking as the previous titles. The problem with elder scrolls 6 is that even if it is released it’s probably going to be bad.
It’s also interesting they spend their money on cosmetics over buying games. Meanwhile, I’ve bought no cosmetics for f2p games I play like The Finals, and instead spend that money on buying single player and coop games.
Those games are what they can all play together across platforms for free, that is what matters as a kid when you get home and want to hop online with your buddies
I play those games for free with friends, but spend zero money on them preferring to spend that money on games that aren’t live service.
That’s the difference I’m noticing in money spent not on why people play them.
I see no added value in cosmetics and these games tend to give away cosmetics too and enough points to redeem battle pass for free, so you aren’t stuck on default outfit if you dont spend.
My parents wouldnt buy me games as a kid but they bought me consoles, I wouldve loved some decent free stuff, fortnite became a thing when I could start buying games myself
SE’s obsession with making every mainline FF game a 100+ million dollar project with hours of cutscenes and a combat system ill suited to fight the skyscraper sized enemies is killing the series.
They’re obsessed with spectacle. Nobody really cares about spectacle anymore.
I mean, being the cutting edge turn based JRPG that’s on par with the most impressive AAA titles if not an industry leader itself was historically Final Fantasy’s place in the market, in contrast to Dragon Quest’s traditionalism.
Hell, I believe Expedition 33 is popular because it more or less filled the spot that Final Fantasy forfeited when it went action.
In fairness, spectacle has been a key part of the series’ identity ever since Summons were trying to show off as many particle effects as the SNES could handle. And then FF7 was designed around being a tech showcase for everything the Playstation could do, it looks quaint today but at the time that was cutting-edge eye candy and it’s how the game was marketed.
I didn’t play the second of the remake games because it was a PS5 exclusive. I usually buy into one platform (it was Xbox this gen) and hop on late in a console cycle for the other side to get cheap consoles and games, but for the first time consoles are getting more expensive over time, so I still don’t have a PS5. It’s on PC now, but building a PC costs as much as a modest house right now.
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Remember the FFVII tech demo they showcased during the PS3 reveal. Good chance FF7 remake has been in development since then, but got shelved because FF15 development became a train wreck
I cant even tell you the last original FF that came out.
I mean…basically FFXIV’s Dawntrail expansion. But even then, a lot of their side dungeons and such have been referencing events/worlds from other Final Fantasy games via some multiverse theory.
it came out so many times in the remakes lol.
Isn’t it true for the developers as well? If the game development lasts 5 years, you have quite a different team and ideas by the end compared to when you started.
In the age of no-new-IP, why does it take so long for new games to come out…
AAA expectations are astronomical, AAs take some extra time to keep up, and indies that actually make it take the time to do their own thing, otherwise they’re almost certainly part of the vas, unseen sea of failed indies.
Also, oldschool game dev was toxic. It had some serious crunch culture, just to start. But I think it also attracted talented devs into “sweet spot” dev team sizes; not too big or too small.
And now, if you do software and want to make any money or provide for a family… well, you don’t do game dev. And that phenomenon has gotten worse and worse.
I thought ff7re (the second part of the remake) sucked ass compared to ff7r (the first part.) The first one felt like a cool modernization of ff7 that still felt like the same game at its core, but the second one felt like complete focus-grouped buzzword filled nonsense. And the most annoying fucking element ive ever seen in a video game, birds that would constantly fly around your screen squawking and generally just being a nuisance until you went and completed their little meaningless side objective. Even the combat aspect felt like a bad monster hunter clone rather than a final fantasy game
i also loved the first one, despite being cut way too short.
i’m playing through the second one, and it feels like a ubisoft game with the climbing tower bullshit and pointless collectible kinda stuff scattered around.
i get that they needed to fill up the open world since the old one was empty but what a shitty way to endlessly stretch just a little bit of gameplay. might as well have given us the full story already.
if i wanted assassin’s creed i would be playing assassin’s creed instead.
Big agree on the ubisoft and assasins creed points. I’m also “playing through the second one” right now, though I’ve been on the Junon area for a month or two now, and I also haven’t opened up the game in a month or two. I just don’t think I’m ever finishing that game, which feels wild to me given the absurd amount of time I’ve spent playing and replaying the ps1 original. I’m just about as much of a simp for that story/those characters as a person can be
I’d be fine with Square Enix going away. In my opinion, they got greedy and way too full of themselves. Nintendo as well, for that matter.
FFXIV funds everything else and now everything sucks. They don’t make fun games anymore. Remake took so long I don’t even care to play anymore. First one had me hyped. Second one I haven’t even touched.
I was going to buy the remake until I found out it was only partly done. Now that it has been six years and it still isn’t out, I’m pretty sure I’m just not going to bother.
I skipped on remake too since I figured wait for everything to come out would take yeara and years.
Are the FF7 remakes really considered that bad?
I thought they were pretty good.
They’re really not, but different people have different tastes. And the fact that’s it’s broken up and is taking about 15 years to finish pissed off a bunch of the general public.
I personally was not interested in them at all. I was much more a fan of 6 than 7. As such, no idea on the quality.
Because you can suplex a train?
The real reason is probably more that I was not a fan of early 3d stuff in general. The camera was kinda crap, the controls didn’t feel great when walking around, etc. Not just an FF thing, either; this was for games as a whole except for racing games. I hated Starfox as well (coming from the Amiga world, some stuff felt like going backwards).
Being able to suplex a train, though, was a nice bonus.
I actually wanted to play one of their games but you had to create a wholeass account with authentication (I think a phone number). Yeah, too much effort to entertain so this decline is a positive for me.
Which one required an account?
Only one I know are mobile garbage or the literal MMO
The online Final Fantasy. 14 I think? The one where people hype up the story. XD
You can just play the original, though.
Same with any of these franchises. The newer titles are hit or miss, but the old games have aged like wine.
We can but it generally looks and controls like crap on modern screens. It has aged worse than many tank control games like Resident Evil.
Lots of people just wanted a nice graphical update with some quality of life improvements. I’m sure that shouldn’t take a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete.
They may have aged like wine but most youths don’t like drinking wine. It is an “acquired taste”. They don’t have the nostalgia you have for them.
Then they can wait six years between sips of AAA piss, I suppose.
My friends with kids don’t seem to have any problem picking up Sonic, Pokemon, or Guantlet. One’s even picked up Eldin Ring.
You don’t need nostalgia to enjoy nice things.
Elden Ring is hardly “aged”. L DLC in the last 12 months. There are modern Sonic and Pokemon games and they hit a short cycle time.
The “can wait 6 years” is the whole point. They aren’t waiting. They aren’t getting attached enough to bother waiting. That’s literally the whole point of the article. Did you read it?
You don’t need to wait to play games that came out thirty years ago.
Plenty of young people are into retro gaming.
I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.
Honestly, what I miss most are the low budget straight-to-handheld spinoffs that used to flourish in that space. Handhelds especially felt like a space where developers weren’t afraid to go wild with experiments, because development cycles were cheap and quick. But that attribute started to show cracks in the 3DS era, it was inevitable that this would no longer be sustainable when all of the budget had to go into bigger and bigger and bigger console games, while next generation handhelds also got more expensive to develop for too. There wasn’t room for these quick and dirty side projects anymore.
Good news! AI slop hits two of those marks!
That’s where mobile comes in.
Problem with mobile, is that games have gotten too stupidly cheap to the point of scamming.
Absolutely 100% I’ll take this trade every day of the week. Graphics got as good as they ever needed to get during the X360/PS3 era. Obviously better is better, but theres a limit to how much you can actually do. Putting the costs aside, we’re properly entering the uncanny valley with some games now, where they almost look realistic enough to be real but its not quite right. The slightest glitch and it scares me a little. When an eye starts rolling funny or something. Even that aside, theres diminishing returns. When youre running fast and looking in as many directions as possible to see if theres movement on a ledge, it really doesnt matter one little bit if the hair has full shadows and has realistic physics.
Agree, as long as we can leave the piss filter of that era in the past
A lot of that quick and dirty space is in indie dev hands now and they’re doing wonderful things. Things like Window Wars or Inscryption or the recent very successful tactical cat breeding game Mewgenics
Edit: author of Mewgenics is shit who accepts shitty people. Leaving due to all the below comments but advise skipping the game.
I’d pirate Mewgenics if you’re interested in it. Dipshit edgelord author used Ethan Klein and Chris Chan for VO work in the game, then justified it with some lame centrist fence sitting. Incredibly tone-deaf response for a game literally named after eugenics, so fuck him.
Wow, what a jackass.
Being pro-murder isn’t a difference of opinion. What a fucking psychopath.
humor of a twelve year old with the morals of a south park character.
I just realized that that game was made by Edmund McMillan.
Honestly if you have played any of that devs games you would have known going in that that is basically exactly how you might describe most of them.
The only reason I even checked out a game named “Mewgenics” was because it was Edmund. I put up with his (literal) shit in Isaac because both it and this game are very well designed from a gameplay perspective. Not gonna reward putting murderers, rapists, and genocidal zionists in a game about doing cat eugenics though.
I’ve been playing Issac again lately because Northern Lion has been releasing videos again.
Still a great game.
Chris Chan the literal motherfucker? I might pirate the shit out of that just for curiosities sake.
They’re just doing meow sounds for the cats. It’s not even worth the controversy he caused by doing it. Could have literally recorded himself meowing as he suggested and no one would have known or cared.
Sorry, I had zero idea. I’m really getting tired of everything going to shit these days. It’s sparked several comments or I’d remove it.
You don’t need to apologize. It’s a good game worth recommending as long as you don’t pay that guy for it.
RPGs got worse for me as soon as they shifted to adding VAs for every line. FFX (1&2) were the last Final Fantasy games I played all the way through. (FFX-2: would not play again even though the combat system was better). I’m fine with voice acting, but I liked when I could read dialogue and advance it accordingly.
If you ever get the itch, I thought XII was better than X. But if you didn’t like X, you almost certainly won’t like any of the XIII series or XV. I haven’t played XVI or VII remake yet
And yeah X-2 was pretty bad. Of the ones I’ve played I think I’d only put XIII-2 behind it
To me, 12 was the start of the downfall. Make it less like a classic JRPG and more like an MMO. Got rid of the strategic turn based battles in favor of watching your characters just do things. It led directly to 13, which to me was by far the worst thing to ever happen to Final Fantasy. It was also the moment I realized that I must be weird as hell, because reviewers kept panning the story as overcomplicated (which is basically what I live for) and praising how unique that awful battle system was.
Ah, yeah tbh I forgot that was the first that wasn’t turn based. I just remembered loving the characters, plot, and environments.
So guess the battles were so pointless I forgot about them. Maybe after the success of Expedition 33 square enix will bring back turn based. At least as an option? Please?
Doubtful. When they remade FFVII they waved their hands around about there being a menu and said “Look! It’s just like the original!” despite the fact it’s NOTHING like it at all. They’re going to gaslight everyone about their bad, flashy effect game systems rather than give classic fans what they want.
Bingo.
Me: “I want to strategically pick from my attacks and dynamically respond to shifts in the battle with a whole optimized and customized party.”
Square-Enix: “Best I can do is half-assed hybrid character action game or stupid, limited autoplaying AI.”
I feel this way too. I just want games with at least PS2 level graphics and I would be happy if it meant they came out sooner or were more fun to play. The obsession with realistic graphics is unrealistic especially with AI buying up all the ram and gpus.
I think back to early 2000’s, I was playing the Jak and daxter games all throughout elementary to highschool with a decent amount of replayability. Same with metal gear solid. And these were pretty fleshed out games worth the money back then.
Kingdom hearts was the first time I got fed up with development hell.
Ratchet & Clank had it’s first three games released in three years. Same graphics and no one cared.
the second one is definetly not as good as the first.
A few years ago I was hit with the sack of bricks that is all Donkey Kong Country games being released one year apart. I have vivid memories of playing the second game for a very long time and then multiple times after while imagining what a third game would be like and you’re telling me that was only one year? There’s no way those games would mean so much to me if we had only had one per console generation.
Also, and I’m just throwing this out there, maybe the circlejerk of nostalgia bait for Gen X/Millennials means fuck-all to younger people in general because it’s the nostalgia of their parents, not their own thing?
Like, aren’t we seeing this in so many different properties? As time marches on, interest wanes? Nobody cares about Marvel movies anymore. Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore. The most hardcore fanatics tend to be older and had the originals, which were literally original content, as things they grew up with. Part of the mystery and excitement of them was how much was left unexplained. Seriously, the Clone Wars was this mysterious fucking thing when it was just an offhand comment by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope. Now we have entire TV series dedicated to the background of the Clone Wars. Mystery gone. The first season of The Mandalorian brought back a sense of mystery to the series and then promptly dropped it to mix it in with every other piece of Star Wars memorabilia.
Young people want their own stuff that they’re growing up with, they don’t want rehashes of the shit their parents obsessed over.
Look at the continued interest in Adventure Time spinoffs, for example. Adventure Time first came out when I was just shy of 29. It would be fodder for the children of people just slightly older than me. It was also enjoyable for older folks who enjoyed silly fantasy, which gave it wider appeal. It persists more because it was an actual original thing that some people grew up with.
We live in an era where copyright that lasts 100 years after authorial death has broken corporations brains and they are scared to death of anything original in case it might not be a clear moneymaker. Letting interest in a new property grow over time is almost unheard of in the Netflix era of two seasons and then fuck you, it’s over. So even when new properties are explored, most aren’t given enough time to mature into something that becomes truly nostagliac for a younger generation.
If corporations want people to be as invested in long-lived series, they have to allow the option for new, interesting series to take the stage. Is it really a shocker that people are over games that started in the NES era? That young people want stories and ideas that reflect the world they live in, not the one their parents grew up in? Young people absolutely lose their shit over Undertale and Deltarune, both games made by a single auteur developer. Pokemon, referenced in the article, were sleeper hits that took time before they became an absolute craze.
I’m in my forties, and I constantly talk about how the world our parents brought us up to live in was dead before we were born. It’s the same but at an accelerated pace for kids these days. The world we know and are trying to prepare them for no longer exists. Our stories and nostalgia become meaningless for our kids because it doesn’t speak to their experiences.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Yeah, I was thinking that recently when I realized I’ve known
the crazy plot twist in Star Wars
(Luke’s daddy issues)
for as long as I can remember.
I’ve also known
so many iconic characters and scenes
(Yoda, R2D2, Chewbacca, the metalkini, C3PO, when they boop the Death Star etc.)
before I was even old enough to watch the movies, too.
I’m sure they’re cool movies, with lots of cultural relevance, but they’ve been spoiled in every possible way for me, specifically because the older generation loves them so much that they can’t shut up about them.
Pokemon games come out often.
I think that’s the big difference. In a single console generation like the PS3 you had Naughty Dog put out Uncharted 1, Uncharted 2, Uncharted 3, and Last of Us 1.
For the PS4 they put out Last of Us 2, Uncharted 4, and Uncharted Lost Legacy.
And for PS5 nothing.
Games aren’t released often by individual studios anymore. The ones that stay part of the public eye frequently release games like Call of Duty or have a live service model like GTA V that has people keep playing like it is Fortnite. Or keep releasing sequels like Pokemon does as opposed to 1 or 2 releases a console generation.
I’m almost 50 but uninvested in Nintendo.
You aren’t wrong but I also think people tend to forget just how much of what we grew up on were remakes and rehashes of stuff even from the radio era. Especially the cartoons that we watched as kids, so much of that was just recycled jokes and such with some jokes for the adults of the day thrown in too. Even Star Wars was an homage to the serials of the 30s-50s like Flash Gordon, which itself got an 80s remake (with an excellent soundtrack by Queen). The remakes aren’t new they are just more obvious.
I mean, all you have to do is look at box office numbers to know you’re wrong about Marvel and Star wars.
Maybe the movies are garbage to hardcore fans, but the franchises still make a fuck ton of money.
Yeah and they largely all fucking suck ass for about the last 5 years.
There’s a difference between slop that appeals to an imagined ‘median consumer’ that will make a boatload of money, and ideas that are actually unique and new and captivating.
Regardless of what you or I think of quality, the median consumer is consuming them. Star Wars is still making a hell of a lot of money, it has not faded from cultural relevance in the slightest.
And yet the Disney effect is a very real thing. If your franchise hasn’t been milked to death, it’s only a matter of time.
On the nostalgia front I just want to say I’ve never been into metroidvanias and never played any kind of metroid game before, I tried metroid zero mission an hour ago and I’m already hooked. These games are just genuinely good. Not dunking on newer games I play those a lot too, just saying not everything new is better and I’d love to see some kind of happy middle ground.
I want to agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but this is very much not true. Regardless of whether you or I like the new stuff, those franchises are still making tons of money, and that does include younger generations.
The article mentions asking kids which is more popular, Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and all the kids answered Pokemon. That’s a franchise that’s slightly younger than FF and DQ, but not by much, it’s still much older than all those kids playing it. So the real question that needs to be unpacked here is: why are some franchises able to continue appealing to new audiences, while others get reduced to nostalgiabait for those that grew up on them?
Also the case with Marvel and Star Wars is the quality dived off the cliff and alienated even original fans.
If people didn’t like it just because it is old then Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokemon wouldn’t still be popular.
My parents once taught me how to use a payphone when I was a kid. I’m 40.
Your post is exactly correct.
Wtf is a payphone
Landlines with coin slots. Insert coin, call someone. Insert more coins to keep talking.
There were many decades between the proliferation of home phones and cell phones. During that time many people may be away from home and need to contact someone over the phone. Payphones were installed in public places that anyone could use to meet that need. They took change in exchange for minutes using the phone.
So just telephone cells? Okay
Far easier to rehash a known moneymaker than to take a risk come up with something original. Some people might point at the multiple tens of thousands of games on Steam as evidence there are people making new games that are original, but if you compare the relaitive few that take off vs the popular franchises’ success it’s pretty obvious that rehashing works. Plenty of new games languish and never really get anywhere.
If only children had the perspective to know alternative choices exist and they should hold out for something better. This assumes young people can control the media they are fed. It’s more likely that the generation making content for them confuses nostalgia for childhood and the audience doesn’t like the iterative/derivative product.
Same for elder scrolls or gta. Kids today get 1, maybe 2 games of their favorite series before they have to do adult things. The only teams releasing on a quick schedule are the shit mobile games.
i mean with those games it feels like you get one every game third generation at this point.
elder scrolls 6 is going to become halflife 3 at this point.
HL3 problem is that they want it to be as groundbreaking as the previous titles. The problem with elder scrolls 6 is that even if it is released it’s probably going to be bad.
Kids play kid’s games like Roblox or Fortnite. Also i feel kids don’t play single player games all that much.
It’s also interesting they spend their money on cosmetics over buying games. Meanwhile, I’ve bought no cosmetics for f2p games I play like The Finals, and instead spend that money on buying single player and coop games.
Those games are what they can all play together across platforms for free, that is what matters as a kid when you get home and want to hop online with your buddies
I play those games for free with friends, but spend zero money on them preferring to spend that money on games that aren’t live service.
That’s the difference I’m noticing in money spent not on why people play them.
I see no added value in cosmetics and these games tend to give away cosmetics too and enough points to redeem battle pass for free, so you aren’t stuck on default outfit if you dont spend.
My parents wouldnt buy me games as a kid but they bought me consoles, I wouldve loved some decent free stuff, fortnite became a thing when I could start buying games myself
SE’s obsession with making every mainline FF game a 100+ million dollar project with hours of cutscenes and a combat system ill suited to fight the skyscraper sized enemies is killing the series.
They’re obsessed with spectacle. Nobody really cares about spectacle anymore.
I mean, being the cutting edge turn based JRPG that’s on par with the most impressive AAA titles if not an industry leader itself was historically Final Fantasy’s place in the market, in contrast to Dragon Quest’s traditionalism.
Hell, I believe Expedition 33 is popular because it more or less filled the spot that Final Fantasy forfeited when it went action.
In fairness, spectacle has been a key part of the series’ identity ever since Summons were trying to show off as many particle effects as the SNES could handle. And then FF7 was designed around being a tech showcase for everything the Playstation could do, it looks quaint today but at the time that was cutting-edge eye candy and it’s how the game was marketed.
I still remember they put Deus Ex in the freezer, handed it over to Embracer, then they murdered it before the final chapter.
I didn’t play the second of the remake games because it was a PS5 exclusive. I usually buy into one platform (it was Xbox this gen) and hop on late in a console cycle for the other side to get cheap consoles and games, but for the first time consoles are getting more expensive over time, so I still don’t have a PS5. It’s on PC now, but building a PC costs as much as a modest house right now.
I won’t argue your point that PCs cost too much nowadays but gotta say you got some really amazing house prices.