Did Ff16 Flop?

The greater question isn't if 16 flopped, it's if anything they make doesn't (other than remakes, which avoid having to rely on the out of touch creatives they have now)

wym deplete the stagger bar is such a deep and interesting mechanic, you don't love knocking something on its *** or it sits in a stunned status for a duration while the bar refills itself and you deal a bunch of extra damage? You don't love that every attack you do the enemy model doesn't flinch or react to being brutally pummeled until there is an awkward forced cutscene that has them suddenly up and staggering away to let you know you're now in the next phase?

I'm honestly fabbergasted, completely and utterly bamboozled and dumbfounded that they would exclude such a deep and rich mechanic from the pixel remasters they did last year. Maybe we'll see it in the next re-remaster in 5-10 more years when the current assets just aren't feeling polished enough.

Appreciate that FF games might not be considered difficult in the traditional sense (XV's Pitioss Ruins was an intense platformer though), but I've always felt that the real battle is the finding the comfortable and personal balance between time taken and progression. Especially true for FFXI where the time taken element dovetails into efficiency of simultaneous completion of multiple elements.

Secondly, being able to think about your character builds and tinker with stat bonuses/abilities to match your playstyle whilst you're repeating content for resources and/or XP keeps your brain exercised.


Personally, I find it lonely playing single-player games, even though I don't much interact with others in XI/XIV - the sense of a shared, persistent world with an economy is something I hope they bring to future 'single-player' FFs. That and perhaps an episodic release schedule so that players can chat about storyline and builds as stuff comes out.

The Echoes of the Fallen DLC felt like a flop to me. I'd be pissed if I paid 10 USD for this DLC standalone just to only get 3 hrs of content.

not as bad as Nintendo DLC but still pretty bad. hope the 2nd one is more substantial

Speaking of DLC, just compare how much you'd like to know when Elden Ring's DLC is releasing vs anything about XVI. Both have action combat, both have rpg elements, seems like jrpg+action can work.

The reason Square Enix keep making slop now is the same reason all western companies keep making slop and are alienating their customers (Blizzard, Bethesda, Rocksteady and soon Rockstar etc etc), they are publicly traded companies that have earned trust from the market. Square Enix is simply the most westernized Japanese video game company, so this rot hit them before the rest of the Japanese video game industry.

When you are a publicly traded company that has high trust from the market (high trust from the market is the key part, because this is where you attract serious people to invest) you no longer exist to make games, you are a financial institution that exists to give share holders a continual increase on their investments, and you use games as the vehicle to do that. You don't exist to make customers happy or make creative products, you exist to pander the skittish and unreasonable demands of investors that put their savings (or pension fund managers) into your company.

The desires of investors are antithetical to the desires of customers: customers want bigger games with high production values, with more features, lots of replay-ability, that tell interesting and possibly shocking or emotional stories, with good looking characters and that pander to their niche. Investors want games made as cheap and fast as possible, monetized in every way possible, that appeal to everyone (turn that jrpg into a rpg!), that can be played by everyone and that causes zero offense to anyone on twitter.

If you have seen the part in Robocop 2 where they reprogram Robocop, that's kind of what happens to a market friendly public company. They turn into an inoffensive, appeal to everyone, creatively bankrupt slop factory.
The CEO answers to the share holders, his entire mindset is pandering to the skittish nature of share holders and nothing else. Worse still, this company brings creative project leads into the board room and effectively reprograms their minds into being more business orientated and less creative too. They effectively take their best creators and turn them into grey suits looking at spreadsheets.

It's ironic that success in this market is the highway to failure, the more successful your games are the more you attract investment. As you attract more investment, these people who only invested to get a return on that investment fear losing money and so pressure the company to make slop. As you make slop, you alienate your customers, as you alienate your customers investors will leave anyway and the stock price falls into the basement.

Then when your stock price is rock bottom and you have alienated your fanbase, some mega corp buys you out and you turn into a mega turbo assembly line slop factory (as happened when Disney bought star wars for instance, mass assembly line). Till they get tired of the empty husk and move onto buying some other company to repeat the process.

It's kind of funny that the reason Japanese games are dominating so hard now is because investors ruined the western video game industry with their demands (creatively), and because of that success (due to being free of them) they will now all flood in and invest there and ruin the Japanese video game industry in the same way too.

And that wall of nonsense folks, is why you should not bump this thread!

I thought it was written by ChatGPT lol.

That's a compliment! Do you own shares in Square Enix Afania?

No, which was a shame to be honest. I was just thinking about entering the market near the end of December because technical analysis shows that SE stock price will bounce for 20%+ on Dec 27.

Then the price went from 4674 JPY on Dec 22 to 5909 JPY on Feb 5. So I missed that chance to make +25% in a month. but oh well. Always more short term trading opportunity in the future.

Your chatGPT post is not entirely wrong, but it is surface level of conclusion. Many creative companies like Nintendo are publicly traded, this did not kill their creativity. You can always find opposite examples to counter the arguments that you made. So the conclusion of "public traded = no creativity" is not universal fact.

Same can be said for "investors want the game made cheap" bit. Literally anyone involved would want the game made cheap and fast, investors or not. The reason is simple: you need to pay people to make a game, but no one has unlimited resources. So at one point people involved in the process will need to find ways to lower the cost or else nothing gets done. This has nothing to with investors or public stock trading, it is the reality of life. The real question is what do you sacrifice when you make it cheap.

That is why I call it ChatGPT, your made incomplete conclusions bases on partial data, without actual in-depth experience of any of these things.

I ask because when people get emotional and use strawman attacks such as saying chatgpt I wonder if they have a financial reason, people tend to get mad when you potentially influence their money. I don't see you get emotional very often, so it's out of character.

My argument was mainly about the creative aspect of making slop, I fully appreciate many companies making slop will still gradually appreciate in value. Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft are prime examples of companies making awful games now but make more and more money than ever doing so. You can obviously become a slop master, at least short term cause you're burning fan goodwill way with a flamethrower. If I had my savings in a company I would want them to make slop too, which is why I would not invest heavily in things I care about.

As for Nintendo, yes there will always be exceptions and I consider them very much the exception because they have an incredibly loyal fanbase and strong leadership (their pokemon games are sloppo tho). Also as I said, the problem isn't really being publicly traded itself, but becoming market trusted and publicly traded where you start getting pension fund managers and similar types of groups investing and making demands to increase the stock price year on year.

If you are publicly traded and most of your share holders are employees and fans of your company, you're gonna be doing good. If the value keeps rising cause you keep making bangers and these people start selling to serious investors to cash out though, the creative / quality ruination will follow. I'm really worried about Capcom, cause I can see the signs with them too.

I could list so many reasons I think Square Enix is as I said, really poor leadership fixated purely with pushing the stock price up, low confidence in their creatives and instead copying other things (foamstars lol), very western obsessed, is well respected in the western stock market and from their own communications (things like "did not meet expectations", is purely a stock market reaction expectation type statement). This means they don't care how much money a game made, they care if the game had positive stock market price impact and if not it was a failure to them.

I have seen pretty much every company I used to like turn into a slop merchant (starfield was a travesty of slop), they are almost all publicly traded companies that are talked about on financial segments on news channels now by men in suits. Most companies that are privately owned (larion) or smaller and not relevant for big investors tend to make good games with massive effort and lower monetization still, because they are still trying to appeal to customers instead of investors.

Nah, games from many smaller companies flop all the time. You just aren't a fan of them to care to begin with.

Just this year we have Gollum, their dev (Daedalic Entertainment) had a fair share of fans from adventure games community. They flopped anyways. And then there is Saints Row, which killed their developer Volition games.

Games flop and studios shut down all the time, big or small, private or public. Such is the nature of this business. The reason why game dev often copy other successful formula is because the chance of pushing a new idea and fail in the market is just too damn high. Since failing a game may lead to the death of a company, of course game developers would rather play safe.

At least SE did fair number of experiment on smaller projects with external studios over the years. Games like Paranormasight(visual novel), Harvestella(farm sim+rpg) doesn't feel mainstream at all.
Their bigger budget games like DQ12, FF16 and FF7R are more mainstream titles.

To me this feels like a good spread of genres for different fans. If you want indie budget games you get farm sims or visual novel. If you want AAA action oriented narrative games you have FF16. If you want a more traditional big budget jrpg you get DQ12, FF7R or remasters of old IP.

I have no idea you got so mad because you don't like FF16. Yoshi-P said it is a narrative focused game for casual players. And they delivered exactly that. If you don't like it you could play something else instead of attacking the people who worked on it.


But you are here complaining every game from them has to be exactly what you want, this is NOT reasonable.

The problem isn't so much that games flop, because obviously private companies can just make bad games sometimes. It's that you take skilled developers with massive budgets that can make bangers and due to investor demands you make them create worse games and even alienate fanbases.

Volition isn't a private company, it's a subsidary of THQ and is actually a prime example of what I'm talking about.

I didn't like ff15, but it was well made. I just didn't like the characters. ff16, forespoken, foamstars, babylon fall, stranger of paradise, lots of failed mobile games, marvel game and numerous other recent games are the way they were for imo a whole other reason and I think that's worrying for the future of the franchise, company, fanbase etc

I think fans of DQ should be a bit worried about statements they have made about DQ12 too, what does “Dragon Quest for adults” mean exactly lol

This post on reddit got me thinking about 16 again yesterday.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ahwyi2/gamespot_expanding_final_fantasy_16_meant/

This was just a bad game in general though.

FFO was a *** banger.

My two cents:

I think most people just have the mindset of "if something isn't broken, don't fix it" when it comes to their game franchises. SE is trying to "fix" Final Fantasy to make more money.

We all (or most of us all) want the traditional FF combat with a lineup of 3/4 party members in an old school RPG enviornment and the comradery/companionship that has come with that through the story. Instead we got "this is Clive's story" action-jrpg with one character.

Don't get me wrong. It was a good game. I'd even say a great game, but it was so far from what we know as Final Fantasy growing up that it was tough pill to swallow for many, which I can understand.

Not me. I prefer real time battle system without party member swap. They can add companionship with AI companions or none combat support NPC or use story to convey that.

I honestly can't see myself go back and play 90s old school turn base rpg with 5-30 seconds animation time after every action, with super simple strategy aspect that was basically just picking a damaging move from the menu then heal up when HP/MP is low.

I think the old school FF combat system needs to change in this modern era, if they want to do turn based at least do it like Larian studio games. I am not sure if there are that many FF fans still want a 90s era combat system tbh. It feels SO dated. Not because of turn based, but because of how the entire system is designed.

ff10:Yuna, Lulu, Rikku

ff11:all the main story characters

ff12:Fran, Ashelia, Penelo

ff13: L I G H T N I N G, Vanille, Fang

ff14: Y'shtola, Lyse, etc

FF7R: Tifa, Aerith, Jessie, Yuffi

FF15: no female playable character
fans: ???????????????????????

FF16: jill
fans: ???????????????????????

It's been my experience that people fall back to emotionally arguments (I feel like... vomit) / attacks (you're a bad person) when they simply can't respond with reason or logic.

You nailed it. People can't muster the strength to say they were wrong and move on.

afania hasn't been arguing in good faith anytime this topic comes up.

the fact that he's still arguing SE as a company is doing well or putting out quality product is absolutely wild.

SE is doing crap creatively but they are going to put out another console Mana game this year so they can be doing whatever so long as that makes it to release.

There isn't going to be another Vagrant Story. My expectations are unimportant to my personal happiness.

I'm interested in the Mana series, Trials was pretty damn good. Thought I really wish they would remake Vandal Hearts II, that game was awesome.

lolno

1) I didn't say all of the SE game has high quality. Some games like Babylon's Fall is obviously bad. Many other games like FF7 remake, octopath traveler 2, star ocean 2 remake, FF14 all has generally positive reputation in the gaming community. This is fact if you read game forums.

FF16 to me feels more like having polarizing views than flopped. Having polarizing opinions in the community is NOT the same as flopped. I would use the term flopped to describe games like Gollum.

2) Whether a company do well or not is relative, not absolute. Compare with companies like Ubisoft, which has more than 70% stock price decrease in the past 5 years, SE isn't that bad. I simply referenced a number of companies that did better and worse than SE to show where SE is in the entire industry.

But you like to cite a top 1% company in the industry that did better then argue that SE is failing, this is not arguing in good faith.

Like, you even said FF14 does not have good performance because wow(a MMO that is unlikely to be beaten by any other mmo) has more sub. How is that arguing in good faith lol?

If you want to make an argument that SE is not doing well, reference ALL of the companies in the same industry. Don't reference the best company in the industry then exclude the rest, don't reference companies from another industry.

Otherwise I can not take your points seriously.

Ff7 rebirth will outsell ffShiteen day 1.

The funny thing is that a some of the complaints about FFXVI being repetitive action combat with a lesser focus on character building is basically a staple of the Mana series. It's also chasing broad appeal with a cuter fantasy aesthetic and will be all ages. Maybe there will be some sad/dark plot points but there won't be any sexy adult themes that get handled awkwardly. It'll probably still be awkward, but in a localization kind of way.

It only has to be better than the ps2 version for me to be completely happy that they are still making them.

And yes I will play any tactical fantasy rpg at least once so long as they even remotely tried and I have the time. Triangle Strategy wasn't FFT but it was good for a once through.

A private company (Larion) is based purely on profits as a sign of success, nothing else really matters. This is why a private company can be outrageous for attention and outrage twitter and it won't matter. See Baldurs gate with the bear or Palworld with beating up pokemon. Customers love controversial games, this is how you win. Be controversial and make good games, simple! Private companies can use these cheat codes that big companies cannot.

A large public company does NOT work this way, a large public company bases success purely on how investors / the market view the product. With this kind of company, making twitter angry cause of a sexy female character or something can crash the stock price. Cause investors are often not gamers, and just panic sell if they see someone be mad on twitter. A game can make a massive profit and be a total failure, and a game can lose a ton of money and still be an amazing success. When Square says "did not meet expectations" it means it's a failure and how much money it made is irrelevant.

Why do people invest in a company? they invest because of speculation on the future games being bigger hits than the last and that pushing stock prices up, and so the money they invested being worth more in the years to come. So if a game made a lots of money but you alienate large numbers of your fanbase and don't attract new customers (ff16) then it's a failure, profits don't matter that much. Worse than that, it actually drove the stock price down hard.

Public game companies are stupid, you're taking creative products aimed at consumers and applying forces that are not conducive to the the success of that product. Public companies function based on the myth of forever growth, which is impossible and so you end up having to use scummy tricks to give the illusion of constant growth on financial reports and these tricks alienate the fanbase.

See Blizzard as a shining example. Tricks = obscene and never ending monetization to milk your fanbase dry and push the 1/4 rev up, cheaper and less edgy content additions or games to not outrage twitter, make everything easier to try make sure as many people who try the game stick with it, "overwatch 2" scammming to make people buy the same game, cheaper staff (lay off experienced staff to hire younger cheaper people to increase profits) etc

This is also why you now have serious issues with strategy games like total war now too, because it's impossible for them to grow the audience with these kinds of games. They have very profitable games but very profitable isn't constant growth so that's bad. So now you have creative assembly / sega, trying all the tricks to fake constant growth and alienating their fans. They make cheaper games, dumber games, use less / cheaper staff, masses of micro=-transactions, higher prices.

Speaking of this topic....aren't you the one who attacked anyone as SE fanboy for judging SE stock price objectively using financial data instead of personal hatred on their games?

https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/57464/square-enix-holdings-has-shed-nearly-2-billions/3#3678303





Well SE stock price is 6343 JPY today, or +20% if you enter the market in 2023 Sept at 5318 JPY when this discussion happened.
ヽ(ヅ)ノ

I said it again and again, I am not a SE fan nor I care about SE game direction. I only look at financial data and metacritic score and compare them with every other companies in the same industry when I judge SE's current situation. You really need to stop labeling anybody who disagree with you as SE fan.

it's down 11.3% over the last year.

minimizing datasets so that your opinion looks stronger is a sign of someone arguing in bad faith.

if the stock dipped 40% tomorrow and then the next day it rose 10% you'd use that as a metric for why it's doing good.

overall just moving goalposts and incredibly disingenuous.