I wonder if any of their team is still around on the projects or just what in the hell happened after they merged for this idiocy now?
Yasumi Matsuno's been trying to start up his own development team so he can keep producing 'Tactics-like' games. Unfortunately, his development team was plagued with deadlines and funding issues that were never able to be met. It's hard to say if we'll ever see him produce more works of art the way he did when he worked with Squaresoft.
Mergers usually tend to ruin the original developer's work ethic in favor for selling out to as many idiots as they can push their ***on.
It wasn't just Square that suffered from the merger syndrome on a massive scale; the other notable example of this is Blizzard Entertainment merging into
Activision-Blizzard. After that happened, Blizzard tried to stress the idea that despite the merger, absolutely nothing would change on their side of the development.
This was an outright lie, because the quality of Blizzard's releases after this occurred was instantly noticeable. Everyone that knew the market from the inside out knew that Activision's corporate end would start pushing them to make more sales in the same way that Electronic Arts doesn't give a *** about how many Madden/FIFA/etc. games they can release in a year. We're talking about a company that made amazing, challenging games that were infinitely replayable suddenly pushing trash out on a semi-annual basis that you would buy, play for a month, and then wonder why you even installed or bought them to begin with.
The merger companies place a strong emphasis on sales at any price; where the price paid is a lack of originality, quality, and story development in favor of a stronger marketing push. That's why the second Squaresoft transitioned into Square-Enix we started seeing less originality and quality in their game design and more recycled garbage.
As evidence of this, I would like to reference the following:
(While attempting to do the "101%" clear on my first playthrough, I made it to the scholar where you have to listen to his story, fell asleep for a half hour while watching, woke up and saw that he was still talking; at which point I ejected the disc and frisbee'd it into a brick wall. Never once in my life have I ever broken a controller or a game disc out of rage or for any other reason, but in this particular instance, X-2 was the greatest disappointment I'd ever seen released from Square.)
I knew Squaresoft and their legacy was dead the second this happened and haven't bought a single Final Fantasy release since this happened;
with the exception being XIV, and even that decision was ultimately regrettable. The only reason XI turned out to be the "
last true Final Fantasy experience" in the series was because it was in development and nearly completed prior to the merger with Enix. After that, everything they released started hoping on board the '
aw muh gawd graphix' hype train that saw character and story development being replaced with '
speishul efeccts' and DLC content.
For their religious fan following, it was always about the story and the various character development systems fused with the tried and true turn based menu. I mean, that was essentially the definition of Final Fantasy. Did they have reoccurring elements from prior games? Of course they did, but it wasn't like they were just recycling the same things over and over. There was always some sort of improvement that made the same old things completely new again. Every game's main characters represented the original Final Fantasy class/jobs in some way, shape, or form.
Then the very second they transitioned into Enix, suddenly you can't even tell what these homo-erotic metrosexual character designs are even supposed to represent.
"Is this dude supposed to be a warrior or is he going to try to sell me hair product and suck my ***?"
After firing most of their original development team and replacing them with interns, the same way Blizzard did in their later years, that's when you started to see everything going downhill almost overnight. They started experimenting with different ideas and most of them turned out to be atrocious. Yet, for whatever reason, they still decided to use them. Now that we get to XV, the combat system is essentially little more than button mashing and potion chugging with reckless abandon.
Their developers have run out of good ideas at this point, that's why we're not going to see another original Final Fantasy for a long time - if ever. What you are going to get is a series of remasters based on their most successful games to date. What's likely to happen is they're going to kill everyone's passion for FFVII by running it into the ground the same way Disney's going to kill Star Wars. That's also why they brought Yasumi Matsuno back as a guest developer in order to try and keep Stormblood from being a heaping pile of trash the second it launched. And it worked on me, because I still say Tactics was the best and most underrated game in the series. At least for about a week, because as usual I beat the entire expansion in like four days and unsubbed only to never look back.
It's a shame really, because Square-Enix would be a thousand times better off hiring Matsuno to a permanent position as their creative director and story developer. Even if he's a pain in the *** to work with because he's so dedicated to making everything perfect.
I can promise you if they gave him ten years to develop XV it would have been praised as the greatest game they ever made.