Squaresoft was a major part of my childhood growing up. Knowing for Christmas or my birthday I had a 40+ hour RPG present waiting for me to divulge into was all I wanted. Every month, my excitement grew more and more for each game they developed as I flipped to the RPG section of my GamePro magazine and drooled over the two or three new screenshots they provided. Their games helped me become a better reader and made me realize that games could be more than the side-scroller genre I was so fond of. They could tell amazing fantasy tales filled with interesting characters and were easily my favorite development studio as a child next to Nintendo.

Nowadays, Square Enix is nothing but a joke to me. What once was a company I would throw money at with each new release has become nothing but an exaggerated laugh each time I hear news about them. Their games fail to do anything interesting and only show that the company is struggling to keep up with modern times. It started last generation when Square Enix started developing questionable IPs and sequels to numbered Final Fantasy games, which was unheard of until then. Now Square Enix is just as confused as their fans are with this crazy new direction try are taking which is rehashing old titles on every console available and creating spinoffs that review terribly.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse but just want to reiterate that I simply hated Final Fantasy XIII. I tried to trick myself into thinking I liked it only to sink 25 hours into it and regret every minute I wasted. The story was inconceivable, the characters were stereotypically stupid and that combat system could not hold my interest at all. I’ve written about the game in the past as to why I hated taking off work to play this game so I’ll just leave it at that.

I’ve not been much of an MMO guy so deciding to finally try one out with the next Final Fantasy, which came out the same year as FFXIII, turned out to be a huge hassle and I gave up on trying fighting my way through their shitty system of getting into the beta. I watched for days as the client downloaded, starting and stopping every now and then to see if it froze up until I gave up on it and decided to wait for reviews. I read multiple impressions pieces on it and followed Phil Kollar from Game Informer as he struggled with the game trying to find any sort of fun within. Quite simply, the game was broken and to this day continues to do so. I applaud Square Enix to continue to offer the service for free but still am aggravated to know gamers went to stores and bought a broken game.

FFXIII did decent but wasn’t what people expected, yet Square continues to kill it’s series with multiple spinoffs, including a direct sequel, which I’m sure will be a main focus at E3. And to top it off, just recently sites have been reporting of yet another entry to the MMO genre that isn’t tied into Final Fantasy that should be released next year. Will FFXIV be fixed by then? Will it finally be available to PS3 owners? Will gamers even give a shit?

I’m not afraid of change; I kind of liked FFXII even though it wasn’t a typical turn based RPG. I also haven’t grown tired of this genre of games because im still playing through Pokémon which I’m thoroughly enjoying.  Square announced they want to innovate the series with modern times but seems go wildly into directions I don’t want. Turn based isn’t bad, neither are random battles. Mario, Pokemon, these games still do turn based quite well and still sell great to a large audience. You know how many gamers want a new Pokémon game for current home consoles?

You would think the company has tons of money to use for their top tier franchises. It seems every month they release an old entry to one of their franchises to a console it wasn’t available for previously. They must keep doing this for a reason; hell Nintendo as a company is known for this. I for one could care less to play these older games on my phone or PSP. Instead of focusing on this, why can’t they put their resources to something new? Or if they want to remake games, why always go for FFIV? Final Fantasy VII would sell tremendously if they would just remake the game for HD consoles. They claim it would be too much money, but how much have they wasted so far on their latest MMO which hadn’t seen a month of revenue yet? I’m not claiming I want FFVII to be remade, but just putting it on the PSN got a million downloads. People want this game but Square fails to notice.

The company needs to do something because what they are doing now is losing them money. Maybe acquiring Eidos wasn’t the right thing for them where they should have been focusing on how to better their internal studios. E3 is going to be an interesting show for them, when they come out showcasing all the new spinoffs and this new MMO that looking at comments across the web is unanimously unwanted. Hopefully they have something that could make me a believer again but for now I’ll focus on the developers who are doing the RPG genre right.