The Official SQUARE ENIX Thread

Congrats to @ozone for claiming victory here on this year's Square Enix banner.

Our runners-up were willin's Sephiroth banner in very close 2nd and whitegreyblack had two tied for 3rd.

The Official SQUARE ENIX Thread

This year's E3 is obviously a weird one. While Square Enix has had major successes in recent years with Final Fantasy VII Remake and Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn, they've also their fair share of the weird with the likes of The Quiet Man and, most recently, Balan Wonderworld. They've already stated what they will be showing at E3 this year, but what if they drop some extra surprises?

In an attempt to keep the E3 shenanigans organized, the mods institute these official discussion threads for each conference so that everybody has a go-to place to discuss them before, during, and after the show.

Despite the insanity of E3, keep in mind that the general site rules still apply. So, don't be a dick. If you need a refresher on to conduct yourself like an upstanding citizen of the Giant Bomb community, check out the FAQ.

Keep Discussions On Topic

This thread is exclusively for the general discussion of the Square Enix show. Discussion involving the other company's conferences should be taken to their respective threads (once they're posted).

Specific Announcements

To help you get where you need to go to talk about anything announced or shown during this press conference, we have created a list of them right here:

• Babylon's Fall
• Life is Strange: True Colors
• Marvel's Avengers
• ???

Where Can I Watch?

Sunday, June 13 @ 12:15 PM PDT (Your Local Time)

• Giant Bomb Chat
• YouTube
• Twitch

They sure did show off a lot of that Guardians game.

The complete lack of any explanation about FF Pixel Remaster made that announcement quickly go from potentially really exciting to "oh god damn it Square again with this shit", because they're clearly giving those games the lack of attention they usually give old FF remasters.

Well that was a wet fart.

Guardians game looks good, depending on how bonkers the abilities get and how well they adapt the FFVIIR combat style (which is awesome). Unlike the crew I still find the Drax/Rocket dynamic entertaining, so that got over for me. The choice stuff is pretty curious - it teases Suicide Mission-type potential, but ultimately this is a Marvel property in what is likely meant to be a new franchise so...could it really aspire to break the glass ceiling "he will remember that" has been struggling to break through ever since Walking Dead Season Two?

I personally think that Final Fantasy Origins game looks awesome, if only because I spent the early parts of quarantine pretty steeped in Japanese games for the first time since I was a kid and that dude who wants to kill chaos is pretty hilarious. The entire script was ridiculous, actually - did they break double digits in references to chaos? I'm hesitantly super interested depending on the gameplay!

The pixel remaster collection, meanwhile, feels like a classic Square bait and switch that sounds like a great idea but is really just a money grab.

Avengers gonna Avenger - I hope that expansion shores up some loose threads for the people still playing that game but I just don't think they can salvage the endgame, and unfortunately the endgame looms so large over everything else in that game that if it's handled anything like the Hawkeye expansion and other post-game story content is just gonna feel shoehorned and awkward.

I guess I have no thoughts on Babylon's Fall? Other than it feels like a huge mistake to base a whole game around NieR's combat system without the world to back it up...

I still think I'm one and done with Life Is Strange. There's just a level of earnestness that series goes for that is admirable but effortfully corny in a way that I don't always click with.

Overall, fun show and great for GB commentary! I wish we'd seen more of FFXVI but I get not.

I am livid that I didn't get the Final Fantasy VII Battle Royale fix I deserved, but I'll accept DmC: Final Fantasy as a consolation prize.

The presentation definitely was all over the place. No The World Ends With You details, which is really worrisome. I guess they couldn't confuse messaging by showing Final Fantasy XVI details, held back Project Triangle because of Eiyuden Chronicle; I dunno, it felt like they played it super duper safe and it didn't pan out as good as it could have been.

Folks are thinking that some of the comparison shots in the Life is Strange remaster trailer were done with less finished versions of the remaster. Square put out a bunch of new screenshots for the game and when compared with the trailer the new screenshots look much, much better and a lot closer to how the new Life is Strange game looks. In these screenshots the eyes don't look weird and a bunch of the textures and models are a lot better looking than in the trailer. Putting out that trailer in that state was a weird choice to say the least.

Final Fantasy Origin looks straight out of the PS3 era. And not just the visuals, it has that feel of Japanese devs gunning hard for the Western market, so everything's gunmetal grey and edgy.

@glik: This was my exact thought. Real 05-06 Capcom vibes.

That said, there's a demo out so I'll least check it out. They're still letting Christopher Sabat play z Garland which is always a delight, so it's got that going for it.

The audible curse I muttered when they announced that FF collection for Steam and mobile only...

Been a while since a company I love so dearly has released a presser with—quite literally—not a single thing that to me looks good or even remotely interesting. I'll hold to that one brief-ass glimpse of FFXVI and hope for the best, but jesus what a miserable showing.

@edens_heel: And yes, I know Life is Strange has its fans and that I should probably give it another shot, but my partner and I could not stop laughing at the bad writing in the first episode and just couldn't take it seriously enough to press on. What I've seen from that entire series reeks of thirty- to forty-year-old people trying desperately to write what they think teenagers sound like.

What a rough presentation.

-GoG looks somewhat better than Avengers, but a better attempt at making something that's already pretty safe and bland isn't particularly exciting.

-I'm mildly curious about Babylon's Fall, but that was a very rough trailer. Just a bunch of combat shots that don't look particularly interesting or impressive.

-FF Origin: God. I didn't think you could squeeze all the worst aspects of SE Japan in a single short trailer, but they managed it. Nomura's bad character designs, Nojima's bad writing, bad fanservice, copycat gameplay that's ten years too late...

- Life is Strange: Not for me, but cool that is successful and ongoing.

-FF Pixel Remaster: they spent so little time on it, and it's a bit worrying. Hopefully they'll at least avoid the mistakes of the previous awful mobile ports they made.

-A million mobile announcements: Fair enough I guess. They know what side of their bread is buttered...

And no mention of Project Triangle at all, the only Square project I care about at this point. It just makes me sad. Square used to be one of my favorite devs.

I've never 180'd on a game so hard like FF Origins. It sounded like such a good idea in concept, but executed with some of the worst aspects Square had been known to have.

That AND this game got center stage over their MAIN LINE FINAL FANTASY GAME IN DEVELOPMENT. Granted the studio might be overloaded with Endwalker, this and other stuff but some of that footage in the sizzle reel seemed new.

Unpopular opinion, but I want to play Guardians of the Galaxy. The choice to make it single player and focus on story is surprisingly alluring, even as someone who loved Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

@edens_heel: I just want to mention that I really like Life is Strange, but I also find the first episode to be the worst of the bunch. It is the most corny and standard mediocre high school writing (despite the game taking place in college) without the mystery having got interesting enough to really suck you in. I felt like the episodes only kept getting better from there, with episode four being the pinnacle, though all of them are a step up from episode 1.

I have recommended LiS to a bunch of people, but I always tell them that the first episode is the worst of the bunch, so I recommend going just a bit further. If it's still not grabbing you after episode 2, then you can safely file it away in the "not for you" folder.

I don't plan on getting the new game though unless I hear really good things about it. The setup and some of the dialogue makes it look like it might be too cringy even for me, and I think one of the main brilliance of the original LiS which seldom gets mentioned is the time travel mechanic. It means you don't get forced into saying something way out of line with what you thought you were picking, and forces the developer to make all the responses somewhat different from each other as otherwise you would see right through the illusion of choice companies like TellTale love giving you.

@visoredbead: I'm right there with you, though a part of me can't help but dwell on how similarly it seems to function like FFVIIR's system and yet that game still had four distinct play styles between Cloud, Tifa, Barrett and Aerith. You were ultimately encouraged to main Cloud with a heaping of Tifa and little dabs into Barrett and Aerith situationally, but it was still nice for a change of pace. Can't help but wish Eidos had stumbled onto the same concept considering how close they've got already.

@visoredbead: I'm right there with you on GotG. I think it looks really fun and the combat could be interesting. The writing did make me audibly groan more than once, but most games I can easily ignore stuff like that.

Other than that, I'm sure I'm going to forget about almost every other game talked about by the end of next week.

FF Origins looks stupid as fuck as I'll wade into that sludge on day 1. I'm here to kill Chaos.

Anyone with more knowledge of FF1 (beyond "Onion Kid endlessly suffers and you should have a party of four white mages") :

Does the Kill Chaos line work better in Japanese? Is it like some stupid overly literal translation of some extra gruff shonen-inspired bullshit?

@gundato: I mean it is what he says. 'Kaosu wo taosu'. It's.. pun-adjacent maybe.

@nodima: The UI reminded me more of Horizon Zero Dawn than FFVII Remake. I’m kinda excited for it too.