"Hey, you love that thing and want us to do a modern version of it, right? Well, what if we half-ass it into a different format, make it impossible to actually race, and yank it offline in about three months? What? That's not what you want at all? Well, I guess you don't really want F-Zero to make a comeback, so... see ya in another twenty years!"
And now it's being reported that Square-Enix is taking a $2 billion dollar bath on underperforming games from the last year. The headlines are misleading because by most reports, FFXVI did fine, but couldn't make up for Square's fetishistic desire to flood the market with character action games and mobile flops.
You'd hope this would mean they'd learn something from all this, but also it's Square Enix so expect a Forspoken kart racer and maybe one of those hot new MOBA games everyone's talking about.
Welp... this maybe isn't the most surprising news, but you hate to hear anyone getting laid off in this damn crazy day and age. I don't know. We could talk for hours about the misfires of Saints Row or Agents of Mayhem, but at this point, that's a kicking a horse so long dead the skeleton's been pretty well picked over by buzzards. But while they were around, the devs did a lot of amazing shit, and I respect that.
So long, Saints and Mars guerillas and Descenters. You had some kind of magic.
I'll add this too - the post-game content is a bizarre mess. I'm sure there are probably rocket scientists and engineers who know what the hell is going on but that was so poorly designed and inaccessible as to completely put me off replaying it.
The shooting is good, the guns feel better than in the previous two games, but everything else is such a let down. The villains are horrible, the plot is horrible, the jokes make Borderlands 2 look brilliant in comparison, and it shits on its own legacy at every possible turn, the most egregious being what they did to the characters from Tales from the Borderlands. It feels like, in every way, Gearbox was laughing at the people who liked their games, and everything they've done since has convinced me that assessment is pretty damn accurate.
I loved one of the first ones. I have no idea which because the late nineties was just all anime mechs all the time. But it was rad! Glad to see big clunky ribbits making a comeback as of the last five years. Now just give me a Battletech sequel and we're good.
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