It’s honestly kinda crazy how long some games spend in development. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is a perfect example of something that should’ve been quick but ended up being so bloated and took forever to make.
FF7Remake was announced in 2015, got stuck in development hell for a bit, released 2020. The sequel released 2024. The third one still hasn’t been teased yet. How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story? I loved the first remake but dropped the second one, I just didn’t care about the story as much as I did ~5 years ago.
I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.
Honestly, what I miss most are the low budget straight-to-handheld spinoffs that used to flourish in that space. Handhelds especially felt like a space where developers weren’t afraid to go wild with experiments, because development cycles were cheap and quick. But that attribute started to show cracks in the 3DS era, it was inevitable that this would no longer be sustainable when all of the budget had to go into bigger and bigger and bigger console games, while next generation handhelds also got more expensive to develop for too. There wasn’t room for these quick and dirty side projects anymore.
A lot of that quick and dirty space is in indie dev hands now and they’re doing wonderful things. Things like Window Wars or Inscryption or the recent very successful tactical cat breeding game Mewgenics
Edit: author of Mewgenics is shit who accepts shitty people. Leaving due to all the below comments but advise skipping the game.
Absolutely 100% I’ll take this trade every day of the week. Graphics got as good as they ever needed to get during the X360/PS3 era. Obviously better is better, but theres a limit to how much you can actually do. Putting the costs aside, we’re properly entering the uncanny valley with some games now, where they almost look realistic enough to be real but its not quite right. The slightest glitch and it scares me a little. When an eye starts rolling funny or something. Even that aside, theres diminishing returns. When youre running fast and looking in as many directions as possible to see if theres movement on a ledge, it really doesnt matter one little bit if the hair has full shadows and has realistic physics.
Good news! AI slop hits two of those marks!
RPGs got worse for me as soon as they shifted to adding VAs for every line. FFX (1&2) were the last Final Fantasy games I played all the way through. (FFX-2: would not play again even though the combat system was better). I’m fine with voice acting, but I liked when I could read dialogue and advance it accordingly.
If you ever get the itch, I thought XII was better than X. But if you didn’t like X, you almost certainly won’t like any of the XIII series or XV. I haven’t played XVI or VII remake yet
And yeah X-2 was pretty bad. Of the ones I’ve played I think I’d only put XIII-2 behind it
To me, 12 was the start of the downfall. Make it less like a classic JRPG and more like an MMO. Got rid of the strategic turn based battles in favor of watching your characters just do things. It led directly to 13, which to me was by far the worst thing to ever happen to Final Fantasy. It was also the moment I realized that I must be weird as hell, because reviewers kept panning the story as overcomplicated (which is basically what I live for) and praising how unique that awful battle system was.
Bingo.
Me: “I want to strategically pick from my attacks and dynamically respond to shifts in the battle with a whole optimized and customized party.”
Square-Enix: “Best I can do is half-assed hybrid character action game or stupid, limited autoplaying AI.”
Ah, yeah tbh I forgot that was the first that wasn’t turn based. I just remembered loving the characters, plot, and environments.
So guess the battles were so pointless I forgot about them. Maybe after the success of Expedition 33 square enix will bring back turn based. At least as an option? Please?
Doubtful. When they remade FFVII they waved their hands around about there being a menu and said “Look! It’s just like the original!” despite the fact it’s NOTHING like it at all. They’re going to gaslight everyone about their bad, flashy effect game systems rather than give classic fans what they want.