bkeswick

A few extra trivia, in bite size:

• Trails in the Sky trilogy is The Legend of Heroes VI.
• Dragon Slayer The Legend of Heroes I from 1989 is the sixth chapter of Dragon Slayer from 1984.
• The Legend of Heroes II Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch is The Legend of Heroes III in Japan and it ended the 'Dragon Slayer' naming, leaving behind just "The Legend Of Heroes".
• The mainline Dragon Slayer continued to the eighth chapter (1995) which ended Dragon Slayer series due to the popularity of Dragon Slayer The Legend Of Heroes branch, which continues to this day.

Oh man, these "of all time" ones are so hard for me. My taste has changed over the years too, and I don't even know my own yardstick. Everybody seems to have a clear idea, I envy you all.

The series that teaches us how to effectively build a world and its actors. I think the big trick is in the efficient dialogue and how its written, but I'm no expert in that area.

TotK has been superb. Quite sandboxie so it would be a very different kind of game from the narrative heavy FF and Spiderman, but I get the feeling it will be the one to beat this winter.

Then again, Yoshida can be godlike as well. But he needs another Shadowbringers class blockbuster to have any chance, I think.

I can't blame him, TotK has been very addictive for me as well. I admire them for the way they put together a string of seemingly ordinary gameplay elements to form a distinct and coherent whole. The devs must have experimented a lot.

I'm guessing Bravely Default will likely survive due to its lower budget chibi art style and BD2 going over a million sales.

I fear that Star Ocean series is now lost due to its much lower sales and it could only really gain momentum with the FF level funding due to its fully proportioned art style. I doubt that will happen.

Budget wise it might survive if they go anime style like Tales of Arise which Bandai managed to sell over 2m. But I doubt SE would even take that risk.

Well deserved. I'm hoping that one day they can up the funding and take a bit more risk like Capcom did with MH World. On the other hand, I also think they're kind of ok as it is so long as they can continue.

BTW, since nobody seems to have mentioned it, I'm pretty sure PS3 is a twist on a orchestra tuning at the start of a concert. It's that "getting ready!" feel which only comes across if you're a classical nerd.

Isn't this more like, which PS console are you most nostalgic of. I like the retro feel of PS1 boot just because I'm retro. There wasn't much of a boot sequence to PS4. I actually think PS5 boot is chic, but it has to include the final note which chimes as you go into the home screen. That last note does something to the whole sequence.

I thought Sony's figures typically exclude bundled copies unless otherwise stated. At least that's how it used to be during PS4 if I remember correctly.

I have mixed feelings about it. But at the same time I can see the changing landscape of gaming would compel Sony to focus on their identify around higher budget devs because only some companies can fund those.

In some ways it makes sense to rely on indie partners for small, creative output since those games tend to come out of nowhere from less known devs. So logically I can see that it's the right way around, but emotionally I'm feeling nostalgic.

@Chaudy I think there's something to be said about gamers' habit of collecting games though. There was an article about this many years ago that according to data many people buy more games than they play - so they're just buying games, not playing them.

I don't know to what extent that is true, but I sure hear a lot of people talk about their backlog. Same on the steam - I see a lot of people say they won't leave steam just because their collection is there.

All of this is anecdotal, but I'm just saying there's a chance that gamers' consumer behavior is complicated and Phil might have a lot of data that we don't know about.

FF3j and 5 were such a big deal at the time. Not sure if these pixel remasters can help without that context, but personally I'm happy with them and that they refreshed all of them for more longevity.

I think Sony's words were correct - that it is just another small part of a product life cycle for devs/publishers. So it can exist to serve devs who want this phase introduced into their product life cycle, but otherwise it isn't something that can replace the traditional methods.

I very much treat it that way myself as a consumer, so far as the high end gaming is concerned. I don't know about the lower end, cheaper games though, especially on smartphones; there's a whole different balance there between the lower production cost and non-committal consumer behavior. So it may or may not be more viable, I'm not sure.

@Jill_Sandwich That's like saying Microsoft doesn't make Xbox because it's not a hardware company.... 360 and XB one were outsourced to Flextronics. Not sure who handles the Series.

Bobby has 4,305,890 shares in ABK, so multiply that by its share price ($95) which Microsoft would have paid to find what he would have pocketed.

Plus a rumor has it that he was going to receive $30 million from MS as part of the buyout clause. I'm sure he would have expected to be let go by MS after some time, with a golden parachute which would be another three-figure million.

So, our sympathies to big Bobby.

So the digital edition of new PS5 can be eradicated at any time just by buying a drive. It's probably good for propagating physical media if you're into that sort.

Goodness me. So our big Jim is a beneficiary by proxy. Who knows, this might be a better outcome for him.

This DLC has been a joy. I like Seyka a lot, she is an interesting character. Dare I say, I wouldn't have been sad if she took the lead in the series. Kill Aloy off, soap-opera-fashion?

@Grumblevolcano Last year they said they increased the budget for traditional games for the same period according to their investor call, so it's reasonable to think that they aren't doing any less in that department.

Just to be clear, concerns are fine and good. I was talking more about those who are going beyond that and portray it as if they've stopped doing traditional games.

I still think we're on course to getting at least as many traditional games at the end of PS5 as it was for ps4.

@Smiffy01 The machine gun approach was shocking to me at first too, but rationally on a second thought, only some of them will survive.

If I didn't know better and just read some of the comments here, I would think Sony has stopped doing traditional games. It's that type of over-reaction which goes over my head.

I'm so glad Live a live has been made available in the west. I think they should do more of these revival-debuts from GB as well.

@Smiffy01 We're getting those full games though. I think we're on course to getting more of it by the end of PS5 than we had at the end of PS4.

As for the services, I suspect most of them won't survive when all is said and done. I would think they would be reduced down to the best 3 or 4, if that.

I suspect things will settle down at about half-half. I'll be fine with that. I don't get why many of you are so against having any notion of a live service, it almost feels like a single minded madness to me.

FF5 looks silly now, but the tech seemed ridiculously good at the time. That color palette shift of the sky in the prologue, parallax scrolling of a distant forest as you walk across a mountain etc. Music sounded so orchestral.

None of them were new of course. The likes of SMW and F-zero did parallax scrolling and palette cycling, but there was something about the expression of distance from the mountain top that was shocking and FF5 used different tricks effectively. Square must have done a lot of experiments after they released FF4.

I suppose in a weird way one could say FF5 was to early Snes what Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart is to PS5; it's that moment when you felt that you had a glimpse of the future, a tip of an iceberg of sorts.

FF3 is an important title for some of us job change lovers. It's also what propagated the franchise' name and gave birth to the whole DQ vs FF rivalry in Japan.

It's also the root cause of the original divide in the fanbase, in a sense that many saw FF5 was what FF4 should have been as a true successor to FF3, when the idea that FF is a transient series had not yet been established.

That screenshot from the sky is like a freakin' hand drawn picture with so much detail in the distance. Insane.

Something is way off with that photoshop'd picture. I think Jim Ryan's face is too small? His neck is in Goku's chin, from what I can decipher. It doesn't matter, I know

@PsBoxSwitchOwner

However I’ll be more annoyed with them should the price not drop when inflation etc stabilises

We will probably need a deflation of the same magnitude for that. Inflation tends to raise prices permanently.

The question I have is to what extent the price increase in tech are due to fuel prices and currency exchange; if they make up most of the increase then maybe prices will back down. But I fear that the bulk of the increase has been other factors like wages going up in the supply chain.

Then again, older tech gets cheaper to make over time, so I guess it's down to what factor wins over other factors.

Personally, if I had to guess, I think the gaming cost is tracking behind inflation and any future discount will be cancelled out, keeping the price point the same for the next few years even if the economy settles down.

I think there's a chance that most of the $10 increase we saw for games in 2020, before we knew of this inflation, has already been gobbled up by the recent inflation as well.

As Jim Ryan said, gaming isn't the same as linear entertainment like TV/movie subs.

Haha Deeply flawed levelling system is right. It's an age old criticism of the second. They can't change it now, so they will have the same critique rubbed in over and over forever. FF3 was such a big deal in Japan, due in part to a rebound from FF2.

On a side note one of the devs lost his family around that time and FF2 story drew inspiration from it, so its story themes are rather sad and gloomy.

I'm enjoying it so far. Feels less of a period drama which Horizon tends to feel like.

@NEStalgia I'm glad you've opened up on the fact that FF can mean many things to many people. I've always thought that a friendly exchange of views is what makes these discussions interesting. But it pains me to watch when people bash each other over it.

As to your conclusion about the brand as a whole, that is the truth which some of us who decided to remain as fans had to come to terms with at some point. You aren't alone. I think the series has been broken as well, and it happened very long time ago.

I used to argue with my friends about how the first 3 were related. You could argue that maybe even up to 5 or 6 may be linked, if you bend your imagination hard enough.

But FF7 was so "out there" that it ended any chance we had at putting them all together as one brand. There were dissidents before that time and they too have their right, so I'm not going to claim any authority over this, but I have no doubt in my mind that the departure from the Crystals being at the heart of the world was the killing blow for many of us; it shattered our dream of putting together one coherent series.

And so the notion that FF changes completely every game spread as the basic idea. You could even say it was a coping mechanism for us fans to still be fans, even when every FF might as well be a different IP.

Think about it. There's no reason why FF6 and 7 need to belong to the same brand; they would function just fine separately and be good games. So the rest is down to whether you could happen to tolerate and handle new features or mechanics in the next instalment.

Ultimately I can't tell you what is right and wrong, or where it went wrong, or whether it went wrong at all, because all that is your choice. I came to terms with it and I made my choice. I did it quietly on my own, without lashing out on other fans.

So somehow I'm still a FF fan today. Not sure to what extent, but enough to take time bothering to put my experience and what I gained through it across to you.

Next time you're irritated by FF, I just want you to remember that none of us has a monopoly over it and you certainly aren't the only one who feels strongly about it. It's just that many of us who were there at the start went through those trials and tribulations quietly at some point, in my case back in the 90s.

Heck, one might even say the entire series has been a long trial for us, post-NES. That's why I said all I hope for in any FF is that it's a good game and I enjoy it. If it "feels" about right, then that would be amazing for me. Same goes to FF16.

@NEStalgia That's fine, I'm not denying your reality - not just because I can relate to it myself. Heck, I think we overlap a lot based on what you wrote.

I was just saying that there are multiple realities depending on people's relationship with FF, which makes it more complicated than food & drinks and other analogy where its meaning is decyphered through a single axis like taste buds - a yardstick is that little bit easier to come by then.

I grew up in Japan in the 80s and I went through so many versions of this debate in the 90s. Some said to me they want Job Changes in their FF, some said it has to have squishy chibi characters, some even said FF isn't a true FF if it isn't 2D.

I also alrealdy covered why FF7 wasn't a true FF to me for a while until I accepted it for what it is and went on to love it.

Some changes happened because of trends - like more realistically proportioned characters - others for other reasons. It makes no difference to my point.

Look across this comments section - we have spectrum of views and they're all real to them. Many of them (unfortunately not all of them) just state their view and leave it at that, probably because they've had a realization at some point that none of us has a sole ownership of FF.

I'm not here to deny any of those realities, including yours. In fact I love it because you are expressing your passion and I feel it. I love old FF and it feels great when somebody else reaffirms it.

But there's a difference between sharing your view and weaponizing it to put down other people's realities. And it is only on that part alone that I was making my earlier point.

Don't stop being passionate about what you love; this comment isn't me saying you are wrong and you should forget about your experiences. I'm just desperately trying to put across to you that none of us preside over the universal truth. We all have our "what have you done to MY Final Fantasy!?" moments.

@LiamCroft I appreciate your reply Liam. It was the tone of your article which made me think that; I think being doom-and-gloom a month into a hardware lifespan is a record at Push Square? I can't think of another example that came sooner.

When is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 coming again?

Wow. Imagine that in VR.

Deliver Liam the good news, and also tell him to stop being rattled by one report a month into a hardware's release I guess we're all impressionable in some ways.

@NEStalgia In the end, we can't have one ultimate yardstick when we don't all share the same idea about what the 'core' is; that's down to how you personally connected with the series.

But what we can do is to appreciate that we all bring our perspectives and share it on a level playing field.

@NEStalgia Yeah we'll see, I just hope it's a good game and feels about right, although that's a personal thing. This whole thing is a personal issue.

I think we all have something we connected with in the franchise in the past, and build our rationale differently. I loved old FF on Nes/Snes and I alongside many of my real life friends despaired with FF7; no proper gear slots, no selection of gear to buy in shops like in RPG, no proper castles or dungeons, or treasure chests, etc.

So what I perceived as the 'core' broke down before. FF has done that many times to me. For what its worth, times change - heck, I sometimes even hear a younger gen call Monster Hunter World a JRPG. But whatever. I moved on too and I've always been pretty open minded, so I ended up loving FF7 some years after its release.

My realization after all these decades is that, in the end, gaming is experiential; you start with an experience of playing a game and whether or not we instinctively enjoyed it forms the basis of our logic as to why we liked/hated the game. So our reasoning is ultimately reverse-engineered from that foundation.

So it's hard for me to encourage or discourage people to look forward to FF16 based on how I personally feel about the way the series changed, but personally I will be very happy if it's a good game. And yes, it is still an FF to me. An emphasis on 'to me'.

All that being said, it might be easier for me to say all that when I'm as comfortable with twitch action just as much as any other combat. It must be a lot harder to accept it for people who are less welcoming of action based trends. That's a harder issue to resolve, tbh.

@NEStalgia I guess it depends on how RPG it feels in the end, which we are all just guessing until it's released. So far it seems very RPG to me, but who knows.

@Jireland92 But you're supposed to be speaking in the context of Sony's success as a platform, not in the context of a new game in a vacuum. That was the context I had replied in.

Your point makes no sense when judging a business as a whole because the history of quality does indeed play a part in generating traction. That's in spite of the fact that a new product is an unknown quantity. In that regard each round doesn't entirely start with a clean slate.

Same works the other way - keep pumping out bad products, everything starts to go the other way. That's in spite of the fact that the next new game is just as an unknown quantity as before.

Of course advertising works, but the idea that quality of games has nothing to do with it is absurd when speaking in the context of a platform.

@Jireland92 Good god man, is that how you compartmentalize the notion of quality when people typically perceive quality in the broader scope of their past experience and history of quality as well as the critical reception.

But fine, I suppose I get what you mean at a technical level if we degenerate the notion down to that narrow scope.

@NEStalgia Haha that car life thing dates back to the bygone era of PS1/2. I think it originates in a Japanese interview with the designer, but not sure.

This reminds me of the old mantra around the series that it's not a racing game, it's your "car-life" game. Supposedly it implies a life-style and sentimentalism of living with a car. So it's just as well that they put more focus on the people in a movie.

I don't dislike it when games take that approach; I felt the same in games like Days Gone where I developed an affection towards my bike, and that wasn't even a racing game. But that feeling of interdependency between it and me was beautiful.

@Jireland92 That's a slightly different point then. Earlier you ruled out the quality as the reason why Sony dominates by stating that "The quality of the game is not what sells it, it’s how you advertise it" as if there wasn't any interdependency between them, so I was replying in that specific context.

Quality can be a number of factors - whatever the addressable market is drawn to - so there are some options there and not every company does it the same way, but you need some kind of quality which builds up your reputation in the first place in some way shape or form.

@Jireland92 "no Sony dominates due to having a more effective marketing strategy. The quality of the game is not what sells it, it’s how you advertise it."

That's very likely to be untrue, which is why Microsoft has been bolstering their reliable line up, including acquiring ABK. Otherwise it would've been relatively easy for any company to keep up just by changing their marketing to what Sony has been doing. Surely advertising is built off the back of quality first and foremost.

"2087 Wishlist it now" made me chuckle a bit; for a moment it felt like it's due in 2087. Talk about announcing a game too soon.

The 40 min clip with Yoshida sold it to me the other day, so whatever really. Quality of a game isn't ultimately determined by how a map is arranged.

Interestingly, fairly recent big western RPGs had similar arrangements. DA Inquisition, Pillars of Eternity, Divinity Original Sin etc. The system worked because each region was wholesome and interesting; you almost forget that the map is segmented.

@somnambulance "not enough focus on the actual games, even though the PS5 line-up has been strong so far."

Do you know, I personally see a massive contradiction in that line. They're literally the opposite of each other, one following the other.