Here, check out this Twitch presentation by Samantha Ferreira of Anime Herald (she’s seriously a one-woman encyclopedia on the franchise)

Except the sniper who somehow lands five crits in a row

The elephant in the room everyone tries to ignore

I mean, even putting aside Nomura, Kitase and Nojima both have had very troubling habits in their careers. Kitase’s record as a producer has been terrible for instance; he tried to push Motomu Toriyama as the next golden boy and that idiot left a trash fire in his wake with the XIII brand becoming so toxic they needed…

Correct, they were just lucky. Or at the very least they were completely tapped out after it and are now far past their glory days

Even putting aside Nomura, it has guys like Kitase and Nojima in it. Kitase has...not been a good as an FF producer. He tried to push Toriyama (XIII’s director) as the new golden boy and that whole experiment was a shitshow. Nojima has also gone to seed as a writer; I’ve seen his sequel novels to FFX and there are…

Arise mostly pisses me off because the writer for it is a wife-beating douchebag with pretensions of grandeur

If your first instinct is to use “girly” as a pejorative, that is not a good thing.

Pretty much; the Major in the Oshii film is basically a completely different character.

The thing that gets me is that this is nothing new for Square; they’ve tried to do these kinds of alternate-timeline-hopping plots before...and they’ve always been a trainwreck. And even before that, we all remember how much of a mess the attempted Compilation of FFVII was.

-Looks to see Kitase, Nojima, and Toriyam are on the team-

I’m predicting this is what will happen: they’ll make the story more archetypal. They’re going to sand down the more interesting, shocking, deconstructive elements that still make FFVII the odd one out in the franchise in order to make it more “in-line” with the entries that have been made since VII. They’re going to…

Because they have an inflated sense of being more daring than they actually are.

Pretty much. Except without the talent and self-awareness necessary. I get the feeling people claiming to love this are gonna be eating their words down the line.

It’s not mind-boggling, it’s the same kind of convoluted Shounen Jump stuff Nomura, Nojima, and Kitase have done before. Except now they’re trying to do meta-commentary and...they’ve never been able to make that work. They just don’t have the skillset for it. They aren’t Hideako Anno with Evangelion Rebuild or even…

Actually having a meaningful plot and having a combat system that isn’t just pure fructose

God XII is so boring.

FFXIV is what FFXII should have been.

Square cannot make up their minds about mainline entry combat systems. The last one to be entirely coherent was FFX which went for a turn-based system. Everything since then has been a mess. FFXII did a half-assed MMO setup due to refusing to drop the ATB gauge, FFXIII was on auto-pilot, and FFXV was a giant QTE.

This is modern-day SE, they exist in a bubble.