Uh yeah, I said that

Yes

Rise looks cool (hunting dog!) but Stories 2 came outta nowhere! Good to see they’re continuing with that.

1) Only extremely rarely 2) not the fucking point. FF has never been big on the whole swords and sorcery tradition. They didn’t take long to ramp up the robots, steampunk, and sci-fi elements. The series was always more about trying out new things and, if anything, pushing what the term “fantasy” actually meant. The…

That’s all salad-dressing; when it came to the actual CORE story themes and concepts, the series became stale. It’s why XIV was such a shot in the arm because it did something different in terms of narrative.

No, it’s because they’re BAD. I-VII all tried new things, new terminology, new worlds, exploring new themes and dealing with new sorts of characters and storylines.

Exactly; the series has basically had the same exclusionary club running it for the past twenty years. Time for some new perspective

Yeah, maybe pick something other than Dark Souls’ keeps and swamps for the big reveal, guys. Give us a nice forest or two

It’s become incredibly incurious; it has become less daring, less subversive, and has sanded off its rebellious, experimental core, save for FFXIV. The games became toothless

He’s merely the producer, settle down. He’s not leading the game

The first game had you go into a flying fortress and encounter a giant, fuckoff war mech. And airships were as common as cars. The FF series has never been traditional high fantasy, that’s Dragon Quest’s thing. The FF series becoming incurious is why it became so tepid post-VII.

I will say, this is at least a different vibe for FF. They’ve never really done the grounded fantasy approach except in spin-offs like Tactics.

FFXII happened; Matsuno was the original director, but had executives breathing down his neck so much he left because he wasn’t going to suffer a nervous breakdown to placate a bunch of assholes. He formed his own idea factory company later and has mostly worked as a writer for stuff like FFXIV (he did the Ivalice…

It couldn’t star Ashley though. He is literally the most powerful character in Square history, so he has ascended beyond

Which would still be different for the franchise because it’s never done the Tolkien or Witcher approach

Yoshida worships at the altar of Yasumi Matsuno so of course he’s going to take notes from his style.It also kind of reminds me of Dragon Age a bit what with the demonic forces and whatnot.

Yeah, mostly because they finally got some fresh blood in the franchise. The problem with FF over the past twenty years is that it just hasn’t been allowed to do anything new because it was mostly the same guys (like Nojima, Nomura, and Kitase) deciding who got to work on it. It became a very closed off club where if…

He had to emphasize he’s a PRODUCER, he’s already got his hands full with XIV. The director is Hiroshi Takai who was the director of The Last Remnant and a co-director for XIV’s Stormblood expansion

Yeah, it almost makes me feel like it’s taking after Vagrant Story a bit.

Well, this is the problem: FF has never BEEN high fantasy. It’s always been this weird, subversive fantasy. It’s why the games kept doing new things, adding new terminology, exploring new themes. The reason FF has stumbled is because it hasn’t gone anywhere; it stopped doing NEW stuff and trying to just rehash old…