Not getting that vibe, to be honest. If anything this is what it’s aping: Vagrant Story. Right down to an older protagonist (for Square Enix at least) who has only been seen alone. Two of the characters even seem to be modeled after Vagrant Story characters. Joshua seems to be an homage to Joshua Bardorba while the…

Sherlock Holmes’ entire motivation in the original stories was that he solved crimes because he hated being. It’s why when he had nothing to do he’d snort coke.

-Looks at Sherlock Holmes-

Zenos is the best villain the franchise has had since Sephiroth himself. Mostly because he’s like if Sephiroth had a manic-depressive younger brother

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.