Display space and psychology. First, it is better viewable from afar, and it creates more display space, as in, free advertising.

Standing out on shelf is still super important.

Nintendo probably realizes making them smaller would associate them with the handheld market, and as they are aggressively positioning the Switch as a home console, they probably opted to keep them bigger in line with home-console game boxes.

Family Sharing isn’t exactly there so everyone can have free apps. It’s there to manage who buys what. If you and your family each owned a 3DS, you would all have to buy different copies of the same game to play on your personal 3DS. You all own different iPhones, so you all have to buy a different copy of Super Mario…

Yeah, Donkey Kong Country Returns is... not a good comparison.

“Whatever that means in theory, in practice it looks somewhat similar to what Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country Returns tried to pull off, mixing the principles of a 2D platformer with the look and feel of a 3D environment that has depth and range.”

9, really? Um, okay, that’s just some shit taste in games you have right there.

What both those games share are their usage of European theatrics. FF6 gave the player a sense of a progressing story through several characters and quickly finding a common enemy, an enemy that escalates how psychotic he is and expresses a typical goal. It’s a story that even a seven year old will understand.

Not really. FF6 and Tactics still are some of my favorite JRPGs, and while nostalgia does have a moderate role, I still find them to be nicely written. FF has taken a more niche route for years now in terms of plots and tropes which will not resonate with newcomers in the West.

And jup, wouldn’t you know it. The writing seems to suck. I really hope that Noctis and co being genuinely so into a dress is not any indication of the rest of the plot.

Then again, I am not surprised. I mean, where Naughty Dog and Bethesda were having extremely detailed presentations about technical art techniques…

yep... that seems EXACTLY what this game is going for with the fishing, driving, overly done animations and a shiny gloss to everything. This is what happens when you dont know what you want to make and do it for 10 years.