/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.10687550]

>saves square multiple times over
>produces hit after hit
>makes shitloads of money in sales
>thrown to the curb after a single mistake

You can't deny that they did him dirty

[Anonymous No.10687560]

It was a big mistake tho

[Anonymous No.10687574]

What was the mistake the Final Fantasy movie?

[Anonymous No.10687589]

>>10687560
>>10687574
you don't cost the money that much money and not get the broom closet desk

[Anonymous No.10687594]

working on FFXII wrecked him. frankly, I don't blame him

[Anonymous No.10687602]

>>10687594
>>10687594
He went from small projects where he could probably micromanage everything to a mainline FF.

[Anonymous No.10687610]

>>10687560
They recouped the losses with FFX and KH. It was always a knee-jerk move and I suspect there were politics involved behind the scenes, probably he needed to be removed to complete the Enix merger.

[Anonymous No.10687753]

>>10687610
It was actually mostly due to FFXI and Sony. Yes, FFX and KH helped Square to get it’s shit back together, but it was Sony that held their shit together by buying their stock and FFXI that grossed an insane amount of money.

[Anonymous No.10687908]

>>10687550
Spirits Within was a pretty fucking enormous mistake. The man himself didn't want to do anything after that big of a failure, either.

[Anonymous No.10687921]

>>10687550
I like that Uematsu basically left Square same time as Sakaguchi, and then made the music for 'guchi's Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey etc. with Mistwalker instead. Uematsu was a real bro.

[Anonymous No.10688048]

>>10687908
It wasn't just Spirits Within, it was also the multi-million dollar production studio they built in fucking Hawaii for it too, they absolutely lost their fucking minds

[Anonymous No.10688213]

>>10687610
Only way I could see it not being politics:
>Sakaguchi starts to get an ego after FF's success, eyes even bigger projects to establish the brand as a household name like Mario or Sonic
>Chases his white whale of producing a ludicrously expensive movie for the time to make it happen, literally everyone around him voices concerns but he presses on
>Release happens, doesn't recoup hardly any of its losses, but completely shatters his ego
>Convinced to step down at his low point despite still being quite capable
>Company left virtually headless without a great successor, Enix merger goes through, Square reduced to a set of IPs and a few mid level talents

Sakaguchi still had plenty of life in him, unless backroom politics did him in, it had to be he lost faith in himself. I think had he exercised a lot more restraint when it came to things like the FF movie, Square would've remained dominant in the industry for another decade or so at minimum, at least until the release of FFXIV 1.0.

[Anonymous No.10688343]

>>10687610
It was really embarrassing beyond just the money

[Anonymous No.10688367]

>>10687550
That's just Japanese business. Look up the guy who invented the Game Boy; same shit. Japan is all about shaming.

[Anonymous No.10688731]

>>10688213
To be fair, Sakaguchi had already appointed Nomura and Matsuno as the stewards for KH and FFXII in 2000 (before Spirits Within crashed and burned). I think it’s fair to say he would have had a reduced role in the games going forward regardless of the level of SW’s success.

[Anonymous No.10688740]

>>10687550
It was enix, therefor do not play any square enix games, long live squaresoft.

[Anonymous No.10688789]

>>10688367
This. Used to be you'd be commanded to commit sudoku for this sort of shamefur dispray just to regain your honor.

[Anonymous No.10688854]

afaik, a lot of people inside Square at the time didn't want him to leave and thought the way he was treated was a complete overreaction, but their complaints fell on deaf ears or were silenced heavily due to their sympathy going against the grain.

more importantly, the guy was blacklisted from returning for over a decade, and you really have to ask why.

[Anonymous No.10688858]

>>10687589
Huh?

[Anonymous No.10689391]

I liked Spirits Within and think it got unfairly dismissed
taken as a separate work in the context of the time, it's really beautiful and well done

[Anonymous No.10689405]

>>10689391
It is beautiful, especially for its time, but honestly, the story was as generic a sci-fi movie as it comes. And what, besides the whole Gaia thing and the villain being a black-haired Seifer, did it have to do with Final Fantasy?

[Anonymous No.10689425]

>>10688858
Japanese companies can’t legally fire employees except in specific circumstances, so they will often give employees undesirable desks or postings and nothing to do until they leave

[Anonymous No.10689495]

>>10689425
>Conglatulations, You are plomoted to lead oul new office in Sibelia

[Anonymous No.10689701]

>joins in when Square is on the brick of bankruptcy
>programs hits after hits using Iranian wizardry
>singlehandeldy saves square multiple times over
>so respected by the company he even gets his name all over the games title screens and advertisment
>makes shitloads of money in sales
>just leaves at the top of his glory
>disappears off the face of the earth
>legacy forever untouched

BASED
A
S
E
D

[Anonymous No.10689960]

>>10687550
On the bright side he got to finally live his dream of becoming a rapper

[Anonymous No.10690032]

>>10688213
>unless backroom politics did him in
I remember hearing grapevine internet rumors like 5 years after X-2 came out that there is a Japanese phenomenon where you keep your position but get talked over or at worst completely ignored like you don't exist at meetings and shit and this is what internetters in that thread were insisting happened to Guch and he put up with it for a bit before stepping down.

[Anonymous No.10690046]

>>10690032
>I remember hearing rumors
Gather around, everyone. I think this guy's got some valuable insight for us!

[Anonymous No.10690051]

>>10690046
I mean most of this thread has been speculation including the post I was quoting

[Anonymous No.10690126]

>>10690032
This happens in the west too.

[Anonymous No.10690182]

>>10687610
Spirits Within literally bankrupted Square and is the reason Enix bought them out. All that money they made with those explosive FF hits, flushed down the drain for a movie no one saw and a "virtual actress" no one wanted to use the license for.
So whenever someone talks about Square no longer following Sakaguchi's vision, spare me. His vision killed the company and is responsible for being what it is today.

[Anonymous No.10690198]

>>10690182
>Spirits Within literally bankrupted Square and is the reason Enix bought them out.
This is an urban legend.

[Anonymous No.10690203]

>>10687550
Final Fantasy X was the last real Final Fantasy game before the series was reborn with Fantasian

[Anonymous No.10690208]

>>10690203
Elaborate. I'm as out of touch as they come.

[Anonymous No.10690215]

>>10690032
What you're talking about is the fact that in Japan, you legally can't be fired from a salaried position. Let me explain this to you. Thanks to Japan having extremely strong labor laws, companies are not allowed to just fire people or the courts will be on their ass. There are legally only TWO ways to layoff an employee
>you're grossly incompetent, which is hard to prove in a court of law because they thought you showed competence when hiring you so the onus is on them to correct the errors in your work instead of getting rid of you
>the company is bleeding money, which requires offering voluntary severance pay to EVERYONE in the company and establishing an official pecking order of who is first to go solid there aren't enough volunteering to leave

THAT'S IT, anything else, you're not getting fired no matter what. Instead, they will constantly shift you around the company to more and more demeaning positions until you quit of your own accord. You know how you always hear stories of people at Konami who used to make games but now they're the janitor? That's why, they're doing that because legally they can't fire the person, but they really want them to gtfo of the company so they're hoping that person will get the picture with enough humiliation.

[Anonymous No.10690217]

>>10690215
>solid there aren't enough
assuming* there aren't enough, I meant

[Anonymous No.10690232]

>>10690208
Produced and written by Sakaguchi, with music by Uematsu, and feels like a continuation and love letter to playstation era Final Fantasies. The drawback is that it's only available for fucking Apple devices.

[Anonymous No.10690240]

>>10690232
>Produced and written by Sakaguchi
I mean so was The Last Story and I thought that game was boring as shit.

[Anonymous No.10690249]

>>10687908
>make good video games
>make bad movie
>quit making video games
???

[Anonymous No.10690252]

>>10690182
>Spirits Within literally bankrupted Square and is the reason Enix bought them out
Wrong, the merger was decided long before the movie and the movie's failure actually threatened to kill the merger since Enix was now hesitant to merge with Square after such a disaster making them look financially unstable. Square took complete power in the "merger", if you didn't notice.

[Anonymous No.10690268]

>>10690232
Sakaguchi hasn't made a single good game since leaving Square. All of them, including Lost Odyssey, were middling wet farts (and LO would immediately be exposed for this if it were ever released from 360 jail) He was a hack carried by stellar teams.

[Anonymous No.10690869]

>>10690182
>His vision killed the company and is responsible for being what it is today.
If it wasn't for him, the company wouldn't have even lived into the 90s.

[Anonymous No.10691073]

>>10689701
He was an interesting figure. Certainly had some know how from what I've read

[Anonymous No.10691079]

>>10690869
>If it wasn't for him, the company wouldn't have even lived into the 90s.
Myth.

[Anonymous No.10691085]

>>10687560
>It was a big mistake tho
Any of the prior gambles could've been big mistakes as well. FFVII was a costly endeavor and had to rely on Western sales to justify its expense. But the reality is the man was a pioneer. Sure, he was thinking too far into the future with Spirits Within and probably should've had someone who knew how to write along with actually tying the game to Final Fantasy or at the very least cooperating with a renowned story teller or creator.
Square no longer takes chances and they rest on the most basic money grabbing fads rather than ideas that have immense potential.
I always love the fact that he caught on quick with Western games like Everquest and would push for Square to go into that direction.

[Anonymous No.10691087]

>>10691079
>myth
Not him, but fact.

[Anonymous No.10691092]

>>10690215
>they will constantly shift you around the company to more and more demeaning positions until you quit of your own accord.
https://youtu.be/IRjwbrP9wKw

[Anonymous No.10691104]

>>10690182
> Square and is the reason Enix bought them out.
Enix didn't buy them out, Square bought them. Anytime a company merger occurs, the dominate player of the union has their name come first (examples: TimeWarner, BandaiNamco, ActivisionBlizzard). In only rare instances does that not occur for reputation intentions like SegaSammy (Sammy didn't want their gambling/gacha operations to tarnish their purchase of a game company with a kid friendly mascot like Sonic).

[Anonymous No.10691109]

>>10689425
>show up to work
>do nothing
>get money
and this is supposed to be a punishment?

[Anonymous No.10691110]

>>10691109
For people with ambition and aren't lost souls, yes it is. I'm sorry you have no drive in life.

[Anonymous No.10691194]

Oh no. The company reinvested surplus profit into a product that didn't produce infinite growth.

[Anonymous No.10691527]

>>10687610
>probably he needed to be removed to complete the Enix merger
"Why wasn't I told?"
"The last thing they want is a power struggle with entrenched management. The deal is off if you come with it. The board expects your resignation in thirty days."
"You can't do this to me... I started Final Fantasy. YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I SACRIFICED?"

[Anonymous No.10691541]

>>10691104
>BandaiNamco
>dominant
Bandai did not have a FRACTION of the power and influence that Namco did when the merger happened, that merging was because Namco wanted to just have an entire piece of the animation industry.

[Anonymous No.10691543]

>>10691541
Also it should be noted, when they merged Namco's name was first until 2012 where they switched them around.

[Anonymous No.10691553]

>>10690215
>You know how you always hear stories of people at Konami who used to make games but now they're the janitor? That's why, they're doing that because legally they can't fire the person, but they really want them to gtfo of the company so they're hoping that person will get the picture with enough humiliation.
What if you are too autistic to get a clue? What if you continuosly show up to the janitor job to half-ass it? Will they, eh, " correct the errors in your work" by cleaning the toilet in your stead? How far can you go with trolling them?

[Anonymous No.10691554]

>>10691085
>FFVII was a costly endeavor
Only because they spent 100 million in budget

[Anonymous No.10691556]

>>10691541
>Bandai did not have a FRACTION of the power and influence that Namco did when the merger happened
Can't tell if you're just completely unaware of what Bandai does as a business or you're just baiting
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB111501945716621991
>Bandai Co., the developer of the Tamagotchi virtual pet, will acquire Namco Ltd., best known for its Pac-Man arcade game, in a stock deal valued at roughly 176 billion yen, or about $1.7 billion, creating one of Japan's largest toys and games business groups.

[Anonymous No.10691562]

>>10691554
Yes, thats why I said it was a costly endeavor. What they were doing with prerendered CGI was groundbreaking.

[Anonymous No.10691570]

>>10691553
Japan is a lot more community based due to its homogeneous background and how close people are. Shame is one of the worst things one can endure in Japanese society which is why otakus are usually driven to suicide.

[Anonymous No.10691592]

>>10691556
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/bandai-namco-to-merge/1100-6123385/
>The new holding company, in which Bandai will hold a 57 percent stake to Namco's 43 percent,
Again, they are the dominating factor when it came to the merger.

[Anonymous No.10691598]

>>10691556
>>10691592
Nta but then why was the merger name Namco-Bandai from 2006-2012? I don't think it's a SegaSammy situation considering you know, Bandai gave the world Gundam and isn't known for being scummy.

[Anonymous No.10691805]

>>10691598
https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/01/24/namco-bandai-changing-name-to-bandai-namco
>According to the brief announcement, the change is intended to unify the brand internationally (since the company is already known as Bandai Namco in Japan) in order to increase the “value” and “appeal” of the name.
That was only for publishing in the West probably because they knew more people overseas know the name Namco when it comes to videogames more so than Bandai, especially with titles like Tekken.

[Anonymous No.10691824]

>>10691805
But everyone just called it Bamco to begin with.

[Anonymous No.10691847]

>>10687550
>Most of /vr/ posters still have this haircut in 2024

[Anonymous No.10692037]

>>10691824
Sounds catchier than Nandai

[Anonymous No.10692106]

>>10691847
Beats broccolimutts or slavshaves anyday

[Anonymous No.10692134]

>>10691847
I'm still rocking the denim button down.

[Anonymous No.10692693]

When I look at the trio 3-D World Runner / Rad Racer / Final Fantasy, I can't help but wonder what other masterpieces he and Nasir could have done together had the company not turned into a Final Fantasy machine. Imagine if they had dipped their toes in action sidescrollers, puzzle games, SHUMPs, platformers, etc what other ludo kino could have been made on S/FC ?

And really it could have very well gone another way. People repeat the ubran meme "Final Fantasy saved Square!" but the reality is that Rad Racer sold 2 fucking millions copies, a lot more than FF1; and all it got was a lousy US only sequel. Dragon Quest 3 really broke Japan in more ways than we realize.

[Anonymous No.10692701]

>>10691073
>Certainly had some know how from what I've read

From what I understand, which is confirmed by the little I've seen from NES and SNES game code, Japan programming best practices basically all followed the same guidelines, or ways of doing nothing, plus tended to copy each others. You look at the code of NES games from Konami/Capcom/Nintendo etc you'll see a lot of similar things. But the moment you look at a western game like Rare's, it was an entire different way of doing things.
I think that's why talented western programmers like Nasir, Rare's or Argonaut's were so important to Japanese devs, they were able to bring in a different perspective and make the best of both worlds.

[Anonymous No.10692706]

>>10691073
>Certainly had some know how from what I've read

From what I understand, which is confirmed by the little I've seen from NES and SNES game code, Japan programming best practices basically all followed the same guidelines, or ways of doing things, plus tended to copy each others. You look at the code of NES games from Konami/Capcom/Nintendo etc you'll see a lot of similar things. But the moment you look at a western game like Rare's, it was an entire different way of doing things.
I think that's why talented western programmers like Nasir, Rare's or Argonaut's were so important to Japanese devs, they were able to bring in a different perspective and make the best of both worlds.
Meanwhile, was there even a single Japanese programmer that made it to the west? The gain from cultural exchange only seemed to go Japan's way.

[Anonymous No.10692785]

>>10687589
ESL posters should be hanged.

[Anonymous No.10693881]

>>10692706
>Meanwhile, was there even a single Japanese programmer that made it to the west? The gain from cultural exchange only seemed to go Japan's way.
is this a troll post? I see so many names in the credits for programming and shit that are clearly not American in older games.

[Anonymous No.10693910]

>>10687550
sakaguchi shills for and actively plays FFXIV today even when not working for the company. the evil shit they did to him sadly now rots his brain

>>10687753
iirc FFXI was done with long-term profit in mind and it took several years before the subscriptions made it worthwhile. the first few years were rocky and the box sales weren't much so it's honestly a bit shocking they were willing to play that somewhat risky game especially in a pre-WoW era

[Anonymous No.10694052]

>>10687908
Frankly it was everyone's mistake. Sakaguchi may have been spearheading it but clearly he wasn't the only one pushing that agenda. Everyone else at the company with any pull whatsoever was either behind him or placating him, either of which makes them equally responsible.

The frustrating part is that it didn't NEED to be a disaster. Had they gone the sane route and contracted an outside animation studio to make the exact same movie they could have absorbed the loss. What fucked them royally was breaking ground on an entire animation studio in Hawaii and putting all their eggs in the basket that somehow Squaresoft was going to transition into a CGI movie juggernaut rivaling Lucasfilm.

[Anonymous No.10694060]

>>10692693
Isn't that kind of what the PS1 was like for Squaresoft? They really spread their wings on that console and they were doing a bang up job. A lot of their non-RPGs on PS1 had a real future on PS2 had they stayed the course. Spirits Within completely derailed them.

[Anonymous No.10694063]

>>10694052
Technically speaking, you're correct, but the biggest name attached to a project is who will wind up taking the fall for it, especially in Japan. Easier to blame one person and shame them into oblivion than accept that everyone had the same ridiculous delusions.

[Anonymous No.10694073]

>>10687550
It's interesting that a 3d cgi movie burned this company's innards so severely, yet now all they want to make is interactive movies. It's like they're stuck on trying to repeat FFVII but can't see that the FMVs are not the most memorable/good part of it.

[Anonymous No.10694076]

>>10689495
that's not how Engrish works. They can't pronounce Ls. They can do Rs fine.

[Anonymous No.10694087]

>>10687550
Welcome to Japanese work culture.

[Anonymous No.10694089]

>>10694063
Yes, that is true. He who wants the fame earns the infamy. But Sakaguchi was not a creative, not a businessman. I get that given his pedigree you don't want to be "that guy" who tells him no. But there HAD to be a diplomatic way to let him make the movie and be his creative self while also suggesting that they not invest in the actual filmmaking infrastructure for their first outing. "We'll write the checks for the film itself but let's work with ILM or Dreamworks for this one. Let's wait until we have some proof of concept before we start buying land. If Spirits Within is a hit then we'll move in that direction." Unless Sakaguchi was a complete dumbass he probably would have been fine with that arrangement. Everyone else was either too sycophantic or cowardly to confront him on it.

[Anonymous No.10694094]

>>10694089
>*Sakaguchi was a creative, not a businessman

[Anonymous No.10694118]

>>10688858
>>10692785
>I don't get the cultural reference.
>E-ESL!

[Anonymous No.10695332]

>>10694052
>>10694063
You guys are also forgetting the biggest money sink with Spirits Within: the whole "digital actress" thing they created that they planned to license out for film studios AND NO ONE WANTED IT

[Anonymous No.10695341]

>>10689391
It's boring as shit and the plot is pants-on-head.

[Anonymous No.10695345]

>>10695332
True but that came off as wishful thinking marketing mumbo jumbo. Yeah, Aki Ross appeared in Maxim Magazine's swimsuit issue and had a few puff pieces on the news about Square's ideas for her going forward but that wasn't the real money sink. They could have theoretically done that with any of their CGI women. They kinda did a miniature version of it with Lightning during FFXIII's marketing blitz, with her hocking Louis Vuitton, seemingly independent from the game itself. Building and staffing a studio in Hawaii that ended up being useless after the movie bombed is what totally fucked them. They basically funded an entire subsidiary that was effectively the equivalent of Dreamworks as opposed to farming the project out to an existing animation studio and simply bankrolling the production. The failure still would have stung but Squaresoft as an entity may still be around in that scenario instead of having been absorbed by Enix.

[Anonymous No.10695451]

>>10687550
Sad he's relegated to producing mobile vidya. I haven't gotten far in Fantasian to know if it's good or not, but I really liked the twist on the random battles mechanic. Still have Lost Odyssey on the backlog too.

[Anonymous No.10696210]

>>10691805
>That was only for publishing in the West probably
they're called bandai namco all around the world since 2014. they swapped the order of the names around because the company thought that bandai name was worth more than namcos, and due to the ownership stake
> ign
lmao. it amazes me people go out of their way to give this shit website clicks.

[Anonymous No.10696602]

>>10691570
funny how westerner's overlook stuff like this when they salivate at the idea of the whole world becoming more like that country.

[Anonymous No.10696630]

>>10696602
>westerner's
Why would you put an apostrophe there?

[Anonymous No.10696649]

>>10689391
it was shit then when I saw it in cinema and it is shit now

[Anonymous No.10696828]

>>10696630
idk anon. are you crying about it?

[Anonymous No.10697114]

>>10696602
Because it's not really...true? Being more homogenous =/= that automatically. China is like 90% Han and it's one of the lowest-trust societies in the world because Confucianism teaches loyalty to the family above all else, and the more loyal you are to your family the less adverse you are to fucking over others if it benefits your family. People aren't close and yet they engage in shame culture regardless, it's just that the east emphasizes shame as a form of societal control while the west emphasizes guilt. The difference being guilt is, "I did a bad thing" and shame is "I'm a bad person"

[Anonymous No.10697137]

>>10697114
Actually let me rephrase that, guilt is, "I did something bad and the reason that negatively affects me is because of my own guilty conscience letting me know I made a personal failure." While shame is, "I did something bad and now this will negatively affect how the rest of society perceives and judges me." It's internal vs external.

[Anonymous No.10697238]

>>10696602
Who's salivating over the world becoming more like Japan other than weeaboos?

[Anonymous No.10697249]

>>10697238
Nta but it's mostly people obsessed with countries being ethnically homogenous and always point to Japan for its low number of immigrants as an example. For whatever reason they think it's because Japan makes it hard to immigrate there which is patently false, they actually make the process super easy, the issue is living there is so expensive that why would you pick it when you could pick a cheaper first-world country?

[Anonymous No.10697386]

>>10697249
Ah. So retards. Gotcha. Isn't Japan also like the Florida of Asia? The population skews incredibly old because nobody is having kids. The median age is like 50.

[Anonymous No.10697397]

>>10697386
Nobody has kids in any developed country. North America and European numbers are skewed by millions of immigrants.

[Anonymous No.10697575]

>>10689960
Sakaaguchiiiiiiiiiiii

[Anonymous No.10697612]

>>10697397
>nobody in any developed country is able to have kids
not 100% true though. Depends on a number of factors here and there.

[Anonymous No.10697668]

>>10697397
>Nobody has kids in any developed country.
Or even most developing countries. Which I mean, considering we went from 2 to 7 billion in only 80 years, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. It's not like any countries are just going to go extinct, just that a bunch of old people will die off.

[Anonymous No.10699863]

>>10689701
Nasir Gebelli was an absolute programming god, who helped make all of our childhoods magical.

[Anonymous No.10700135]

If a merger had to happen, Squaresoft should have either merged with 2000s Blizzard, Konami, or WestWood.

[Anonymous No.10700351]

>>10699863
Funny factoid, FF2 was developed in California because Nasir's Japanese work visa expired so rather than working remotely, which would have been annoying back then, Squaresoft just up and moved themselves into Nasir's fucking living room. The guy was accommodating as fuck.

[Anonymous No.10700545]

square might have also shut down Square of America too early.
i liked Evermore

[Anonymous No.10700575]

>>10700545
They DEFINITELY shut it down too early. The game is pretty good and for a first outing it's very impressive.

[Anonymous No.10700689]

>>10689701
He was overrated as shit though
Secret of Mana had some shoddy programming

[Anonymous No.10700705]

>>10700545
>>10700575
There was never a Square of America
They had an American office which continued to be a thing but it wasn't like Sega of America
They just didn't continue doing American games

[Anonymous No.10700735]

>>10689701
>half the spells in the games he coded don't work properly
based

[Anonymous No.10700759]

>>10700735
This
The only reason people remember him is because his name stood out as a non-Japanese dude in a staff full of Japs

[Anonymous No.10700780]

>>10692693
Japanese devs are autists with their obsessive need to be successful in their home country

>>10694060
They tried some Japan Wrestling games on PS2 and the Racing Game RPG on PSX but none of them stuck
They fucked themselves over with Final Fantasy

[Anonymous No.10700794]

>>10700351
That says FF3?

[Anonymous No.10700851]

>>10700705
>They just didn't continue doing American games
stopped too early

[Anonymous No.10700924]

>>10700851
Probably didn't sell well
That and with FF7 being a runaway success in the west they changed their plans

SoE was originally developed as a way to appeal to make an American-style game to American gamer market
With FF7 finally making Final Fantasy a huge hit in the US they got their US market so Evermore's purpose was made irrelevant

[Anonymous No.10700926]

>>10700351
>Nasir's house be like...

[Anonymous No.10700935]

>>10700924
SoE's purpose was to fill a hole left by no Seiken Densentsu 3. there were no plans to translate it at all, so Square decided to let the American team have a shot.
Evermore was '95, they could have given them another shot in '96 before FF7 descended.

[Anonymous No.10700945]

>>10700935
Or even after. Squaresoft was putting out all kinds of different games. Bushido Blade, Parasite Eve, etc. There's no reason the SoE team couldn't have participated in that.

[Anonymous No.10700974]

>>10700935
The whole SD3 replacement thing is a myth.
Evermore was being developed from early 1994 and was known by different titles in its early development + had different concepts early on. Square didn't just launch a new Seattle studio to make a quick SD3 replacement, that's fucking autistic theory.
Square told them to make an American-style Mana-like Action RPG

Many retards assume that they used the SoM engine because of the Ring Command system but in reality they just copied it because Fedrau or whatever his name liked Secret of Mana and since they were told to make a Mana-like game he thought they shouldn't reinvent the wheel too much. You can tell it's not the same engine since Evermore is so much responsive than SoM ever was.

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2009/04/interview_with_brian_fehdrau_secret_of_evermore

[Anonymous No.10700992]

>>10700945
Bushido Blade was developed by another Japanese dev
Parasite Eve was developed by Square of Japan

You are not making any sense
There would have been nothing to contribute there
Language barriers would just make things more complicated

[Anonymous No.10701027]

>>10700992
I'm saying they could have made a different game to be released among those more oddball games since Square was doing that kind of thing anyway. Is this somehow an absurd proposition? We're talking about a company that eventually imploded from trying to make a Hollywood movie. I don't think letting the SoE people make another game is a big ask.

[Anonymous No.10701058]

>>10701027
Read the pic I posted, their office was closed in favor of the LA one

Btw adding onto this >>10700974
Evermore was supposed to be released in Japan a few months after the US according to a March 1995 issue of Gamepro but it was cancelled

[Anonymous No.10701164]

>>10697114
you're mentally retarded, "trust" is only about shared values, if your shared value is being selfish and fucking people over you will still have outcomes like that.

china still has a huge culture of shame, something that even africa has also btw, but america absolutely does not

i wonder why lmao

you literally will not give a fuck what random retarded mexicans or niggers think if you live in america because they are so alien and unlike you that it's very easy to disregard any of the stupid things that they think

[Anonymous No.10701178]

>>10701164
you need to seek therapy away from the internet

[Anonymous No.10701204]

>>10687574
The story in the movie was just incredibly silly, I could see how it would work in a game but not for a movie.

>>10692693
Thats about as much as sonic for an almost throw away game, graphically it is very impressive.

>>10692706
Seems like they follow the trend of 4 enemies on screen in most snes games.

[Anonymous No.10701275]

>>10700974
>a myth
which is why i specifically mentioned they were never going to translate it. if there were ever any plans, they gave up as soon as they hit this bug.

[Anonymous No.10701317]

>>10701275
Maybe, who know?
We might never truly know why SD3 wasn't localized back then until we get word from Tanaka and Iishi.
Not like Evermore was spotless when it came to bugs.

If I were to guess it would have to be technical reasons. Neil Corlett had his work cut out for him.
Doesn't help that Seiken Densetsu 3 was a laggy piece of shit with godawful programming.

[Anonymous No.10701329]

>>10700689
>40% of the game was cut

[Anonymous No.10701336]

is XI worth checking out nowadays?

[Anonymous No.10701342]

>>10701329
Think you are confusing that with Woolsey having to edit out 40% of the script for the localization

[Anonymous No.10701346]

>>10700794
FF2 and FF3 were developed around the same time

[Anonymous No.10701542]

>>10701275
I'm glad this snippet exists because it's further proof of what I keep saying about RPGs. People keep thinking that RPGs weren't getting localized back then because they didn't sell well when really it was a logistics thing. It wasn't like today where you have this well oiled machine getting games out worldwide nearly same day. The amount of time it took to localize an RPG would often put it way behind. And since technology moved at a lightning pace in the 90s if your game took an extra six months to come out, newer and better looking games were coming out in the meantime. So by the time your game was ready you'd be stuck releasing it into a hostile market. And then since Ted Woolsey was one guy and there were only so many hours in the day you had to further triage which games took priority.

[Anonymous No.10701576]

From what I gather from Square, I don't think the original founders were anything special. They all seemed to be in the early 80s bored college students fucking around not sure what to do with their lives. Modern Square Enix seems to be a company with highly disciplined CS and graphic design grads really desperate to prove themselves, who are highly disciplined, being lead by what were once rebellious children fucking around in a small video game company avoiding the nepotistic job at their dad's electrical company. I think people underestimate how barren the field was with competition, and how much of an early founder effect they had.

The company has long been criticized internally for its overly hierarchical business model, even by Japanese standards. Had they just opened the floodgates a little and let the 20 and 30 year olds have a say, maybe the games would have more inter-generational appeal? Sure, Fujos get their uke seme fix with modern square enix quite regularly, but is that any different to showcasing titties to get sales? The reason the games are coasting on nostalgia so much is because the fanbase is aging with them. Nomura and Nojima are fast approaching boomer years and will have to let go of the pen if they're going to continue writing games for teenagers. Especially since teenagers are highly sensitive to the trends of the contemporary era.

Nomura was in his 20s during the development of Final Fantasy VII, if Square was anything like Square Enix is now, it'd be like some guy born in the 1930s trying to appeal to teenagers in the 90s and writing a story, how the fuck would that work out?

[Anonymous No.10701617]

>>10701542
to be fair, console RPGs were only so popular in the west before the late '90s boom.

[Anonymous No.10701841]

>>10701617
"Only so popular" was still pretty popular though. They routinely sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Which in those days was pretty solid. FF1 sold something like 700,000 copies on the NES.

[Anonymous No.10701858]

>>10700351
Source on pic?

>>10700794
Here is the FF2 one

[Anonymous No.10701859]

>>10701858

[Anonymous No.10701867]

>>10701841
i would have definitely bought the untranslated squaresoft games even if they were released a little late, i bought ff5 for the playstation even...

[Anonymous No.10701873]

>>10701858
family computer magazine

[Anonymous No.10701874]

>>10701542
>they didn't sell well when really it was a logistics thing.

Yep, the issue was that, in the west, not nearly as many games were being produced as in Japan; and the thing with RPGs is that, EVEN if the translation was done and not counting its cost, they had a much higher production cost due to bigger ROMs and big manuals.
Back in those days, for console RPGs it was the norm to have manuals that were between 50 and 100 pages.
So if a publisher can only produce that many games; given the choice between a 1MB game with a 20 pages manual, and a 4MB game with a 60 pages manual, what do you think he's going to choose?

Those logistics is also why European countries didn't get many RPGs (usually only A-RPGs), the market for each individual language was even smaller

When a publisher says
>oh actually our western players don't like RPGs!
what they actually mean is
>People like what we tell them to like. And they'll be happy.
They're like marketers, who believe the only reason people buy a product is because of the marketing, not because of the product itself.

[Anonymous No.10701884]

>>10701867
For sales comparisons we can probably compare to late releases like Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Mega Man X3. Based on how expensive they are now it doesn't seem like they sold great. The fear of missing a good release window was probably significant.

[Anonymous No.10701885]

>>10701873
I don't think this issue has been scanned has it?

also it is me or did a tons of Famitsu scans disappear from archive.org? Any other places to get them?

[Anonymous No.10701904]

>>10701841
FF1 was given away for free at one point

[Anonymous No.10701910]

>>10701874
>When a publisher says
>oh actually our western players don't like RPGs!
>what they actually mean is
>People like what we tell them to like. >And they'll be happy.
It feels like a PR thing that got out of hand. This is just conjecture but it feels like they used the US market as a test market for their upcoming FFIV Easy Type they were working on and then quickly came up with the Americans dont like RPGs thing to justify why they delivered a butchered version. But then it just became ingrained and they kept running with it. All four Dragon Quests came out on the NES. FF1 sold well and FFII was planned and translated before being canceled due to the SNES release timing. Nothing happened in the interim for them to think FFIV was too complicated for the west. I can't think of any reason other than the above.

[Anonymous No.10701918]

>>10701884
i wanted X3 when i was a kid but could never find it, i do own dream land 3 though

[Anonymous No.10701929]

>>10701910
DQ wasn't very popular but i think that's mostly because the games all released years later in america so they felt very dated

DQ3/4 didn't even release until after FF4 was out...

rpgs failed in america because they either released when they were already ancient(DQ) weren't marketed at all(earthbound) were actual dogshit(seventh saga, actually ruined by the localizers)

i mean look how popular pokemon was...

[Anonymous No.10702009]

>>10701929
Dragon Warrior were popular enough to stay in the Nintendo Power top 10-20 up to late 1993

[Anonymous No.10702010]

>>10701929
>>10702009
this one is october 1993

[Anonymous No.10702038]

>>10702009
>You better get it before he gets you.

[Anonymous No.10702039]

>>10700545
the game had so much soul and character its unreal especially for a snes rpg.

[Anonymous No.10702103]

>>10702039
The Jeremy Soule soundtrack was also a good 50% of the game's soul, as well.

[Anonymous No.10702128]

>>10701929
>>10702009
>>10702010
June 91, Dragon Warrior II is doing well. Note also: Crystalis, Wizardry, Ultima AND Destiny of an Emperor all in the top.

Man those western console players sure hate RPGs.

[Anonymous No.10702141]

>>10702128
It was such a different era. Yet shareholders and suits making arbitrary decisions based upon smoke and their own farts about 'gamer' demographics is the same as it is now.

[Anonymous No.10702216]

>>10702128
>>10702010
>>10702009
none of these are sales.
DQ 3/4 sold like shit because they were released after snes in america. They weren't bad games and had some fans but to pretend otherwise is just pure cope.

>>10702141
it's not like there was no reason, it probably cost as much to translate a game like DQ3 as it did to make some shovelware garbage from scratch

[Anonymous No.10702309]

>>10702216
RPGs have always been rather saturated on Nintendo consoles, (5th, 6th, 7th gens aside, but even when Nintendo's boxes didn't have them, Sony's did and by the truckload) so there was definitely a market for them. I think there's more to it. Translating is probably a big reason, sure. There's the risk of not making it to market with them in time. Or content that needs to be edited/censored to match with Nintendo's standards at the time, or comply with ESRB ratings mandates (game looks like it's for kids, but it got rated T? Possible sales flop!). All these things were big issues when cartridges were the main storage medium. There's always a lag on them, so you could potentially have a 8-12 month lag on releasing your game, and by then there's the chance of nobody caring anymore.

[Anonymous No.10702398]

>>10701336
No, you missed the bus. The director shift in like 2010 ruined the whole thing

[Anonymous No.10702406]

>>10702309
It's not that there wasn't a market for them just that there were many issues with translating games like rpgs. it was especially true in that era where game development costs were cheap relative to the cost of localization and lots of unsold cartridges meant a big loss.

rpgs failed in the west for various reasons, many never even were released at all despite intentions, even sometimes having a complete script. Those that managed to avoid all of the pitfalls, traps and delays were generally fairly successful.


as game development costs grew and manufacturing prices fell(cd vs cartridge) it became much more viable to try and release games overseas

[Anonymous No.10702425]

>>10702216
It's disingenuous too, because Nintedo Power's Top list are an aggregate that we still don't quite understand their math behind of three different categories: Players (presumably, the average consumer who wrote in), "Pros" (Nintendo Power themselves), and "Dealers" (sales data from retailers?). Most of the times an RPG gets in a high ranking is from the "Pro" of Nintendo Power staff ranking it highly. Notice how Players and Dealers don't even list Ultima, Wizardy, and Destiny of an Emperor in their rankings, but Pro does.

[Anonymous No.10702427]

>>10701918
I also wanted both Mega Man X3 AND Mega Man 7 but ran into a different situation. It's not that I couldn't find them but since the PS1 was out and Blockbuster was a thing I was satisfied just renting them instead for a quick fix and my attention for games I wanted to actually buy moved to the PS1. I think that's exactly what happened with a lot of people. You get caught up in the whirlwind of a new generation and it's very easy for late releases that you're interested in to just kinda get put on the backburner and then by the time you have the money to buy them you're not really thinking backwards and it never happens. "I'll get to it eventually, maybe." And since a lot of RPGs were expensive that only made it worse.

This also seems to have been a pattern with Mega Man. Capcom didn't even want to publish Mega Man 6 in the US because of the SNES and Nintendo chose to step in and publish it itself.

[Anonymous No.10702441]

>>10702425
> Most of the times an RPG gets in a high ranking is from the "Pro"

actually the image you posted has "players" rank all 3 Dragon Warrior games higher than any of the combined rankings images.

[Anonymous No.10702447]

>>10701929
If you look around a SHIT ton of RPGs came out in America. The Shining Forces and Phantasy Stars, the Breath of Fires, etc. The SNES DQs didn't but that's because Enix bailed on the US market entirely for a bit. It's very strange for these companies to keep pumping out RPGs that Americans supposedly didn't want. They weren't pulling Street Fighter II numbers but then again no game was. For Chrono Trigger, a late release SNES game that launched at $80 to sell 300,000 copies, clearly it must have been popular enough. FFVII sold millions, yes, but let's not forget that game sales skyrocketed in general because gaming expanding massively.

[Anonymous No.10702453]

>>10702427
i ended up either renting them or playing on emulator once zsnes came out, it was not worth the hassle of going hunting at a used game place.

[Anonymous No.10702458]

>>10702441
That's Double Dragon III, bro, not Dragon Warrior III.

[Anonymous No.10702474]

>>10702447
Yeah like i said the rpgs that did badly in america were mostly mismanaged projects or just plain awful games. I'm sure that enix gave up after troubles with dq3/4 but not every company did. squaresoft still tried hard despite their issues with final fantasy 2, 3, and 5, but they also had lots of success when they were able to actually release something.

[Anonymous No.10702479]

>>10702216
>DQ 3/4 sold like shit because they were released after snes in america. They weren't bad games and had some fans but to pretend otherwise is just pure cope.
Okay but then let's not mix up the cause and effect. Did Dragon Warrior 3 and 4 sell like shit because they came out after the SNES or because they were RPGs? Did these games sell as well in America as they did in Japan back then? No. But MOST games didn't. In the 90s Japan was buying several more games per capita than Americans were. A lot of that was because North America had a lucrative rental market. People remember the factoid that Metroid and Castlevania sold better in America than in Japan specifically because it's an anomaly.

[Anonymous No.10702485]

>>10702458
the list was probably from before dq3 released....
because it took FOUR YEARS

[Anonymous No.10702487]

>>10702479
>People remember the factoid that Metroid and Castlevania sold better in America than in Japan specifically because it's an anomaly.

Castlevania and Metroid were FDS games in Japan, thus was released for a smaller market which also had piracy. The fact that FDS games were less expensive doesn't even make up for that.

[Anonymous No.10702491]

>>10702406
I haven't done an actual count but I have the sense that more RPGs actually failed to get localized during the 32 bit era than the 16 bit one. Nobody would argue that RPGs weren't successful after FFVII but games still kept failing to cross the Pacific.

[Anonymous No.10702496]

>>10702406
I would say that localization costs were significantly less than development costs. It's just that localization creates a time lag and you're still dealing with something from a foreign market that might not always see a success here. Easier to go with tie-in games instead.
>>10702427
You sound a lot like me. I lived in a small town, so I had Babbages, Wal Mart and Kay Bee Toys as my sources for games, and the selection was always so limited. Finding most RPGs I wanted was near impossible. Once the run was over, it was done for. You weren't getting it unless you lucked out and found it in a pawn shop. The PS1 era changed all of that thanks to CDs and Sony being more than willing to spin up batches of CDs at a moment's notice because they were eager to push into Nintendo's market share and crowd them out by being the anti-Nintendo.

[Anonymous No.10702520]

>>10702474
Yup, it's also strange that Squaresoft seems to be the sole source of the RPGs aren't popular idea. I don't remember Sega ever saying that as they pumped out all their RPGs. I don't even really remember hearing it THAT often even from Square. It comes off like an off the cuff remark someone made in an interview that everyone took as gospel.

Don't get me wrong here. I understand the logic behind why they'd phrase it that way. Squaresoft's biggest games were RPGs. And those games were not doing as well in America as they were in Japan. It'd make sense for them to say something along the lines of "we have added pressure in America because our games don't do as well over there as they do here." It WAS a different market with different considerations. But it gets overstated nowadays, as if the entire genre was struggling until the savior FFVII turned the tide. There's no evidence of that being the case. In fact, fighting games make a better example of that. There were a decent number of fighting games pre-Street Fighter II but they were pretty obscure and not particularly popular. Then Street Fighter II came out and the genre became an unstoppable juggernaut. That's not really what happened with RPGs.

[Anonymous No.10702523]

>>10702479
To the publisher it doesn't really matter though. Whether the risk is because there isn't much of a market, or you will flub the release, it's still a sizable risk and a lot of work to deal with especially for small studios.

anyway i never even implied that games failed because they were rpgs, notice how i mentioned pokemon? it is probably the most famous rpg series of all time, it also probably had the smoothest rollout of any jrpg at the time, including an anime shortly after which was also pretty rare back then.
i don't really think that was a coincidence. people put in a lot of effort to see pokemon succeed, and it did, unlike all those other half-assed releases.

[Anonymous No.10702536]

>>10702523
I know. I'm just doubling down on what you said, that games that did poorly often had other factors driving that.

[Anonymous No.10702554]

>>10702496
I'm a bit different in that I live in a metropolitan area so access to what I wanted was never the problem. For me it was simple resource management. That birthday and Christmas money had to last and when I was 11 and 12 I was spending some cash here and there going to movies and fast food joints with friends. I was a lucky kid who never wanted for anything but I still wasn't just casually asking mom and dad for a new game at launch.

[Anonymous No.10702560]

>>10702520
It was a sentiment that was being said before FF7 released, but even then I can see it more as misunderstanding of multiple points like "Console RPGs don't sell as much here compared to Japan" or "Most of the target audience in the US faster paced action games" and then just conflating all that to a simpler bullet point of "RPGs don't have much luck in the states"

[Anonymous No.10702572]

>>10702560
Yeah, the game of telephone definitely played a role.

[Anonymous No.10702663]

>>10702554
I had to wait for Christmas, Birthday, or my mom feeling generous. I missed out on a lot because it was simply impossible to get to carts in time before the supply dried up. PS1 fixed all of that. I can only think of two legitimately rare games from that era and I only missed out on Suikoden 2 because I assumed I could wait for it to hit $15 like 1 did before I picked it up.

[Anonymous No.10702704]

>>10702663
there are rare ps1 games? thats news to me lol

[Anonymous No.10702716]

>>10702103
shame he never really made anything like the Evermore soundtrack again.
and that he harassed women.

[Anonymous No.10702724]

>>10687550
You don't even know how funny it is going on the box-office bombs wiki page and seeing how far Spirits Within dropped down. It used to be in the top 10, now it's just a footnote

[Anonymous No.10702741]

>>10702520
>There's no evidence of that being the case.
initial sales:
FFVII - 494,000 (one month after release)
Chrono Trigger - 289,000
Breath of Fire 2 - 89,000
Lufia 2 - 60,254
Secret of Mana - 500,000 (3 years after release)

they never even bothered translating the SNES Dragon Quests for the US.

[Anonymous No.10702871]

>>10702741
Have you not been reading the thread? Everything about those numbers has been addressed.

[Anonymous No.10702878]

>>10702520
I wish we had numbers like this for Dragon Warrior, because the wikipedia numbers seem to be complete bogus. Only source is some old archived fan site, which itselfs sources it from ANOTHER fansite which itself has not been archived.

In other words, wikipedia numbers.

[Anonymous No.10702879]

>>10702871
In fact I think those numbers proves the point. You have to pull up Lufia 2 of all games to get as low as 60,000. Earthbound even sold more than that and that was a disaster forced upon it by garbage marketing--literal garbage, in fact.

[Anonymous No.10702884]

>>10702878
Dragon Warrior is hard to pin down because there was a massive giveaway promotion. That said, you don't just giveaway a game that you think nobody wants. Nintendo gave away Zelda games, too, during the Gamecube.

[Anonymous No.10702891]

>>10702879
Yeah, pulling Lufia 2 or Breath of Fire 2 is like pulling Sonic Blast Man II and Brawl Brothers to say, wow, players sure didn't buy beat em ups.

[Anonymous No.10702907]

>>10689701
But all FF he programmed barely run and is full of not working spells and abilities.

[Anonymous No.10702932]

>>10687574
Hollywood is a money laundering pedophile blackmail operation for rich <spoiler>goblins</spoiler>. Gary Gyjax tried to make a movie about his table top RPG hobby too and the results were the same.

They don't want any competition. They don't want you snooping around. They don't want Dungeons and Dragons movie. They don't want a Final Fantasy movie. You have been warned.

[Anonymous No.10702939]

>>10702932
>They don't want Dungeons and Dragons movie.

Picrel was actually surpringsly fun, for a modern movie.

[Anonymous No.10702997]

>>10702879
i'm just pulling early 90s console RPGs in general, anon.
what about the numbers have been addressed? as someone who was alive back then, i can assure you console RPGs were not as popular in the early 90s as they were in the late 90s. here's some more.
Earthbound - 140,000
Phantasy Star 4 - 49,612
Shining Force - 35,000
Super Mario RPG - 300,000

[Anonymous No.10703015]

>>10701885
It was scanned. I remember reading it.

[Anonymous No.10703019]

>>10702997
>i can assure you console RPGs were not as popular in the early 90s as they were in the late 90s
Nobody is denying that FFVII and the PS1 caused a huge explosion in the RPG genre's popularity.
They're just arguing against the myth of "RPGs were a niche genre in the SNES and NES days that nobody cared about." They sold just as well as other games back then, and were a popular genre after platformers.

[Anonymous No.10703023]

>>10702997
>i can assure you console RPGs were not as popular in the early 90s as they were in the late 90s.
You're moving the goalposts there. People are saying they weren't UNpopular, not that they were as popular as they became later on. But, again, EVERY game became more popular later on. Saying RPGs were not popular in North America because they sold a fraction of what FFVII did would be like saying the SNES wasn't popular in America because it sold a fraction of what the PS1 did. Would a Lufia 3 on PS1 have sold well in 1998, when RPGs "were popular"? My guess is no.

[Anonymous No.10703025]

>>10700759
People remember him because even John Romero was a fan of him and used to praise him a lot.

[Anonymous No.10703030]

>>10689701
That's Electroboom.

[Anonymous No.10703067]

>>10703023
>because they sold a fraction of what FFVII did
they sold a fraction of what other games did, as well. the standouts are the ones we all know, because they're the ones held up as pinnacles of the genre; Chrono Trigger, FFVI. the rest were barely competing.
>Would a Lufia 3 on PS1 have sold well in 1998, when RPGs "were popular"?
Did Breath of Fire 3?

[Anonymous No.10703092]

>>10702716
>and that he harassed women.
And didn't those allegations turn out to be completely false?

[Anonymous No.10703096]

>>10703067
Translator's note: Breath of Fire 3 is the best selling game in the series.

[Anonymous No.10703098]

>>10702997
>PS4 sold barely 50k
>getting a copy of it back before the retro craze was impossibly easy and it was affordable
>games that sold 4x as many copies commanded a much higher price
retro prices were always bullshit, prove me wrong

[Anonymous No.10703207]

>>10703096
So RPGs got less popular after BOF3? Because that'd be the takeaway from the point you're making. Here's the thing. Define your definitions. What exactly counts as "good" sales exactly? What's "niche"? Under half a million? Because A LOT of well known SNES games sold half a million or less but nobody ever acts like "Americans didn't like game X." Give me a number. Square's games were pretty rock solid, selling better than a quarter million throughout the SNES's lifecycle, even ones that were new IPs like Chrono Trigger. I can probably name several genres that consistently sold worse. Were shootemups as popular? Were puzzle games as popular if they weren't named Tetris? Were racing games more popular in general if they weren't either F-Zero or Mario Kart? How well did the Top Gear games do on SNES? Or Uniracers? Or Stunt Race FX? When you break it down you suddenly realize that there are a lot of genres in the same boat as RPGs were, hovering in the hundreds of thousands. Everyone keeps saying that RPGs were less popular than platformers and fighting games. And that's true! Except there are way more than two genres so are people arguing that RPGs are only the third or fourth most popular genre? Write up a list of where RPGs fall in the genre popularity category. Are they in the bottom half?

[Anonymous No.10703249]

>>10700351
I wonder what dev environment they’re using.

[Anonymous No.10703279]

>>10703098
It’s not bullshit it’s just based off of whatever someone is going to pay for something. What matters is the buyers perception and what they think it’s worth.

[Anonymous No.10703318]

>>10702939
That movie came out 40 years after Gygax moved to Hollywood to turn his game into a movie. There was an earlier one too, but he was not involved with either of them.

[Anonymous No.10703332]

>>10703096
it's also the best... have you played them? it's not even close really

[Anonymous No.10703446]

>>10703332
2 had certain features and certain charms that were never really replicated.
3 drifted ever so slightly.
4 drifted more.
5 became Baroque.

[Anonymous No.10703509]

>>10702523
pokemon succeeded thanks to its insane marketing and because nintendo poached talent from the dragonball animation team to up the quality of the anime. the game's being portable were also a good gimmick as well. and, it was primarily designed for kids+young teens with latent addictive personalities, and surprise, it succeeded.
to even compare the mania around those 'games' to the complicated marketing behind traditional rpgs is disingenuous so lets not kid ourselves here.

[Anonymous No.10703553]

>>10703509
To be fair, it really was kind of crazy that Pokemon was so successful that it revitalized the incredibly out of date Game Boy, which had been on its last legs shortly prior. But also to be fair, everything similar to Pokemon was also insanely popular. Tamagotchis were all the rage, and you could argue that it was the video game equivalent of collectable toy lines like troll dolls and beanie babies. Themed collectables seem to be an exploit of the human brain.

[Anonymous No.10703587]

About how many RPGs were released on the SNES in North America? Because the PS1 had about 80 as seen here:
https://imgur.com/a/iYOuO

I want to say the SNES had at least 30-35, which given the difference in total library size, seems proportionally comparable.

[Anonymous No.10703602]

think about how many RPGs the Super Famicom had that were never translated. Genesis too. companies just didn't bother sending RPGs to the states that often. the target demographic needed to age a bit, and FFVII broke down the walls.
https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_SNES_role-playing_games

[Anonymous No.10703640]

>>10703602
Think about how many RPGs the PS1 had that were never translated. In fact, I bet there were even more of those. The logic breaks down if it's based on FFVII opening the floodgates. Why wasn't Tales of Phantasia PS1 Remake localized? Why wasn't Tear Ring Saga localized? Or Front Mission 2? Tobal 2 (if you want to count the dungeon crawler portion). All the Atelier games, however many there were on PS1. Growlanser? Langrisser? The list goes on.

The prevailing wisdom is that pre-FFVII RPGs stayed in Japan because nobody liked them but after FFVII, everyone loved RPGs so they started localizing them. But then why were so many games stuck in Japan even after FFVII? "Because they couldn't localize every one of them." Exactly. Logistics, resources, arbitrary bans on 2D content, whatever it was there were reasons those games stayed in Japan that had nothing to do with whether or not people liked RPGs. Well if that's true after FFVII why can't it be just as true prior to FFVII?

[Anonymous No.10703945]

>>10701204
The story of the movie is literally Death Stranding.

[Anonymous No.10705178]

>>10703509
>pokemon succeeded thanks to its insane marketing and because nintendo poached talent from the dragonball animation team to up the quality of the anime.

You do realize that Dragon Quest also had an anime, which didn't just have Dragon Ball "animators", it had THE Dragon Ball guy, and which also aired in the US?

However the Dragon Quest anime suffered from awful VA (even by standards of the time) and bad slots. The first few episodes also make for a slow start which probably didn't help

[Anonymous No.10705237]

>>10687550
Fuck this dude for Terra Battle

[Anonymous No.10705465]

>>10700926
Kek

[Anonymous No.10705710]

>>10703509
>designed for kids
It was kid crack. It wasn't merely "marketing"

[Anonymous No.10706058]

>>10705237
always wanted to play it desu. was it any good? still mad he pulled the games down from those stores just because the second game was a flop.

[Anonymous No.10707798]

Here are 2 US sales charts that put Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy as doing well

[Anonymous No.10707802]

>when you have to go to Japan to look for US sales charts

Interesting also how the average NES game price in the US was 35$; which would even put them cheaper than Famicom cartridge games (though of course it's different economies so not comparable without taking into account various other factors, but still). Most people assume today they were 60-70$.

[Anonymous No.10707804]

It does seem that NES games did go slightly more expensive as years went on, going from 35 to 40$ on average; this is an older one

[Anonymous No.10707969]

>>10701873
>>10700351
whelp, I was unable to find the source for this. Looked everywhere on archive.org and retromags

but I found this instead in Famimaga #100, interestingly he thinks there isn't any difference between American and Japanese RPG players

[Anonymous No.10707998]

One difference that may have existed is because the Famicom and NES launches were two years apart the NES audience may have scaled younger on average and thus be less reading adept. A Japanese kid in 1983 got a Famicom while an American kid at the exact same time got a Commodore 64 and may have bypassed the NES altogether. This would have evened out over time though, certainly irrelevant by the SNES.

[Anonymous No.10708032]

>>10687550
That’s just the way it works man. You’re only as good as your previous work. That’s life.

[Anonymous No.10708203]

>>10706058
Yeah, it was. Weird story but still engaging, interesting tactical gameplay. Played since release and even dropped a little dosh on it, then they went and simultaneously announced TB2 and 3... and then shut down and the entire franchise disappeared overnight. RIP

[Anonymous No.10710223]

>>10708032
To be fair, obliterating the company is a pretty big fucking deal. That's not just a mistake.

[Anonymous No.10710292]

>>10700351
BASED

[Anonymous No.10711784]

>>10689425
>>10691109
>>10691110
You're telling me this stuff happens in real life?

[Anonymous No.10711819]

>>10691554
>it was only expensive because they spent a lot of money and resources on it
Yeah bro, that's what expensive means.

[Anonymous No.10711827]

>>10688048
If Square had kept it, Japan would continued to have a military foothold on the island. Such a blunder.

[Anonymous No.10711880]

>>10691110
If they're sitting you in a room with nothing to do but paying you a salary I'd get a second job and use my current one as office space. Pull double salary for the time of one.

>>10711784
It's probably very exaggerated in Japan. The people it happens to are probably nepo babies who the manager can't fire because they're the boss's son but they can't be allowed to shit up projects either. I have a hard time believing that you'd be treated the same way as a random salaryman. Maybe they're a bit more lenient than in the west and will give people a lot of rope but if you're a legitimate fuck up you'll still probably be fired.

[Anonymous No.10711887]

>>10694076
They absolutely do mix up the pronunciation of Rs and Ls. There's a Japanese girl I knew and every time she talked about having to write a report, she kept pronouncing it "LEport".

[Anonymous No.10712030]

>>10694076
they can do Rs, but still mix them up for some reason.

[Anonymous No.10712247]

>>10687550
Many such cases

[Anonymous No.10712267]

>>10712247
Why didn't Gunpei go bow and ask for forgiveness after realizing the piss poor sales and reception of the virtual boy?
>"GOMEN"!

[Anonymous No.10712289]

>>10712267
yokoi didn't sink the virtual boy, nintendo set it out there because they needed something while the n64 team still had nothing to deliver. Meanwhile the gameboy was selling gamebusters and they sank the latest project of the guy responsible. So he says "ok fine" and makes another game boy and it's another massive success and then he says "ok thats all, thanks folks!" and leaves. Then nintendo uses their yakuza connections to kill him.

[Anonymous No.10712310]

>>10712289
>HEHE Nintendo used their Yakuza connections and such to get him killed.
Well, perhaps...
However, I am not fully convinced as to that theory. Yes, most major gambling companies were founded or got into big cahoots with Yakuza in one way another, but how do you know it was Nintendo for sure rather than either an accident, or some Yakuza killing done on their own terms? He certainly wasn't shot or thrown off a bridge for sure, but what was the exact weapon in question that was used that resulted in his demise?

[Anonymous No.10712356]

>>10712310
It's bullshit. He got into a fender bender and when examining the damage unfortunately died in a collision from a passing car.

[Anonymous No.10712830]

>>10701576
Modern generations are retards who only play gatcha shit and would rather gamble for PNGs than play a good game, so it's a lose/lose situation.
At best you make a shitty money printing gatcha to fund passion projects, but deep down you know your passion project will never make as much money as the gatcha.

Not like western players are any better, if it's not gaas shit shilled by some streamer they won't even look at it.

[Anonymous No.10712838]

It's Japanese business, you can produce gold your entire career, but one boner and you're out.

[Anonymous No.10712845]

>>10712838
BATMAN'S GREATEST BONER!

[Anonymous No.10712852]

Square is (was) made up of nothing but chads

[Anonymous No.10712856]

>>10712356
Why didn't anyone care to call the paramedics? When he died, phones had for at like 10-11 years been around in both corded and wireless (aka cell phones) forms.

[Anonymous No.10712863]

>>10712356
>from a passing car.
that fled the scene, aka it was a hit
>oopsie looks like I tapped your bumper, mr. target
>oh no, have a look here, this'll be expensive to fix
>second car hits target and drives off
it's just the murder equivalent of the ancient "guy 1 'accidentally' spills something on the mark, guy 2 shows up to 'clean' the mark's shirt and lifts his wallet" play

[Anonymous No.10712925]

>>10712838
Harvey Weinstein, is that you?

[Anonymous No.10712928]

>>10689425
weeb myth

[Anonymous No.10713352]

>>10703249
whole bunch pc98 computers for graphics and 6502 assembly, looks like a generic text editor of the time, and seems to be using a custom interface between computer, some circuit board and the nes cart port. testing things out on a real nes would have taken seconds. chad setup.

[Anonymous No.10713367]

>>10712928
it's just exaggerated, they have to have a good reason and incompetence or stupidity are not good enough

[Anonymous No.10713474]

>>10713352
I never understood why FF2 and maybe 3 couldn't come to the NES.
They're already testing on an NES in that picture, so the conversion process should have been seamless.
With Nasir speaking Japanese, and English, and programming, couldn't he give a translation for most of it? Then just have an editor go over it? I've seen interviews with him, he's very well spoken in English. Or was he so immersed in Japanese that when he saw たたかう he couldn't even see that as "fight" anymore?
Carts are expensive but Final Fantasy was one of the biggest selling games on the NES, so surely it would be worth it.

[Anonymous No.10713485]

>>10713474
Nasir spoke English yes, in fact design documents in this picture show that they were communicating both in English and Japanese between themselves >>10689701

But it wouldn't have been his job to do that. You want a native speaker and not waste your precious programmer's time on things like this. Even programming the translation in should be mostly a task for the additional programmers unless it requires some structural code changes (it may).

There was a translation of FF2 in the works, in fact we have a prototype of it
https://tcrf.net/Proto:Final_Fantasy_II

not releasing it was probably just publishing/marketing bullshit and the will to focus all efforts on FF4 and the SNES

[Anonymous No.10713497]

>>10713485
>>10713474
well actually the translator for FF2 was Japanese, not a native speaker, they didn't care about that yet

[Anonymous No.10713536]

>>10713474
>I never understood why FF2 and maybe 3 couldn't come to the NES.
no idea, anon. it's possible at the time that nintendo/square didn't think there'd be a market outside of japan for it.

>>10713485
>tcrf
god bless this glorious website.

[Anonymous No.10713754]

>>10713474
FF1 had already taken them over 2 years to export. Rather than continue to lag releasing the other NES titles, they decided to focus efforts on releasing the SNES title as early as possible. FF1 NA release was 1990, FF4 NA release was 1991, only a month or two after JP.

[Anonymous No.10713848]

>>10713474
They were going to. FFII was translated and ready. But remember FF1 didn't make it overseas until fucking 1990. That's the same year Super Mario Bros. 3 came out in the US and a year before the SNES did. Squaresoft must have done some number crunching and realized NES games with 1988 graphics would have flopped if they launched after the SNES was already for sale so they cut their losses. Something similar happened to FFV which by the time it was translated it looked way too primitive in comparison to what was hitting the market.

[Anonymous No.10713901]

>>10713848
Rest of the flyer

Interesting how they put "challenge" as a selling point up and formost. So much for the "oh actually americans don't like RPGs they're too hard for them"

[Anonymous No.10713908]

>>10713848
>>10713901
on a side note, where those pics come from they also have this. I really wish I could read it but of course there is only this low res image (and of course other sources of the same image are even lower res)

[Anonymous No.10715070]

I would like to see another movie made by the guy desu.

[Anonymous No.10715591]

>>10713901
>"We started gearing up for a long-term U.S. effort as we began to see the market call for more challenging and sophisticated game play."
>"Sales for the Final Fantasy games in 1990 more than met our expectations."
It's like this flier was designed to debunk the idea that Americans didn't like RPGs. It CERTAINLY debunks the idea that FFIV was dumbed down for stupid gaijin considering that game would have come out mere months after this was written. I think I'm starting to think I was right about this >>10701910

[Anonymous No.10716215]

>>10713901
> "dynamic lcd graphics"
as much as i love the gameboy, that's a stretching the truth a bit.
>>10715591
>It's like this flier was designed to debunk the idea that Americans didn't like RPGs.
certainly was the case throughout the 1980s. rpg on computers always did well. on consoles? people weren't rushing out to buy rpgs like today.
>>"Sales for the Final Fantasy games in 1990 more than met our expectations."
yeah. in japan. it's likely they assumed such titles would never sell in great numbers outside of japan.

[Anonymous No.10716340]

>>10715591
I don't know the history behind FF4 Easy Type.
What I know however, is that Japanese players complained that pretty much every single popular Famicom RPG was too hard. Pretty much every DQ, every FF, Mother etc you'll find comments like that very easily.

And now the rest of this post is just a theory but I wouldn't be surprised if they also complained about the difficulty of FF4, which lead Square to finally listen and make Easy Type for them, and from that point onward every FF would be significantly easier than og FF4 and the ones before. So when it came to releasing the game in the US they just went with the latest version, probably partly because it also had bugfixes, and probably partly because they thought they knew better.

Another theory comes from another interesting point from the flyer: the fact that they mention having a player base of 18-35 years old. I don't think they had a substantial playerbase of that age, not at that time, and the flyer is marketing wishful thinking: now they've reached 500k+ sales in each region, they feel they can't really do better without making the target audiance wider, and the flyer is made for journos, they want journos to say "this game is perfect for adults too!" to attract adults attention.
Making the games easier could be another way they thought they could attract a wider audiance, and they'd have been correct because it's exactly the course video games took as a whole and it worked, they'd just have been way ahead of their time.

[Anonymous No.10717119]

>>10716340
>What I know however, is that Japanese players complained that pretty much every single popular Famicom RPG was too hard.
Interesting to see this. Way back when I first saw the difference between FF4 Japan and FF4 US, my first reaction was that they looked like changes from actual feedback from customers. Cecil's dark sword ability consumes his own hitpoints. It's basically the first special ability other than Kain's jump and you can literally kill yourself with it by overuse. The motivation for that clearly came from experience. When developers renege on a good idea like that, it's usually not based on a brainstorming session about Gaijin stupidity it's based on hard experience observing players in the field. Inventory management is another thing players probably bitched about, which is why easytype axed so many of the single-use items. It doesn't actually make the game "easier" in fact a lot of really useful, powerful items got eliminated. But it's exactly the kind of thing people like to complain about and subsequent games essentially eliminated inventory management pressure altogether.

[Anonymous No.10717225]

>>10717119
Forgotten lessons...

[Anonymous No.10717234]

>>10697668
Problem is that the wrong people are having kids. We don't need more aids ridden africans, we need more Engineers and magic autistic science men and those people overwhelmingly come from Europe.

[Anonymous No.10717484]

>>10695345
Louis Vuitton sucks and Lightning is extremely attractive

[Anonymous No.10717513]

>>10701858
Nasir's got that anime hair

[Anonymous No.10717556]

>>10700735
>half the spells in the games he coded don't work properly

There are 64 spells in FF1, of which 5 are badly broken and 1 is slightly broken in the player's favor. That is not half.

I haven't played FF2 or FF3 but some wiki I just looked at claims FF2 has 8 buggy spells and FF3 has 2 (but only in the NES version).
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Magic_bugs
I'm guessing these numbers are also far smaller than 50%.

As penance for your attempt at misinformation, please begin eating less, so that you eventually stop being so fat as you currently are. (If you are already not fat, then no penance is required.)

[Anonymous No.10717582]

>>10717556
>I haven't played FF2 or FF3

Do it

[Anonymous No.10717624]

>>10717582

I eventually will

[Anonymous No.10717639]

>>10716215
>"Accourding to Cloutier, Square has completed the first wave of the company's plan in 1990 with the highly successful introduction of Final Fantasy I for the NES under the Nintendo name and Final Fantasy Legend I for Game Boy under the Square name."
The very next sentence:
>"Sales for the Final Fantasy games in 1990 more than met our expectations."

He's clearly talking about North American sales of FF1 and FF Legend.

[Anonymous No.10719423]

>>10717556
The only broken spell that really fucks the game over is Temper because had it worked right the Thief wouldn't be nearly as useless.

[Anonymous No.10719578]

>>10687560
Wasn't even really a mistake as they kept making CG movies. Advent Children and the FF15 one, they were pretty successful. Clearly if they actually tried to develop a proper movie studio it could've worked

[Anonymous No.10719751]

>>10712852
Pretty sure his porn music is fantastic, I wish I could hear it.

[Anonymous No.10721241]

>>10719751
That has to be a pretty epic porn. Live action or hentai?

[Anonymous No.10721264]

>>10691104
Someone does not know what alphabetical merger order is...

[Anonymous No.10722127]

>>10687550
His movie was flawless. It wasn't his fault it flopped. It was the Jews. They conspired against him to crush the competition.

[Anonymous No.10722150]

>>10713901
This proves nothing.
FFV didn't get released because it would be 'too hard' for Weimurricans.

[Anonymous No.10722198]

>>10687550
With the 'stache he looks like a spic

[Anonymous No.10722204]

>>10722150
FFV was fully translated before it was canceled. You're telling me they had Woolsey do all the work only to decide in the 11th hour that it was too much for stupid gaijin? What really happened was that it came out in Japan in late 1992 and was perfectly in sync with SNES games at that moment but by the time it would have been ready to release in late '94 it would have looked hilariously primitive up against games like Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country, not to mention Square's own Secret of Mana. So they switched gears and skipped to FFVI instead. I think there was a rumor that they planned to circle back to FFV and release it as "Final Fantasy Extreme" (because 90s, I guess) but that didn't happen, probably for the same reasons.

[Anonymous No.10722319]

>>10722204
>I think there was a rumor that they planned to circle back to FFV and release it as "Final Fantasy Extreme"
did you check the issues of nintendo power cited on the snes central page you got this image from?

[Anonymous No.10722349]

This is the full page. What should I be looking for?

[Anonymous No.10722358]

>>10722349
Neither reference substantiates the "rumor" about Final Fantasy Extreme. Looks like you've also been spreading this "rumor" on Reddit. Note the parenthetical reference to the 90s.
SNES Central doesn't substantiate the claim either. I can't find any other reference to it in English yet.

[Anonymous No.10722373]

>>10722204
That makes no fucking sense. FFVI was released in 1994. By that logic (it akes 2 yrs to translate) , it should have released in 1996 alongside Genso Suikoden and looked primitive by comparison.

[Anonymous No.10722376]

>>10722358
Not that guy, but I know I read the rumors about Xtreme in one of the magazines back in the day.

[Anonymous No.10722378]

>>10722358
I called it a rumor for that exact reason. I could cite a dictionary if you need. Christ almighty why is /vr/ full of the most autistic fuckers.

[Anonymous No.10722383]

>>10722358
That's not me, by the way. This may be hard to believe but a whole two people might be able to connect the word "extreme" to 90s culture.

[Anonymous No.10722387]

>>10722373
I don't know what the timetable was like but remember that games didn't just come out all willy nilly whenever they were ready. You didn't want to release your game in, say, March. They were still largely marketed to kids and the holiday season was big money.

[Anonymous No.10722390]

>>10722376
>>10722378
>>10722383

[Anonymous No.10722393]

>>10722390
Believe it or not, a whole two people may think you're a retard.

[Anonymous No.10722402]

>>10722376
>>10722393
Surely there must be one contemporaneous shred of evidence. What if you both just read it on SNES Central then forgot about?

[Anonymous No.10722406]

>>10722402
I have no idea. It might be absolutely bullshit made up by that one website. Hence "rumor." I'm not claiming it's true.

[Anonymous No.10722415]

>>10722406
Next time don't claim it at all.

[Anonymous No.10722425]

>>10722378
>autistic fuckers
The SNES Central article and your stupid little fucking reddit post appeared in the same google search faggot. It definitely is you because you phrased it the same way in a 2 month timespan. Autism would be stenographically analyzing your reddit profile to match your writing patterns to other posts in this thread.

[Anonymous No.10722429]

>>10722415
>>10722425
Christ almighty, I never would have mentioned it in the first place if I knew it would cause an autist meltdown. It wasn't even the main point of my post.

[Anonymous No.10722432]

>>10722429
Take it back, fucker. Admit you're peddling bullshit. Admit you're spreading lies.

[Anonymous No.10722436]

There is NO Final Fantasy X-Treme and there will NEVER be one.

[Anonymous No.10722442]

>>10722425
The irony here is that legitimately isn't me. It's entirely a coincidence. You won't believe me because you're an angry autist and the idea that you "caught me" denying that I posted something similar on Reddit makes you cum, but it's legitimately a different person. I'm actually impressed I accidentally sent you into a rage. You're throwing a bitch fit over something so stupid. Examine your life.

[Anonymous No.10722446]

>>10722432
That's right! I'm spreading lies on /vr/! What are you gonna do about it?!

[Anonymous No.10722454]

>>10694076
They scramble them at random.
Haven't you ever seen that infamous video where Nobuta said Bracks can be dangelous.

[Anonymous No.10722456]

>>10722446
Take it back! I'm warning you...

[Anonymous No.10722457]

>>10712030
They literally can't hear the difference and aren't aware of which sound they're making. It's all the same shit to them. The same as Americans don't distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated but these are phonemic differences in Korean and Chinese (think p in pause or p in help, these are actually considered absolutely different sounds in some languages).

[Anonymous No.10722459]

>>10722456

[Anonymous No.10722465]

>>10722457
This is super interesting about linguistics and the brain. If someone asks me to recognize the difference in tones I can hear the difference but it's impossible to convince my brain to care when reproducing the words.