The Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin demo is Broken

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a trend in recent years to throw ridiculous amounts of money at everything except writing?

For Square-Enix it certainly is.

This is always a polarizing topic since SE has so many rabid fans. Personally I think they are really struggling to adapt to the times. Square-Enix has put style over substance for years and it has mostly paid dividends for them. People don't understand that Square-Enix likes to build tech sandboxes and gamify them afterwards. You can look back at games like FF13 and FF13 versus which later became FF15, things like Octopath Traveler, FFXIV 1.0 as examples of this. You can see it happening with Triangle Strategy and the tech demo now known as Forspoken. Heck even FF7 remake felt like an odd mish-mash of game mechanics blended together, but at least they got the story and combat mostly right.

To me it's clear they asked Team Ninja to make a spinoff of the Nioh Engine to be used for something. They probably decided at some point to finally provide some FF assets and to replace the violent animations with some cheesy crystal effect. They probably then finally decided they would let them use FF1, and they'd half-ass a story eventually. But if it's anything like Octopath / Triangle, they don't always care about good story or dialogue.

Square Enix really needs to mix up its creation process and get some new blood to force that paradigm shift. They seem to do things ass-backwards and they get away with it because some of their games just print money for them. It's not sustainable.

/r/Games Thread Parent Link - eurogamer.net