[Sarafan]

Says who? You dont know if it will suck, the game industry maybe in a general decline but there are games with higher quality being made even today.

[Mr. Vega]

It will suck. Because Square (excuse me, Square-Enix) has changed into a company that subordinates craftsmanship to sales.  And because they have taken the staff that made all of Square's masterpieces and ether laid them off, moved them to other projects or to management positions where they don't actually work on the games anymore (case in point: Yoshinori Kitase, who took over director duties for FFVI when Sakaguchi decided to move up, who is more responsable than anyone for that zenith of the genre, who then directed and wrote VII to X, is now sitting in a nice desk job as a producer for XIII).

[Ransom]

That's right, only the original staff could possibly make a good game. Hiring new people will just stagnate the franchise!

[Sarafan]

That's right, only the original staff could possibly make a good game. Hiring new people will just stagnate the franchise!

Or bring new blood or ideas to the already stagnate franchise thus perhaps ending said stagnation.

[Ransom]

Apparently I forgot to close my [sarcasm] tags.

[Mr. Vega]

Hah.

1. Financial pressure, for reasons I have stated earlier, means the Square executives and the shareholders want something that doesn't take many risks. More experienced staff with reputations are better equipped to resist this pressure than newcomers who have yet to earn a place inside the company.

2. The "original" staff has been responsible for so many great games, and they'd shown no signs of stagnating as of FFX, so it seems lunacy to remove them now. It's not the addition of new talent that bugs me, it's the removal of the veterans who could have assimilated these newcomers into the old Square culture.

3. I've love the old Square for years, ever since I rented a copy of FFVI. So I get protective. Give me a break.

[Kamikaze]

[Square makes one game that people dont consider of god-like quality and people start saying everything is going to hell.

Only one? Final Fantasy X was a bit lacking (e.g. too easy, soundtrack sucked, puzzles were stupid). Final Fantasy X-2 was a travesty. Then they made Final Fantasy XII, which sucks.

I don't think that Square can pull off XIII. They're sticking to a real-time battle system, which was one of the biggest problems with FFXII. The real-time system made battles lose a lot of their epic quality, especially because of the bad camera control. FFXII boss battles tend to degenerate into boring MMORPG style encounters. Tank, heal-spam and it's over. Because FFXII bosses attack at a faster rate than other FF games, the player ends up spending a lot of time doing boring micromanagement (even when using gambits).

[Sarafan]

I agree that FFX was easy, especially the last boss, but it is a great game.

[Mr. Vega]

No arguement here.