About recent situation with SE....

I'm not a fan of them building something for console and then porting it to PC. The end result is usually the crappiest port to control and play. I'm kinda pissed at them with Replicant, because I have to physically unplug my joystick any time I want to play. It won't let you play at all with keyboard and mouse if it's plugged in, and there's no way to change it. Problem with that is I have to calibrate again each time I plug it back in to play MSFS. Just fix it FFS.

I also hate the fact that FFXIV graphics are so limited for PC because of console players. It seems they lean way too much on their proprietary engine(s) to make excuses not to do something.

It aligns with the departure of the father of the Final Fantasy series, Hironobu Sakaguchi.
He recently released what, in my humble opinion, is the closest experience to a modern but traditional FF game, Fantasian. I highly recommend you play it if you are into jRPGs, and if you love the original FF series.

Also, he has been playing FF14 ever since the release, and has been enjoying it. He even made is own in game clothing brand, SakaGUCCI.

I have no idea about Squaresoft, but I remember Final Fantasy being synonymous with high quality graphics and richness in detail (at least here where I live). A company that sank the FPS of an MMORPG, in favor of a beautifully rendered barrel of flowers.
But now what I'm seeing is that they gave up on this title. With each expansion, more and more failures.
For example: Au'ras were released and despite the horns and tail, no items were a problem. Elderly and children NPCs were made, all perfect. Our last two races came broken and poorly made, not even 1 child NPC was added after 3 years (apart from the problems of the races, which have barely improved in 3 years).
Bluemage looks like it's been abandoned. If they are implementing "solo content" in the game, I wonder why they didn't do it with bluemage, since that class exists for nothing.
And it's been a few years since even the old races have been receiving the Viera and Hrothgar treatment, where ears are erased so they don't have the trouble of shaping the helmets for each race.

I would say there is an incontinency for sure. Some stuff is clearly hyper polished and excellent, other stuff is released too early and or appears there are parts incomplete, and like if you go into the mobile market it's all over the place, with ports (in general) generally having loads of issues. Some sort of issue internally with consistent cadence and process of quality control is missing (I don't think FFXIV has that, if anything I think the team / Yoshida are exceptionally consistent and so they must have something figured out).

I highly doubt the solution is "work the grunts harder" which is the issues I described are often manager issues, and the solution provided by poor management tends to be burn the workers out more. I've not actual internal knowledge but given my experience of a few systems of power, I imagine it's that. From the top down ownership of some of the issues and only then delegating once the structure makes sense (rather than the classic "chocobo turds flow down hill", as it were lol). Definitely is what happened at CD Projekt Red for Cyberpunk, given all the internal leaked info we got and the stuff we learned after release.

One thing I quite dislike about some of the dark parts of the industry is constant glee for crunch, and not all companies but some using the hobby as a way to pay less ("get to do your dream, so we're not going to pay you for the value of your work because the work is fun- meanwhile Joe Bo our CEO will make 200 mil a year"), so when SE said they were going to a 4 month turn around my great hope is this was for the benefit of the employees. Could be naïve of me, getting less for no reason (certainly possible, and silly), but that's my hope- to which I don't mind the slower but consistent pace then (I'm sure there is still work lol, also not always true but hiring more people could also help spread the load- I encourage encouraging the community to pick up skills and then hire from there as I think it helps create a nice relationship / encouragement to get the people who like the product, but uh.. kind of narrow market since it's Japanese only for the most part lol).

Looking back, the biggest issue I have with SE (both Square and Enix) over the years is that they basically stopped experimenting. Whether this was due to ballooning development budgets, too much focus on proven successes, or something else, I miss the smaller, weirder titles that they used to do. There was time when it wasn't just FF and DQ, with closely associated spinoffs. There was stuff like the Actraiser and Soulblazer games from Enix. There was stuff like Dewprism, Brave Fencer Musashi, and Vagrant Story from Square. There were more on both sides, of course, but those are just the ones that immediately spring to mind for me.

Personally, I blame a lot of this on FF7. It was such a huge game at it's time with so much success, but with such a cost to develop, that focusing on "making the next FF7" ended up killing almost everything else. This was even forced into further focus by the fanbase response and raised expectations (on both the side of the fans as well as the company). When games like Vagrant Story and Dewprism didn't absolutely blow the doors off (and we know SE has a terrible concept of what success looks like) it just became clear to them that "Another FF7" was the only way forward.

I do find it funny how much people gush over Sakaguchi, but let me remind you what he made prior to leaving Squaresoft...Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

I do find it funny how much people gush over Sakaguchi, but let me remind you what he made prior to leaving Squaresoft...Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

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And yet he is still considered one of the greatest game developers of all time, one failure over a lifetime of achievements.

On point, SE looks like it did in the mid to late 2000's. Everything is nothing more than cash grabs at this point with little to no quality. It's a portfolio of remakes and rehash. No wonder there are rumors Sony is about to buy the company.

XIV going medieval is just getting back to Final Fantasy roots. They may have had steampunk elements like airships, but the general structure in the earlier games is that more medieval fantasy setting. Kings, queens, princesses, knights, small villages, wizards, dwarves. It's all there in the early games.

In terms of Final Fantasy yeah I feel like the shift in the series direction changed when FF7 hit the west and became a mainstream title. To me I think that's when they started looking at trying to make games for the western market instead of making games for the Japan market and just localizing them for western gamers. I'm still of the opinion that FF8 was actually the worst entry in the main series to date. There was some experimentation but to me it just resulted in a game that felt more like an interactive movie since every enemy scaled to your level. At the least I'd have probably made all the normal enemies a static level and only made the bosses scale so players couldn't cheese them by overgrinding.

SE still does experimentation with titles and releases. Some of the later mana titles changed up the formula of how the game was played. They attempted a diablo style game on the 3ds called Heroes of Ruin and also FF Explorers which felt like an attempt to blend Final Fantasy and Monster Hunter. FFXV went with a more open world kind of game. World of Final Fantasy felt like an FF spin on Pokemon. Chocobo Racing/GP was basically their version of Mario Kart. Outriders felt like an attempt at making a better version of Destiny. Etc...

That said there's been recent titles that essentially were failures. Balan's Wonderworld failed to impress ppl. The Marvel games for Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy. (Though it's possible that the attempt making those titles was pushed by Disney) Babylon's Fall is being reported as just about abandoned by players already on steam. The major western IP's they recently sold failed to generate sales numbers they wanted.

While some ppl want to use the sale of western IP's as proof SE is going to get bought by Sony. I feel it's an indication they may be looking to going back to making games with the Japanese player base in mind since they hit success in the western market more often with Japanese titles because the western gamers wanted Japanese games and not so much a western game made by a Japanese company.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

I do find it funny how much people gush over Sakaguchi, but let me remind you what he made prior to leaving Squaresoft...Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

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Oh wait, you mean they brought in Sakaguchi solely to create a Paladin skill for this game? What an odd thing to do