Renaming Final Fantasy XIV to Final Fantasy Online

[Ranaku]

And what, you won't be able to sleep if the name of a game doesn't suit you? Obsessive-compulsive disorder?

Watch out if you go too low you might end up as one of us Lalafell and i bet you really don't want that. It's hard to see anything between all these forests of legs.

Funfact, you can think about things (and OP even said they just wonder) without wanting to enforce these ideas in a instant, even if these ideas turn out bad. You don't have to beat people just cause they use their brain a bit.

[_Pigzig]

Lul when FF11 was a numbered title, people complained an online game was more like a spinoff and not worthy of a numbers greatness.
How times changed, all the recent single player ones were bad(Though I expect some fanboys will debate this)

[Vrankyl]

As others have said both FF11 and FF14 have Online already in their name, and have more than earned their place in the numbered Final Fantasy series rather than being regulated to spin offs. Especially since spin offs are such a mixed bag. Tactics was great, but who remembers Crystal Chronicles? If they were to lose their numbered status then at the very least FF13 should, because FF11 and FF14 deserve their numbers far more than that hot mess does. Good old FF13, aka FF Oops, FF Oops-2 Almost Redemption, and FF Oops-3 Dead Horse.

[SilverObi]

We literally had the same discussion when XI came out in the west like 15 years or so ago.

Almost 20 at this point lol but yeah for reals this thread gave me deja vu! These games deserve their numbered status as they are full fledged FF stories and that's what gets them the attention they do. Tactics and the like are rightfully lauded but even XIII has outsold it, and that could be because they are viewed as spin-offs by casual fans.

...but who remembers Crystal Chronicles?

I do, I loved playing that with my buddy! Didn't have the whole squad setup but with two players it was pretty fun though the story was a painfully slow burn. But yeah... point taken.

[ChazNatlo]

As others have said both FF11 and FF14 have Online already in their name, and have more than earned their place in the numbered Final Fantasy series rather than being regulated to spin offs. Especially since spin offs are such a mixed bag. Tactics was great, but who remembers Crystal Chronicles? If they were to lose their numbered status then at the very least FF13 should, because FF11 and FF14 deserve their numbers far more than that hot mess does. Good old FF13, aka FF Oops, FF Oops-2 Almost Redemption, and FF Oops-3 Dead Horse.

This is why I dislike treating the numbered games as a matter of prestige. Like, Should we pick a number of the spin offs and give them the numbers of the games that we don't like?

The numbers, to me, meant that it was a single player traditional Japanese RPG. Not that it was going to be a good game, but rather that it was going to be a particular sort of game. Clearly Square decided differently and made FF XI, and have drifted further from traditional JRPG styling as time went on, and I've accepted that. But as noted, spin offs don't need to be bad, and mainline games don't need to be good. But then what does separate a numbered entry from a spin off (Obviously the answer is which development teams they put on them, but then the question becomes how do they decide that.)

Edit: sorry missed your post while typing mine.

Almost 20 at this point lol but yeah for reals this thread gave me deja vu! These games deserve their numbered status as they are full fledged FF stories and that's what gets them the attention they do. Tactics and the like are rightfully lauded but even XIII has outsold it, and that could be because they are viewed as spin-offs by casual fans.

The reason Tactics has been outsold by XIII is less to do with it's status as a spin off and more to do with age. Compare most older games to newer ones and the newer one will win in sales.

[PlushyprincessMusa]

Calling it 14 honestly is what kept me away from FF14 for so many years. Giving it a numbers make me assume that they will give up on this MMO someday. My guess is Eastern developers will never understand why Western players feel this way.

Final Fantasy Online makes a massive amount of sense to me because it makes me assume that we might get graphical engine updates someday or actual UI updates someday.

Calling it 14 leads me to assumption this MMO is basically stuck in time and never really changing that much from the original formula which is very successful to be fair.

Im in the usa and i dont feel that way...

Beside look at WoW it has no number and they gave up on giving a damn about it..

I guess it cuz westerns tend to be idiotic with linking things togeather and assuming..

To be honest as someone in the Usa, if "westerns get a feel because of a number" its basically going against what your taught from age 5 dont assume at all learn to read into it.

Hints why the majority of "western" are dumb lol

[Tint]

Calling it 14 honestly is what kept me away from FF14 for so many years. Giving it a numbers make me assume that they will give up on this MMO someday. My guess is Eastern developers will never understand why Western players feel this way.

Final Fantasy Online makes a massive amount of sense to me because it makes me assume that we might get graphical engine updates someday or actual UI updates someday.

Calling it 14 leads me to assumption this MMO is basically stuck in time and never really changing that much from the original formula which is very successful to be fair.

But the opposite is true. Square wants to keep every numbered FF title available in some sort. So FF14 will basically stay forever. Or at least as long as Sqaure as a company exists.

This is also the reason why the game got it's relaunch after the failure of 1.0. They could not just shut it down and move on. There would be forever a gap in the numbered titles. The damage for the Final Fantasy brand was huge. People in 50 years would look at the games and ask where the number 14 was and remember that even a Final Fantasy game can objectively be bad.

[Vrankyl]

This is why I dislike treating the numbered games as a matter of prestige. Like, Should we pick a number of the spin offs and give them the numbers of the games that we don't like?

The numbers, to me, meant that it was a single player traditional Japanese RPG. Not that it was going to be a good game, but rather that it was going to be a particular sort of game. Clearly Square decided differently and made FF XI, and have drifted further from traditional JRPG styling as time went on, and I've accepted that. But as noted, spin offs don't need to be bad, and mainline games don't need to be good. But then what does separate a numbered entry from a spin off (Obviously the answer is which development teams they put on them, but then the question becomes how do they decide that.)

I do agree that the reasoning behind the numbered and spin offs is a bit odd as it truly is not an indicator of being good or not. Nor does there really seem to be a theme for spin offs. The only ones I really think deserve spin off status is like Final Fantasy Dissidia since it actually takes the characters from the main games themselves and does something with them. Tactics should definitely have been considered a numbered game. Even Chrystal Chronicles could make an argument for numbered status.

[technole]

OP probably never played Final Fantasy XI Online. It's it's own universe and story.

There will be another Final Fantasy Number Online some day. Even though YoshiP wants to keep on with XIV for longer, it's just par for the course.

[Alpheus]

Sakaguchi (FF creator) and Hiromiki Tanaka (lead Dev for FFIII, FFXI and XIV 1.0) fought with upper management back in the Squaresoft days about XI's branding, they convinced the company to give XI it's mainline entry status, something that was then considered a given when XIV entered Development. ARR literally would not have happened (because the fact it was a numbered FF meant it's failure was non-negotiable it had to succeed by any means which eventually led to almost the entirety of SE's game Dev output be all hands on deck to help with the ARR rebuild.) had Sakaguchi and Tanaka not fought and won their argument for why the MMOs are worthy of their numbered entry designation. And it always irks me that FFXI has had to tank constant conversations of "the MMO FF(s) doesn't/don't count" for nearly 20 years now when the Father of FF that people look up to has been clear about this matter since FFXI was in development.