The Final Days of Final Fantasy 205
An anonymous reader writes "Could the Final Fantasy series have finally come to an end? About.com's Adrien-Luc Sanders thinks so in his article The Final Days of Final Fantasy. I'm sure many people here remember Final Fantasy VII and how it helped Sony win the console market away from Nintendo. The article contends that Final Fantasy's glory days are over, that with the release of Final Fantasy X-2, the underwhelming EverQuest clone Final Fantasy XI, and the much-delayed Final Fantasy XII (finally confirmed for a 2006 US release), we've effectively seen the end of Final Fantasy. Is it time for Square-Enix to give up on Final Fantasy?"
Of spinoffs and game quality. (Score:3, Informative)
Mario, who's often brought up, has been appearing in sports games for longer than some people on this site have been alive---yet no one gripes about NES Open, even when they bring up (GC or GBA) Mario Golf. Even beyond that, things like Dr. Mario or the truly wretched edutainment titles for the SNES featuring him are ignored by people hoping to improve their retro street cred at the expense of reality.
For that matter, -three seperate- unrelated properties have appeared under the Final Fantasy name in various places; the first SaGa series -and- Seiken Densetsu were marketed as such in the US, while the first SD also was marketed as "FF Side Story" in Japan; and then there's FF: Mystic Quest. All of these back in the idolized 8- and 16-bit eras.
Hell, Dragon Quest 8, in its Japanese release last year, managed to sell about 1 copy for every 30 Japanese citizens---this from a series with only one other entry since the SNES, but a huge pile of spinoffs ranging from top-down action games to monster-trading Pokemon clones to graphical takeoffs on Nethack during that period.
As for FF11, in particular...
Even ignoring the fact that the average pretender "oldschool" gamer's complaint is "WTF, why's it so hard, take so long to play, need play sessions so long, and have a loose mission structure? I want the old FFs back, where there was actually a challenge, a good amout of playtime, long dungeons without savepoints all over ruining the challenge, and it wasn't so cinematic!", the fact remains that over the past year, S-E's grossed about $90 million directly from it---that's more money than changes hands directly to retail stores, never mind their lower wholesale price, of a 1.5 million seller. Love it or hate it, you can't complain that it's harming the odds of putting more money into more FF titles.