How Final Fantasy Plans to Survive - IGN

Very interesting article, even more interesting comments. Have a read and discuss it in this thread.

I'll start by saying that the franchise itself is indeed in a lot of trouble. Its trying to appeal to casual gamers and increase the audience it appeals too. By doing this, they have "removed certain elements" from the final fantasy titles that may not appeal to the larger audience, in doing so, have created a rift between the series and the fans who made the game what it is today. By focusing time and energy into creating a game that tries to appeal to everyone, we get something called the FFXIII trilogy. Probably the biggest dissapointment to come from squareenix to date. In terms of success, the game did poorly in sales in comparison to final fantasy 7, 8 and only marginally better than 9. The idea they could rehash the graphics/characters/scenario from the previous game leads me to believe that it was cheaper than constructing a new FF from scratch in order to make more of a profit off of the FF13 idea. An Idea that was to create something different, but remove all elements of everything that made final fantasy great to us, the players. Needless to say, RPG's are not for casual gamers. Trying to make an RPG for a casual gamer is on par with trying to equip tetris with a dramatic storyline. Its absurd. I was excited about FF15, but after reading what the directors from ff13 had to say, I'm not confident that square will ever be the same. And yes, it bothers me. It bothers me to know that there are a bunch of plebs out there who are giving them the thumbs up for this shit.

And I dont want to hear that turn based combat is "dead" or "outdated" , because Pokemon still uses the same system and they always manage to max out their sales stats.