SquareSoft and Enix Merger - Good or Bad?

[Chaos Residue]

As the title says, do you feel that the SquareSoft and Enix merger was a good thing, or a bad thing?

I am of the opinion that SquareSoft and Enix were better off as separate companies. After the merger it felt (to me) like the quality of their games was drastically worse. Visually they stood out, but I love the story and gameplay in their older games much more than their newer ones. This isn't to say that every game from Square Enix is bad. I'm simply of the opinion that they had better games overall while they were separate companies.

Feel free to respond with your thoughts. (Please try to be nice. You can disagree with people without resorting to name-calling, taunting, ridicule, etcetera.)

[Seattlehockeyfan84]

I think its better for both companies that they merged then they were as separate companies. We still have dragon quest games post merger.

[Chaos Residue]

Originally posted by gstommylee001:

I think its better for both companies that they merged then they were as separate companies. We still have dragon quest games post merger.

Dragon Quest was successful pre-merger though. Do you mean to say that Dragon Quest would have flopped without the merger? Do you think this one series is the only reason that the merger was a good thing?

[Seattlehockeyfan84]

Originally posted by Chaos Residue:

Originally posted by gstommylee001:

I think its better for both companies that they merged then they were as separate companies. We still have dragon quest games post merger.

Dragon Quest was successful pre-merger though. Do you mean to say that Dragon Quest would have flopped without the merger? Do you think this one series is the only reason that the merger was a good thing?

I think it was one of the main good things.

[blahblahblacksheep8]

Did Square have equity and funds to continue to develop games after the movie didn't make over budget?
http://www.imdb.com/company/co0035851/?ref_=ttco_co_2

[Seattlehockeyfan84]

Originally posted by blahblahblacksheep8:

Did Square have equity and funds to continue to develop games after the movie didn't make over budget?
http://www.imdb.com/company/co0035851/?ref_=ttco_co_2

Both square and enix were having finanical mess. Remember DW7 was delayed a year hurt them.

[Chaos Residue]

They weren't in a financial mess. Not one that remotely required a merger versus bankruptcy, anyway.

Originally posted by http://www.ign.com/articles/2002/11/25/square-and-enix-merge:

The purpose of the merger, according to statements released by the companies, is to fight off the threat of heightened development costs and competition from foreign developers and to increase development power and earnings. Taken together, the two companies will certainly form the dominant force in Japanese role playing market, with Enix having sold 2.75 million games in Japan last year and Square 4.37 million, mostly through RPGs. The Enix connection brings in ties with well known Japanese RPG development houses such as tri-Ace and Chun Soft, with the Square connection bringing with it the foreign presence Enix has always lacked.

They merged to remove the competition. Square was bigger in the U.S. and Enix was bigger in Japan. Pre-merger they were competitors. Post-merger they didn't have any major competititor, and they've been on a decline since (in my opinion).

[FafnirChaos]

Good and Bad, Good that Square didn't go bankrupt, not losing the franchise to other developers(unless mistwalker would have grabbed it, then F square-enix) Bad that we get ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ games like ffxiii, and no remaster of Illusion of Gaia.

[Corfaisus]

This is more a case of personal taste and nostalgia than it is any real calculable decline in quality. Time (illusion though it may be) could only tell what the future would've held had it not been for the merger. Who's to say they wouldn't have wiped each other out by this time? Would Final Fantasy still be worth poop, or would we have eventually just gotten the games we have now regardless?

[TotalBlank]

It was bad news for me. I abandoned Final Fantasy as a whole after FF9, so yeah it was awful. They ruined my childhood with all of the garbage remakes on GBA and stuff just to suck out money from people for nostalgia. And the newer Final Fantasy games and spin offs have officially ruined the franchise.

[Corfaisus]

Originally posted by aetonix:

Chaos Residue why did you cheat to unlock 10,000 kills for FF8?

That's an important question. I've got more time sunk into that game and yet I've only got 1,000 kills on my file. Looks like someone's been abusing the speed/all 9999/special boosters.

[Cyanure]

Originally posted by aetonix:

Originally posted by Corfaisus:

That's an important question. I've got more time sunk into that game and yet I've only got 1,000 kills on my file. Looks like someone's been abusing the speed/all 9999/special boosters.

I don't understand if someone doesn't want to go for an achievement for whatever reason, why not just leave it locked?

I think, it deserve a brand new topic to debate if he should be lynched or not.

[Daddy Fuzzbottom]

Originally posted by aetonix:

Chaos Residue why did you cheat to unlock 10,000 kills for FF8?

On hell of a way to derail a thread.

[TheBlackCarlo]

Originally posted by Blank:

It was bad news for me. I abandoned Final Fantasy as a whole after FF9, so yeah it was awful. They ruined my childhood with all of the garbage remakes on GBA and stuff just to suck out money from people for nostalgia. And the newer Final Fantasy games and spin offs have officially ruined the franchise.

In my opinion FFX was great and while FFXIII is a bit hit and miss with the story and the initial linearity, they came up with great ideas for the battle system. If they listen to feedback from the fans (FF7 remake is the biggest proof about that) maybe FFXV could be a FF with a great story and the spectacular battle system of XIII. We shall see.

[Falcus]

Personally I think the drop in quality for Squaresoft in particular started before the merger and they dropped down a bit more for a while. That being said I do feel they were up and down past the merger in quality and they did have some good periods.

But yeah I think about a year before the merger is when they started to drop in quality and I think the big drop in quality for FFX-2 is a good indicator. I absolutely loved the battle/job system in it but it felt like a big drop in quality to me.

Also I'm aware someone will probably quote me saying "But that's a Square Enix game!" it isn't. It was developed by SquareSoft and released by SquareSoft in Japan. It was released outside of Japan right after the merger. If I recall correctly it was the same month the merger even happened.

At this point I think they've gone up in quality a lot compared to how they were 5~ years ago.
As for Enix I can't really comment on how they would have gone but as far as I recall they were having major issues with finance and I feel they would have either focused entirely on mobile to stay alive (a few years after the merger would have happened)

[Orphy]

I don't think it was the merger that caused the drop in quality, or at least not completely. It was The Spirits Within that broke their neck. Before Spirits Within Final Fantasy and SquareSoft were going incredibly strong; one game was released after the other in quick succession and each time a new FF was announced it was as if the Playstation Pope had decreed a jubilee. They had plans to remake FF 1-3 on handhaelds and VII-IX on the PS II.
Then Spirits Within came along, Sakaguchi fell from grace, the company lost way too much money on that stupid project and things turned very ugly.
The remakes of 1 and 2 (the only ones completed) were re-released again and again and again. FF X-2 was created as an obvous cashgrab by appealing to the heterosexual male audience.

And since the merger... obviously I don't like the way FF has developed after X, but even if one takes personal preference out of it, I do think that Square-Enix is guilty mismanagement and inefficient, FFXII took 6 years to complete, ruined the health of its original director and had heaps of already announced content stripped from the final release.
FF XIII AND XV (back then a spinn-off/Nomura vanity project called Versus-XIII) were announced in 2006 as the two principal titles in some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ called "Fabula Nova Crystallis". Whatever "Fabula Nova Chrystallis" was, it never materialized, Final Fantasy XII has a rocky development, changed engine, system and had everything stripped off it but the very bare bones (hence the extreme linearity and the absence of towns) The developers themselves admit that for a good chunk of the development they had no idea what the game should be about.

FF XV...still hasn't released, 10 full years after it was announced and there is little evidence that any solid work was done on it until 3-4 years ago. Instead they pushed sequels for XIII nobody asked for so that they could push their waifu Lightning into the spotlight more, even though that personality-free, pink haired barbie only wishes she was half as cool or popular as Terra, Celes, Yuna, Tifa, Freya, Garnet or even Ashe.
Where we once got quality games with closed and completed storylines, Square-Enix is now in the bad spinn-off fever, FFX-2 and the XIII sequels are only the tip of the iceberg; there's the whole compilation of VII, IV: After Years, the tatics Advance spinn-offs of XII (one of which was released before the actual main game, due to missmanagement) the Dissidas... the list just goes on.
Do they milk Dragon Quest in a similar manner? I have only passing familiarity with those games, but it seems to me that series remained much more consistent and recognizable post-merger...and the only spinn-off I'm aware of is that Dragon Quest Monsters series (basically pokemon with Dragon Quest critters)
...that's actually a spinn-off I'd like to see in the Final Fantasy universe...a pokemon-style monsters game where you collect the Summons or something, wanted that since I was a kid :-P