“We lost our focus” admits Square Enix president

Square Enix bravely sees the light

This week’s top Final Fantasy story.

Following the warm welcome around the world for their recently released RPG “Bravely Default,” president of Square Enix Yosuke Matsuda has acknowledged in an interview with Nikkei Trendy that the company has made some drastic errors in judgment when it comes to developing major titles of late, and that they intend to shift to a refocus on what made the company great in the first place:

“In the past, when we developed console games with a worldwide premise, we lost our focus, and not only did they end up being games that weren’t for the Japanese, but they ended up being incomplete titles that weren’t even fit for a global audience. … On the other hand, there are games like the JRPG we made for the Japanese audience with the proper elements, Bravely Default, which ended up selling well all around the world. … For the new games we’ll be developing from this point on, while this may sound a bit extreme, we’ve been talking about making them as heavy JRPGs. I believe that way, we can better focus on our target, which will also bring better results. If you focus too much on the global aspect, you might lose sight of who you’re actually making the game for.”

Yes, these comments are real, as seen over at Siliconera. So taken aback by this admission were we here at TheLifestream.net that we actually delayed making mention of this news by a couple of weeks in case it was part of a delayed April Fools Day joke.

The SE president’s humility is echoed in sentiments expressed by Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn director Naoki Yoshida, who recently explained to Gamasutra that the relaunch of FFXIV as “A Realm Reborn” required keeping the original game’s title so as to begin earning back the trust of disappointed fans:

“First of all, the MMORPG usually requires a very high-spec PC, and with the success of Final Fantasy XI, the expectation for Final Fantasy XIV was really high. There were people who went out and purchased a $2,000 high-end PC and really looked forward to the launch of the original Final Fantasy XIV. With it failing, it was such a big shock and negative impact.

Even if it was a failure — even if we were to, say, shut down this game within a year and put out the next Final Fantasy game, that would lose the trust, and it would completely disappoint all of our fans. I’m sure there would be a lot of players who would say, ‘I’m never going to play Final Fantasy again,’ or ‘I’m never going to buy a Square Enix game ever again.’ I, too, am a fan of the Final Fantasy series. I would have said the same thing, too.

In order to regain that trust — regardless of business or commercial success — I think it was very important that Square Enix admitted the game did fail, but we want to regain the trust of our fans. It was very important to go back to Final Fantasy XIV and make sure that we fixed the mistakes, and go back and gain the trust that we had lost in the initial failure.

I’m sure that if you compare that with other games, you might think it’s a crazy thing to do, but it’s definitely important. We felt that Final Fantasy is that important, that we go back to the original game and try to rebuild it. Of course, if it were that important, we shouldn’t have failed in the first place, but… Yeah, it was really important for us to build that.”

Yoshida — who lists “An unhealthy obsession with graphic quality” first on a list of “Three Easy Steps to Failure” — also remarked that “within the development staff they are thinking more about what the fans want” and suggested that the value in maintaining communication with gamers has come to be recognized.

All this eating of crow is a drastic turnaround for the company who has faced harsh criticism over the past several years for not only being notoriously inaccessible for direct comment from fans, but also a number of design decisions many longtime fans found questionable to say the least. They often seemed simply unwilling to acknowledge production mistakes, relegating the blame for Final Fantasy XIII’s lukewarm reception four years ago to gamers simply looking at the development from the wrong perspective, despite the same source of those comments (FFXIII director and scenario designer Motomu Toriyama) later admitting “Even at a late stage of development, we did not agree on key elements of the game, which stemmed from the lack of a cohesive vision, the lack of finalized specs, and the remaining problems with communication between departments.”

Final Fantasy XIII was, after all, the game for which one of its artists admitted in an interview, “A rock. I’ve been working on a single rock that appears in only one scene, for three seconds, for the past three days,” prompting another employee to add “That’s how that team works, everybody spends a lot of their days polishing rocks.” Yoshida’s reminder that “An unhealthy obsession with graphic quality” can lead to failure is much needed for the Square Enix of today.

Perhaps they are finally — finally — getting back on the right track?

If subscription numbers for FFXIV: A Realm Reborn are anything to go by, they may be. As of this month, more than two million users have registered for the game, even if not all are currently exploring the realm of Eorzea.

Thanks for the Siliconera news tip go out to Site Contributor Shademp.