Why Can’t You Just Stick To Your Roots, Square-Enix?

When i briefly heard about a new Front Mission game coming out, nostalgia filled my brain. Thoughts of sitting with my PlayStation in my living room delving into one of the first strategy RPG’s I ever experienced got me all tingling inside. We all have that one special game that opened up our gaming world to a whole new genre, and for me, Front Mission 3 was it. So you could only imagine my level of excitement when I heard about Front Mission: Evolved coming out this spring. You would probably imagine correctly, at least until I found out it was a third person action title.

Square-Enix describes the new Front Mission game as follows:

“Featuring Hollywood style production values and a totally immersive storyline, players are thrust deep into a swirl of destruction, conspiracy and crumbling alliances, and battle through intense combat situations as man strives to create the ultimate humanoid fighting machine in a war against terror.”

Cool. Yeah, sounds great. It might actually be a cool game, (though other sites say that it feels a little lackluster so far) but thats not my point with this post. If i wanted to play a third person mech action game, I would turn my attention over to the Armored Core series. The real question is now that Front Mission won’t be delivering what I want it to, where will I look for my turnbased strategy mech action fix? Tell me Square-Enix, because I really don’t know!

Lately it seems that certain genre’s are getting pushed further and further out of the realm of gaming. For instance, the amount of traditional JRPGs released in the western market today continues to dwindle, as the sales of gory first person shooters exponentially increase. I like innovation just such as the next guy, but sometimes I have a hankering for some classic turn based battles, and the chances of getting that wrapped up in a new good story on a next gen system is slim to none.

Many people would agree with me when I say that Square-Enix titles in the hay day of the SNES and the original PlayStation were almost always A+ releases. Like Bioware is today, I would hardly ever look at a new game coming out under the Square name (then Squaresoft, before they merged with Enix) and wonder “I hope this game is good!”, because almost always it delivered the excellent experience I was looking for. Whether it was a traditional RPG in the form of Final Fantasy 6 or even survival horror with RPG elements in the form of Parasite Eve, I can’t remember one instance in picking up a Square title and thinking ” wow, this is really disappointing.”

But all that changed once Square-Enix moved on to the next gen consoles. Sure, not all their games were bad, I am not saying that at all(Final Fantasy XII was GREAT), but that reputation of perfection was gone when stinkbombs like Final Fantasy 7: Dirge of Cerebus or The Last Remanent dropped. Also, the entire Crystal Chronicles series I just pretend doesn’t exist, or else I will cry from both pain and sadness.

So why the drop in quality? Well, When thinking about what happened to my favorite developer, I came to the conclusion that every game they released that ended up biting the big one had an action orientated battle system. Thats it! That is what happened to my darlings! They were trying to appeal to western audiences! They were trying to appeal to..er..to..me.

….

Forget what we westerners like, Square-enix, we really don’t know any better. When I say that the masses are calling for innovative battle systems in your RPG’s, they just mean do exactly what you did with Final Fantasy 7. You gotta trust me.

In all seriousness, I probably will still anticipate playing the new Front Mission game, because even if the battle system is atrocious, at least I know the story will be top notch. For my RPG’s though, I will stick with Atlus, and stay on my knees praying that Final Fantasy XIII isn’t as bad as everyone says it is.

What are your thoughts on Square-Enix and the state of RPG’s in general?