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History of SquareSoft
thryllkill writes: "GameSpot currently has an excellent article posted about the history of SquareSoft. As most /.ers know Square is responsible for bringing console RPGs to the mainstream, and some claim brought the PlayStation the success it needed to dominate the late 90s video game market. The article is light on corporate info, but a great rundown of Square's contributions. The only error I noted was the omission of Final Fantasy SGI." And FFX is supposed to ship next week.
FF SGI was just a demo of some 3-D renders of characters from Final Fantasy VI - Terra, Locke, and Shadow, if memory serves. It was basically assumed to be a technology demo to show what style Square had planned for the N64, but when Nintendo refused to give up on the RDRAM platform for media, and Square was discovering the luxuries of FMV, Square decided to bail. The N64 was workable, but contrary to how Hiroshi Yamauchi sees it, Square was just making a much more viable business decision - Ninteno felt stabbed in the back...Not that they didn't deserve it, seeing as how they tried to give Sony the shaft in the first place by displacing them with Phillips as the manufacturer of the SNES-CDROM add-on...
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Square hasn't actually disappointed much lately, except for their bizarre character designs and incomprehensible names (I guess this is due to the lack of the great Yoshitaka Amano...)
Wrong. Amano did the character design for Final Fantasy IX.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Kind of on-topic: The article states that Square probably won't be releasing a game on a Nintendo system any time soon, but Brownie Brown will. They're made up of former Square employees who were behind Secret of Mana and they have confirmed that a GameCube RPG is in the works.
My other
I hereby mod you to (-1, Wrong).
The name "Final Fantasy" was probably more of a bad translation than anything else.Kinda hard to mistranslate it when the name is written in katakana. What else are you going to read it as when you read "Fainaru Fantashii"? And apparently, if it is an urban legend, it's enough to fool GameSpot and also Mr. Sakaguchi himself in this interview. Listen to the beginning of the second clip - He says right at the beginning that Square was really struggling at the release of the original Final Fantasy.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Don't put too much stock into this article. It's full of fluff and omissions. Most of it is mini-reviews of games and the only real history they give is the breakup with Nintendo that everyone knows about. They didn't even mention the tension that lead up to the breakup. The writers obviously didn't do any research or they'd know the abusive license policies Nintendo had in the 80s and early 90s and how Square did not like those policies to say the least. They didn't mention Nintendo's strong arm intimidation tactics nor their exhorbinant licensig fees.
They also barely mentioned the renaming scandal. The real reason Final Fantasy IV was called II was Nintendo originally was supposed to port all three NES Final Fantasies. But they grossly underestimated the translation effort and it took them three years. Nintendo will tell you the renaming was to "prevent confusion," but it was really a coverup.
Nor did they mention the constantly broke stats of the company in the 1980s or the truly terrible Famicom Disc System games that never made it over here.
This is a sad article. If I wanted reviews I'd go elsewhere. A history is supposed to be about the company's workings over the years, not one paragraph blurbs about the U.S.-only releases of a company.