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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.
Personally, I do not like RPGs at all, from Zelda through the latest Final Fantasy, just not my thing.
But! Rad Racer is still one of my favorite games.
Considering the very limited processors in game consoles back then compared to the computer power in todays gaming consoles, the programmers back in those days were true Code Poets. I mean, they did some amazing things with their limited resources.
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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...
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I must admit that I wasn't a fan of the FF series when it was NES but after seeing FFVII I went to FuncoLand and bought the NES games (all for under $10!).
I was younger and wanted action then. Plus NES graphics didn't give the game what Square was all about. The games are great but when you are 10 you'd rather play Contra.
Seeing FFVII blew me away. It actually made me buy a playstation [and Quake II] even though I was/am a Sony-hater.
The FF games are great, like Pokemon for Gboy it helped teach my little brother to read. He loved the gameplay and the graphics, but he learned real quick that you needed to read the dialouge to win.
FFVII, being my first actual FF game, took me at least two work weeks of time to complete. I would sit up and play all night. My friend [who is a FF nut - which I never knew] that turned me onto the game can hear the music and pick it up right away.
I was playing some mp3s and the Sephiroth music came on and he jumped out of the chair. "I know what that is!"
See what these games do to people.
And: Not only graphics, but the sound was awsome in the PSX games. FFVII wasn't the best, but it was great to play.
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Where else can I have multiple girls after me, walk into people's houses and look through their stuff with no consequences, be able to weild a sword that's twice my body mass, oh ya, and the cross-dressing is kinda nice also...
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.
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I never "got" Square games. Sure, they were among the prettiest out there, but as games they were clunky and repetitive, and as stories they were just silly anime plots with almost no interactivity.
In every Square-style console RPG I tried, I'd hit a "wall"--there would be some point at which I just decided it wasn't fun anymore, either because the incessant combat was no longer interesting, because the story had crossed the line into nonsensical, or because the game was unbalanced and I didn't feel like "levelling up" to correct the designer's mistakes. I never got that in Planescape: Torment (though Curst came close) or in Fallout.
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
The article gives a brief one-paragraph synopsis of Final Fantasy (NES) just like everything else, but what it fails to mention is this:
Square's games, other than Rad Racer, were *not* selling well at all in the US, and they weren't doing too great in the Japanese market either. Final Fantasy was named as such because it was a last ditch effort by Square to stay in the market. The CEO at the time (I think it was Sakaguchi then...) had stated that if Final Fantasy didn't succeed, they were going to close up shop. So it had the prospect of being literally "final".
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Squaresoft was founded in 1973. click here for next page. ---> And then in 1998 came Final Fantasy X.
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.
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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.