Square Enix - The Next Generation?

Thanks to GameSpot for its feature regarding a Square Enix analyst's attempts to grow the company into the online and mobile arenas. This new strategy "...has two main themes - one that recognizes the limitations of the current-console platforms and one that acknowledges the fascination consumers have with online gameplay." The analyst, Ichiro Otobe, discusses the importance of community above all: "You need to have something like a Final Fantasy XI that can attract a certain community of people. In a way, our content is more a kind of bait to attract strong community, and the actual content is offered through the communication with these communities [of players]", and also has interesting theories on the perceived decline of the Japanese games market, suggesting it's "...actually a shift of users' interests. Most of the people spend time and money for mobile content, but most of the money is actually going to packet fees, which, in turn, go to network carriers."

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FInal Fantasy movie: Take 2

[C0rinthian]

Will Advent Children suffer the same fate as The Spirits Within? "We learned a lot from the movie experience," Otobe said. "This is really a new type of movie content." Reflecting more on The Spirits Within, Otobe said, "We should have created something that looked more animation-like. Think of artists. They have the ability to create realistic pictures, but they don't. They create artistic expressions. We should have done the same thing, but we didn't. That was a huge mistake."

This makes me very hopeful that Advent Children will be what The Spirits Within should have been. I bet aiming for a DVD release instead of theatres will give Advent a much better chance of being commercially successful, as the break even point won't be as astronomically high as a theatre release.

For the record, I thought The Spirits Within was a good movie, and a fantastic technical achievement. However I can see why it failed miserably in the box office. The themes were very much in line with those of the rest of the FF series, unfortunately those themes are not that accessible to American audiences. Gaia spirits are a little too deep for Joe Popcorn I think.

BTW, why is it that we can render near photo-realistic faces on characters, but their hands look like rubber? I guess hands are REALLY hard to get right. I know that was one of the traits that really popped at me watching Spirits.