Once upon a time, a Japanese company named Squaresoft made lots and lots of RPGs that people really really liked. Today, a Japanese company named Square Enix makes video games.
One of those games, an RPG called Bravely Default, sold a lot of copies both in Japan and in the west , which has made Square Enix realise something very important: people everywhere — not just in Japan — like Japanese role-playing games.
“Due to having split [the development mindset] according to regions around the world, we weren’t able to see this clearly up until now, but fans of JRPGs are really spread around the world,” Square Enix head honcho Yosuke Matsuda told Nikkei (as translated by Siliconera).
You’d think the worldwide success of all those other RPGs over the past two decades might have tipped them off, but hey. Never too late to change your ways. Now here’s the money quote…
“For the new games we’ll be developing from this point on,” Matsuda said, “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.”
!!!!!!
ALL PRAISE SQUARE ENIX.
In other news, Matsuda says we’ll hear more about Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III at E3. Please be excited.
Comments
30 responses to “Square Enix Has Finally Realised That People Like JRPGs”
Wasn’t it only a year ago that they said JRPGs was a niche market?
Anyways, I hope they’re not too extreme about this. JRPGs are fine, but what really draws people into those games are the characters, the story and sometimes the settings.
FINALLY.
I don’t understand how they could have NOT noticed this for so damn long.
Is this a april fools joke ? you can’t fool me Square Enix and Kotaku.
It was posted after midday, which is (traditionally speaking) the point at which April Fools Day jokes stop.
Of course, it could be that Kotaku are the ones who have been taken in.
Internet jokes rarely care about that tradition, and it doesn’t matter anyway because it is still before noon in the US where this was posted.
except that April fools in americaland has only just begun.
Which would matter if this was the American version of the site.
I perhaps unrealistically expect that somebody in Oz at least eyeballs the US stories before they show up here. (The occasionally clumsy localisation suggests this is the case.)
There was also the “Kotaku will be an April Fools Free Zone” story, which was apparently sincere and contained no shred of humour. April Fools jokes are generally *funny* lies, not just outright lies.
Final fantasy xv may actually come out being good. Yay!
Yeah just like the majority of them. May.
Square Enix has terrible management. If it was a Western Company, there would have been a shareholders revolt by now. They’ve point blank refused to produce their signature products for a decade, instead trying to produce me too games no one wanted.
That’s a bit extreme.
Among their failures they have released some good games.
(And what products have they refused to produce?)
Secret of Mana? Chrono Trigger? Xenogears? Vagrant story?
Those were all great Squaresoft IP’s that are now ignored, it would be nice to see a new installment in any of those IP’s.
They have released a few good games, but their market share has massively declined. They let Toriyama turn their flagship product into a vanity project. They aren’t producing a lot of worthwhile (or profitable content) for a company of their size. Their few successes have come from the Eidos acquisition.
Bravely Default is so far from what Squeenix makes these days, that you’d be forgiven for assuming it was a completely different dev.
Shareholders did revolt and former CEO Yoichi Wada stepped down about 6-9 months ago.
Must of missed that – they were sure as shit right to do it. I’d basically fire anyone not working in the handheld teams at this point.
To be fair, Shareholders also generally want games publishers to focus on crappy microtransaction-based phone games
I’m not sure thats true at all – they want the company to make money. I’m not sure that Square Enix’s MT based titles have made much simply because they’ve been so brazen about it.
Squenix has some of the most lucrative phone games in Japan and over there that’s where the vast bulk of easy money appears to be. Investors are definitely pushing companies to go that way. Look at the Nintendo shareholders that constantly push for putting Mario etc. onto phones.
That’s phones though – only some of their games have had MT actions, and as I understand it, they didn’t do so well (ATB was a massive flop).
I never understood the appeal of JRPG… They are just so… weird… How do you become immersed in something that doesn’t make any sense most of the time?
*cough* CoD *cough*
lol havent played COD in a few years now… Was secret of mana a jrpg? i loved that back in the day!
I was being a sod lol.
I don’t disagree with you to be honest, more than a few JRPGs have left me scratching my head over the years. Still no clue what happened at the end of FF12 and I couldn’t tell you what were supposed to be in FF13, Fal Cie or the other one with the same name. (I had to view it as me saving my sister only and all that other stuff was just crazy people getting in my way with evil plots I couldn’t remember or cared about by the end)
Well, yes it was.
You guys forgot about Sleeping Dogs and Tomb Raider reboot.
True they are best at Final Fantasy type of game but I am actually glad they are venturing out to different genre. That way they can learn from the experience and build something else. FF15 looks like it’s gonna be ARPG which their experience build from Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs will definitely help.
They can’t just make Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest forever. Bravely Default is a masterpiece too.
But I have to admit they went too much off path by focusing on local mobile market and ignored international market. People are waiting for what SE bring to us but they seem to have ignored us and go on with their safe venture of local mobile market.
Seriously, this better not have implications for the future of the Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs franchises. Some of the best games of the last couple of years.
Very true indeed! Hopefully they don’t go like ‘We are going to focus JRPG now, other franchises will be on hiatus until we get the best FF for current gen”. That would go so wrong….
The thing is though, reading between the lines, those games were made DESPITE the influence of Square Enix. Not because of it. Basically Square Enix made a good acquisition in Eidos.
They can make final fantasy for ever seen as they loosely follow a set of game mechics but storey and charecters differ between games.