I hope the main thing we can all agree on is FFXII's soundtrack is awful. Definitely the worst 3D Final Fantasy soundtrack and maybe the worst soundtrack for a high budget JRPG game.
Also, the worst upgrade pathing possible for a RPG. Yeah yeah the Zodiac version has pre-defined class boards, but the majority of people played the version where not using a guide meant getting the ability to use spears when you really wanted a dagger.
Summon system was also fucking weird and getting summons meant getting a fuck ton of MP for some reason.
The music was good for the game, but it's not the kind of music I'd listen to outside of the game as it's not melodic. But the towns and fields had nice tunes, there was some good battle music and the opening FF theme mix is probably the best version of the crystal theme yet.
Upgrade path was cool except that everyone is exactly the same, yeah. So you had to go out of your way to make the characters different but by the end they all ended up the same character. Summons were kinda cool. I liked the combat and gambits a lot, story was awesome for like half of it and then it goes nowhere and falls apart.
At the end of the day here's the deal:
FFXII (started in 2001) was a development fucking mess, Matsuno eye cancer, unfinished game pulled together at the end by staff not initially involved giving a mish mash unfinished feel to everything.
FFXIII was a mess of a game but actually out of the last 15 years of FF this is the only game development that went smooth and they cranked the whole thing together into a mostly polished graphical edge pushing title in a 3 year development period. But conceptually and story-wise the game was a mess and then the whole FFXIII-2, LR trilogy was a mess of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks with sinking budgets
FFXIV was a development mess so bad they had to remake the entire fucking game again
FFXV is a development mess that's taken 10 years of on/off development and at least 3 years of major development only to still be consistently changing based on feedback with no core idea of what they are making
So since 2001, there's been 15 years of every FF title being a fucking mess. I don't think there's any other franchise in history in any format of media that's had 15 years of non-stop we can't do a single product right even with all the money and time in the world.
It's a clusterfuck and I don't see how it's gonna change unless the change is SE goes out of business. At least Kingdom Hearts with the Osaka team seems to be going much smoother with their development pipeline (BBS -> 3DS -> III in probably late 2017). The sad thing is that even if the KH Osaka team was given an FF game (say XVI or XVII) after KHIII, it'd still probably be a fuckup as it seems like what's been killing FF for 15 years is less the lack of talent and more the Warner Bros DC problem of the studio consistently interfering with the product because so much is riding on each mainline FF and the ship is sinking and every exec thinks they know how to correct it. If they just let the developers make a fucking FF game in 3 years on their own, it might not be great or save the franchise, but it would probably be better than all these disasters.
Or they fire everyone in the whole company except Nomura and Nojima and let them hire people and run the studio. In the last 15 years of SE, almost every single product released from the Square side that Nomura wasn't involved in has been a disaster outside maybe Bravely Default but that's debatable with the 2nd half and all that, whereas TWEWY, Crisis Core, Dissidia, KH BBS and KH 3DS all turned out fine. I don't think anyone can comment on Versus without knowing wtf happened behind the scenes, which I doubt we ever will know.
The other option is take the FFXIV team that made the GOOD version, and give them 3 years to make an offline MMO-ish SP mainline FF and don't studio interfere. That'd probably churn out a decent FFIXish title.
I think its kind of weird you talk about them needing an internal culture change and then say they should keep Nomura, the guy who helmed the disaster that is FFXV for most of it's life cycle, the guy who has made a concept as simple as Disney x Final Fantasy into such a narrative piece of nonsense, the guy who is credited with ORIGINAL CONCEPT for FINAL FANTASY ALL THE BRAVEST.
In the past 6 years he's been director on:
Kingdom Hearts BBS (Low 80s, 500k plus in Japan)
Kingdom Hearts DS (Mid 60s)
Kingdom Hearts 3DS (Mid 70s review scores about ~400k sold world wide)
Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 (Low 80s review scores no idea on sales)
Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 (Mid 80s review scores, sub 200k in Japan, dunno about WW)
Kingdom Hearts Mobile Gachapon
FFXV
Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8
Kingdom Hearts 3
Final Fantasy 7 we decided to do it episodic even though that model almost never works edition.
What about that body of work is supposed to inspire me to think that Nomura is the person who can properly direct a successful mainstream Japanese RPG. Nomura's upside is a B tier game, his downside is 10 wasted years of development.
