Nick

Dark Souls changed everything for me. Prior to that, I never really considered difficulty to be an important facet of whether I would enjoy a game. Now, games won’t hold my interest unless they are both difficult and provide the opportunity for me to experiment. Story and cutscenes take away from time I could be playing the actual game, so I just skip them. Every time I start a new game, I joke that there is not a “for those who won’t enjoy the story” option in the difficulty settings for guys like me. From Software single- handedly turned me into a video game psychopath with a ruthless drive for achievement, with no regard to the consequences or hardships of the poor characters in the games, lol.

I don’t think ff8 had the same popularity as ff9. I also think the original art style of ff9 (the characters looking somewhat cartoony and child looking), gives them an option to change that style if they felt fans would find it interesting for them to do so (i.e. Characters look more realistic and age appropriate). The ff8 characters already looked realistic, and it would be a pretty tough internal sell to decision makers to devote a lot of resources to a game people might receive as merely ff8 with updated graphics. Some people would prefer that, but games like that aren’t made and intended to be mainline games. They’re treated as remasters and smaller in development scale. I never got that far into ff6, but that would be awesome as a remake. I agree that I don’t think it’s likely they had any plans beyond ff7, but that is only for now. Once AI technology improves and the semi-taboo of using it on a large scale to develop games is breached (only a matter of time), remakes/remasters will become more common. It’s much easier for a machine to make something with less human creativity needed to reinvent something which already exists.

I wasn’t a fan of Final Fantasy XIV’s customization (or lack thereof). Sure there are a good number of classes and the wardrobe system is nice, but there aren’t really different “builds” for the classes. It’s just different tiers of the same sets of gear with the same stats, with no skill trees for specialization. Most of the mainline final fantasy games have way more customization than that.