@grognard That wouldn't surprise me as they might be using those old FF sales expectations. Reminds me of Namco and their twisted expectations of non Tekken/SC games in the past.

@pakhair Square has been traditionally known as a RPG company of the highest calibur. Wada basically ruined that and betrayed various long time fans of the company. Even if they're able to do well with Eidos and such, they'd be mainly known as two things "as that company that revived Eidos" and "the great RPG company that went to pot and sold out"

@franzito @pakhair I wouldn't say FF is heavily exploration based than story based. If you were lucky going out of the way may result in an early subquest, but other than that, it just serves as a way to pick up some new things if you A) have the money needed and B) survive the trip there (some games can punish you badly for going off of the path in the form of tougher enemies)

@pakhair @shadowboy88 the PSP entries besides perhaps P3P aren't the best examples as they're mild remakes of old games.

@youngzen69 There's not as much as you'd think, though the world map in most games give that illusion pretty well. Though FF1 was less linear than usual (you could actually do a few things out of order if you figured out how)

@PixelAddict I'm not denying that; if they were more aware they'd fix their issues and scale back production costs as to reduce the losses that would come their way. The rise of the western market has thrown japan into chaos, as various companies have done stupid things in vain attempts to get some of that market. Even Capcom with their DmC (when the original series was rather popular in the west in the first place)

That and even before the big point, people were slowly tiring of modern rpg bad habits (cinemas, lacking gameplay, etc). wRPG's rise merely ignited the building disconcent.

@King9999 Wouldn't surprise me as that's often a term for working for a publisher. Why else would Xenosaga have appearances by characters resembling Elly and Fei but NOT Elly and Fei?

Though I wonder what Tri-Ace is doing at the moment as they don't seem to be having as much luck as they used to in terms of popularity.

@PixelAddict It's mainly recently that things have changed; it's not just FFXIII's massive flaws but rather the rise of wRPGs in popularity and production values. This combined with natural preferences, results in what we saw: A 180 turn of opinion towards jRPGs.

@Grimkillah Quitting is enough as well as living with the shame. I mean Sakaguchi and Mistwalker are sort of struggling to get respect from RPG fans who expect him to make a FF quality game with far less resources and a lack of a high-profile venues.

@King9999 @StriderTuna @pakhair @franzito There are bigger issues but the topic was the matter of towns.