You actually tricked me to not reading this entry for over a week. I'm so sick of the sexism talk that I don't even bother opening articles with it in the title. So, being very bored one Saturday morning I figured okay, I'll read it. Lo and behold.

Anyhow, I have replayed both FF VI and FF IV on the DS in the last year. I would have to say that I like them. I over played VI as a kid, a lot, and I struggle to find my way through it now simply because I have seen everything the game has to offer. I can just recite the story in my head these days, which makes me wonder why I would ever trudge through 20+ hours of gameplay when I already know the story and that's what I play FF for anyhow. 

I agree with you on the dialog thing though - Voice acting in general sucks. Especially translated voiced over dialog. But at this point I don't even think that is the root of the problem. In an attempt to turn a RPG into a action game they have broken the gameplay. In addition to that they have made the story so complex, in terms of reading and figuring it all out, that it just isn't interesting to me anymore. Bad writing alone isn't what I"m talking about here. What the hell is even happening in FF XIII early on? you get a basic gist, but you have to climb through mounds of codex to get all the backstory and really understand it - if I wanted a book I would read a book.

On the other hand, games that hit the mark lead you into what is going on very early on, then expand it out from there fairly quickly. Look at the pacing of FF IV, FF VI, and FF VII, then look at the pacing of FF XIII - one gets to the point - you know your quest, you know why you are where you are and you are off to your first mission within 10 minutes of the opening. FF VI, you are in the heat of the story in the first sequence. FF VII you know the mission and why you are there right off. FF XIII, what the hell are you doing for the first 3 hours of the game other than leading 4 people you could care less about down corridors? FF sucks these days because it doesn't get to the point. It is because everyone keeps griping about 90 hour epics instead of cohesive 20 hour adventures that get to the point.

One final point about the SE merger - I'm curious to know where you got that information about the same dev teams producing FF since VII. I don't have access to personnel files or anything, but the general buzz seems to be that a LOT of the original Squaresoft employees left in the years following the merger. Directly after, SE did end up with about 80% Square staff (though Square lost the financial end of the merger), and the internal structure of the development teams has remained relatively consistent since then, but my understanding is that most of the actual positions involved have gone through a fair bit of turnover.

Sakaguchi left and founded Mistwalker, yes, but so did a lot of the other creative forces behind Square's best series. Tetsuya Takahashi (graphics design and direction for Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Front Mission; and work on several FF titles) took Suguira and founded Monolith Soft (who went on the make Xenoblade Chronicles, the closest thing to a classic FF title this gen). Nojima (scenario and concept writer for most of the 'classic' FF titles) left in 2003, followed by Uematsu (who scored pretty much all of the memorable Square music in existence) in 2004, both to found their own companies - and while they consult with SE on some projects, they're far from company assets any more.

More than that, after SE's team 3 finished up work on Chrono Cross, pretty much the whole lot of them (and apparently others as well) were scooped up by Monolith, which is now the closest thing to the original Squaresoft the industry has. So while from a management perspective team 3 produced Xenogears, Chrono Cross, and then went on to make FF XI and XIV, almost none of the same actual people were involved (and it shows, oh how it shows).

Info is a little harder to come by on team 1 (all the main non-MMO FF titles since VII, save XII for some reason; plus Kingdom Hearts and Dissidia) because there wasn't a single mass-exodus like on team 3, but my understanding is that over the intervening years, many members of that team have also left for other companies or to pursue other projects. As a result, SE is sitting on some of the most valuable IPs in the industry, without almost anyone involved in their initial meteoric rise to popularity. If you could link (or at least point me to) the info that SE's team 1 has maintained a consistent employee roster over the last decade-and-a-half, I'd be very interested to read it, if only because I've been hearing conflicting (if not fully substantiated) reports over the same period of time!

As for your theory, you're probably right in that a lot of clamor for a remake comes from fans remembering through rosy nostalgia-glasses, and I agree that SE shouldn't bother remaking any of them. However, some of your other points are a bit off the mark (I mean this in the 'constructive criticism' sense, not 'douchy know-it-all', and by all means call me on it if I come across as the latter).

So, the dialogue. I won't argue with you on your point - if put word-for-word into voice acting, the result would be nothing less than cheesetastically facepalmable. Hell, Square's first foray into voice acting in X pretty much proved that first hand. That said, you're forgetting a few important things here. First off, I think a lot of people confuse bad localization with bad dialogue. You did mention that writing and translation are separate creative acts at one point, but failed to differentiate them in your argument. Let me put it this way: Do you read Japanese, and have you played the originals in their native language? I don't and haven't, but a few friends who now live over there have claimed that the English translations are laughably inferior to the Japanese originals, especially when you account for subtle cultural cues and references that a) never made any sense in NA to begin with and b) probably wouldn't make much sense even in Japan over a decade later. I'm willing to chalk it up to their opinions, but unless you've seen the source material, it's better to comment on the English translation as opposed to the writing as a whole. More like, 'it takes a real [North American] writer to [translate] that story into a script that sounds like something a [North American] would say' (sorry Europe/restoftheworld, same goes for you guys too)

Secondly, as any professional writer knows, dialogue has to be molded to fit the medium its written for.  The entire style and inflection of writing changes drastically even when we are dealing with different written mediums (c.f. nonfiction; novels; newspaper articles; internet comments lulz!; and yes, textboxes in videogames). The limitations of the medium itself shape what can (and more importantly what CAN'T) be said in a text-based game. Nowadays, we can just fill in story through spoken dialogue while the player rolls along with the game, but back then, the whole game had to stop and parse out 3 lines of dialogue at a time. As a writer, you're pretty limited in the range of emotive content you can fit into that context. It's a whole other story (literally) if the writer knows these words are going to be voiceacted, and that carries its own set of problems and limitations.

I don't think any company in its right mind would attempt to directly quote every piece of dialogue into a new medium - they often don't make the jump well (try reading a few movie screenplays and you'll see what I mean). Sometimes, the exact thing that made the written dialogue interesting or enjoyable just doesn't work in another medium (look at the Hitchhiker's Guide movie *facepalm*), and in the case of FF, at least some of what was enjoyable WAS the almost endearingly bad translations. You're right, they would be terrible if voice acted, but if SE failed to recognize and account for this (either by reworking dialogue for spoken word or keeping the games text-based), they should probably just pack up their shit and stop making games right now.

Thirdly, most of the FF games weren't written by programmers. Most of the most fondly remembered ones (the same ones people keep clamoring for remakes about) were written by Kazushige Nojima - at least on an overarching scale. While he isn't what you would probably call a'professional writer' (I don't think he studied Japanese lit at university) his sole job for the last 2 decades has been as a scenario and concept writer for the exact medium we're talking about here. Actually, if he's not a professional writer in this context, I don't really know who would be. Frankly I don't want John Grisham or Margaret Atwood writing games, because frankly that would suck. Again, different mediums create different writing needs, and there's no such thing as a guru of all writing styles. Actually, a lot of the criticism of modern games is the way they shoehorn the player into pre-scripted set pieces. This is the direct result of hiring 'professional writers' schooled in liner narratives to do the job. Any writer who doesn't have an intimate understanding of game design isn't going to be able to write a convincing game world in which the player - not the writer - is ultimately in control.

So yeah, I agree that their day is over and SE should focus on new games (maybe even a franchise or two beyond FF - a new Seiken Densetsu would be nice if they could actually get it right), but it's not for the reason you mentioned. Honestly, once you get over the translation issues (which are actually a bonus for me), the original Squaresoft versions are pretty well written games - if not every single line of dialogue, then certainly the stories, many of the characters, and the worlds in which they exist. They may not appeal to current North American sensibilities, but f&^% it, this is a cultural hub which insists on the rebooting and retelling of a handful of familiar stories every 5 years or so - only darker and grittier!!! And only then, so it can be collectively s&^* upon by every self-proclaimed critic on the internet. So frankly, no, these shouldn't be remade. Not because He Man looks dumb to an adult, or because they would be impossible to update with voice acting, or because the writing wasn't 'professional' enough, but because they already exist and you can go download and play them right now! And graphics aside, they hold up pretty damn well. And if you can't play a game that has less-than-current gen graphics, I'm not really interested in your gaming needs anyway - they've already been taken care of thanks.

A lot of interesting points brought up here, where to begin? Well, FFV does have a dedicated fanbase, it's just that it wasn't originally released outside of Japan, and didn't make it to English-speaking audiences until its re-release in Final Fantasy Anthology seven years later. At that point, most fans had seen the technological leap provided by the PS in VII, and were busy anticipating the release of VIII later that year.

Simply put: not too many people actually played the game outside of Japan (at least comparative to the other titles released in NA and Europe within their launch windows). Those that did saw the game closing in on a decade after its prime, so much of the praise that it received was inevitably of the 'cool game, but not groundbreaking' sort. After VII, how could it have been received any differently?

That said, a lot of the people who played V really liked it, and most of the residual comments you hear about the game are positive (granted, not a representative sample, but hey, we're talking about internet forums and comments sections here). It refined III's job system and laid the groundwork for the kickassery that was FF Tactics, as well being an enjoyable title in and of itself.

At the end of the day, you don't read much praise on English language forums for any of the FF titles that weren't initially outside of Japan, for the same reasons above. How often do you hear people go on about FF II or III?

Also, i wanted to add that what contributed to the greatness of those rpg, those before the 3d era, and i'm including all the jrpg that came through the nineties chrono trigger included, is that they leave to you, the player, plenty of room to fill in the space leaved by the 2d sprites, the lack of facial expressions and voice over, with your imagination.

It's a process of penetration inside the character that's very intimate, something that someone (freud fixation) even saw as sexual, but it's something that lets you fill FREELY all those empty spaces and that helps you in becoming a real part of the story, and that sucks you in the game and contributes to the great memory that those games left you 15 years ago.

You can't do that with a rpg full of cinematic sequences drawn up by motion capture, resulting in movie sequences wonderfully dubbed, where what you see and what you hear is what you get, it's not something that inspires your imagination at all.

So, i find that saying that those games worked just because they weren't voiced well, it's pretty generic and immature.  Don't get it personal, thanks.

FFV is fantastic, loved galuf (poor old man) and gilgamesh (that joker), plus the job system is really entertaining, makes you want to try all the combination until you got the mime.

Do a favour to yourself, play it on a snes or gba emulator and forget about remakes.

Final Fantasy women are sexist!

It has been 10 years since I played FF 7 & 8 (the only ones I really played) I got them on my PS3 and I still find them to be good games.

If remade you can easily re-write a lot of the dialog to suit voice acting and still tell the same story. It's not like you just got the original game and have some just read out the lines on the screen. No you would re-write every scene to match with the new graphics.

Mid 90's to early 00's were the best time for cartoons with the exception of Dragon Ball.

Good point about the voice overs...I only started playing FF(the RPGs) at the age of 21. That was two years ago. Maybe because of the hype. First was FFA:1 and 2 then up to 6. It was enjoyable but when I think about it, the story and dialouge were better left off to the player's tolerance and imagination. There are lines that I would cringe to if it were spoken..

But the FF Rpg's aren't the games made by SE. What about srpg? There is FFT and TO(although I'm sure that it was Square's to begin with). TO:LUCT has some voice overs but its only in the narrative. And I would say both of these games are very well written and LUCT has that perfectly grim and serious voice overs.

I went back to watch the cartoons from my childhood and they were better than I remember. here in the middle east we were reared on the works of Miyazaki, World Masterpiece Theater, Moomins and Tom and Jerry :)   . also Final Fantasy need to step it up since to me the old FF left you're imagination play a part in the storytelling weather you imagined the characters voices or just made stories of your own (didn't understand English then) so they need to match the expectation I built in my imagination. I have a friend who started with FFX and like it so much. he then played the PS1 FF and liked them but he didn't like the ones after X. he say's they have no sense of adventure. 

"The cause is the arrival of voice over. As soon as Square had to actually write lines that people would speak their games were suddenly much more poorly received." - What are you talking about? Both FFX and FFXII were critical smash hits and they were both voice-acted. Pretty poorly written and reasoned!

If you want to play a game with a good dialogue play Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions. Sure its written in an archaic style, but its vastly superior to most of the writing in the main series.

The dialog for the early Final Fantasy games weren't great, but they were pretty decent... in JAPANESE. When they were translated, they turned out pretty cruddy. The reason, however, isn't because the writing or translating was bad. The writers never took a step back and thought that this would be translated in many different languages, and so much of the dialog suffered from some sever cultural identity crisises. Much of the dialog, even in Japanese, would seem strange to a foreigner. However, a Japanese person who was raised in that culture wouldn't see anything wrong with the dialog. These cultural differences are extremely apparent in Final Fantasy 8, more then any others. Much of the dialog, in Japanese, from a Japanese point of view, is actually perfectly fine. Some of it is actually pretty great. But when having both of those degrees of separation for foreigners, the dialog looks and feels awkward or just plain awful. You can't simply rule that the writing of Final Fantasy is bad, when you're ignoring the cultural and language barriers. Though I admit, some of the very early games' dialog definitely weren't masterpieces even in Japanese.

Actually, If I recall from an interview a while back, the only reason why they decided not to make a remake of FF7 on the PS3 was because they would have too much temptation to change it. To remake a game to be exactly the way it was is an enormous feat. It means that you go over the entire game and rebuild it piece by piece. But when you look back at what you've made, most of the time you see ways that it could have been done better or differently. They stated that they would probably end up changing more then just dialog, but gameplay aspects as well. If they decided to remake FF7, it wouldn't turn out to be the same FF7 that people fell in love with, which was the main reason why they decided not to.

Also, I thought FFV was decent... It's even on the Wii virtual console and PSN. It took a long time to make it to the US because it was originally going to be brought over as Final Fantasy III, but they simply decided it wasn't worth it. (Glad they didn't, the numbering was getting confusing enough as back then). The story was a bit weak and it doesn't really stand out too much.

i hate final fantasy

I guess this is all under the presumption that a remake would involve spoken dialogue at all. Or dialogue that isn't re-written- both of which could be highly plausible circumstances involved in a remake. Some people would just like the games "remade," in a sense that they are re-released with current gen graphics and probably wouldn't care about reading dialogue again. Just sayin'.

I didn't like the idea of the series having spoken dialogus but wasn't displeased with FF 10,12,13,the continuations,spin offs and crisis core

I don't want an FFVII remake,just a sequel.Dirge of cerberus sucked.I want it to be turn based(I am not one of those FF fans who bash on the series for not having turn based combat).

I have the DS and GBA version of a lot of the FF games, and I never played them before they had DS/GBA versions. However, comparing to what I've seen of the original games to what's on the handhelds, I've have to say they ported them very well. They're still very enjoyable games.

If Square-Enix does make a FFVII remake they better not change a thing! I want to see cross dressing Cloud Strife in HD! Haha #FFVII 

I see title pic to be from 'Another World'.

Is it available for PC ?

I think the reason people want remakes of the old games is because the most recent batch have been crap, and people remember loving the older games to the point they played them through the night until they couldn't stay awake anymore. Granted that there's an element of rose-coloured glasses with anything from your teenage or childhood years, but to blame the decline of the series on bad scripts is way off. FF13 and 14 were bad games, end of. I don't think voice acting comes into it. Sid's "hold onto your draws 'n don't piss in 'em!" line in FF7 is hardly Shakespeare (in fact it isn't even 50 Shades of Grey), so actually hearing that aloud makes no difference to the fact it's a bad line - or the fact it's still one of the best games ever.

Thank you for this.

Though I think they should have never added spoken dialogue to the series it has nothing to do with the downfall of FF. Proof of that is the greatness of FFX. FF 7,8, and 9 had amazing stories and the writing was incredible. These games stories and dialogue were written in Japanese manga/anime style. And no dialogue in anime ever sounds like something somebody would say in real life. In no way does this make it "poorly written" it's just something you obviously don't understand. Also I don't think the writing is the main reason people aren't fans of the new FFs. FF13 had a decent story (at least from what I could bare playing through) but everything else was absolute shit. Battle system is press A A A A A, switch stances, A A A A A A A, switch stances, A A A A. Walk down a narrow path and watch cut scenes along the way. Also I think music is a big deal too. Music in FFXIII made me want to kill myself. 7-10 have soundtracks I still listen to after all these years. The music really contributes to the emotional impact of the story, just as music does in any movie.

I'm not hoping for any FF remake, I think the games are perfect the way they are. I'd love to see a new game from SE but they need to have the right approach. PS1 was the golden age of JRPG's and they need to look back at what they were doing back then and take inspiration from that.

I dunno, I've played through FFVI, VII & VIII again over the last couple of years and in terms of depth & story, I think they still hold up really well. There's not many games out these days that you can rack up 50 hours+ of game time and considering these games are as old as they are, it shows how remarkable they still are. Sure, the turn-based battle system feels a bit dated now, but in all honesty I wouldn't mind seeing an HD remake of them. But you're right: It would be better if SE would concentrate on bringing out a FF game this gen that captures the magic of the old ones. Sadly, the recent ones haven't even come close.

Great blog. It's easy to whine and scream "SE SUXS NAO!" but its more complicated than "they suck now."

Like you said, FF had no written dialogue so no one actually heard how ridiculous these lines were. I recently picked up FF8 at a flea market, and so far I don't see it as any less cornier than the recent FFs. I laughed at Rinoa's "Look into my eyes! You're going to like me, you're going to like me! Did it work?" for all the wrong reasons. Its still a good game but come on people, take off those rose tinted nostalgia glasses and actually READ this stuff.

Also, now it seems like other JRPG companies with half of SE's budget are putting out games with stories and gameplay just as good (Atlus, Mistwalker, Monolith Soft, and Namco Bandai say hi!). SE is going to have to step it up in the story department if they want to stay in the race for another 10 years.

I commend SE for always changing things up gameplay wise. I liked most of the battle systems in FF and like that I'm getting something new each time (only one I didn't like was 8's junction system). But maybe now its time for them to change it up story wise. I highly doubt a remake is the answer to SE's problems.

While I believe you offer a very interesting premise, I have to disagree with it to a degree. While the dialogue has never been flawless, the stories in FF 7-10 really lifted the games enough to make players ignore the, more often than not, dubious dialogue. I feel that the current generation of FF fails to live up to the lofty story heights that were set by the previous installments. Also, I like FF 5.

Nothing to do with vioce overs its the gameplay systems which isnt as it use to be final fantasy was about Open World lots of town, Citys ,flying ships, Side quests and a Great story, Now non of  This exist in FF13 thats what they are lacking the core basics of the final fantasy Genre and thats what fans are missing not bad vioce overs FF 13 was the end for me its the worst in the series nothing good about it there was no Open world element nor there were any towns or citys or any one to talk to and the battle systems really sucked and even some maps were recycled from FF12 over all i blame them for changing the core basics of there genre.

Hahaha I like the way you trick people into coming here. Kudos! Anyways, I think it would be cool to see the older FF games remade. Same game with no changes made to gameplay, just changes in the look and sound of the games. It might not be accurate to say that the games would be pretty bad. I think nostalgia would have a positive affect, but that's just a personal opinion.

square enix is no longer the same they are money hungrey making two xiii follow ups