E3 2021: Square Enix
I honestly don’t know why Square Enix bothers with their own conferences. I know they’re one of the most recognizable faces in gaming and they have a fair number of franchises and companies under their belt, but that doesn’t mean they have enough games to fill out a press conference.
At least Squares conferences are short. They don’t meander for too long like Ubisoft’s conferences do, but this only further shows how pointless they are. Especially since their games often show up in other conferences any way. I just don’t see the point in them doing this on their own.
But enough of that, how was the conference itself? Well...
I feel like I owe Ubisoft an apology, sure their conference was boring, but at least it had a handful of decent looking titles. At least it didn’t spend half the conference to talk about one frigging game. Square Enix’s conference was a goddamn train wreck.
It started out well enough. The first game they showed was Guardians of the Galaxy by Eidos Montreal. I liked the movies and the game looks like it has the same spirit as those. I don’t like that Star Lord is the only playable character, but at least the game looks fun. It certainly looks better than that Avengers game they brought out last year.
But like the Energiser Bunny on bath salts, the trailer just kept going, and going, and going. The whole Guardians reveal felt like 3 trailers superglued together. I thought Ubisoft stretched their announcements thin but this, this is just unfair. I felt like I was doing that bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail screaming “GET ON WITH IT!”
And they eventually did after 15 goddamn minutes, and that’s when it downed on me that the over long Guardians reveal was the big highlight of the show. Because from that point on, it was all down hill from there.
And it wasn’t a slow descent either. This thing plummeted down like a goddamn meteor. The second announcement should have been big, it was a collection of remasters of the first 6 Final Fantasy games. Sounds like a good idea, and then they revealed it would be coming to Steam, Mobile, AND NOT CONSOLES!
How in the name of Bahamut’s draconic ball-sack can you screw this up Square? These games would have printed money on the Switch, and instead you only release them on platforms that already have them. I’m not joking, I double checked this. All 6 games are on mobile phones already and 4 of them are on steam. Sure, most of those are remakes, and the versions of 5 and 6 are a sin of God, but they’re still on there. They aren’t on current console, so fix this shit.
And you know what the worst thing is, they aren’t in one collection. You have to buy them all separately. Square, do you want to die? Do you not want to make the money? Cause a collection of these on current consoles would have made all the money.
It’s amazing how much they screwed this up. From that point on it was all over for them. Not to worry though, Platinum Games came to the rescue with their new game, Babylon's Fall. A brand-new hack and slash live service game, and godman it! Those words might as well be a fucking death sentence on any game they’re attached to. Did they learn nothing from the Avengers disaster? If you couldn’t make it work with one of the biggest established IP’s in the world, what precisely makes you think you can do it with a new one.
Even then the game itself looks terrible, When I woke up this morning to write this, the trailer has already been decimated on YouTube. People are not happy with this, and I don’t think it can ever truly recover. Platinum Games, you might want to pull the plug on this one to save face, cause you sure as shit aren’t making your money back on it.
And that was it, that was their last chance to salvage this whole thing. The rest of the event was just a bunch of mobile games, and the new Life is Strange game. No Final Fantasy XVI, no World Ends With You Neo, no Forespoken, nothing people were actually excited about.
They couldn’t even get the updates for the Avengers game right. Sure would be nice to have a release date for the Black Panther DLC guys. This show just ate a barrel of ass. The only way it could be any worse is if they showed of an edgy, Dark Souls like remake of Final Fantasy with a boy band as the protagonists. But no one could be stupid enough to do that...
You know what the sad thing is, I thought this had potential. A darker take on the original Final Fantasy, sounds intriguing. But what in the hell is this. You've got characters from a Final Fantasy XV, walking around a Dark Souls like world, battling bosses from fucking Dissidia. What is this art direction? Oh and can you tell these guys don’t like Chaos, because they want you to know that they don’t like Chaos. They repeat the word chaos more times than the cast from Kingdom Hearts say heart, and with about half the enthusiasm.
Square Enix, bubbelah, I get that you’re one of the most famous developers/publishers in the world, but for fucks sake you can’t do E3. As a wise Eastwood once said, “a man's got to know to know his limitations”. You are not cut out for this shit. It's time for you to make like a Dragoon, and fucking bounce. Oh sweet Jesus let the next one be good.