Square Enix's CEO suggests the company makes too many mid-budget games, but that's exactly where it's doing its best work

GamesRPGFinal FantasyFinal Fantasy 7 Remake IntergradeSquare Enix’s CEO suggests the company makes too many mid-budget games, but that’s exactly where it’s doing its best workWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Square Enix)

Visions of Mana

Square Enix has had a volatile, well,decadein the games business. There seems to be a “throw everything at the wall” mentality over at Square Enix HQ, which has resulted in a few genuinely great and surprising games, and a few pitches so embarrassing you have to wonder how the hell they got the green light. This spaghetti-based idiom can only extend so far, you know, and I think at a few points in the last 10 years Square Enix has thrown some bowling balls straight through the wall of common sense. Final Fantasy 15’s strung out development, Forspoken’s memed-on writing, Marvel’s Avengers' memed-on… everything. Selling IO Interactive, only to turn around and watch the studio crush it with Hitman 2 and 3.

The Quiet Man.

I am no business genius, but I feel like I could’ve avoided puncturing my wall with at least a couple of these disasters. Would I have caught Yuji Nakainsider trading under my nose? Maybe not! But would I have slobbered all overthe blockchainandNFTsat the earliest possible opportunities? I’m going with a much more confident L O L N O on that one.

Square Enix has certainly had some recent wins too, though. Final Fantasy 14 is continuously celebrated; PowerWash Simulator was a surprise hit; Final Fantasy 7 Remake was the smash success Square hoped for, despite what I’d charitably call “some of the worst sidequests I’ve ever played” and pacing that challenged Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies to a “most padded childhood fave” contest.

I thought Final Fantasy 7 squandered the opportunity to fill Midgar with the characterful stories it deserved, and Final Fantasy 16 apparentlyfollowed its lead. If these shiny megamillions games were the only ones Square Enix was making, I’d declare its relevance as an RPG studio well and truly over. But in between blockbusters, Square has filled the last few years with a range of lower budget games that actually kinda rock, or are at leastinterestinginstead of aiming for maximum mainstream appeal.

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(Image credit: Square Enix)

Protagonist Clive in Final Fantasy 16

Square can’t afford to make a game like Final Fantasy 16 without aiming for the broadest possible audience, but that restriction loosens a bit when you’re doing anHD 2D remakeof one of your weirdest Super Nintendo games, avisual novel murder mystery, ora dungeon crawler from one of your all-time great designersthat barely had the budget for graphics.

In 2021 Square Enix finally released good-looking remasters of the classic Final Fantasy games on PC. In 2022 it releasedthreestrategy games in the span of just a few months, which was a treat but also perhaps exactly the kind of thing CEO Takashi Kiryu would point to to justify making fewer games.

There’s some accurate self-reflection in there—the marketing team certainly could’ve done a better job promoting Tactics Ogre Reborn, Triangle Strategy and The DioField Chronicle if they hadn’t all come out so close together. Likewise Square Enix seems to squander every opportunity to win over PC players between console exclusives, Epic exclusives, andmeager ports for its biggest games. Kiryu specifically mentioned wanting to bulk up the marketing team, which could be good news for the kinds of smaller, more creative games the company has been releasing to little fanfare.

Some of Kiryu’s other statements in the financial briefing seem to directly contradict his line about Square “slimming down” its lineup, to the point that I’m not really sure what his strategy is.

“I want to make clearer distinctions going forward,” he said.

No offense to PowerWash Simulator, but “the middle” is the only place Square Enix is doing consistently good work today. Its steady stream of HD 2D RPGs, its strategy games, and its 3D reinterpretations of classic games are all delivering on a style of game that felt dangerously close to going extinct from Square Enix’s lineup not so long ago.

Trials of Manawas a genuine charmer, and Visions of Mana, shown off at length during Xbox’s recent Developer Direct, is the exact style of “PS2 RPG but modernized” that I know Square Enix’s most diehard fans are craving.

It’s delightful! And no, it won’t sell 10 million copies, but it’s also going to cost a fraction of what Final Fantasy 16 cost to make, without trying to thread the impossible needle of pleasing fans who want a number-heavy RPG and the broader audience Square was chasing. Kiryu is no doubt right that Square Enix needs to get better at marketing its broad range of games, but I’d much rather see a future Square that gives up on Forspokens thanHarvestellas. Gambling’s a lot more exciting when you’re not going all-in on every hand.

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