By Nelson Schneider - 04/26/26 at 04:39 PM CT
Alas, ‘Final Fantasy’ has been in freefall for FAR too long now, as I’ve pointed out previously. Each time a new game is announced, there’s the fleeting possibility that it will redeem the last TWENTY YEARS of flops and garbage, but it never manages to deliver.
Inexplicably, the second MMO entry in the series - “Final Fantasy 14 Online: A Realm Reborn” – seems to be the most recent title to garner a substantial amount of praise, even after flopping at launch and needing a complete revision into its more-or-less current incarnation. This praise comes in spite of the fact that the game is a) an MMO RPG, b) a subscription-based MMO RPG, and c) incredibly EFF-ing boring. Yet it is still getting plenty of support, with a new expansion, “Evercold,” revealed at the recent North American Fan Fest.
Of course, the game’s director, Naoki Yoshida, had a lot more to talk about than just the newest expansion for the last surviving revenue stream with ‘Final Fantasy’ branding on it, as he also answered questions – and one of those questions was quite interesting.
Yoshida was asked whether or not it would be possible to have an OFFLINE version of “Final Fantasy 14,” much like how Square-Enix has previously taken “Dragon Quest 10” into stand-alone OFFLINE territory (in Japan, at least), and Capcom did with “Mega Man X: DiVE.” There is both a demand for OFFLINE versions of these kinds of games, and Yoshida said such a thing would be possible, and he even though about doing it... the only problem is that the ONLY competent dev team at Square-Enix who could handle the monumental task of creating the first good, mainline, non-MMO ‘Final Fantasy’ game since “Final Fantasy 12” in 2006... is the team Yoshida already has slaving away at the online version of “Final Fantasy 14.”
It’s a real tragedy that the talent at Square-Enix is so thin that they only have a single team capable of tacking a flagship-tier project, but it really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Nobody on the retro-game teams at Square-Enix seems to understand why their classic 16-bit RPGs were popular (Something, something, grinding? Yeah, that’s the ticket!), hence the abject mediocrity of everything out of Tokyo RPG Factory and the grinding hell of ‘Octopath Traveler.’
Here’s hoping that the next time some C-Suite moron at Square-Enix floats the idea of a THIRD ‘Final Fantasy’ MMO, Yoshida actually speaks up and suggests doing the whole “offline version” thing instead. I don’t know how much longer these legacy Japanese gaming corporations can keep going by burning all the goodwill of their long-time fans, while failing to cultivate a new generation of fans among the youth.
