How can Squeenix fix itself?

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Had'ohken

"Innovation" means different things to different people, but IMO, mucking around with the battle system and adding new gimmicks is one thing that's HAMPERED each game in some way.

FF7: Materia - offered a wide range of customization with character spells and abilities. This opened the way for their other traits to let you play better as you liked without worrying about a class system.
FF8: Drawing...OH GOD, THE DRAWING - allowed you to gain spells easily, use them to boost your stats, and never worry about MP and MP items. You had a guaranteed max of 100 castings per spell per character.
FF10: Sphere Grid - allowed you to customize character abilities and character growth and get only the abilities you wanted per character. Negated learning spells per level up or needing to buy them.
FF12: MMORPG-lite, computer-controlled party members (only if you let it, but still) - offered you the broad ability to customize your party's AI, which is a lot more than other games offer. Manual control was still an option.

At least the earlier FFs were consistent with the battle system, now it's like they think they need a new gimmick to make it feel "fresh" in each game.

Well, it sounds to me like all you're really plugging is a class system, since you failed to mention 9 and 11, which feature classes heavily. Classes are fine, but they also can mean an incredible task of providing game balance and almost inevitably forcing players to use classes they dislike for certain jobs.

Oh, and Desperation Attacks are just as much a "gimmick" as anything else. That was in FF6. FF3 and 5 both had the job change system in battle, which was different. FF2 had a completely different way of handling weaponry and magic than any title before or since. FF4 was the first to introduce job techniques like Jump and Cover in a non-spell format, to my knowledge.

Your argument pretty much falls flat if that's really what you were getting at, because the only real thing tying the older games together was limited graphics technology.