Square Enix' Glorious PC Future: The CoNcast Episode 28

Posted on Tuesday 27th January 2015 at 14:09 by Rangers51

We've covered it in CoN news for quite some time, but Square Enix has been making inroads for quite a while in the Windows space both as a developer and as a massive company who own lots of smaller fish also publishing for PC gamers.

For a long time, the company treated the PC as a bit of a wasteland, at least in terms of the flagship Final Fantasy franchise, with no games released for Windows for many years; now, though, the company is experiencing a renaissance on the platform with the two rereleases of Final Fantasy VII followed closely on by iOS 3D ports and the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy.

So, in this installment, the CoNcast team hits the highs and the lows of Square Enix gaming on the Windows platform as well as what might be coming in the near future. Get your Steam wishlists ready for the Final Fantasy games we'll talk about today!

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes, This Episode

Posted in: CoNcasts

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Written by	Rangers51
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	Member Since: 1997-07-31
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Comments

Glenn Magus Harvey	Comment 1: 2015-04-05 01:54
	As someone who plays games of types that are traditionally/stereotypically associated with consoles, but plays on PC, I welcome the fact that Squenix is gradually moving toward PC. Been considering buying FF7 on Steam for a while now. I've been on the fence though since I've actually played some of it and I don't hugely like it. Also have been considering buying FF3, though I'm aware that they've tweaked it a bit so that now your party of four characters isn't just generic classless onion kids. And also FF13 because the story seems kinda interesting but i've just heard account after account about how it's tedious. I'd actually like to see them bring over some of the other more distinctive Square and Enix titles. For example, the Soul Blazer trilogy, E.V.O., and Einh�nder. Squenix hasn't exactly made a game in recent years that has captured my interest, but one should also consider that I haven't exactly been exploring Squenix's recent offerings, especially since I don't own the systems their offerings are on. (And I'm talking about Squenix's "first-party" (or something like that) games, not their other franchises like Tomb Raider or Hitman.) I enjoyed FFIV, FFV, FFVI, Terranigma, FFTA, and such -- in general the SNES and GBA offerings of Squenix -- so I'd like to see more in the vein of those sorts of games...whatever that means, I'm not actually too sure. I have felt that more recent offerings tend too much toward trying to make a cinematic presentation rather than a immersive one. But this is not really the topic here... The talk of Squenix engaging with the PC playerbase more these days makes me think of another RPG company who used to develop for PC but actually stopped a few years ago I think. Nihon Falcom, maker of games like the Ys series and the Legend of Heroes series (which includes the Trails in the Sky subseries), has had more of their stuff catching my fancy lately. Their PC "backcatalogue" has gone on Steam with the help of localizers in recent years, and been pretty successful, with reportedly six-digit sales figures and such. With the help of localizers, some more of their PC games are still on their way to the English-speaking audience, but eventually there will come a time when they'll run out of PC-native Ys and Trails games and they'll have to decide whether they want to continue the series on PC by porting those games to the PC (or using some existing ports developed by Chinese companies), or simply abandon all the new PC fans they've gotten in the past few years or try to push them toward console/handheld gaming. (You can probably guess what my preference is.) Those meow meow jokes won't stop now, will they. Talk English School is the folks at talk.edu, right? Yeah, they're probably using the name "TALK" as a name. > 1000 gamerscore Meh, I never liked achievements and "completion whoring". > spelling and grammar fixes The PS1 version had "this guy are sick" and the original PC version fixed that, didn't it? Because I remember not running across that line when I first played it on PC but then finding that screenshot online. > Cloud has no mouth I guess the FFT characters voiced their complaint at having no nose. > the music is procedurally generated I think you mean that it is machine-generated. Which I guess could be called "procedurally" but it's nothing like a semi-randomly-generated thing a la roguelike levels. Also, the MIDI is a little odd, but I do still maintain that "Underneath the Rotting Pizza" sounds better in MIDI than in its PS1 version. Incidentally, early on in FFVII's Steam release, some fans created a patch that replaced the MIDI music with PS1 music, and it got taken down -- a whole megathread on the Steam Community forum for FFVII thanking/praising that patch got suddenly zapped, leaving me with like +64 notifications that I never bothered to clear since I don't like clearing them and I always am holding out hope that they get undeleted so I can read what I missed. > press Esc and FF13 quits without warning To be fair, Esc to quit is actually sort of a common thing with some Japanese PC games. I've seen doujin games do that. It's not a great idea, and they should just do it like old DOS games, where if you press Esc you get the system menu, or at least a "do you want to quit? yes/no" dialog. > 1080p I'm probably behind the times, but considering that my most commonly used display screens are built-in laptop scree at 1366x768 and external monitor at 1600x900, it sorta doesn't matter to me. Then again, I'm just horribly out-of-the-mainstream compared to the rest of the customer base, since I'm a long-tail consumer who purchases things several years after release, and I even am okay with playing games windowed. > title of this podcast > not "Whatever. Enjoy." You lied, R51!
Rangers51	Comment 2: 2015-04-08 17:35
	Quote (GMH) Talk English School is the folks at talk.edu, right? Yeah, they're probably using the name "TALK" as a name. That's not the URL they have on their signage, I don't think, but yes. And also, thats-the-joke.jpg. Quote (GMH) You lied, R51! Whatever. Enjoy.
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