The history nerd in me is always active, always eager to absorb the complete lineage of whatever greatly interests me. Final Fantasy XVI, and the contentiousness surrounding it, have made that side particularly active. That game exists in a peculiar crossroads of public and corporate perception, crossing through strands that are just as recent as they are decades old. And part of me dearly wants to chart it all out through an article (and potentially some kind of sprawling family tree as well.)
I've taken a lot of notes on this, don't know when I'll write it, or if I'll ever be able to. Besides other (more immediate) commitments, I'll need to play more of the associated games for a better grasp, the scope is likely too big to ever result in a single article with focus, and the newness of XVI means no idea how its legacy will shake out. This is really a zeroeth draft of multiple factors that have been bouncing around my head since last year, and below is my attempt to split them out in an orderly way:
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The parallels in development and end product between XIII and XVI, and the various ways in which they differ or match
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Naoki Yoshida's continuing attempts to build a brand of its own for the Square Enix subdivision he leads, its confluence with his Matsuno fanboyism + other kinds of FF narrative strands, and its immutability in face of the company's multiple structural reshuffles
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The "pivot to FF/FF shift" started circa '98-'99 that led to the withering of other Square series, of which only a few have been able to stand/recover
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The constant push of Tetsuya Nomura into projects he had varying degrees of involvement with, since at least Parasite Eve, including numbered FFs with very different styles than his teams', and the ramifications that had on franchise/company identity for much of the public
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The company's deep roots in westaboodom, and the continuing of that preference despite its overshadowing by a handful leads
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The desire to compete on the same standing as western AAA companies and the cultural tensions underpinning that dynamic
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Square's longtime struggles to get foreigners' mass acceptance of most anything they made besides FF
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The struggle to make multiple FF fans recognize its nature as a free-form anthology, and Square's failure to take advantage of the breadth of forms it can take
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The demands of AAA dev—protracted development cycles, merging of multiple small-mid sized teams into a handful big ones—& how they lead to the stifling of creativity and companies to take artistic decisions at the speed of a fully loaded dreadnought
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The dilated sense of time long-time players have, and the ease of forgetting the wider history, which ties into the point above