Wafiti

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:

I originally wrote this as an e-mail to a podcast which was revising its list of the 100 most influential games and taking listener feedback in consideration. Ultimately, a number of messages were not read on-air due to time constraints, and none of what I brought up was addressed on the episode.

Its a topic I'm very invested in, so I ended up going too hard (the below is a revision, the original was over 1700 words); and its all history that hasn't been properly synthesized in English anyway, so I get it. Some of my guidance on this matter came from the GameStaff wiki, which hosts a comprehensive list of every development team under both Square and Square Enix. But the go-to expert on that company history is Ryo Saito. What you read below cribs a fair amount from their researching and mapping of this stuff.