yeah there's no secret franchise sauce just good characters, good music and good melodrama. occasionally they fuck this up and make a terrible game instead.

yeah there's no secret franchise sauce just good characters, good music and good melodrama. occasionally they fuck this up and make a terrible game instead.
i haven't played everything and also i'm riding high on just how fucking incredible the ending of FFXV was last night so this isn't like a firm answer. i just still have too many gaps because there are six trillion final fantasy games, and i need to replay 8 and 13. but this is a good cross section of some of the best mother fucking rpgs to ever do it.
yeah i saw the article on ign real grim stuff! one asks what is the point of firing everyone and ruining the vibe to "keep your independence" when the number one biggest worry about being incorporated into sony's structure is they would fire everyone and ruin the vibe. obviously all management are engaging in the same capitalist evil but this bungie story just has this extra twist of total cowardice on top of it that really brings it together.
a lot of luck, and being in the right place at the right time. i think we do good and consistent work but that was true for the half decade before we really had any audience whatsoever. we absolutely rode a wave of visibility with waypoint and also starting ggp, just being in those same communities and getting regularly shouted out put a lot of eyes on us. being the communist mecha anime podcast was a good selling point and got way more people interested than our game criticism work lol.
also it can't be overstated that being able to work for basically half a decade completely for free, em with a job and me disabled in university, is a resource that 99% of people simply do not have. we were able to do it long enough that we stumbled into it quietly being successful enough to justify keeping working on, if GGP hadn't blown up i don't think we'd be doing it anymore tbh. simply having independent resources at all is a large reason we've kinda quietly stayed here building up a body of work while so many of my peers have had full time jobs, got laid off, switched careers, etc etc. the machine really eats people alive and we've been largely to the side of it doing our own thing. which is both occasionally frustrating (i would love a salaried job lol. i tried! just didn't pan out) but also its own form of privilege.
thats not to be modest, i do think we've worked really hard the past decade and done a lot of good work that people enjoy, but i think the quality of the work is at most a small part of the reason we've found a successful footing. i'm slightly worried it's all going to fall apart now that twitter is deader than dead, waypoint is gone, everything is fragmented into smaller subcultures and the games cultuare that Abnormal Mapping was born out of simply does not exist lmao. but we're going to do our best to keep it going another decade! evolving with the times and all that.