Bravely Going

Today marks the NA release of Square Enix's Bravely Default, the deliriously goofy name for what appears to be the best new Final Fantasy in almost a decade. Everybody and their brother says so. I have to be honest, I am awfully excited to go play it.

The reasons, though, are firmly set in that I'm ready for a good RPG, and not because I just love old school Final Fantasy games. I mean, I do, but if I were to only want to play something new just because it feels like something old I would sit around and download bullshitty tablet game all day long as that seems to be the market for recycled content you can overpay for. Less cynically, though, I like the optimism and good will, however tenuous it is at the moment, that Bravely Default and this Tuesday's Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is bringing back the struggling Square Enix. In the most simple terms, that company really needs a win, and even if it comes from the court of public opinion and not sales figures, it would go a long way toward rebuilding the publisher into the creative powerhouse that it was in years' past.

But that's still just cleaning off our rose-tinted glasses. It's been a pretty tumultuous decade for Square both financially and figuratively. Major releases have tanked and at the cost of tens of millions of dollars (plus incalculable time wasted in development). More than perhaps any major Japanese publisher other than Konami, HD development really caught Square with its pants down. This is ironic considering that the company's games were such a champion of new and emerging audio/visual technology in older console generations; the advent of higher resolutions and consistent frame rates have led them to fumble around trying to figure out exactly how to move their major franchises forward. The problem, as Final Fantasy XIII has shown us, was that they did it on their terms, and not their audience. So much time and money wasted on making a stiflingly linear game that still seemed half-baked upon release was a clear enough indicator that the emperor had no clothes, and that proletariat gamer could only look at them in baffled amusement.

You could probably say that the divisiveness over Final Fantasy games, and much of Square's output, began during one of the earlier PlayStation generations, but the 2008 release of XIII represents a clear partition in their existence. Certainly before XIII came out, the hardest of the hardcore fans of the series would piss and moan that things Just Weren't Like They Used to Be (as evident by the first guy to buy FF XII in Japan telling CEO Yoichi Wada that they should remake VII during a live press event), but this was during a period that games from the franchise --and the company as a whole-- were still coming out at a steady clip and of high quality. While, yes, you could complain that X or XII wasn't your cup of tea, but you couldn't argue against the fact that all of that production went into making as solid a product as could be made for its time. Visually impressive, finely balanced, and (for the most part) coherently written were things that you could expect from a new Final Fantasy game whether you liked it as much as their Super NES predecessors or not. But then XIII came out, and all of a sudden, all of your doomsday scenarios about a company falling apart seemed frightfully on-target.

For as subjective as video game reviews really are, the overall consensus was that we were seeing quantifiable evidence that they Just Weren't Like the Used to Be. While there is certainly a small cadre of XIII apologists out there, the years since its release has lead to much head shaking and shoulder shrugging over its design. So much, in fact, that it took Square to cobble together two more games in the XIII "series" to make good by the fans. The fact that they even did this proves that the old guys were right all along, and a general perception that if Square Enix, the shepherds of the once titanic genre, couldn't figure it out than the RPGs of yesteryear were doomed to fade away.

This is defeatist thinking.

This morning, I read this exemplary article about the shooing of Jay Leno. Part of the story was about how smug a villain Leno had become over his 22 year tenure as host of the decaying Tonight Show, but much more of it was how sad the world will be without Leno in it to punish with our "hipper," "edgier" scorn. This really struck a chord with me, especially today with Bravely Default's release. While the opposite may be true in that I did it because I care and not because I have empirical evidence of their idiocy, but I have been ragging on Square for years now, and their paleolithic design sensibilities and business practices need to bow out for the younger, sexier, more in-touch Jimmy Fallons of the game design world. When I sat back and really reflected on it, though, this is not at all what I want.

No, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the JRPG isn't mounting a comeback (it's been here for years), nor am I going to pontificate that the publisher has finally gotten its head out of its ass (we still need to be cautious about Final Fantasy XV, after all). We need to stop being so pious toward past successes, and less embittered to recent failings. I know that this sounds a little counter intuitive because I began by telling you how excited I am for a decidedly retro RPG, and I just said a second ago that it's hard to be totally optimistic about what the company is pushing out over the next few years, but really, optimism is something Square desperately needs, and Bravely Default and Lightning Returns, while diametrically different games, clearly show that the company can push their creativity when they need to. That's good for everybody. Some companies --Nintendo, for example-- really turn up the gas when they're backed into a corner, and it looks like that's what's finally happened to Square. While the reviews aren't finished being tallied for BD, and haven't even hit yet for LR:FFXIII, it's hard to disagree that this could be the start of a return to form in the post- XIII-Weren't-Like-They-Used-to-Be era. If we didn't at least hope for the fact that companies will make better games than their previous output, nobody would play anything new at all, and we need to move past that. It's time for us to be excited again. I hope that you feel the same way.

See you tomorrow.