There are lots of people who have said that the Final Fantasy series as been on a downturn for quite some time. Of course it’s understandable after Square-Enix had major success with Final Fantasy VII and the great sales of VIII-X.
During a recent interview with Siliconera, Final Fantasy XV Director Hajime Tabata admitted the team had to look in the mirror and realize that the series has been struggling as of late. Stating…
“No, there was something that needed to be done before having a solid talk on what to do with Final Fantasy XV. Everyone needed to face the reality that Final Fantasy hasn’t been succeeding, and they needed to be prepared to overcome this. One thing we all agreed on was: instead of following everything the way we’ve been doing up until now because Final Fantasy hasn’t been able to succeed in HD,’ we’ll do everything that must be done in order to succeed in the era of HD. It started with creating one team, with everyone having the mindset of a challenger as we went into production,”
Tabata also admitted that the hierarchy structure at Square-Enix was doing more harm than good. Saying..
“We reset the hierarchy of the organization, because the person that serves as the section leader would be in the same position for decades, at times. When that happens, it’s a given that the power relations between staff will always be decided, you’ll have imitation of originals, and instead of having winning conditions as a team everyone ends up working to follow the personal standards of subjectivity and feelings of this said person. By resetting such unnecessary relations, we had a talk about ‘from here on, there is no top or bottom in this land of Shura!’”
Final Fantasy XV will be released in September 30 on Playstation 4 and Xbox One.