Yoichi Wada: FFXIV greatly damaged" the Final Fantasy brand

Final Fantasy XIV’s launch was rough, even by MMO standards. Reviewers and players alike complained about the game’s lackluster UI, grind-heavy gameplay, and overall lack of any sort of polish. We gave it a 4/10, but hoped that future updates would fix the issues and make it a game worth playing. Now here we sit, in said future, and Final Fantasy XIV is still absolutely crap. But Square-Enix CEO Yoichi Wada isn’t hiding from his company’s mistakes – he’s willing to admit that the game was not only half-baked when it released, but that "The Final Fantasy brand has been greatly damaged" by its release.

For as disappointed as we were by Final Fantasy XIV, we don’t know if we’d go as far as to say it has actually “damaged” the brand much all that much. Heck, we doubt most people even consider the Final Fantasy MMOs as part of the Final Fantasy core series, instead casting it off in the same section as other spin-offs. Sure, it was bad (really bad), but it didn’t do any more damage to the brand than Dirge of Cerberus did, right?

But that’s not the point for Wada, who isn’t content with the game dying a slow, painful death. The CEO says that the company plans on fixing Final Fantasy XIV, even if it means tearing it apart and putting it back together. “We'll continue with our reform work,” he said in a Tokyo press conference, “which basically amounts to fully redoing the game, and hope to revive the FFXIV that should have been released."

Sep 28, 2011