Square Enix knows how to do epic video games and big parties. Tonight, the Japanese company threw its launch party for Final Fantasy XIII, a huge release for the U.S. console game market that goes on sale Tuesday. The launch party itself, housed in a grand theater in San Francisco, showed that video games are serious business, with as much pomp and circumstance as the red carpet launch of a movie like Avatar.
Yoichi Wada, chief executive of Square Enix, walked down a red carpet lined with models in white dresses. He welcomed the crowd to play the game a night before it goes on sale. He showed off the game’s movie-like computer animated trailer. And I have to say it was spectacular. This is the one game where saying it is “movie-like” is really a compliment, with hair-raising combat scenes and beautifully drawn characters that you could fall in love with until you realize that they’re just digital bits.
“The Final Fantasy franchise is one of the cultural hallmarks of our industry,” said Mike Gallagher, president of the Entertainment Software Association, as he joined a bunch of other game luminaries onstage.
And yet it’s still a big question whether this kind of game has moved past its prime and the industry, and gamers, have rightfully moved on to something else. The Final Fantasy series has sold more than 92 million units, generating billions in revenues. Final Fantasy is that rare Japanese game, like Nintendo’s Mario franchise, that has universal appeal around the world. It is key to Square Enix’s goal of becoming a global entertainment company, Wada said. But it’s not going to be easy to shatter past records. As a cultural event, can it get any better?
The game launched to great accolades in Japan in December, but its launch in the U.S. is the real test of whether Square Enix can overcome the recession and still be appealing in the age of casual gamers who are obsessed with FarmVille on Facebook. Can it still knock it out of the park with games that have great graphics and deep, emotion-rich stories for a huge mass market? It’s hard to bet against the company’s past success.
Previous wins have given Square Enix a war chest of resources that is unique in the industry. Budgets for games like this just don’t get any bigger — running into the tens of millions of dollars. Hundreds of people worked on developing the game. For voice acting, Square Enix turned to actors Troy Baker (pictured, right) and Ali Hillis to play the lead characters Snow and Lightning. Leona Lewis created the theme song for the game, “My Hands” from her album Echoes.
“Games just don’t get any bigger than this,” said Chris Taylor, creator of Supreme Commander 2, who appeared onstage with other star game designers to talk about the impact of the Final Fantasy series on game designers. “To see it done so beautifully, it’s just amazing.”
Is the game any good? Well, if you piece together all of the computer-generated animation scenes from the game, you get a real movie. The animated human characters look just like real people. In fact, they just look better than real people. The action scenes are so intricate that it seems quite possible that the company spent months and months getting them just right, even though they last a matter of seconds. Those scenes are the reward sequences in between the game play scenes.
The actual game play doesn’t look as good. The developers drop down the animation quality somewhat and throw in a bunch of numbers onscreen to tell you how much damage you’re doing to an enemy. As with other role-playing games, you form a party of fighters and, one by one, the characters attack the enemy. You fight round after round of combat until the last enemy drops dead. It’s a very different kind of game play, with more strategy involved in picking the attacks. It’s not as action oriented by its very nature, compared to fast-action shooting games.
Some players love the role-playing game tactics. But others who love action hate it. Wada said in an interview that the company tried to make the game more accessible to broader numbers of gamers by adding more action to the fighting sequences. But the more that Square Enix tries to appeal to action gamers, the more it risks alienating role-playing game fans. Titles such as Mass Effect 2 from Electronic Arts’ BioWare division have managed to balance these competing demands. The result: Mass Effect 2, launched on Jan. 26, has sold millions of units.
Sales of Final Fantasy XIII are likely to get a leg up over past Final Fantasy games in one respect. The video game will appear on the Xbox 360 at the same time as the PlayStation 3. Previous launches always gave an edge to Sony. The game takes up three DVDs on the Xbox 360, and just one of the PS 3’s Blu-ray disks. I’ve started playing the game on the Xbox 360, and I have to say I have never seen cinematic sequences done so well. It is just an open question of whether I can tolerate the role-playing game sequences long enough to get through the story. There’s dozens of hours of game play in this one, and a story with love and battle that stretches across it all. It’s truly epic. But let’s hope that’s what gamers are still looking for.
Building a blockbuster franchise is one of our topics at GamesBeat@GDC, our conference at the Game Developers Conference on Wednesday. You can still register for it in-person at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.