Unportant

FF4 was a bit of a pioneer ..... but in a good way? All those fake-out-deaths could be seen as the progenitor of some of the series' worst habits (like the outrageously capricious characters in FF13 that it uses to artificially generate drama), and it cared far more about its story than its gameplay (which constantly anchors you to largely useless characters), which ... also, not a healthy trend.

If anything I think it's given way too many plaudits. It's usually elevated above 5 and sometimes even 6, and ... those games have customization, they're objectively more interactive, they're significantly more fun to play from minute-to-minute.

Gamers talk about consoles like they're chemotherapy. Like they have essentially no choice but to buy that thing RIGHT NOW, and if the manufacturers increase prices, or don't lower the prices at expected times (Switch games), or delay games, etc. etc. that they're snake oil salesmen who took advantage of your helplessness.

These are entertainment products. They are completely optional .... and not optional in the fashion of cafes or water fountains in the south pre-Civil Rights, but optional in the way that you have tens of thousands of legitimate options for entertainment and most of them are currently on sale. Buy it or don't buy it. Or wait to buy it. These are your choices, and you're not dying. You're not a Make-a-Wish kid. Grow up.

He was always a dude who was more concerned with whether or not he COULD do something rather than whether or not he SHOULD do something.

He's just daydreaming about what's possible, in a literal sense ...... which is kinda a glass half-full mentality, which is nice, generally ...... but it's also the way that eugenicists and weapons makers and people developing mind-control chips think. If your reaction to the moral problems of something is to shrug and say "yeah but it's reality", then .... you've probably got some fundamental issues with morality.

The problem is not the slowness or the realism, those are perfectly viable approaches to making a game (look at all the survival games and sims in the world). The problem is that they were more determined to SIMULATE EVERYTHING than to make an intuitive videogame system, and what they ended up doing was creating a product that's almost just a bunch of QTEs strung together.

The whole point of bosses is to say something like "Hey, you're new, you're trying to make your mark, you're trying to get all the books in the black, we get it ...... but we just f'ing greenlit buying all these studios like, YESTERDAY, and this company needs to release SOMETHING, and these games are mostly completed, so, no, you don't get to close down everything. They won't all be successes, but you'll get some leniency there, you didn't greenlight them. We're trying to run a stable business here, not a revolving door of execs just doing random stuff so they can tell us they did something."