flonnebonne: (SoraSilly)
1. Beg Hironobu Sakaguchi to come back.* This shouldn't be too hard.

2. Ask Sakaguchi to make a game on an SNES cartridge. If you're feeling generous, give him a Chrono Trigger-sized cartridge. Ask the employees who made that FFXIII sprite movie to help out. Beg Yoshitaka Amano and Kaori Tanaka to do the designs. Beg Nobuo Uematsu to do the music, and be nice to him so he doesn't rage-quit and form his own music group.

3. One year later: Playtest the game and make sure it has not morphed into a feature-length film about Sakaguchi's dead mother.

4. Don't release Sakaguchi's game. Keep it a secret.

5. Beg Hajime Tabata to come back.

6. Ask Tabata to turn Sakaguchi's 16-bit game into an AAA blockbuster on PS4/Xbox/Switch/CPU. Be nice to Tabata so he doesn't rage-quit and form a competing game company. Ask Alexander O. Smith to rewrite all the bad dialogue into iambic pentameter. Ask Hikaru Utada to sing a theme song. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ALLOW TETSUYA NOMURA ON THE DEV FLOOR. But let him add some anime hair to the sprites, direct some trailers, and make a splash at E3.

7. Profit.

---

POST-LAUNCH DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

1. Release Sakaguchi's 16-bit game on handheld and mobile systems.

2. Keep an eye on Nomura. NO RANDOM SPIN-OFF GAMES.

3. Let the execs have a bonding session in a Coleman tent.** Catch some fish. Cook all the meals in FFXV. Make sure Uematsu spends some time in a hot spring.

4. Profit.

---

*Kitase or Matsuno would also do. Kitase is still at Square, technically, but I think he just sits around and collects money. Matsuno would be my pick, but Matsuno already rage-quit once or twice? so I think it would be a tough one.

**...Square Enix needs some more women in the leadership ranks, doesn't it?

 

flonnebonne: (SoraSilly)

1. Lock Tetsuya Nomura in a room and give him some acid so he can start drawing up...something. Something involving belts and hearts. NO EDITING ALLOWED.

2. Make pretty trailers based on whatever Nomura drew. Trailer must include mockups of gameplay so people will understand that development is definitely well on its way.

3. Plan out all side games and side movies and mobile games. Hire Sean Bean to play all side characters.

4. Make sure to announce several bombshells at E3. Watch hype grow like a weed. Send out cheques to shareholders.

5. Five years later: Think about actually developing the game.

6. Hire Outsourced Company to develop the game. Bring them to the room where acidified Nomura scribbled his soul in blood all over the walls. Tell them to Figure This Out. All employees of Outsourced Company receive free leather coats for inspiration.

7. Five years later: Realize that Outsourced Company is a film company and not a game company. Start sweating. Fetch Nomura from rehab and tell him to Fix Everything. With his well-organized and highly analytical mind, surely he can find solutions to all these problematic gameplay elements, like the fact that there is no gameplay.

8. Twenty years later: Quality Control says the game has neither quality nor control. Someone compares the game to a fetal monstrosity theatening to rip apart time and space, Chrono Cross style. Interesting idea, but the shareholders are starting to Panic, and the dev floor is filled with Heartless and Nobodies in leather coats.

9. Call Hajime Tabata and beg him to Fix Everything. Tabata politely explains that he doesn't do that anymore.

10. Cut out half of the planned storyline. Keep all the cutscenes (shiny!) and add more cooking/fishing/cell phone mini-games (more shiny!).

11. Release the game to the public. Make Nomura do some frantic hand waving and say it was all “creative genius choices,” not budget cuts.

12. Profit.

——

POST-LAUNCH DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

1. Release some rage-inducing DLCs and mobile games.

2. Profit.

——

...Have I mentioned that complaining about Kingdom Hearts 3 is now my full-time job?

August 2023

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789101112
13 141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 6th, 2025 02:06 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios