Sponichi (via Andriasang) reports that Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada has been speaking about the future of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest at a Tokyo press conference today.
During the conference, Wada reportedly noted that he believed "the Final Fantasy brand has been greatly damaged" by troublesome MMO Final Fantasy XIV, which has been riddled with bugs and issues since its launch. Hoping to learn from its mistakes, Square Enix has been revamping the flawed game ever since earlier this year, and Wada believes that the end product will be more like "the FFXIV that should have been released." The revamp work will, according to Wada, "basically amount to fully redoing the game."
Our field report on the game around this time last year described a game with a lot of potential that needed a lot of work to be ready for the primetime. Since that time, the development team has had a considerable reshuffle, and producer Naoki Yoshida has been regularly updating the community on plans to revamp and improve the game. Will it be enough? Or has FFXIV's rocky launch done too much damage to the brand, as Wada suggests?
Meanwhile, conference attendees who expressed concern at recent news of Dragon Quest X's shift to online play -- particularly given Square Enix's somewhat patchy record with online games, as evidenced above -- were reassured that the series would not be exclusively online in the future. Wada noted that the team was planning to "continue with a variety of developments, offline included," but that DQX itself would remain an online title.
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