Square - E3 2002
What happened to Square? Yikes, as much as I don't want to have to report negative news from one of my favorite developers, this year was certainly sub-par for one of the industry's most coveted members. The entire booth are of Square consisted of a single game: Kingdom Hearts, which E3 goers saw last year on the Square movie theater. The theater was also missing this year, so no sneak peaks at what's to come a year from now. Lastly, Final Fantasy XI wasn't even at the Square booth, instead there were 4 playable demos in the Sony area, usually devoid of players. Why? read below.
| Kingdom Hearts - Kingdon Hearts is certainly a great looking game. Full of color and nice magic effects and big enemies. The problems I had with the game was that it was clearly a very juvenile game. Summoning Dumbo to squirt enemies just doesn't have a cool factor. The game plays very much like an action game, with some RPG elements. They even hired Hollywood stars to do the voices for many of the characters. Completion time was estimated at 30+ hours and 45-50 hours if you looked at all the secret areas. Overall this game is to have less speech/plot than traditional Square RPGs. This game may be perfect for the newbie RPGer/young. Unless you can't get enough Disney, this game will simply be too simple for most Hardcore players. |
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Final Fantasy XI -We've all heard about it, the first Final Fantasy game to incorporate online play. Unfortunately the version at the show was so devoid of players, that there was nothing to do except run around forests and a town. That's it. Even the exploration looked a little boring... reminded me of FF7 world graphics. All the commands were in Japanese, so that hurt playability as well. After a minute most people just walked away. To top it all off, it wasn't even at the Square booth, it was in one of the many rows in the Sony booth. Sony's online strategy better consist of something more than this, because the game seemed to be an alpha copy and probably shouldn't have been shown yet. |
