Alternate gaming history: What if Square went to Sega instead of Sony in '96?

[kool kitty89]

Square only took money up front for that kind of thing.

Heh, one more thing NEC could have pushed in the late 80s and early 90s and totally missed. (imagine Super CD exclusive Square titles )

Hmm . . . wait, if NEC had gone Sony-style mass-marketing heavy-hitter gaming megacorp with the PCE/TG-16, but Sega and Nintendo had still managed to make big impacts in the 4th gen markets (for Sega, at least outside Japan), what would that have meant for the following generation? What would it have meant for Sony with another multi-division multi-market electronics megacorp directly competing on the market along with 2 more game-specific hardware/software companies?

Hell, what would it have meant if NEC was competent enough to reasonably push marketing and exploit their in-house advantages, but still managed to be flawed enough to make mistakes for competition to push into as well? (perhaps relating to instability generated by their PC monopoly in Japan falling apart around 1993)

Heh, what if RJ Mical and Dave Needle's engineering team got taken on by NEC after Sega turning them down in 1990 (rather than Trip Hawkins later on), and the PC FX was built around the 3DO hardware instead, and actually PCE/TG compatible too. (ie PCE/SGX hardware included like PCFX did, but with the HU6208 too, and 3DO style Cel engine GPU in place of the BG generator of the PCFX -so 3DO sprite/quad renderer along with dual PCE VDPs )

OK, now I'm just on a massive hypothetical suggestion rant. (still kind of cool to think on though)

[sheath]

In the late 80s early 90s Square was locked into Nintendo's monopolistic licensing contract, so they would also have to be convinced to be willing to be sued, a lot, to make a Final Fantasy for another console. Plus, Final Fantasy didn't matter much until after 1990, when NEC was already perpetually fumbling like all massive corporations do eventually.

[Black_Tiger]

I thought there were seven endings? As far as I know Phantasy Star III is the only RPG to span generations and it is definitely the first I know of with multiple endings aside from a bad and good ending. I'm sure some PC adventure style games, especially text adventures, had multiple endings. The master race will always consider those RPGs as well.

Although PSIII is under-appreciated, I was very disappointed the first time I played through it when it came out. The generations concept sounded revolutionary, but turned out to only loosely exist as a theme. Ads promised that "You'll get married, grow old and die three times". In actuality, none of that really happens. It's all just window dressing for simply selecting one of two brief scenarios to play through next. You don't even establish any kind of romantic connections as you progress, it's just "which woman are you going to have sex with" as a reward for completing each chapter. But really, it's more like "which woman did that guy have sex with", as you re no longer playing that scenario.

It's not really non-linear so much as a small assortment of can't miss or mix up branching paths. Just like Chrono Trigger's illusion of time travel, both games milk a novelty concept to spam the same areas instead of including more original content. I still enjoy playing through every which way, as I love <16-bit JRPGs and as much as I appreciate Phantasy Star II, it was extremely un-Phantasy Star. PSIII returns to the fantasy with a touch of sci-fi theme of the original. It's a cool game, but more of an unbalanced collection of mini-scenarios. Unbalanced, in that some are ruined by having to repeat them too often just to try all of the rest. It would have been nice to be able to select to play any scenario any time you want, once you unlock them.

Last Armageddon came out the year before PSIII (and a few months after on PCE) and comes much closer to fulfilling PSIII's marketing promises. Depending on how you play and who you choose to mate/merge with, you wind up with a unique set of ever-evolving party members and trigger different cinemas depending on who/what is in your party. I haven't played enough of After Armageddon Gaiden to see if the loose-linear gameplay is still intact, but it certainly looks cool.

[sheath]

That is an interesting way to look at it. When I first played through the game I ended up choosing which character I kept on the team the most and depended on the most. When I played through the game the second, third, fourth and however many other times I did the same but had purposefully built up that female character until the transition point. The idea was about relationship established through total gameplay time to me, not sex or what was going on illicitly in the background.

As for my appreciation of Phantasy Star III, if the game had ended after only one play through I would have been disappointed. Once I played through all possible generations and seen all of the endings I really appreciated that each of the characters could potentially be made into a valuable party member regardless of when they were added.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Of course not, because you cannot have an opinion and persist in it if you define anything. Thanks for confirming.

A story's quality is defined by how it adheres to a rubric. Anything else is just another belly button.

OK then, how about our rubric is simple composition 101. Is the story actually a story or is it a rough outline?

As I said, PSII's story isn't really a fully developed story. It's instead more of an outline of major plot points that can later be developed into a story. If all it took to make a good story was a handful of themes and an outline of key plot points and dialogue pieces then every 5th grade writer would be an award winning author. Fortunately that isn't the case. A story needs to actually be developed and written beyond that.

An outline and collection of themes is a good starting point to write a story, but it is not an adequate replacement for an actual story and is certainly not equivalent to a great story. PSII doesn't have a fully developed story. It has a plot outline that could have been developed into something truly spectacular, but for whatever reason wasn't.

[Knuckle Duster]

OK then, how about our rubric is simple composition 101. Is the story actually a story or is it a rough outline?

As I said, PSII's story isn't really a fully developed story. It's instead more of an outline of major plot points that can later be developed into a story. If all it took to make a good story was a handful of themes and an outline of key plot points and dialogue pieces then every 5th grade writer would be an award winning author. Fortunately that isn't the case. A story needs to actually be developed and written beyond that.

An outline and collection of themes is a good starting point to write a story, but it is not an adequate replacement for an actual story and is certainly not equivalent to a great story. PSII doesn't have a fully developed story. It has a plot outline that could have been developed into something truly spectacular, but for whatever reason wasn't.

For whatever reason?

Hmmm. I figure the fact that it's translated, it's a video game, and it was developed in 1989 are acceptable reasons.

[kool kitty89]

In the late 80s early 90s Square was locked into Nintendo's monopolistic licensing contract, so they would also have to be convinced to be willing to be sued, a lot, to make a Final Fantasy for another console. Plus, Final Fantasy didn't matter much until after 1990, when NEC was already perpetually fumbling like all massive corporations do eventually.

There were already loopholes in Nintendo's licensing that several companies exploited . . . but in any case (at least in the US), it only mattered for games actually being published on Nintendo platforms. A company publishing a game on Nintendo could still publish a totally different game for another platform (they just couldn't publish it for Nintendo then . . . for the most part -exceptions like Afterburner, Space Harrier, Altered Beast, and Double Dragon aside).

And since NEC had the resources and clout to potentially take on Square exclusively, it would just mean Square's new games would go NEC and their old ones would stay Nintendo. (at least until the waiting period ended . . . which I think was at least 2 years after Nintendo publication in the US) And in the context I'm talking, that would probably mean everything after FFII on the Famicom. (assuming NEC started pushing hard soon after the PCE launch and especially towards CD support -especially nice for multimedia/story/music rich RPGs, and assuming it took a couple years of waiting and pushing to get them on board -1989 with the CD-ROM^2 starting to get more established would have been a good time)


Also, it would be interesting to actually uncover just how Nintendo's Famicom licensing worked overall. There was no hardware lockout, so I'm not really sure how they enforced licensing in general prior to the SNES. (US/EU publishers wouldn't have given a second thought to going unlicensed without lockout)