When Did the Final Fantasy Series "Jump the Shark"?

[Nz17]

I would say March - April 2003, those being the months when Final Fantasy X-2 was released and when Enix acquired Square.

[bb_hood]

I think everything after Final Fantasy 7 is just "nothing special", and are games I really dont care for.
Final Fantasy 8 was the beginning of the decline, the games became way too 'story based' and included too many long drawn-out dialogue scenes.

[celerystalker]

Yeah, I think for me it started with 7, but overall I'd say 11 was where the series started really losing fans. Having a numbered entry be an MMORPG changed what the series name meant too much. Before that, you mostly knew what you were getting into, but at that point we weren't talking about traditional JRPGs anymore, and Final Fantasy had been the face of the genre in the west to that point.

I agree quite a bit about 8 starting negative trends. The games started to focus on the characters' feelings more instead of the struggle in their world. It's like the newer Star Wars movies. I wasn't even curious about 10 year old Anakin, and certainly didn't need a whole movie about him. I would have preferred a focus on the clone wars and the rushed rise of the empire, whose infrastructure seems to have grown impossibly quickly in the time alotted. Similarly, if I don't get into the character of a whiner like Squall and the game is built so much around him and his person, I stop caring.

[kupomogli]

Final Fantasy 8, then 10 and beyond. Final Fantasy 9 was good so not included. Final Fantasy 10-2 while having a bad story has amazing gameplay. Final Fantasy 12 has amazing everything except for gameplay.

After losing Sakaguchi they brought Matsuno to do the work on Final Fantasy 12 and from what I've played, everything other than what I feel was awful progression unless you trial and error on that license board when learning skills is amazing. If they fixed the issues with Final Fantasy 12 then it probably would have been the greatest JRPG of all time, but the gameplay drags because of its flaws and after seeing a full list of the license board, it's because of a poor design decision that I could probably get past if I replay it and use a filled out license board as a guide. Maybe they did fix it with Final Fantasy 12 Zodiac Job System version.

[ZeroCool]

After the jump to PS2, I stopped caring. I loved the PS ones especially 9. I couldn't get into X. I like XIII from what Ive played. I need to beat Odin one day.

[Tanooki]

Jumped it at 7, and then jumped the shark, then killed it with its frickin laser beam with 8. Up until 7 there were some general set terms, patterns and designs the franchise stood on and stood for -- you could go into it and have a certain expectation how things in general would work. No it wasn't as copy paste common as Dragon Quest has stuck to, but it was fairly uniform. They decided to jump to big personality, big movies, big animations on anything, convoluted boyband looking people and weird plots with some good moments here and there. With 7 forward it more or less gave up being what FF was and did its own thing with each release after uniquely. Other than your staple enemies, magic names, items and stuff I find the name is more of a crutch to sell a disassociated game to the fans of the franchise. Not saying that's bad, but it's more like slapping a name on the box to sell something by old reputation alone.

[BlastProcessing402]

Yeah, I think for me it started with 7, but overall I'd say 11 was where the series started really losing fans. Having a numbered entry be an MMORPG changed what the series name meant too much.

Yeah, 7 wasn't my favorite, but 11 is where they really jumped. Frickin online shouldn't have been a numbered entry! And now there are TWO numbered online games... Get bent, squeenix, and take your FF13 garbage with you too.

[Jorpho]

It seems plenty of people liked XII.

I hear there's a patch to play the International Zodiac Job System version in English; it's a version with some engine tweaks that was only released in Japan.

[sidewinderl]

The two most ridiculously overused themes in the Final Fantasy series are amnesia and orphans. So the game with mass orphan amnesia is irrefutably the game where FF jumped the shark. That, of course, would be 8.