imho I have never experienced really good writing in any FF mainline game. Like they all have very creative and cool story arcs but it’s the execution that ruins it for me. The dialogues and characters are always so cringe af, you can basically tell that the writers have based their writing framework solely on lowbrow manga. Which is fine when the dialogues weren’t voiced since you could speed read trough the dialogues. Like I thought 6 and 7 were decent and 9 was okay (8 was annoying emo teen angst drama). But once they started voicing the dialogues and added longer cut scenes the bad writing just stuck out like a sore thumb. 10 was just really bad even though I loved 10 for the gameplay. I even skipped 12 because of that. With 13 they improved a bit, but with 15 they slid back almost to the level of the dialogues of 8. I haven’t played 16 yet but from the trailers I’ve seen and based on opinions of my friends who’ve played it I don’t have hope that the dialogues are any better.
And also Octopath and Forspoken just proofs that Square just can’t write good characters and dialogues. Even when they hire non-Japanese writers. They need to look at Naughty Dog and Larian for how it’s done. Neil Druckmann adheres to “Simple story complex characters” with his writing which makes his stories always compelling. While Square, and Japanese video game writers in general, always does the opposite.
What would you consider the last Final Fantasy game they made with good writing?
Final Fantasy 7: The Tale of the Mungus.
imho I have never experienced really good writing in any FF mainline game. Like they all have very creative and cool story arcs but it’s the execution that ruins it for me. The dialogues and characters are always so cringe af, you can basically tell that the writers have based their writing framework solely on lowbrow manga. Which is fine when the dialogues weren’t voiced since you could speed read trough the dialogues. Like I thought 6 and 7 were decent and 9 was okay (8 was annoying emo teen angst drama). But once they started voicing the dialogues and added longer cut scenes the bad writing just stuck out like a sore thumb. 10 was just really bad even though I loved 10 for the gameplay. I even skipped 12 because of that. With 13 they improved a bit, but with 15 they slid back almost to the level of the dialogues of 8. I haven’t played 16 yet but from the trailers I’ve seen and based on opinions of my friends who’ve played it I don’t have hope that the dialogues are any better.
And also Octopath and Forspoken just proofs that Square just can’t write good characters and dialogues. Even when they hire non-Japanese writers. They need to look at Naughty Dog and Larian for how it’s done. Neil Druckmann adheres to “Simple story complex characters” with his writing which makes his stories always compelling. While Square, and Japanese video game writers in general, always does the opposite.
I found myself involuntarily agreeing with most of this(except ff12 whose dialogue I actually enjoyed)