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Kickstarted-funded console-company Ouya recently announced two major partners: OnLive and Square Enix. The former announced that its streaming games service will be available for the upcoming console, while Ouya revealed that Square Enix’s Final Fantasy III will be a system launch title. Those are two great partners to have. My question for you today is this: Have these collaborations changed your opinion of Ouya?
On the plus side, OnLive brings a large number of games and several top publishers to the mix. Detractors will point to this partnership looking like a desperate and weak reaction to Sony’s recent purchase of Gaikai. Cynics will say that this is a case of a sinking company (OnLive) teaming up with one that will never make it out of the gates (Ouya).
Seeing the glass half-full, Square Enix is a marvelous partner to have. It’s possible that the relationship will lead to several classic games from Square Enix’s extensive library being available on Ouya. Seeing the glass half-empty, Final Fantasy III has been out for iOS since March 2011 and available for Android since June 2012. While the Final Fantasy name is nice to have, it’s not all that impressive that FFIII will be a launch title for an Android-based console arriving in 2013.
What do you make of Ouya’s partnerships with OnLive and Square Enix? Does having an established streaming games service and Final Fantasy III as a launch title change your opinion of Ouya?
I tend to agree w/ the cynics with regards to the Onlive pickup. With regards to teaming with Square…..which Square are we talking about? The one that used to put out a number of top notch RPG’s with a wide diversity of titles? Or the one that puts all it’s eggs into a FF franchise that it doesn’t seem to know what to do with, while letting their top tier RPG franchises like Mana and Chrono quietly die on the vine? I mean, sure, access to all those old games would be awesome….if I didn’t already own them all. So I still fail to see the benefit for me. on this one
“The one that used to put out a number of top notch RPG’s with a wide
diversity of titles? Or the one that puts all it’s eggs into a FF franchise
that it doesn’t seem to know what to do with, while letting their top tier RPG
franchises like Mana and Chrono quietly die on the vine?”
This is probably the best quote describing the FF franchise that I have ever heard.
Why won’t Disqus let me “thumbs up” this comment more than once?!
-M
Square is more diverse now than it ever was. Deus Ex was its best reviewed game last year. Sleeping Dogs will probably be its best reviewed game this year. It has several Western games in addition to JRPGs. How does the company not know what it’s doing with FF? Other publishers would kill for the sales figures of XIII and XIII-2.
Nice try, but Deus Ex was published by SquareEnix, and you of all people should know to never judge a game before it comes out (no matter how good it looks). I’m pretty sure Nightshade was talking about games that they actually develop… from our past… that we really like.
Besides, why must you ruin our sentiments with your crafty logic and reason? Why don’t you come to our fantasy land where everything is better back when we were kids?
-M
The game was developed by Eidos Montreal, which is owned by Square Enix. The whole point of the Eidos acquisition was to add Western games to the company catalog. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the company hasn’t been diverse when it has spent a lot of money in an effort to diversify.
Sales figures do not equal quality. You and I are about as far apart as humanly possible when it comes to our opinions of the last few FF’s games with regards to quality. I haven’t liked a game in the series since FFX. They’ve all been crappy in their own way since. I feel like the franchise is not very well developed anymore beyond “oooooh, this looks pretty,” because the stories and combat systems are crap.
Also, Deus Ex was crap too.
We’re not as far apart as you think. I enjoyed XIII and XIII-2, but am well aware of their flaws. They’re hardly “crappy” nor are they among the best games in the series. You’re limiting yourself by thinking in a binary way.
Maybe you didn’t like Deus Ex, but the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. “Crap” games don’t average 90 on Gamerankings and 89 on Metacritic.
Yes, crap games often do get great scores. The CoD multiplayer is usually a broken mess full of glitches and exploits, yet those games routinely get top grades due to the cinematic stories that hardly anyone plays and perk systems that helps make the multiplayer completely closed off to newbies.
The boss fights in Deus Ex make the game’s concept of “play any way you want” completely bogus because they’re completely impossible if you make a stealth character, a hacker, or really anything but a a pure FPS type character.
So you didn’t like the boss fights, therefore the entire game is “crap”? It is possible — and completely fine — for you not to like something and acknowledge that it’s good. For example, I don’t really enjoy Halo, but I understand why it’s good. Most critics and people that bought the game thought it was good to great.
The boss fights were game-breaking completely dependent on what type of character you chose to make, in a game where you were supposed to be able to play the game any way you wanted to. That’s a poor game design.
Yes, I understand that you don’t like that aspect of the game. Certainly it must have done other things right if it was well reviewed and allegedly sold over a million units. Again, it’s one thing if you don’t like, but saying it’s “crap” is just inaccurate.
If it breaks the game, it’s a lot more than “one aspect” of the game. It breaks the game.
You were being specific about boss fights. Now it breaks the entire game? Anyway, since you don’t want to or can’t mention anything positive about the game and most people can then it looks like you just don’t like it. I just don’t think you’re being objective about it.
Onlive isn’t appealing. Less appealing if you are a Comcast customer in Nashville with their new overages or ATT with any of their overages.
Square? Meh. Make something new that isn’t the uninteresting Lightning saga.
This thing is going to fail.
They need NEW games that people want to play. Nostalgia will only take your company so far (*glares at Nintendo*). Also, we’ll see their customer’s tolerance for broadband throttling or data overages when they start streaming dozens of hours’ worth of games.
-M
“They need NEW games that people want to play. Nostalgia will only take your company so far (*glares at Nintendo*)”
Yes. 100 times yes