I love Final Fantasy 16’s low-poly dog

There sure have been a lot of low points for Final Fantasy as a series since the halcyon days of the PS1 Final Fantasy era. As soon as FF12 was out the door, the series began to stumble – weighed down by its own legacy, so desperate to reinvent and re-establish its place as an industry leader that it continually made promises it couldn’t keep.

This pre-adolescent identity crisis manifested most clearly in the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy, where Square Enix tried its damnedest to develop a game worthy of the series’ name, but came up against problem after problem after problem – all underlined by the Crystal Tools engine, an incomplete and inefficient platform that hobbled both Final Fantasy 13, and the doomed initial release of Final Fantasy 14, too.

Rumor has it that so much time and money was spent on making this engine work that Square Enix decided it needed to extract as much juice from Crystal Tools as it could once it was (finally) up and running. Hence, the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy was born. The whole thing was a bit of a farce, culminating in Final Fantasy 13: Lightning Returns – a game developed in 18 months with a genuinely good battle system at the heart of it, but little else to write home about outside of that.