MMO Blog

Dynasty Warriors is a series that some love, some hate. To the haters, it’s obvious that every single game is identical, perhaps with a slight character shake-up to make it seem like the poor fools buying are getting something new for their buck. For people who love the series, people like me, it’s a fairly deep game based on a fantastic novel and each major release is an incredible event. The people who hate the series can’t understand how it continues to be a success, the people that love it can’t understand how anybody could ever question it. In Dynasty Warriors Online, Koei took their best loved series into the MMO domain. Read more about it in our DWO interview with Aeria

Square Enix have had it rather badly over the last couple of years. I’d argue that they’ve not exactly made terrible games or even that they’ve made games far below what they used to, but that they’ve had to compete both with a massive shift in the industry, from which Japanese developers are no longer practically infallible, and with a wave of nostalgia that coats all their earlier work. Despite almost universally perfect reviews for XIII and a promising future for XIV, it seems that the fans of their work are unlikely to let them forget their transgressions any time soon. This week, after playing a hell of a lot of Final Fantasy XIII over the last month or so, I thought we could take a look what Square Enix and MMO developers everywhere could learn from Final Fantasy’s past mistakes.