Square overbanked on their success on the PlayStation, that was a good run, and I don't think we're going to see anything like that wave of quality and quantity ever again.
But around this time, you could tell mainstream-wise that FF-Mania was starting to cool down. 7 had the opportunity of being one of the first big 3rd party PS1 exclusives and launching right as the anime boom in the US kicked off into overdrive.
8 got a little too emo for my tastes, and 9 got tragically overshadowed in the US by the PS2 launch and the mainstream Joe Schmoes who weren't aware the cherubic designs were supposed to be a callback to 8/16-bit era FF games who saw the kid protagonists and assumed it was Final Fantasy for babies, despite what was on those four discs and proceeded to jump on the next-gen hype train.
I never finished X, I got to the part where the typhoon wiped out the sports stadium before I lost control of Tidus and the game locked up, but I liked what I played beforehand.
And about X-2, let's just say that I have an old joke about X-2 being Square's not-so-subtle test for how fast tweenagers could scramble for their PS2 console's power button before their parents came into the room
10 years ago, this kid gets a degree and thinks she's going to have a successful future. It saddens me these manchild cucks brainwashed and ruined her life. They all need to be dealt with. They're not special and I wish everyone would wake up to the damn truth
This, it made sense in '96 when a majority of the gaming press were magazines and such, and the online players were just starting to show up toting around their fancy new AOL keywords and Shockwave-animated intro pages, but now the game's changed.
Here's the thing - E3 was for the press, retailers and bigwigs way back when the 16-bit era was starting to wrap up, the internet was still crawling out of the deepest dankest depths of DARPA, and CD-ROM titles were starting to come out of the woodwork, it was NEVER meant to be Gamerpalooza 20xx, and it wasn't until recently that developers and publishers realized they didn't need to waste a good chunk of their mark-o-bucks on fancy glorified staged commercials which could've been spent putting Mr. CoDnite (or whatever's hip now, I'm old) on bags of cheese chips when they could just day-bomb their YT channels with the reveals for big games and get equal response
Another thing was that back in that era - it wouldn't be a challenge to pop out a few demo versions for a few key games, but now with the massive time, resources, and money it takes to make a Triple A game, it'd take time out of the schedule.
It's classic Disney logic
Letting grieving parents put Spider-Man on a child's grave = nope
Letting characters serenade you as you bleed out in a trench to death to the ending version of the Mickey Mouse Club theme = yes
Yes. Because whenever I see world famous vidya icon Donkey Kong, I always hear his world-famous catchphrase just as it distinctly blasted out of the arcade cabinets of the 80s, and the Super Nintendos (Nintendi?) of the 90s - HUHREHEHEHEH
"holy fukk i jamped, get outta here whitey"