January 12th, 2003

Early days and smiling faces, but the merger may yet fail

Near the end of November 2002 the two companies announced their upcoming fusion, which was planned to take place in this April. Now new worrying rumours from Japan have come up which suggest that the merger isn't completely certain after all. Square isn't happy about Enix taking the leading role in the merger.

Saturday's edition of Nihon Kezai Shimbun (Japanese newspaper) told about this unfortunate news. Masafumi Miyamoto – the biggest shareholder of Square – isn't happy with the financial details of the fusion and it has now become public. Enix is responding to that, their chairman Yasuhiro Fukushima is saying that Square's objection may cause the whole merger to collapse.

The agreement was that 100 of Square's shares will be exchanged into 81 of Enix's shares. Miyamoto finds this agreement totally unacceptable and has stated he will vote against the merger in Square's shareholders' meeting on 13th February, unless the share exchange ratio will be reconsidered to be more beneficial for Square. This is a serious threat to the merger's success because Miyamoto alone owns 40% of the company, so it will be impossible to gain the necessary two thirds of the shareholders to support the merger without his approval.

But all the hope for the merger isn't lost yet. Miyamoto says he still supports the merger in principle, but he just can't accept the current terms. He thinks the whole thing should be reconsidered, and the two companies should negotiate terms that they both can agree with.

Something in happening on Enix's side too. The chairman of the company has called a deviant board meeting that will take place early next week, and the goal is to discuss the change of share ratio and if the merger will still be worth completing under different share ratio. Fukushima claims that changing the share ratio would be against the other shareholders wishes and that the share ratio was decided earlier, and the both companies had agreed with it.

Enix and Square are two very different companies, even if the both are working on producing Japanese RPG console games. Enix doesn't have offices outside Japan, whereas Square has become known as a very global firm whose games are known worldwide. Square also has huge in-house development teams to work on the games, whereas Enix is more concentrated on letting outsiders to do the work from their designs and collecting the money from their licences. That's one reason the merger would favour Enix since it doesn't take into account the huge costs that Square has accumulated in order to reach the development skills they have today.

Enix are unknown to many western gamers because their games haven't been such big hits outside Japan, but in Japan Enix is about as big as Square. Established in 1982, Enix Corporation pioneered the console software Role Playing Game genre. Enix is one of Japan's top five publishers of video game software and publisher of the RPG series Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior® in North America), which has sold more than 22 million units worldwide.

Sources: www.gamers.com, the-magicbox.com & www.enix.com

A little positive news however. FFOrigins will be released in the USA. No details for the release of PAL-version have come up yet, but the release in the USA sure is a good sign for a possible PAL release as well.

FF1 was released in Japan in 1987 and in USA in 1990. FF2 has never been released in the USA before this, so it's a big day for fans who wish to get every single Final Fantasy for their collection. Now Famicom's FF3 is the only one that has yet to see the light of day in the markets of North America. The re-release of the games in one package is happening in April in USA and it will carry the rating T (Teen), and will have many innovations compared to the original game.

The graphics have been updated from 8-bit graphics to 16-bit. FF1 and 2 will also have a feature that didn't even exist at the time they were released – FMVs. We'll see how well FMV sequences will fit to the old game, the difference in graphics is going to be huge at least.

Graphics aren't the only thing that are getting revamped – the storyline will also go through a renewal process. More events will be added to make the storyline deeper and more complex than it was. Music has been updated as well, to fit in more with today's standards, and also some totally new theme songs will be introduced. Whether Nobuo Uematsu will be the composer or not isn't known. Dialogue will be partly rewritten to get rid of the early English grammar errors that the early Japanese origin games always had.

The gameplay is also a bit easier. Auto-save is one new feature, as well as the possibility to set your own difficulty level. This helps gamers who have never played the game before. The game will also present a new bestiary and art galleries full of Amano's artwork for the game. To add more replay value for it, new features will open when you finish the game, so it should be long-lasting experience if the player wants to see all the extras.

Here are some screenshots from the FMV scenes of FF1.

Click the thumbnails to see the bigger image.

Sources: www.rpgamer.com, www.gamespot.com, www.ign.psx.com

Written by alhana, proofread by TRZD