LogFAQs > #876285513

The biggest news item of 2003 has to be the Square/Enix merger. I could write a book about Square, but the FF movie came out in I think 2001, bombed, caused Square to post a huge loss and eventually triggered the merger. "Square Enix" still sounds stupid 14 years later and a lot of people just call them Square. My general opinion is that the merger itself is harmless and that Square was already going down a bad path, as evidenced by their 2003 output. They released a bad FFT spinoff on the GBA, a weird-ass sequel to FFX that basically took a somber classic and turned it into a jpop tour around Spira, and released an MMO on PC. Three FF games and none of them particularly popular. FFXI did end up finding a notable audience over the years but it was a huge departure from what made Square great. By 2003, their glory days were gone. Sakaguchi would resign in 2004.

PS2 RPGs kept on coming. The most notable one in 2003 had to be Xenosaga. Xenosaga was ambitious and crazy. It had Nietzschean subtitles, decided it was too high-brow to have a video game soundtrack and had some of the worst pacing in a video game. It was also setting up an insane cosmic world that was way beyond what we were used to from our RPGs. I mean, the other big RPGs this year are said jpop simulator FFX-2 and Disgaea which treats its characters and narrative as a complete joke. I really liked Xenosaga for what it was promising in 2003 but feel a lot less optimistic about it today. That game is just not fun to play.

2003 also had a new Mario Kart, Viewtiful Joe, Beyond Good and Evil, a new Warcraft expansion and the infamous Eve Online. Not a bad year, all told. 2003 is kind of the heart of the PS2 generation that is remembered so fondly by many.
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