In a lot of ways I think the big reason the subsequent games were not as good was because square took the wrong message from the success. They didn’t go “we sho

In a lot of ways I think the big reason the subsequent games were not as good was because square took the wrong message from the success. They didn’t go “we should release more emotionally impactful video games with extremely well-told stories” (although they did this well into the ps2 era), they went “we need to be the most technically innovative company in the world” and this mindset brought them into the the failures of crystal tools and the luminus engine, where they were pulling scenario writers off of games to work on their engine (the saga of Final Fantasy VS XIII is because of this). They got the music part down though. That stuck around.