I want to get excited for this because I do like the XIII subseries, but the information revealed so far has me worried. Yes, the open world structure sounds nice, but a doomsday clock and making Lightning the only party member isn't interesting. They keep whittling down the number of party members hear, and yet they forget that IV and XII would have been better to emulate.
Also, either this is basically Final Fantasy XIII-3, or they're going to go Assassin's Creed on us and make this like Brotherhood or Revelations with yet another game after this. They're stressing the fact that this is is the end of Lightning's story, but not the XIII story, unless they do believe that those two are the same thing.
But it hasn't been pushed back any further just because of this game. If anything, people should direct their disappointment at the Kingdom Hearts team, who are the ones responsible for Versus XIII. That being said, it is known that the game has been in full production for about a year now. They can only work so fast. They announced it way too early, but what's done is done.
The 1st Production Department as a whole is the biggest source of what people hate about Square Enix, although the 3rd brought us Final Fantasy XIV. And yes, the announce things too early, and while I should point out that they did they same thing with Kingdom Hearts, at least those games weren't meant to be in the same scope as FNC.
Many people who grew up playing the older Final Fantasy games seem to suffer from self-entitlement issues. They want Square Enix to create the perfect Final Fantasy game as imagined in their heads. If they don't get it, they cry like babies. I kid you not, it is very common to see people who literally say they think that the series hasn't been good since IX, or sometimes X. That's a whole decade of bitterness and hating.
I even received a death threat from some random idiot on YouTube because I said I liked XIII and loved XIII-2 and thought the latter was one of the best games in the entire series!
Square Enix has one of the worst unpleasable fanbase ever, although I consider myself spoiled because I played Kingdom Hearts first and didn't really watch Final Fantasy games at length until I watched some people play X up to the final battle. I get why people think IX is the best, and even Sakuguchi has praised it, but I can see why people think X was where people thought it stopped being good. The party system was weird, the leveling system was unorthodox, and XII didn't really help with that since the party system was nothing like IV's, and the licenses system was a response to the Sphere Grid.
XIII-2 was a huge step up from XIII's party system. It got rid of the stupid "Game Over if your party leader" dies mechanic, but the fact that the third party slot was the only one that could be rotated and was never playable as a result stopped it from being like XII, although at least it had far more freedom.
People keep saying they want new games, not remakes, but the new ones should be like the old ones anyway. Either that or they have their preferred favorite and refuse to accept that anything could be better than it, which either leads Square Enix to believe that they shouldn't try and be better than that game (Which they shouldn't think) or encourages Square Enix to try and make a game better than that (Which could give us the VII remake).
Square's problem is that they're trying to cater too much to fans of western games, especially FPS, but as a result they sacrifice what made Final Fantasy stand out: the unique feel of the franchise. Don't make me think "This is just like Mass Effect," make me think "This is just like Final Fantasy."
Of course, I like to hate Sony (Both as a joke and because of things they do that legitimately piss me off *coughvitacough*), so I'd like to know if they've had some influence in what Square Enix has become. I want to a main Final Fantasy game on a Nintendo console again, and to my knowledge, the most notable Final Fantasy games on there nowadays are Crystal Chronicles.
