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A while back, Bandai had this clever idea. They'd create a single intellectual property which they'd develop across multiple forms of media at the same time, spreading a single cohesive set of stories over a broad set of possible commercial areas. They labeled this '.hack' a story covering the adventures of several people over a spanning massively multiplayer online virtual reality role playing game. It showcased many things, among which that the Japanese were kind of a half-decade behind the American developers in this area. It was also a pretty decent commercial hit. That wasn't a good thing.
Due to the success of dot-hack other companies were encouraged to push onwards faster with Polymorphic Content, intent on taking single intellectual properties and stretching them to their brink by blasting them out over several mediums at the same time. Sadly, these companies will likely continue to make a fair profit off the novelty value alone for a number of years, but in the end, the average consumer loses out. Instead of a policy in which we can expect that buying a game will contain most, if not all, of the story involved, we're seeing a move towards spreading out the story over hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of commercial goods, requiring owning far more than a simple video game system to enjoy. I can't see that as a good thing for us in the long run. When I sit down to enjoy a game, I want to enjoy the game. I don't want to worry that I haven't also bought the manga and the movie and the anime and the cell phone game and therefore am missing a significant fraction of what is going on. I understand the concept of spinning off successful properties, but there's a difference between spinning off after the success as service to the fans and planning the entire thing out as a multi-medium spanning epic.
Beyond that, there's the burnout factor. Even if I enjoy something, I'd rather think back on it nostalgically, desiring more and thus having a greater desire for the next game a company makes rather than be buried in a wave that leaves one disgusted with the whole franchise and the folks who made it. There's something to be said for not riding a franchise right into the ground for every last cent of profit. Something to be said for stepping back, having some artistic integrity, and just telling the tale that needs to be told instead of flinging a thousand spin-offs with it.
More so, this encourages arrogance rather than cautiousness in a company. We're seeing this now with Square's two concurrent polymorphic content franchises: Full Metal Alchemist and Final Fantasy 7. Full Metal Alchemist is coming over to America jointly as a video game and as an Anime series. It's also a Manga; a movie too; and probably a toy line. Not too bad, but come on, how much does the series really need? We're talking around sixty-eighty hours of time just consuming the material from the TV series and the game. Sure, this isn't NEW. Companies haven't shied away from making spin-offs before. But they were more cautious. They'd wait for the first thing to succeed. They wouldn't be tossing six or seven things out on the burner hoping one would catch on like wildfire and justify the fact that they flung over half of their creative staff doing nothing more than churning out content for a single intellectual property. Folks begged for a sequel to Final Fantasy 7 for years. Now, it finally comes as an exercise in insanity. It hasn't even come out yet and I'm already tired of hearing about it. Not one, but four separate grabs off this same intellectual property. Could they all be great? Absolutely, but that isn't the issue. The issue is that in tossing these all out together and on totally separate medium formats, a lot of fans are getting left out in the cold or having to purchase new equipment just to enjoy the series. The issue is there's a limit to how many things can be announced together for a single intellectual property before even driven fans just stop caring. Good? Bad? That's a debate that only occurs when a fan's attention hasn't been saturated beyond them even caring.
I don't think that this trend is a good thing. I'd rather a move back to more cautious days. Enix, one could easily argue, did the same thing with the Dragon Quest series. The only thing is it was more cautious. It came out slowly, a spin-off here, testing the stream with a tv series there. We weren't seeing a planned execution to grab the most money possible as fast as possible. We were seeing more a testing expansion of an intellectual property slowly being cultivated over time. Perhaps it doesn't make a lot of sense in context, but here's a plea for developers to think a little bit about the art of what they do and a little less about how to stretch things for the maximum profit off the bat.
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