[General Discussion] Your Opinion On Yasumi Matsuno

Like with most of the directors over at Square, I only like aspects of each director. When it comes to Matsuno, I think he has an excellent ability to envision the relations of the world and making aspects of his worlds fit together well. His games always have complex political structures and it's nice to see some RPGs that are more than a Kingdom, Princess and some dude who comes along and wants to save the world.

But other than that aspect I find his world designs themselves pretty boring. Personally I prefer the highly stylized worlds Nomura creates (though his characters are a totally different subject) over the more 'realistic' style found in Matsuno headed games. I like the highly creative aspects such as some of the stuff we are seeing in FFXIII VS like the main character using massive amounts of floating swords, being able to teleport and run up and down buildings over the grounded medieval worlds created by Matsuno. But I do still prefer the more complex gameplay systems that come from Matsuno. They just lack the style I'm looking for. I also respect Nomura for being able to create various stylized worlds with Matsuno has pretty much only made games that take place in Ivalice. So in that sense he is unproven talent until he moves away from Ivalice and tries something new.

As you can tell I'm hoping for the day that we see an actual collaboration between Mastuno and Nomura. Nomura's extravagant stylization (minus characters) mixed with Mastuno's depth and complexity would be a worthy game from Square-Enix.

Jam it back in, in the dark.