I love video game fans, I truly do. They tend to be the most blind, fiercely loyal and trolling fans of the internet. I never fail to be amused by how they think every new game they play is worse than the original, how games should be more different than their predecessors, and then whine about changes and that companies always get more terrible every time there is any kind of infrastructure change. Now don't get me wrong, there are some terrible games out there, overrated games, lousy systems and decisions so bad within a company it boggles the mind as to how those ideas ever came out of sobriety. But in a lot of cases, it's bad case of nostalgia and fanboisms.

Case and point: Square Enix.

I started playing Final Fantasy games pretty late on, my first one being X, with my first ever SE game being Kingdom Hearts, and I was shocked to learn how much bile there is towards the company after Square, the maker of the Final Fantasy franchise, and Enix, the creator of Dragon Warrior and Dragon Quest merged together. Forums would be filled with complaints about how the FF games went down after switching the PS2, that games were way better before the merger, etc, etc. Now I will say that Square Enix produces quite a bit of mediocre properties--as does pretty much every other gaming company but the fact is, they always have and the evidence is in a little OVA series called Legend of the Crystals: Final Fantasy

Follow up:

Legend of the Crystals: Final Fantasy was a 4-part OVA done in 1994, based off of Final Fantasy 5 and to sum it up: it was terrible. When I say terrible, it makes Spirits Within look great and Advent Children like Citizen Kane. Produced by Square as a Sequel to the story of FF5 and the animation by Mad House, the anime should have had a lot going for it, but sadly it does not. Taking place 200 years after FF5, Lenali, the descendant of the one of the original 4 warriors is charged with saving the Wind Crystal after her grandfather gets a vision. It turns out that the other 3 crystals of Water, Fire and Earth have been stolen by an evil robot guy bent on becoming a god. FF5 already had a weak story, Legend of the Crystals does nothing to improve that. Prettz is an idiot, Lenali is flat and this series is LOADED with fan service. Every few seconds there is a Lenali panty-shot for no logical, or even humorous, reasons, there is a pirate dominatrix named Rouge and her army of bondage cat-ladies and when Lenali absorbs the Wind Crystal into her body, her butt glows (no. making. this. up)

That being said, I still found it very entertaining. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but I wouldn't try to stop someone from watching it either. My point is this Anime was done pre-merger, and based off of a fairly 'meh' game to begin with. Square Enix may have done some lousy games these days, but the cold hard fact is: this isn't something new with them.