Final Fantasy XV could be an Action/RPG

So says the producer of Final Fantasy XIII-2. My first thought: Final Fantasy is truly dead. My second thought: that would be a huge improvement over Final Fantasy XIII. The latter's great failure was raising the automated play-style of Final Fantasy XII to 11 and at the same time requiring frenetic button-pushing. If it's going to require quick responses, 90% of which will be the repeatedly jam the select button, for heaven's sake let us control the character directly. Combining that with RPG menus really sucks.

I do hope, though, that they don't do this. Final Fantasy XV desperately needs to be a nod to tradition. XII and XIII went so far afield that each broke not only the Final Fantasy series, but the RPG genre itself in diametrically opposed ways (rather than going very outside the box, like Final Fantasy VIII and its innovative, and unfortunately extremely gameable, Junction system).

They need traditional JRPG gameplay, directly navigated airships, and really need to get Uematsu back in order to restore a sense of cohesion to the series as a whole. They need not go as far as Final Fantasy IX did (as great as it was) and give it an aimed-at-children feel. But they do need to bring things back into perspective.

Honestly I still think Final Fantasy X should have been the last main series Final Fantasy game. It was the last to be in the pure JRPG genre, the last to have Uematsu, and the last to have the almost indescribably Final Fantasy feel. XII should have been a spinoff brand (Final Fantasy Ivalice, or Final Fantasy - War of the Occuria, or something of that sort). XIII should have been a totally new series. I mean, really, Chrono Trigger could far more justifiably have been a branded Final Fantasy game; all you'd need to do was add in a Chocobo, a few Moogles, and a guy named cid and it would fit in perfectly. Matsueda was not only the only Square composer on the same level as Uematsu, but also totally compatible with him.

DRM actually does have one use

It does a good job of stopping casual copying between people who know each other. If my cousin bought a book on the Kindle, for example, and wants to share it with me, he or she won't be able to email me a copy due to copy protection. Unless that cousin is as savvy as I am and knows how to strip off the DRM (which is much easier than it looks, BTW). For the record, I only strip DRM for archival purposes. I am bloody well not going to pay multiple times for the same ebook just because I decided to move to a different platform. I also want security in case Amazon goes under or some yahoo decides to delete my account on a whim.

DRM does nothing to deter P2P copying since someone somewhere will know how to break the DRM, will upload it, and then the unprotected data will be passed on from torrent to torrent and network to network. And if the album, movie, or book isn't popular enough to spread like that, then it probably would have benefited from being distributed over P2P since it would raise its profile and produce word-of-mouth publicity that might eventually result in more legitimate purchases.