I feel like most (all?) popular art is that way. Games, movies, music.

1. Create something amazing, pour artisan-level craftsmanship into it, gain huge following

2. Exploit your popularity by churning out branded garbage

3. Profit

Even Disney's not immune. Have you seen how many direct-to-DVD/streaming 'movies' there are that cash in on their popular franchises? It sucks.

> Have you seen how many direct-to-DVD/streaming 'movies' there are that cash in on their popular franchises?

I have a strong feeling that a lot of those are made exclusively for toddlers, who tend to frequently get obsessed with consuming anything-and-everything related to a given franchise. I don't feel bad that they're not well-made; nobody could keep pumping good pieces of media out at the rate an obsessive toddler will want to consume them.

My obsessive toddlers would watch the quality stuff over and over again. They didn't need the filler.

Final Fantasy's name is even indicative of that last-ditch artisanship...

> [Sakaguchi's] employer Square refused to give him permission [to make an RPG] as it expected low sales of such a product

> ...the title was later changed to Final Fantasy as the game was thought to be the company's final project under the threat of bankruptcy. Sakaguchi also explained that the new title stemmed from his personal situation: had the game not sold well, he would have quit the games industry and gone back to university.

A bit editorialized on my part, but still.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_%28video_game%29...

Your point is valid, though perhaps misapplied in this case due to nostalgia-tinted glasses. FFV is a tremendously fun game, but I don't think it's accurate to say it received artisan-level craftsmanship. I don't think it was a transparent money grab the way the HD remake is, but compared to the ones that came before and after, it's...kind of the Godfather 3 of the SNES era. Plenty good on its own, but heavily overshadowed by the others bearing its name.

Maybe, but anecdotally, I saw the FFV remake on steam, and I'm the target audience and have bought a number of versions of various Final Fantasy games and remakes. However, I didn't buy the FFV remake because it looked horrible versus the standard def version.

Didn't FFV already get an amazingly well done remake on the DS? Or was it FFIV?

FFIV had a remake with poor 3D graphics on DS. It later had a remake with excellent 2D graphics on PSP.

shame on you! the 3d remake is amazing - pixels are a good thing when you do it right.