but im thinking of today, and today, it doesnt feel like the two share that same level of prestige anymore. final fantasy is still obviously a big, major, and loved franchise, but it feels like it lost a lot of its stature from the ps1 days. meanwhile Zelda seems to be an even bigger deal now than it has ever been before.
its even weirder because Zelda is actually much rarer with game releases, but final fantasy has multiple major releases so you would think that final fantasy should be able to stay top of mind easier than something that shows up like once every eight years.
Part of it is good curation on Nintendo's side of things against milking on the Square-Enix side. If you look for spinoffs they're few and far between and always have good quality.
Now, if you release a sub-par game you might get sales, but it'll hurt your future games in the franchise sales too.
On top of it all, Zelda has staples that are congruent and still kept in as homage; Final Fantasy does this obligatory homages mostly to moogles, cactuar, chocobos, tonberry, malboro and summons, but it mostly really doesn't know what to do with them. They essentially don't make the game any better, it doesn't feel more congruent for having them, quite the opposite in some cases.
Then there's the "change the subject before it's a sore point" kind of attitude. Nintendo tries to not do the same thing more than 2/3 times (or at least if it does, it tries to space releases quite far between). This means they effectively avoid being criticized for being repetitive by being ahead of the curve or at least get credit for trying to do something with that game that advances the franchises. So even if it fails, they tried something.
Final Fantasy doesn't do that, the closest Zelda game to the Final Fantasy process is Twilight Princess, both a massive hollow tribute, unengaging pacing and... Realism, just because. (which makes some tributes weird/forced)
Even Zelda downs aren't comparable to FF. There hasn't been a good FF since X
FFX should be considered Shadow the Hedgehog level of a game for the franchise had they popped up something like FFIV, V, VI, VII or IX afterwards.
FFXII had the potential to be great and a good direction to go for the franchise.
BOTW and TOTK merely just PS360 level of visual. it is would be interesting as what gonna happened if they develop PS5/XSX level of game right now.
I disagree. Breath of the Wild doesn't feel like a PS360 game graphically, it feels like a PS4/Xbox One demake done with care.
Remember PS360 games were very subdued when it came to colors, they also relied a lot on CPU which would make stuff like the way the game renders grass very intensive for the hardware, as well as the particle system, etc. Lightning model is also way better than what PS360 could muster. The world is also obviously humungous and interactive at that.
Even with all this, the game often runs at 648-720p on the Wii U and 810-900p on the switch, it would have to be scaled down further to run on those systems.
BoTW is a game done on PS360 floating point ballpark, with hardware features being closer to PS4 than closer to them. One of the few games that taps into that successfully (which on the Wii U meant avoiding alpha like the plague as much as possible)