Dumbing down games

Ever since Call of Duty 4 came out and sold eleventy bajillion copies, numerous big game developers have been dumbing down their games, under the guise of making them accessible.

The biggest victims of this are two franchises that are no where near the shooter genre: Final Fantasy and Resident Evil. For the past 4 years, fans of Final Fantasy have been plagued with the cancer known as Lightning. The most cynically designed video game character of all time. She was literally designed to be Cloud Strife Maximum Waifu Impact.

Anyway, Square Enix (particularly their Japanese division) has been making horrible attempts to appeal to a worldwide audience, but failing to appeal to anyone. The Final Fantasy XIII Trilogy of Errors is proof of that. Squenix tried to go for the Call of Duty audience, failing to realize that very few Red Bull chugging dudebros play JRPGs.

Resident Evil's shift from survival horror to action horror to horror shooter to shooter is because of that as well. Unfortunately, it's spiritual successor, The Evil Within, suffers from a similar set of problems. Although it was advertised as the return of real survival horror, it is little more than a slow paced shooter with limited ammo and jump scares.