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(Japan loves Dragon Quest III.)Īnd while Square Enix doesn’t have the resources to commit to large-scale redos of all its games, Romancing SaGa 2, 3, and Frontier have all received commendable remasters in recent years, as has Legend of Mana. And Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is receiving the same treatment, albeit for more obvious reasons. Square Enix didn’t have to roll out the red carpet for a game it has barely touched in the nearly three decades since its Japanese release. The best evidence for this is the HD-2D remaster of Live A Live, which is being published by Nintendo, receiving a physical release (with a board game in Japan), and being priced at $49.99, meaning that Square Enix views this as a high-profile project on the level of Octopath Traveler. This has since become the new normal for these retro-modern hybrids.

It has gone on to sell more than 2.5 million units since launch - and Triangle Strategy seems poised to replicate this success.įrom a PR perspective, Square Enix treated Trials of Mana and Octopath Traveler as if they were on at least vaguely similar footing with huge games like Final Fantasy VII Remake and Dragon Quest XI. The gameplay, meanwhile, takes some DNA from SaGa and Bravely Default, while also innovating a bit with character-specific adventure actions, such as challenging NPCs to a duel. It takes rich, PlayStation 1-like pixel art and a Final Fantasy VI-ish color palette and enhances it with Square’s proprietary HD-2D lightning and visual effects.

(And for good measure, the original game is playable too in Collection of Mana.)Ĭonversely, Octopath Traveler is a completely new franchise, but it feels retro. Square Enix chose to dedicate real budget, design sensibility, and PR to remaking this game, and the result is a definitively modern game that has surpassed 1 million units sold.

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And it didn’t need to be a dramatic upgrade over what was done with the Secret of Mana remake, but it is. The Trials of Mana remake didn’t need to exist, but it does. But to me, the games that demonstrate how Square Enix has fully embraced both its past and its future are the Trials of Mana remake and Octopath Traveler. There is also Final Fantasy XIV Online, the hottest MMO on the market that regularly draws from franchise history while crafting new, celebrated stories. Obviously, the most extreme example is Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is simultaneously a remake of a beloved classic and also the biggest modern blockbuster in the Square Enix library. In the past few years though, that has changed. However, something most of these projects had in common was that they felt like “something extra” in the Square Enix catalogue as opposed to “the next thing.” There’s a reason most of the games I just described were not console releases, for instance.

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Square Enix has always made small efforts here and there to do things with its back catalogue, with varying degrees of success - Final Fantasy IV: The After Years on Wii, The 3 rd Birthday and Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions on Sony PSP, the many Dragon Quest Nintendo DS / 3DS ports, the somewhat subdued Secret of Mana remake, the hideous Final Fantasy mobile ports that preceded the Pixel Remaster series - the list goes on. Fans expect companies to treat their classic IPs with proper reverence and also to make their back catalogues available on modern platforms. But in the past decade, with the rising prominence of digital media, there is also an expectation that game developers must respect their past. Game developers must always be looking forward to the future, attempting to innovate and provide fresh experiences, lest their games become stale and irrelevant. Right now, long-lived game developers and publishers have the weird task of looking both forward and backward. Taken altogether, it feels like Square Enix has entered a new golden age, where it has fully embraced both the retro and modern ends of its game catalogue.īridging the retro and modern catalogues with Square Enix There is just as much “modern” content coming, especially on PlayStation.

That’s a monstrous amount of content for one company at a different company’s event, yet it only even covers the “retro” portion of Square’s catalogue. That’s because Square Enix revealed Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition, the first-ever official English release of Live A Live, Front Mission 1st: Remake and Front Mission 2: Remake, and a new demo for Triangle Strategy, in addition to reiterating that Kingdom Hearts Integrum Masterpiece is now here. Some people have already joked that the FebruNintendo Direct was actually a Square Enix Direct.

Front mission 2 demo