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Remembering Squaresoft

Yes, I know this company still exists today as Square-Enix, but outside of a handful of games, I’ve never much cared for this particular manifestation of it. For me, it was all about the Squaresoft years. It was a time when the Final Fantasy series felt a bit more earnest. Developers there were also a lot more willing and able to experiment with the games they made (especially during the mid to late 1990s). Between the games the studio was making and the image they projected, it felt like a golden age for Japanese RPGs. Now they are largely a Final Fantasy factory wrapped in the taint of typical AAA corporate gaming, which I find a bit off putting (as an aside, I do enjoy Final Fantasy XIV, but other than that modern FF has thus far failed to appeal to me).

My first exposure to Squaresoft was in the late 80s in the run up to the original Final Fantasy coming out. I was just starting to get into RPGs. Most of my experience with the genre up to then was playing Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on my dad’s Apple IIe, as well as the first Dragon Warrior game. It wasn’t much, but I got hooked on levelling up characters, making them stronger, while exploring dungeons and finding treasure. After seeing Final Fantasy, I was thoroughly impressed by the graphics, and it looked like a really big world to explore. Sure, it’s a simple game by today’s standards, but in 1989 it came across as kind of ambitious for the time.

Anyway, I eventually played it and got hooked. From then on, I was constantly keeping an eye out for new stuff from Squaresoft. For a while, this basically meant new Final Fantasy games, because that’s about all that they were releasing from their library in North America. This was fine, though, because the games in the series that made their way here were still quite good. It was a tad frustrating seeing what stayed in Japan, though, because they looked quite good (and many of them were as I learned from playing fan translated ROMs of them years later).

When the original PlayStation came along, Squaresoft was really trying to spread their wings. The company was doing quite well for itself and suddenly started taking a lot more chances. A ton of new RPG series were born like Xenogears, Vagrant Story, and Brave Fencer Musashi. Square were even dipping their toe into new genres with varying degrees of success. They released a couple of racers with Racing Lagoon on the PlayStation, and later Driving Emotion Type-S on the PS2 (I always loved how out there the names for their racing games were). Meanwhile, they were also experimenting with the beat ‘em up genre via their Tobal games, Ehrgeiz, and The Bouncer. Square even made a pretty good shoot ‘em up with Einhander. While Squaresoft didn’t exactly redefine genres with these games, they did create some very enjoyable, memorable experiences.

The company enjoyed quite a lot of success during this time, and it seemed like they could do no wrong. Unfortunately, hubris got the better of them and they eventually released a CG Final Fantasy movie that cost a fortune to make, but was ultimately a flop. It was so bad that it almost forced Squaresoft out of business. The only thing that saved them was a merger with Enix, giving us the Square-Enix we have today. Since then, the company has been very gun shy about experimenting like this again. It has stuck with safe, big name games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. These games do respectably well. Between these and their mobile games, the company has a fairly secure level of revenue and just chugs along now.

It’s just disappointing that we’ll never get another exciting, creative window of game releases like we saw in the late 1990s. That was lightning in a bottle and it’s never coming back. Square-Enix is much more risk averse now and most of the people responsible for the games of that time have moved on or retired. I’ll regularly revisit these games, but it’s all a tad bittersweet to thing that Square will never take chances like this again.

Screenshots

I haven’t done this before, but I wanted to try adding a small gallery in this article. I want to try adding visual references even though images aren’t really a thing in Gemini space. If anyone happens upon this article after I cast it into the either, let me know what you think of adding images in Gemini posts.

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Vagrant Story (PlayStation)

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Einhander (PlayStation)

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Treasure of the Rudras (SNES)

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Bahamut Lagoon (SNES)

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The Bouncer (PlayStation 2)

Pennywhether

pennywhether@posteo.net

September 2, 2021