Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 and Harvestella Lead an Attack of Square Enix' Fall Games

The video game industry is in a product drought. After a rough summer, we’re dealing with a meager release schedule through fall and toward the end of the year, featuring some of the big titles and platform exclusives that usually grace the season. By all accounts, late 2022 is a quiet time for video games.

But no one told Square Enix.

The venerable Japanese publisher has a stacked release schedule. Between mid-September and mid-December, it releases no fewer than nine games – and a whopping 12, if you’re using the PC version of Triangle strategythe life is strange Arcadia Bay Collection on Switch, and the weird mobile compendium remake thing Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisiswhich should go into beta testing this year.

There are no mass releases in this lineup, but quite a few remakes and reissues, as well as some lesser spin-offs and genre experiments. But you couldn’t call it modest either; there’s ambition and breadth here, as well as a daunting, exhausting length – most of these games offer some sort of variation on a JRPG template and aren’t shy of slow build-up or expansive play times.

Together, the games paint a picture of a publisher abandoning its bid to be a global monolith, after selling its Western studios and properties such as Deus Ex and Tomb Raider to Embracer Group, and embracing its Japanese identity as it shakes a wave. of anime popularity and a tidal wave of JRPG content on Switch and Steam. Not too long ago, many of these games wouldn’t have made it to the West at all, let alone seen day-to-date worldwide releases.

At a recent event in London, decorated with fake cherry trees and a counter of Japanese snacks, Square Enix made this lineup available to play, with a few exceptions: a deep remaster of Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song and a more highly anticipated remake of a classic tactical RPG, Tactic Ogre: Reborn. While JRPGs are eminently suitable for sampling in half-hour demos on a show floor, I’ve tried most of them. This is what I found.

The DioField Chronicle

Image: Lancarse/Square Enix

Perhaps the most interesting genre experiment Square Enix had to show, The DioField Chronicle takes the traditional tactical RPG format, exemplified by: Tactic Ogre and removes the movement grid and turn-based action, leaving a game more like a single player League of Legends or a leaner, hero-focused real-time strategy game. It’s busy in a good way, but the stories are told calmly and the mission hub seems to be made on a shoestring budget. I took a closer look at it from last month’s demo.

The DioField Chronicle is available now for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X.

Valkyrie Elysium

Image: Soleil/Square Enix

Probably the most enjoyable game in demo form, Valkyrie Elysium is a loose successor to the Valkyrie Profile series – loose because it turns the Norse mythology-inspired yarn of a hybrid platformer RPG into an action RPG with a firm emphasis on fluid, Bayonetta-esque action. The name of the game keeps your valkyrie’s combo strings alive as you summon einherjar – spirits of dead warriors waiting for Ragnarok – to aid you and exploit enemies’ elemental weaknesses. It’s a sparse production full of empty landscapes, but it plays well where it counts.

Valkyrie Elysium will be released on September 29 on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, with a Windows PC version on November 11.

Nier: Automata – The End of YoRHa Edition

Image: PlatinumGames/Square Enix

Arguably the best game in this plethora of releases, but also the most well-known amount, is this Switch release of Yoko Taro and Platinum’s 2017 cult hit. Just having the game in portable form is a joy, and this edition leans hard on fans of the game with exclusive costumes and a complete approach to content.

Nier: Automata – The End of YoRHa Edition will be released October 6 on Nintendo Switch.

Star Ocean: The Divine Power

Image: Tri-Ace/Square Enix

Less a reboot than Valkyrie Elysium, the sixth Star Ocean game, exists on a continuum with all its predecessors – and shares the same developer, tri-Ace. It continues the steady drift of the sci-fi RPG series into the action area, with large, open environments to explore and plenty of elevation changes to boot. There’s a gimmick, and a pretty good one: DUMA, a floating droid that aids all four party members by bringing an aerial dimension to both exploration and combat. ‘Blindside’ surprise attacks and DUMA-powered Vanguard attacks put an intriguing emphasis on positioning in battle. The game is decent enough, too, but don’t look too hard at the motionless faces of the PS3 era, or listen too hard to the nonsense dialogue (“That’s just semiomancy!”)

Star Ocean: The Divine Power will be released on October 27 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X.

Harvestella

Image: Square Enix

In contrast to the subtle mix of styles of something like The DioField Chronicle, Harvestella takes the no-brainer, Frankenstein’s monstrous approach to genre mashup: What if we just screwed these two things together? Harvestella is a farm life sim at home and an action RPG abroad, linking the two game modes in obvious but satisfying ways (go to monster-infested fields to craft materials to craft equipment for your farm, etc.) Visually, it’s surprisingly lush, and narratively, it’s surprisingly dense. In Harvestellaworld, the natural cycle of the four seasons is interrupted by a time of death known as Quietus, caused by dust from the Seaslight, a huge, undulating crystal that dominates the landscape. Artificial beings known as Omen are involved in some way as well. The main character is an amnesiac who is in the middle of it.

Harvestella doesn’t seem like a very sophisticated example of either genre, but it just works – the two flavors go together like salt and caramel. It seems like a good bet to stand out from the current wave of farming sims.

Harvestella will be released on November 4 for Nintendo Switch and Windows PC.

Dragon Quest Treasures

Image: Tose/Square Enix

I’m a bit hesitant to pass judgment on a short demo of a lite JRPG that clearly makes an effort to introduce itself to young players slowly – but Dragon Quest Treasures does not seem to meet the standard of Dragon Quest 11 (to which it is an apparent prequel, about Erik and Mia’s childhood) or the very charming Dragon Quest Builders and the sequel. Developed by outsourcing specialist Tose, it comes across as a leaden and charmless attempt to conjure up a colorful, treasure-hunting adventure for all ages from the fringes of Dragon Quest lore. It suffers from the worst examples of symptoms that, to varying degrees, affected all games here: piles of explanatory text, jarring transitions between story and gameplay, and a stuttering lack of momentum. Maybe it will get better later?

Dragon Quest Treasures will be released on Nintendo Switch on December 9.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion

Image: Tose/Square Enix

With its Final Fantasy branding and, judging by its slick presentation, relatively lavish budget, this is probably Square Enix’s biggest bet of the season. But it’s also one of the strangest. Like a remake of a 2007 PlayStation Portable game – a prequel to Final Fantasy 7 from the perspective of a SOLDIER agent – it varnishes its humble origins with slick graphics, handsome character models and full voice acting. But structurally it cannot disguise its origin at all. It’s still a narrow, scripted action RPG set in tight environments; there’s a fade out and a jump into a battle arena every time you go into combat, and the pre-rendered video sequences are noticeably lo-fi. In that sense it is very dated. But in the context of 2007, the combat itself was ahead of its time – at least within the Final Fantasy series, in the way it puts the player in immediate command of so many iconic spells and abilities in a free-flowing and well-sorted action game. It’s the past and future of Final Fantasy in one contradictory package.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion will be released on December 13 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X.

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Such an extraordinary accumulation of releases from one publisher could just be a scheduling accident. It could be a publisher reaffirming and redefining its identity after the sale of its western branch. Or, in the same circumstances, it could be proof that Square Enix is ​​filling its global schedule with what would once have been niche products, just for Japan, now that it has nothing else to offer.

None of that is as important to the future of Square Enix as major releases in 2023 like pronounced and Final Fantasy 16 will be. But it does show that a publisher is doing something that many rivals, especially western rivals, are currently not doing. Releasing and remastering past hits to keep brands alive isn’t uncommon, but making that many small bets – as opposed to one or two huge ones – sure is. Square Enix gives both external and internal development teams modest budgets for a wide variety of different purposes, such as experimentation and the creation of original new properties (Harvestella and DioField), brand extension (Dragon Quest Treasures), maintenance of long-running mid-tier series (Stars Ocean) or reviving dormant (Valkyrie Elysium).

It’s no surprise that the original experiments are the most engaging games here, but the bigger picture is that of a publisher willing to keep small but avid fan bases happy. The lesson of the slow success of Capcom’s Monster Hunter and Sega’s Like a Dragon (aka Yakuza) is that it can pay off in the long run. And in the short term? Thanks to Square Enix, at least we’ll have something to play this winter.