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Feature: Sphear of influences
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a ragtag group of orphans wake up one day and decide to slay some monsters, as all small-town gangs are wont to do. This is the opening of Lost Sphear. After bonking some bunny-mutants to death in a nearby field, they discover that their idyllic hometown has blinked out of existence, replaced by a gaping white void.…
If you fancy JRPG action in a retro way, here's Lost Sphear out today. It's the second RPG from Square Enix's Tokyo RPG Factory, the studio behind I Am Setsuna, and it too riffs on ye olde JRPGs. I won't pretend to be well-acquainted with the genre but: yes, JRPG stuff. We do have a review coming from someone who actually knows a gad dang…
Tokyo RPG Factory, Square Enix's glamorously-named retro RPG studio behind 2016's I Am Setsuna, have announced their next game. Lost Sphear [official site] will be another throwback JRPG with some modern stylings, this time telling the tale of a lad trying to stop his world from vanishing. Squeenix say Lost Sphear is "expanding upon the beloved features" from I Am Satsuna, rather than being a…
Feature: Best left in the past?
I Am Setsuna is an attempt by Square Enix and Tokyo RPG Factory to recapture the glory days of the JRPG. From the mournful piano overlaying the title screen to the world map where your character stands tall like a rampaging kaiju next to a diorama village, it aims to intoxicate you with nuclear-grade nostalgia – but does it live up to their legacy or…
Feature: Hands on with Square's throwback RPG
Due on English-speaking shores this summer, Tokyo RPG Factory's I Am Setsuna is a charming throwback experience with one of the bleakest storylines I've come across. It takes place in a kingdom beset by monsters - if that's really the right word for the excitable penguins and shellfish you'll battle early on - who must be periodically appeased with a human sacrifice. The titular Setsuna…
Square Enix is getting back to their '90s JRPG roots with I Am Setsuna [official site], and its latest trailer is a somber look into the frozen world where a young girl has to make a pretty terrible sacrifice.
Against the welcomed deluge of classic Japanese games that've landed on western PCs recently, you'd be forgiven for assuming I Am Setsuna [official site] was another rejigged and repackaged oldie. It's not, though, and is in fact the work of Square Enix's Tokyo RPG Factory studio, a team who are inspired by the JRPG classics of yesteryear. I Am Setsuna is a throwback to those…
Sounds like we were just talking about nostalgia, and here we are again: Square Enix has opened an entire studio, tellingly named "Tokyo RPG Factory," to work on new titles "inspired by the golden era of Japanese role-playing games" like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. Their first work, I Am Setsuna (Ikenie to Yuki no Setsuna in Japanese) [official site] was released in Japan in…
