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Today, the first (and last) DLC for Spiders’ swashbuckling fantasy RPG, Greedfall: The Dying World, a sequel to the multi-million seller Greedfall, was finally released.

Unfortunately, this free expansion ended up being a posthumous celebration of sorts, given its talented French developer was terminated in late April after its parent company, publisher Nacon, filed for insolvency back in February, being refused further funding meant to address a mounting bond repayment default of over 40 million EU.

Spiders’ untimely demise, as anyone invested in videogame RPG history sadly knows, is just the last chapter in a long series of talented developers sank by poorly thought-out acquisitions from large publishers or conglomerates with no actual interest, dedication or resources, to further develop their IPs, often jettisoning the teams they bought just a few years before as a reaction to financial or market issues unrelated to their work or, in other instances, due to unrealistic expectations or mismanagement choices that set up said teams for failure.

-ACQUIRING WITHOUT CARING

Far from being limited to struggling publishers like Nacon, RPG history also offers plenty of examples of thriving parent companies that simply stopped caring about the RPG IPs they managed to acquire, to the point of destroying what were once landmark franchises that shaped RPG history.

In fact, this phenomenon can be traced back to some of the very first major Western RPG series, and it partly explains why some of them have been mostly forgotten over the decades despite the critical role they played in shaping up the identity of early CRPGs.

Let’s consider Origin System’s Ultima franchise, for instance, which ended up being utterly abandoned outside of its Online MMORPG spinoff just a few years after Origin became an Electronic Arts subsidiary, after Ultima IX’s disappointing launch caused its developer to be dramatically downsized and then closed off, with Electronic Arts not even bothering with any significant porting, remaster or remake effort aside from the bare minimum of preservation efforts on platforms such as GoG (which, of course, is still quite welcome).

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A similar scenario played out with New World Computing’s Might and Magic, another storied early WRPG franchise which ended up being mostly forgotten by its new owner, Ubisoft, making most of its older entries an unknown quantity for most WRPG fans who weren’t active back when they were released.

Compared with EA’s treatment of Ultima, at least Ubisoft did end up making a single attempt to bring back the series, not to mention how they allowed Arkane’s Raphael Colantonio to experiment with this IP by creating Dark Messiah and how Might and Magic’s spinoff tactical franchise, Heroes of Might and Magic, is still thriving and has recently been brought back with great results with Olden Era, developed in a partnership with Unfrozen and Hooded Horse.

Yet another seminal RPG franchise, Wizardry, has been a victim of ownership woes since the fall of Sir Tech after Wizardry 8’s release, with the main series ending up dormant for decades, even if a complex web of licenses allowed a variety of Japanese developers to create countless spinoff (mostly unlocalized, sadly) over the last two decades. Then again, the latest news from a few days ago, with Atari and Japanese Drecom splitting the IP’s ownership, doesn’t exactly exude confidence about its future, either.

-EMBRACING DISASTER

There are, of course, much more recent examples, like Arkane Studios, the Austin-based spin-off of the abovementioned French team Arkane behind the Dishonored franchise that ended up being closed down by Microsoft after their Zenimax acquisition, much to the chagrin of legendary Dark Messiah and Dishonored creator Colantonio, not to mention the closure of storied German developer Piranha Bytes, the team that shaped a generation of European CRPG fans and popularized Eurojank RPGs with their Gothic, Risen and Elex franchises, which happened due in no small part to Embracer’s own woes, from overextension to financial miscalculations, with many teams they acquired during their acquisition spree paying the price.

Japanese RPGs aren’t immune to such situations, either, even if Japan’s different normative and corporate situation means the phenomenon we discussed so far has more to do with ignoring vintage IPs long after their developers’ demise in this context, rather than acquiring said teams and closing them down as was often the case in Europe and North America.

We can see this sort of IP forgetfulness, for instance, with Square Enix mostly ignoring Quintet’s Enix-published lineup in the decades after the merge between Squaresoft and old Enix (when, unknown even to most of its fanbase, Quintet kept existing as a downsized outsourcing outlet working on series like Gust’s Atelier and Ar Tonelico), or Lufia after the Taito acquisition, for instance, but there are also more impactful situation involving foreign players, like when Chinese Net Ease tried building up Japanese teams between 2020 and 2022 only to abandon them a few years later, like with Visions of Mana developer Ouka’s Tokyo studio, which ended up being disbanded right after that game’s release, or Yakuza creator Nagoshi’s new team, which also risks being shut down without even releasing its Gang of Dragon given NetEase’s sudden change of plans amid an industry-wide reassessment of the bold expansion plans introduced right after the Pandemic boom.

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-NACON WAR LOGS

Then again, getting back to Spiders, the impact of Nacon’s demise is one of a kind even when compared with the sad examples I just mentioned, since it could end up having a severe impact not just on a single developer, but on the French videogame industry at large and, more specifically, on that French RPG development scene I celebrated just one year ago, discussing its long and diverse history right when Clair Obscur’s success was bringing it to the map for many who never had a chance to explore that country’s output.

Spiders, for instance, was one of the major Western-style French RPG developers born after the Dot Com financial crisis destroyed part of France’s old, pre-’00s videogame industry. Its leader, game designer, writer and director, the talented Jehanne Rousseau, worked first on Monte Cristo’s SilverFall, with its peculiar cel-shaded aesthetic marking its French roots compared with many other Western contemporary efforts, before founding her own independent studio, Spiders, and working on a number of interesting titles like the sci-fi duology formed by the bite-sized Mars War Logs and by the more ambitious, if janky, Technomancer, and finally finding success with Greedfall’s dark fantasy Age of Discovery epic, which I particularly appreciated not just for its fresh setting, but also for how imaginative many of its factions managed to be compared with one could expect from a setting such as this.

Years before Clair Obscur’s success, Greedfall’s rather impressive sales were an Hail Mary of sorts for France’s RPG developers, with Jehanne Rousseu also being awarded the National Order of Merit by the French government in 2022. As I discussed elsewhere, this event was quite poignant, with French videogame legend Muriel Tramis, the developer behind the early French-Martinican Creole adventure, Mewilo, being chosen to award Spiders’ leader, forging an inspiring connection between two very different (and yet subtly connected, given Greedfall’s colonial commentary) moments in French videogame history.

Despite her personal relevance, a few years after Nacon acquired Spiders, in late 2024 Rousseau stepped down from her role as CEO, while continuing to work as writer and creative overseer on Greedfall II and an unknown project that, sadly, will likely never see the light, a development which, in hindsight, likely foreshadowed Spiders’ upcoming woes.

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Alongside Spiders, another French RPG-focused Nacon subsidiary, Cyanide, known for smaller efforts like the one and only Game of Thrones RPG, released before the serial made that series wildly popular, not to mention Aarklash, Call of Cthulhu and plenty of Games Workshop-licensed titles, also filed for insolvence, and Japanese-style developer Midgar Studio could also be affected depending on the performance of their Edge of Memories, their sequel to 2021’s Edge of Eternity which is projected for a late 2026 release.

Even outside France, Nacon-owned Daedalic, the German developer behind many graphical adventures and the Blackguard tactical RPG series, was already impacted long before the current crisis, with its creative staff dramatically downsized after the failure of their Gollum, whose development was noticeably low budget and affected by the lack of personnel to begin with.

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-ALLEGATIONS AND TRIBULATIONS

Considering how in late April French union Le Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) accused Nacon of premeditating Spiders’ closure long before the latest developments, one could theorize Greedfall II’s development woes, shared by a number of other projects helmed by this publisher (including those developed by independent teams, like with Frogwares’ issues in dealing with Nacon for their Sinking City, resulting in a legal dispute and with Frogwares re-releasing the game by self-publishing it later on), had more to do with the attempt to release it while downsizing Spiders before shutting it down, rather than being a good faith attempt at balancing available resources with the intent of finding a buyer for the team by leveraging on the game’s success, even if those issues are still pending a proper investigation and it’s likely Spiders’ internal tensions also played a role.

Then again, STJV’s allegations actually went even deeper than this, accusing Nacon of a long-term lack of strategic and financial planning in the way they administered their subsidiaries, directly contributing to the overall crisis of their own brand to the point of de facto sabotaging their subsidiaries.

While reasoning with hypotheticals is always a minefield for those invested in historical research, especially with this whole situation being still very much ongoing, those allegations and the history of the involved subsidiaries before their acquistion do give the impression that those teams which, aside from the green Midgar Studio, had managed to stay afloat for almost two decades, could have been able to survive longer than this by properly budgeting their development efforts and autonomously securing venture capitals and a variety of public (with France having a favorable disposition in this regard since the Raffarin administration’s attempts to help the struggling ppst Dot Com videogame industry) and private funding venues or loans if they hadn’t been subjected to Nacon’s policies.

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-FALL FROM GREED

In fact, Greedfall II’s own development was apparently impacted in a rather dramatic fashion by Nacon’s circumstances and, while I haven’t found any proof they directly influenced Spiders’ creative process more than it’s already the norm in a publisher-developer relationship and some controversial design choices seemingly originated within Spiders itself, one can imagine the lack of resources and budget allotted to the project did impact the game in a pretty major way, including widespread lamentations by Spiders’ workforce in August 2024, leading to an open letter signed by half the company leading up to a strike and, less than one year later, a wave of layoffs in mid 2025 affecting 25 positions in a variety of ways (which led the remaining workers to protest those cuts and the studio’s overall mismanagement during a July 24 strike), which likely contributed to its poor reception and, in turn, to Spiders not being able to secure their own survival soon after due to hit to their reputation and marketability.

With Greedfall The Dying World’s release being far from the success enjoyed by its predecessor, one can indeed say this situation has likely squandered a RPG IP with lots of potential, which Jehanne Rousseau and her team could have likely developed much better on their own by playing into the economy of scale and asset recycling that many AA RPG series manage to achieve over the years when they’re allowed to steadily release games on their own terms without trying to reinvent the wheel every time, with Sega’s Yakuza and Nihon Falcom’s Trails as some of the most glaring examples, albeit with the crucial difference of being developed by teams that enjoy much more freedom in handling their franchises, and that isn’t even considering Sega’s size.

The fact Greedfall could count on just a single success and still hadn’t proven itself in the long run, on the other hand, was likely another major reason behind the lack of buyers when Nacon tried to market Spiders before its shutdown.

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-STRUGGLING WITH AUTONOMY

The sadness I feel in witnessing the demise of so many talented developers and of their companies and IPs, of course, could be partially offset by the new teams they could end up creating, hopefully managing to preserve their independence as much as possible.

As it’s obvious, though, this is often not an available option, especially in a market as precarious as this, nor do all the team lead have the same personal resources and connections that allowed a company like Sandfall, France’s biggest RPG success story, to secure the resources to develop Clair Obscur while preserving both their IP ownership and creative decisions.

In this regard, my thoughts also go to another French company, Streum On Studios, the developer behind the wildly bizarre EYE Divine Cybermancy, which ended up being acquired for a time by Focus Entertainment but later managed to restore their indepence by buying back their shares while also working on the prequel to EYE itself, breaking with a recent trend of licensed games which made up most of their work during their years as a Focus subsidiary.

Sadly, in an industry where AA developers often end up paying the price for their parent companies’ mistakes, few teams are in the position to protect themselves, their workers and their creations from mismanagement and, as it’s often the case, it’s hard to imagine a lasting, encompassing solution to those kind of situations in the normative landscape shared by most Western countries.

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Developer: Prime Games
Publisher: Prime Games
Director: Victor Atanasov
Composer: Cameron MacMillan
Source material and original writers: Dave Morris and Yve Newnham (White Dwarf version), David Morris and Jamie Thomson (Fabled Lands setting), Dave Morris and Paul Gresty (Castle of Lost Souls’ Fabled Lands retelling)
Genre: Gamebook RPG with turn based tactical combat
Progression: A self-contained adventure in the context of Fabled Lands’ huge sandbox
Developer’s Country: Bulgaria (UK for the original gamebooks)
Platform: PC
Release date: 27\11\2025 (Castle of Lost Souls DLC)
Status: Completed on 29\4\2026

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Among gamebooks of old, the unique solo RPG adventures that turned the reader into each story’s protagonist by having them engage with their systems while jumping from paragraphs to early deaths, few have an history as intricate and interesting as Castle of Lost Souls, with a number of changes, retellings and reframing attempts across the analog and digital space spanning more than four decades.

Our tale starts in quite an unconventional way, on the British White Dwarf magazine. While this storied publication has been known in the past three decades as the main marketing outlet for Games Workshop’s line of wargames and boardgames, from the likes of Warhammer Fantasy and 40.000 to Mordheim, Gorka Morka or Kill Team, back in the mid ‘80s this magazine was much more eclectic, covering a variety of tabletop RPGs and even dabbling in gamebook contents.

After all, two of Games Workshop’s co-founders, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, were the foremost champions of gamebooks in the United Kingdom, having understood the potential of those unique, solo-RPG experiences after witnessing the success of the first line of Choose Your Own Adventure books, originally envisioned in the United States by Edward Burtt Packard for Bantam in the late ‘70s.

Livingstone and Jackson’s take on this budding subgenre, the Fighting Fantasy series they started in 1982, was itself a smashing success, opening the gates for a number of other efforts like Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf that developed their own unique identity compared to American CYOA books, both in terms of systems and art direction (thanks to artists such Gary Chalk, Russ Nicholson, Chris Achilleos or Bruno Elettori), managing to take even continental Europe by storm, with a strong following still existing in countries such as France, Germany and my own Italy, where gamebooks also influenced local videogame RPG efforts, like with Profezia and, more recently, Lone Wolf’s own Italo-British adaptation or 49 Keys.

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-WHITE DWARVES AND GOLDEN DRAGONS

It is because of this connection that Livingstone, acting as White Dwarf’s director, tasked a young writer and tabletop RPG designer, Dave Morris, to work on an episodic gamebook that ended up being published in four issues in mid 1984, which will constitute the first version of the quest against arch-demon Slank in the Castle of Lost Souls. Morris, an Oxford Physics graduate, crafted this adventure alongside his girlfriend Yve Newnham without imagining he would later become a veritable gamebook legend thanks to titles like the Golden Dragon series, Heart of Ice and the unique Fabled Lands series, where each book acts as a regional module allowing the player to freely roam a sandbox world rather than pursuing discrete adventures.

The fact that Castle of Lost Souls was setting-agnostic allowed the adventure to be easily repurposed as a full-fledged gamebook released later on in 1986, as part of the abovementioned Golden Dragon line, albeit with a number of changes both in terms of narrative and systems and a cover art by the awesome Bruno Elettori. This re-issue provide to be quite successful, same as the other books in that series, with countless localizations touching even markets such as Japan.

The Castle’s demonic allure couldn’t be reined in with just a re-release, though: almost forty years later, in 2025, Morris and Paul Gresty, who co-authored the last major Fabled Lands book, adapted Castle of the Lost Souls as part of the Fabled Lands world in the spin-off Quest line, following suit to the Fabled Lands-ification of yet another storied gamebook a few years before, The Keep of the Lich Lord, originally released as part of the Fighting Fantasy line. While most Fabled Lands book, as mentioned, are meant to explore different regions in the same world, using a rich array of keywords to mark accomplishments and trigger new events, the Quest volumes do offer their own separate plotlines, which can be accessed while exploring and stumbling upon their related plot hooks.

With Fabled Lands having an ongoing videogame RPG adaptation I had a chance to discuss last year, licensed to the Bulgarian RPG studio Prime Games led by the passionate and talented Victor Atanasov (who also developed his own line of videogame gamebook RPGs), it’s no wonder Castle of the Lost Souls also ended up getting a quick digital makeover, being included as a paid DLC in Fabled Lands’ sword and sorcery sandbox tapestry.

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-A GAMEBOOK MONOMYTH

In its simplicity, Castle of Lost Souls’ quest structure is as archetypal as it’s timeless, which is something I feel defines pulp fantasy as a whole, contrasting a number of newer subgenres that have grown to monopolize the fantasy space in the past few decades and which, while being rooted in their own interesting and unique contexts, often end up reflecting those rather than trying to get back to Campbell’s monomyth and its building blocks.

Part of this charm is tied with the way worldbuilding is handled in sword and sorcery efforts, being vague enough to let the reader fill in the gaps with their own imagination, reaching out for those shared tropes in a way that makes the story feel theirs, while also being rooted enough that the journey’s start can have at least a semblance of believable normalcy, something to long for and also a contrast to the story’s later developments.

While repurposing Morris and Newnham’s story from a stand-alone effort to a part of the Fabled Lands setting could have ended up being quite a mess, even more so since Fabled Lands is built on a completely different vector compared with most gamebooks, the way the authors handled this is admirable, preserving this classic as its own discrete narrative unit the reader, or player in our own digital rendition, stumbles upon while exploring the kingdom of Golnir, itself a land of dark fairytales, ostentatious bravery and hidden treachery that is famously tricky to navigate due to its brutal random events.

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-THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SOUL

This quest starts out as a request from the affluent children of deceased Luther Faze (in the original version, it was a Greengosh family that tried to recruit a Champion for their mission), a man who quite literally sold his soul to the devil Slank, being forced into an otherworldly captivity in the Castle of Lost Souls.

His progeny’s request is to free their father’s soul from this torment, but that’s easier said than done given reaching the castle, let alone confronting Slank, requires a number of magical and not-so-magical items the hero will have to find on their own, questing both in the Faze family’s village of Lytton and in Golnir’s north-eastern reaches, slowly morphing into a different world as the player gradually approaches the Castle, guided by a pair of demonic boots of all things!, and enters into an alien, foreboding space inhabited by demons and mysterious creatures.

Indeed, this agonizing journey, which was the meat of its second part back when it was originally published on White Dwarf, offers as much as the Castle itself, with a number of ways to reach Slank’s domain that include misleading companions, plenty of red herrings and challenges the player can face in a variety of ways, with Sanctity, Scouting and Magic as the three skills that are most often called upon with dedicated checks.

Of course, combat is still something that will happen sooner or later, returning to Atanasov’s adaptation of the original Fabled Lands ruleset as a tactical RPG with simple hex-based arenas and an Action Point-based economy governing both movements, attacks and skills.

-DINING IN HELL

Upon entering the Castle, the player is regaled with a dedicated interface meant to streamline the exploration of this huge, multi-level dungeon made up of a number of different areas, a bit like Fabled Lands’ own attempt to visually reframe cities into their own screens in order to make them easier to navigate, while still offering discrete text blurbs depending on the player’s choices.

While this is undoubtedly visually appealing, and it does make navigating the Castle much easier, I often felt like it also made the experience a bit too streamlined, offering a clear depiction of a domain that I remembered for its indeterminate, shifting and chaotic quality. Even if this uniquely unsettling atmosphere is of course preserved by the in-game text, one ends up questioning if the choice to dedicate the Castle its own interface, which is unique compared to the way Fabled Lands’ digital adaptation handles its dungeons, was a poor fit on a thematic level, just as much as it could be a welcome one purely in terms of quality of life. Then again, it bears remembering that Atanasov’s digital retelling of Fabled Lands is still one of the most polished and well-thought gamebook videogame RPG adaptations regardless of some minor issues like this or its sprites’ art direction, even more so when compared with the way other developers repurposed Morris’ Heart of Ice or the Fighting Fantasy series.

Challenging Slank in the most favorable way requires having found all the items the player was initially tasked to search, without having wasted them in one of the encounters where they were positioned as potential answers to a contingent issue that could be solved otherwise. Even so, unlike more narrative-driven gamebooks like Italian Profezia, it’s also possible to defeat the demonic overlord by sheer might, even if that’s far from easy even when challenging the Castle with an adventurer that already gained plenty of ranks by traveling the Fabled Lands far and wide (my own Leopold had achieved Rank 9 before discovering the Fazes’ plight).

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-FABLED CHALLENGES

Indeed, the way Castle of Lost Souls is presented in Fabled Lands’ digital adaptation is as something akin to end-game content: while it’s conceivable to push through most of the challenges without having an overpowered character if one plays their cards in the best possible way and is lucky enough to trigger the right events during the trek to the demon realm, it sure helps to have a strong combat backup plan to fall back to, given how frequent and random setbacks can be, a trait Fabled Lands itself inherited from the golden age of gamebooks Castle of Lost Souls was born into. Even this series’ main failsafe, the resurrection deals the player can make at a variety of temples, can fall short in a variety of way during this adventure, since they tend to throw the player off the main path.

With that said, even the most well-traveled veteran will definitely find something useful during this quest, given its rewards include the game’s strongest armor, some of the most powerful weapons (though not the most powerful) and an incredibly useful pouch offering a sub-inventory, allowing the player yet another layer of comfort while collecting items in distant lands where they can’t visit a friendly city to access their stash.

This new and yet vintage trek into Golnir serves not just as a reminder of Castle of Lost Souls’ timeless charm, which doesn’t contrast with it also being part of a very recognizable moment in RPG history, but also as another opportunity for newcomers to give a chance to Atanasov’s own adaptation of Morris, Thomson and Gresty’s world, showcasing yet another time the link between different media in the wider RPG space.

This digital retelling of the one and only gamebook sandbox has kept improving since I last had a chance to cover it, introducing not just the usual bug fixes and small updates, but also a number of completely reworked system and the much-awaited option to start the adventure in any region, as allowed by the original Fabled Lands gamebooks, something that will make each playthrough even more diverse and exciting, bridging the gap with the original experience in yet another very relevant way.

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Quantity, as they say, can have a quality of its own, or at least that’s what I ended up thinking (rather self-indulgently, I admit) after I realized I had just published my hundredth long-form piece about videogame RPG history here on Substack.

When I started my publication one year and a half ago, the main tenet I wanted to adhere to was giving my own curiosity free rein, wildly jumping between different countries, platforms, subgenres, time periods and narrative, ludic and aesthetic design sensibilities not just because of an unbridled whim, but as an attempt to organically develop a sort of syncretistic RPG hermeneutic, so to speak, aimed at showing readers how you can find a common, archetypal thread linking obscure Japanese home PC space operas, Turkish artists influencing early German CRPGs, Korean enthusiasts building their own Grandia-inspired Gnostic hellscapes, Indonesian efforts striving to mix mecha jungle fights with their own national liberation struggle, American tabletop spin-offs daring to combine grand-strategy and dungeon crawling, Russian gamebooks musing about the nature of revolution and French adventure hybrids unveiling late 18th century alternate history conspiracies.

-A COMMON THREAD

Acknowledging this sort of RPG quidditas, I feel, is best done not by theorizing on some common design elements or by chiseling away some abstract, arbitrary and inevitably exclusionary definition, but by showing how all those different contexts build a common story, and a shared history, over decades of software development.

In this regard, I perceive RPGs more as a cultural umbrella comprising wildly different, often contradictory design spaces that still have a place in a cultural tapestry developed over decades, rather than the monolithic, compartimentalized subsets people normally consider when discussing videogame genres.

Ultimately, spotlighting the elusive thread linking the countless parts of videogame RPG history and bringing to light the links and crosspollinations between contexts that would initially seem completely separate is what I tried doing to the best of my limited abilities in every single piece I’ve written so far, each one detailing a small facet of a much larger whole.

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-WITHOUT LOVE, IT CANNOT BE SEEN

In turn, inevitably, I also wanted to convey my own very personal perspective in dealing with this rich and diverse topic, which ultimately is rooted in love: love for every human being who enriched videogame RPGs with their own unique takes, be it in terms of game design, asset creation, artworks, world building, scenario writing, official and fan-made localizations and even walkthroughs, love for how they all connect on an cultural, historical, archetypal and technological level, love for what they were able to achieve in bringing about countless virtual worlds that act as precious reflections of our own one, serving as a commentary on its nature, history and trends.

With this kind of mindset, I went into a sort of writing frenzy since the very beginning, immediately recapturing the same enthusiasm that allowed me to publish 20 to 30 pages per issue on the magazine I contributed to for seven years here in my own country, often reviewing titles that required dozens upon dozens of hours to complete and properly assess, or retrospectives I wrote to let our readers approach new franchises or subgenres rather than to titillate their nostalgia for something they already experienced, as is often the case.

As I mentioned in my very first piece here on this platform, writing about something you love soon becomes a new hobby in itself, distinct from the subject you discuss, and, since the magazine I wrote for ended up folding in 2017, I was glad to finally let my pent-up writing addiction have a proper outlet.

Also, the death of my late beloved Father hit me and my family just a week after starting out my Substack and, since we always shared a deep love for writing, history and a multi-disciplinary approach to our favorite topics, albeit in different fields, I felt devoting more time to this pursuit was a nice way to remember and celebrate him, with my own children asking me what exactly I was writing about and getting involved with a number of pieces, just as I did decades ago with him and his own articles.

-SUBSTACK IN A BUBBLE

It didn’t really matter that, for the first four months or so, I barely had a dozen subscribers to my name, nor that my pieces’ views could pass for a room temperature reading (and we measure it with Celsius degrees, here) or that, at first, I saw Substack as my own bubble, barely interacting with other users or caring to write Notes, initially envisioning them as a distraction to my long-form pursuits, not to mention suspiciously social network-ish (which they are, but still).

Blissfully unaware of how I was ignoring the basic tenets of this platform, I wrote, wrote and kept writing, and then suddenly an audience did materialize and, despite the hurdles afflicting gaming writers here on Substack, bereft of their own publishing category and forced to find their readers by chance or by the mercy of an uncaring algo, my readership kept growing in a way that keeps humbling me, despite those obviously being still rookie numbers compared to more accomplished and talented writers.

Aside from its platform-wide issues, though, Substack’s gaming community has proven to be so cohesive and positive that many of my readers have become recurring presences of sorts I individually think about while writing my pieces, making me feel like the audience here isn’t just an expression of some statistical interest from a faceless public I can’t really connect with, but the actual sum of hundreds of persons focused, for their own reasons and in their own ways, to explore videogame RPG history, some of which are accomplished writers, game drsigners or gaming historians.

-TO THE NEXT HUNDRED

God willing, I would love to continue serving this beautiful audience and pursuing this little quest of mine for as long as I can, possibly expanding it with a number of other columns I’ve been musing about, exploring peculiar physical media or the edition history of a given title or franchise, providing more specific deep dives into topics such as numismatics in RPG, outlining the evolution of a number of very specific subgenres or, again, expanding on the three-part history of French RPGs I wrote last year by covering more countries’ output and their unique traits and historical circumstances.

Meanwhile, I would like to thank yet again all the kind people who have followed me so far, both for their gentleness and for their patience in dealing with my verbose tangents. Your support and curiosity made writing about those topics even more lovely, interesting and funny, than it would have been otherwise.

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This past week, Yoko Taro and Square Enix’s action JRPG franchise, Nier, celebrated its 15th anniversary, and it’s safe to say the series has come a long way since the alluringly dark, experimental and yet kinda janky action JRPG Taro and Cavia released in April 2010, including its peculiar main character redesign for the Western markets (and Japanese X360 users) and its majestic soundtrack.

Born as a sequel to one of the endings of the first game in the Drakengard series, which Yoko Taro started back in the PS2 days before Square Enix had another director work on its sequel, despite an initially rocky reception Nier ended up bringing its director to the attention of niche JRPG enthusiasts, who retroactively started to reevaluate Drakengard due to their love for this new journey.

In the early years of the seventh console generation, after all, people knew to expect some level of jankiness from Square Enix-published JRPGs, from Kawazu’s The Last Remnant to tri-Ace’s Star Ocean 4 and Infinite Undiscovery, so it isn’t that surprising that Nier managed to carve its own niche despite a number of issues that marred its critical reception by a number of outlets (in fact, its release indirectly helped my own early efforts as a RPG reviewer, but that’s another story).

Then again, while three years later Drakengard 3 proved to be a niche hit for Taro’s more ardent fans despite being far less polished than Nier itself, 2017 ended up changing things in a way no one would have envisioned. Nier Automata, whose development was outsourced by Square Enix to Platinum Games, a much better fit for action combat systems compared with teams such as Cavia or Drakengard 3’s Access, ended up being one of Square’s largest, and most unexpected, sales success, with 3,5 million copies sold by the end of 2018, building up to the recently announced ten million figure up until 2026, which is a far cry from the alleged 300k sales projection Square Enix envisioned before its release.

While Automata’s Platinum-developed combat system, setting and soundtrack were routinely praised and its characters, designed by Akihiko Yoshida, quickly ended up becoming iconic, securing countless collaborations even in wildly different franchises such as Soul Calibur, Yoko Taro himself ended up becoming a sort of niche celebrity, with his choice to wear an helmet styled after Nier’s Emil during Automata’s press events as one of the catalysts.

It’s here, though, that our success tale becomes muddled by questionable management choices, the same that ended up making this 15th anniversary kinda bittersweet for anyone that, back then, expected Square Enix to capitalize on Automata's success and Taro’s popularity.

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-THE LOST DECADE

Instead of immediately striving to build the Nier franchise after Automata’s success, in the nine years after its release, despite its surprising sales and enthusiastic following, the appeal of its characters and Taro becoming a sort of JRPG Urobuchi Gen, albeit with a strong sarcastic vein, acclaimed even by many who never actually played his games, Square Enix ended up publishing just two new Nier projects.

The first, back in 2021, was a competent remake of the original Nier, Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139, which Square Enix outsourced to Toylogic, with Platinum’s Taura being handpicked to refine its combat system. Interestingly, despite the popularity fo Father Nier in the international market, Taro, still involved as creative director, ended up picking Brother Nier, originally featured in the Japanese PS3 version of the game, as the canon protagonist for this remake.

Soon after, Nier received its first and only spin-off, Nier ReIncarnation, an episodic gacha game made up of a number of scenarios, with Taro acting as a coordinator of sorts while other writers contributed their own storylines to the Nier universe.

Despite being acclaimed for its narrative merits, ReIncarnation ended up having a less successful trajectory compared with Taro’s other gacha JRPG, Sin of Alice, with its final scenario being released in 2023 soon before it ended up closing down, likely becoming one of many quality gacha games lost to time.

Happily, a valiant group of fans is currently attempting to reincarnate ReIncarnation through a new fanmade server infrastructure, an exciting effort that has already generated a debate among gacha developers and that, if it ends up being successful, could end up being replicated for a number of other titles in a similar position, like Square Enix’s own Valkyria Anatomia or SaGa Universe.

Still, as exciting as this tale of gacha preservation is in its own right (a topic that, as some readers may remember, I had a chance to dissect last year), it can’t really hide the fact that Nier hasn’t seen a proper new entry since Automata.

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-AUTOMATIC RESIGNATION

In a way, part of the explanation for Nier’s situation could be the lack of a dedicated internal team, or even just an influential producer, able to lobby Square Enix on behlf of its franchise (like Akitoshi Kawazu has been doing for his SaGa franchise in the past decade, just to name the most glaring example) while constantly pitching new concepts for its further entries.

This explanation, however, feels more than a bit hollow considering how something like this is exactly what happened with Automata itself: while initially Square Enix was shy about greenlighting its development due to Nier’s mixed reception and unremarkable sales, Nier series producer Yosuke Saito was so confident in Yoko Taro’s talent and in the vision behind Automata that he managed to persuade Square Enix CEO Matsuda to grant it enough resources to make it shine, allegedly threatening to resign from Square Enix if he couldn’t produce Automata.

The fact that the Nier franchise has fared so poorly after Automata despite having such a passionate advocate, with Saito acting as producer for every single game directed by Yoko Taro since then, likely means the franchise’s woes could be linked to a different set of issues, for instance some holdup regarding the choice of an external team to outsource the game’s development.

-A FRANCHISE WITHOUT A TEAM, A TEAM WITHOUT A FRANCHISE

Even this explanation, though, ends up proving more than a bit unconvincing considering the fact that most external teams involved with the Drakengard-Nier universe likely had long windows of availability during the past decade, with Platinum Games being especially vulnerable to the lack of major outsourced projects.

Right after Automata’s success apparently helped save their studio, Platinum felt the lack of a major project as an issue that could end up undermining the company’s long term prospects, leading them to establish a flurry of partnerships and initiatives that, aside from Sol Cresta and Bayonetta 3, proved to be mostly unsuccessful while balooning their overhead costs due to new studios being opened without immediate results, heralding the financial woes and the current decadence of this once-acclaimed action developer, culminating in the 2025 wave of resignations that saw Automata’s Taura leave alongside Platinum founder Kamiya and many other key staffers.

While Cavia had already disbanded soon after developing the first Near, possibly a victim of the cancellation of Mistwalker’s Cry On, Drakengard 3’s Access could also have been contracted if Square Enix wanted to pursue a smaller-scale project, as unlikely as it may be given the circumstances. After all, aside from its main creator Hidetaka Suehiro’s Deadly Premonition series, Access always pursued action-focused projects, working on Square Enix’s Lord of Arcana\Apocalypse handheld franchise and even being contracted by Capcom for some outsourced animation work for Devil May Cry 5.

In fact, even Toylogic, if granted enough resources to bolster their staff, may have been a good fit for a further Nier game, using Replicant’s remake to make them familiarize with this IP and then replicating its development structure by having external figures like Taura assisting their original game design efforts, while Taro kept providing his unique narrative direction.

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-CANCELLED AMBITIONS

Why have those scenarios been left unexplored? One possible explanation, aside from a lack of interest that would be a bit bizarre given the size of Automata’s success, could be that, ironically, Automata was so successful that Square Enix felt compelled to provide its audience a much more ambitious sequel in terms of contents and production values, feeling they couldn’t rely on catching the lightning in a bottle yet again with a low-budget effort and had to invest in a more sizeable production.

This reasoning, though, could have lead to an Automata sequel being put on hiatus for a long while, with Square Enix trying to assess the best way to go, and which team could be the better fit for its development before a new Near game could even start its development. This situation, in turn, could have been further complicated by Square Enix’s internal restructuring after the start of the tenure of current CEO Takashi Kiryu, with a number of titles being cancelled in early 2024, possibly including some of those involving Yoko Taro himself, at least considering his November 2025 claim regarding his involvement in a number of projects whose development ended up being cut short.

Then again, this doesn’t necessarily mean an unnamed Nier entry ended up being cancelled during Kiryu’s review, considering how Taro had been involved in plenty of unrelated projects in the past decade, from the successful gacha Sin of Alice to his brief foray into Final Fantasy XIV and the Voice of Cards series, with the latter being likely one of the niche franchises Square Enix would have never even funded with their current mindset, less favorable to the AA-friendly outlook that greenlighted titles such as Lancarse’s DioField Chronicle, Valkyrie Elysium or Star Ocean 6.

-REBIRTH AND HOPE

That something Nier-related is cooking in Square Enix’s kitchen, though, seems quite likely not just because of the rather blatant tease in the series trailer released to celebrate the series’ 15th anniversary, but also due to Yoko Taro’s own claim about being currently involved in the development of an unannounced game, corroborating Yosuke Saito’s April 2025 interview, which again could mean a variety of very different things since both developers were careful enough to avoid mentioning this new project was linked to the Nier franchise.

Still, the fact that Square Enix has seen fit to inform us of Automata’s abovementioned latest sales landmark, putting it at a whopping ten million copies sold, possibly above Final Fantasy VII Remake unless the latter managed to sell another 1,3 million copies since its last known sales figure in early 2025, showcases an attempt to position Nier as a premium franchise despite its long hiatus, hopefully heralding a new effort able to capitalize on its previous success without losing that unique spark of creative craziness that Taro has always gifted the titles he directed.

Hopefully, if we’re lucky enough to be able to discuss Nier’s next anniversary, we could end up forgetting about this lost decade of sorts, instead focusing on a promising future that finally seems to be more than simple conjecture.

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Even fairly unique cultural contexts like RPG art can end up following broader economic trends, like with Turkish immigration contributing a fresh workforce to Western Germany's economic boom after the Third Reich’s defeat in the Second World War saw the death of millions of Germans under its arms.

The life of Turkish painter Uğurcan Yüce, devoted to explore sword and sorcery art in the tabletop and videogame RPG spaces with an unique historic flair, ended up embodying this peculiar Turco-German relationship in his own, very specific, field.

-OLD EMPIRES AND NEW REALITIES

The connection between the Turkish Ottoman Empire and Germany, back in the days when it was still comprised in the Holy Roman Empire superstate, had often been quite conflictual, with the 1683 siege of Vienna as one of its better known flashpoints and a long list of wars involving the Habsburg emperors and a variety of German princes, but, by the 19th century, the relationship between the Ottomans and the newly-founded, Prussian-led German Empire, born from the ashes of the German Confederation after the 1871 Franco-Prussian war, mellowed out and started getting more and more friendly, with German capital and engineering contributing to the Ottoman industrialization and railways system, including the Anatolian Railway and the ambitious Berlin-Baghdad railway project. Ultimately, the three old empires, Austria, Germany and the Ottomans, ended up joining forces as allies during the First World War.

This historical relationship, together with post-Ottoman, republican Turkiye’s unique position as a State that was neutral during most of the Second World War and ended up in the Western sphere of influence during the Cold War, not to mention its low labor costs, made it a good partner for a West Germany in dire need of plentiful workforce, which could explain why, in 1947, our Uğurcan Yüce was apparently born in Stuttgart from Turkish parents working in what had been for centuries the capital of the Dukedom, and later Kingdom, of Wurttemberg.

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-AN OTTOMAN FRAZETTA

Actually, though, this very relevant biographical detail is one I ended up questioning while researching his life, as older sources I remember reading around fifteen years ago had him born in Turkiye and, given he did pass away in Stuttgart many years later, I started to suspect this detail was added to his later biographies due to a simple mistake that ended up being repeated later on.

Be it as it may, even if he was indeed born in Stuttgart, his family had to have returned almost immediately to Turkiye, possibly due to German law placing restrictions on immigrant workers’ children before the 1967 accords, since Yüce’s earliest memories were firmly set in rural Turkiye, with him reminiscing about his first drawing being about a street seller he had seen at the local market, including his donkey with baskets full of vegetables, before trying to depict more complex scenes influenced by more Eastern imagery, like Persian elephant riders attacked by tigers, not to mention imaginary weapons or even events taken from Greek mythology.

His parents supported his love for art since an early age, allowing him to practice with oil paintings even before having any formal training in the arts, and his talent ended up leading him to different themes. As a teenager, Yüce’s interest shifted to more grounded, historical subjects taken from Ottoman history, including daily life scenes, portrait of famous Sultan-Caliphs of the Osmanli lineage that the founder of contemporary Turkiye, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had removed from power after six centuries just twenty years before his birth and, obviously, battle scenes, which ultimately led him to take an interest in Western sword and sorcery pulp art, with a master such as Frank Frazetta as the main source of inspiration.

After all, Yüce grew up in the same generation as a number of other artists which will become the new standard bearers of that aesthetic, from Boris Vallejo to Cyprus-born Christos Achilleos and, a few years later, Japan’s Jun Suemi and Hitoshi Yoneda, showing how appealing those archetypes ended up being for a wide variety of artists in noticeably different geographical and cultural contexts.

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-CONAN AND THE SISTINE MINIATURE

His school years were apparently spent daydreaming and drawing whatever he fancied, or what his classmates asked him to depict, even if one can see how serious his commitment ended up being given he worked for months on a four-part fresco for a local company, completing it in 1965 when he had just turned 18.

Then, after graduating from high school with some difficulties, he finally had a chance to pursue his calling and enrolled at Istanbul’s Fine Arts University, later renamed as Mimar Sinan University to honor the Ottoman-era architect, and, while he opted to specialize in theater stage props, his painting skills were still in top shape when he managed to paint a 40-centimeters miniature of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. This was also the time where he started working alongside a number of friends on a pulp, Conan-inspired comic, Aybike, which ended up being published by prominent Turkish newspaper Hurriyet.

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-EQUESTRIAN RELOCATIONS

Even during his mandatory military service, Yuce kept exercising his talents by working on an equestrian portrait of Ataturk, which ended up being hung at the Erzurum Officers’ Club. The connections he built during those first few years finally led him to land a number of commissions as an oil painter, whether for private portraits, commercial projects, book covers or even the movie industry, producing posters and artworks starting with the iconic drama Suru (1978).

Feeling he couldn’t hope to become a world-class illustrator if he confined himself to the admittedly insular Turkish market, Yuce chose to try his luck and follow the example set by millions of other Turk workers by journeying (or returning, depending on the truth about his Stuttgart birth) to Germany in 1980 alongside a painter friend.

Soon after relocating, he was contracted as a cover illustrator by the German publishing house Bastei Verlag, specialized in pulp and horror novels, which opened up the gates for a number of fantasy-related commissions. Yuce ended up producing hundreds of works for this line, most of which sadly ended up being thrown away when the publisher moved its main offices decades later.

A few years later, in 1987, this would led him to get involved with Germany’s tabletop RPG scene, contributing to its most successful ruleset, Das Schwarze Auge.

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-KIESOW’S GAMBLE

For Yuce, tabletop RPGs were likely a fairly new, uncharted world: back when he was still living in Turkiye, it was far too early for this mostly American-focused phenomenon to start having its first localized versions, which will start being released after he had already traveled to West Germany.

Germany itself was in a rather different situation, though, with one of Europe’s earliest autonomous tabletop RPG efforts, the abovementioned Das Schwarze Auge, being led by Ulrich Kiesow, who accustomed himself to this new context while working on the localization for the German editions of Tunnels & Trolls and Dungeons & Dragons before creating his own ruleset in 1984 alongside publishing house Schmidt Spiele, who wanted to take hold of this new market with a brand new product after their own deal with TSR went up in smoke. This kind of local answers to Dungeons & Dragons’ worldwide success, after all, were emerging in a variety of different geographical contexts, like with Mizuno’s Sword World ruleset in Japan, Carocci and Senzacqua’s Kata Kumbas in Italy or Gaudo and Rohmer’s Malefices in France.

Initially, Kiesow opted to have the Das Schwarze Auge rulebooks illustrated by a renowned English artist, Bryan Talbot, likely contracted by Schmidt Spiele through a local contact, who will later become a legend among comic authors and, for his DSA illustrations back then, ended up employing a style reminiscent of a less caricatural Gary Chalk.

Even then, in late 1986, the sheer amount of planned DSA releases made him consider other artists more focused on cover arts, possibly with a background in oil painting, which paved the way to a long partnership with West Germany-based artists such as Dieter Rottermund, who ended up focusing on DSA’s novels, and our own Uğurcan Yüce.

The size of this collaboration can’t really be overstated, as Yuce ended up producing almost a hundred of Das Schwarze Auge cover arts from 1987 to 2003, including rulebooks, adventure modules, geographical sourcebooks and countless other releases, refining a unique style that mixed Frazetta-style sword and sorcery with some unique Turkish traits derived from Ottoman-era and Central Asian aesthetic, often seen through an oriental lens compatible with the tastes of the German public he was working for.

The sheer variety of subjects he was tasked to depict also allowed quite a bit of artistic freedom on his part, for instance placing his own self-portrait in the Ship in a Bottle (Das Schiff in der Flasche) adventure module, which amusingly includes a pre-Ottoman, Seljuk-style helmet and scimitar and two miniatures of Central Asian riders.

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-A DIGITAL ARKANIA

With his work being now associated with Germany’s strongest tabletop RPG property, at a time when West Germany and East Germany had just been reunited after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yuce was bound to be contacted by the first German videogame RPG developers attempting to adapt Kiesow’s ruleset to the digital age. In 1991, Attic Entertainment, led by Guido Henkel, started working on the Das Schwarze Auge-based Realms of Arkania series, sometimes known as the Nordland trilogy, which will immediately become the most relevant German videogame RPG franchise before Piranha Bytes’ Gothic, with an English localization effort happily allowing RPG enthusiasts to enjoy it outside Germany.

Henkel immediately established a friendly working relationship with Yuce, likely facilitated that Albstadt, where Attic was based, was just 80km south of Stuttgart. Physical promixity becoming a key reason for early videogame RPG arists to cooperate with a developer, after all, is a rather common theme that strongly influenced Americans like Denis Loubet and his work with Origin Software in his own Austin, not to mention Blizzard’s Didier Samwise, or even German Dieter Rottermund when he started working with Thalion Software on Amberstar and Ambermoon.

Reminiscing about their friendship, Henkel remembered traveling to Yuce’s home countless times, watching him while he painted while his wife, whose own life has sadly proven almost impossible to research whether in German or Turkish, served Attic’s director some tasty Turkish pastries.

This videogame partnership was likely quite exciting for Yuce, too, given he had no previously contact with this field back in Turkiye, where the first local videogame RPG, the unique Istanbul Efsaneleri with its interesting social commentary, will be released a few years later, in 1995. Aside from his new cover arts and illustrations, the Realms of Arkania trilogy also ended up reusing a few previous DSA artworks by translating them to pixel art.

This also highlights the incredibly talented team of pixel artists Attic employed for this trilogy, showcased by its renowned spriteworks and NPC portraits that helped quite a bit in securing its popularity in the rather crowded CRPG landscape of the early ‘90s, a trend that blossomed in its third entry.

After Realms of Arkania I: Blade of Destiny’s Windows release in 1992, with an Amiga port following suit a year later, Attic immediately started working on its sequel, Star Trail, which ended up being published in 1994, of course with yet another sword and sorcery-themed piece by Yüce as its box art.

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-A SHADOW OVER ATTIC

The third part of this story, Shadows over Riva, will end up taking two more years, while Attic also pursued a number of side projects unrelated to DSA which ended up involving Yuce, for instance publishing the German versions of Amiga-exclusive, Doom-inspired first person shooter FEARS, whose cover is a rather blatant tribute to Vallejo, and Ultima-style CRPG Druid: Daemons of the Mind, published in West Germany by Attic as Druidenzirkel with a brand new box art illustrated by Yüce that ended up being a rather massive upgrade compared to the original.

After dabbling in localizing foreign titles, Attic was finally ready to publish Shadows over Riva, which proved to be yet another success for this Das Schwarze Auge-inspired trilogy. In fact, this series was initially planned to have a fourth entry, which unfortunately failed to materialize due to a number of issues with Attic’s publisher, which in turn ended up interrupting Yuce and Henkel’s partnership, even if they still kept in touch.

Years later, Henkel remembered how surprised he was to see Yuce delivering not just the illustrations he was tasked to produce, but also their original analog versions, which are often subject to separate negotiations. Yuce’s generosity in this regard also allowed Henkel himself to publish a clean version of Shadow over Riva’s box art later on.

-A SILVER STYLE LINING

After Shadows over Riva’s release in 1996, Yuce stopped working in the videogame space for a long while, pursuing his work in the tabletop RPG and novel cover spaces. Even then, Das Schwarze Auge’s golden age was about to end with the death of its creator, Ulrich Kiesow, who had suffered an heart attack in 1995 and ultimately passed away in 1997 after completing his last novel, eerily focused on the in-setting symbol of death, The Broken Wheel.

After Kiesow’s passing, Das Schwarze Auge’s release schedule dried up a bit and, while the IP had a number of revivals in the later years, getting to its current Fifth Edition, Yuce stopped working on its covers in the early ‘00s, with one of his last works on this property in 2003, focusing on his other pursuits.

Even then, it was still Das Schwarze Auge that brought Yuce back to the videogame RPG space, when he was asked to contribute a number of artworks for DSA’s first and last MMORPG effort, browser-based Herokon Online by Silver Style Studios, the German team already known for developing RPGs such as Gorasul and The Fall: Last Days of Gaia. Unfortunately, this effort proved to be short-lived, with Herokon Online being cancelled soon after its release.

This also brings our own story to its end, as Yüce, now widely recognized as a master of his craft well outside of Turkiye and Germany, with some of his paintings exposed in galleries around the world and his role in sword and sorcery art finally recognized after decades as one of the most prolific artists in the genre, suddenly passed away in his own studio in Stuttgart the 7th of February of 2015, at the age of 67.

Still, his legacy is still alive in the countless paintings and illustrations he created over the decades, and in the traditional and yet personal RPG fantasy pulp aesthetic he was able to build both in the tabletop and videogame space, influencing generations of German enthusiasts and contributing to the wider international trend that saw sword and sorcery defiantly staying its ground until the early ‘00s, before more eclectic art styles took hold in the tabletop space and renders became the most common option for Western videogame RPG covers.

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Those invested in videogame RPGs have learned since the earliest days of this genre to expect tabletop RPGs being adapted into digital adventures, a trend whose most obvious exponents ended up being Dungeons & Dragons and a number of its campaign setting, like Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Mystara (including Capcom’s side-scrolling arcade adaptations) and, last but certainly not least, Forgotten Realms with a number of key CRPG franchises such as Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Icewind Dale.

This trend also involved a number of rulesets created in different countries, like with Germany’s Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye) and its sprawling genealogy of CRPG spin-offs, or Japan’s Sword World, linked with Ryo Mizuno’s Forcelia campaign setting (which included a number of IPs like Record of Lodoss War, Crystania and Magic Knight Ryou), which also spawned a number of JRPG adaptations in the ‘90s.

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Then again, partly due to the growing popularity of tabletop RPG streams and shows, the last decade or so has also seen the opposite trend growing momentum, with a number of videogame RPGs getting spin-off tabletop rulesets meant to expand their appeal to a new audience while also fleshing out their settings and lore in a way the games themselves couldn’t do, like with Dragon Age RPG (2010) by Chris Pramas, who already worked on Warhammer Fantasy’s 2nd edition, or Fallout RPG (2021) by Modiphius, not to mention an attempt to adapt Pillars of Eternity that, unfortunately, ended up not being released aside from a small alpha-stage teaser.

While often falling prey to the lack of official localization, Japanese RPGs have also benefited from this wave of adaptations, with Square Enix licensing a number of its IPs to different game designers, hoping to strike gold in the analog RPG space it had traditionally failed to pursue. One of those efforts was predictably aimed at its most successful current title, Final Fantasy XIV, bringing its class-focused, multiplayer roots to a customized d20 environment while also localizing it in English, with its 2024 first print getting out of stock unexpectedly fast and a second one being released next year.

While Final Fantasy XIV’s TTRPG, a combat and class-focused, d20-based system, had been mostly outsourced to Hobby Japan, its narrative section were assigned to one of Japan’s foremost contemporary tabletop RPG companies, Yura Kubota’s Far East Amusement Research (FEAR), which had also worked as an outsourced scenario writing outlet for Square Enix during the development of a number of Team Asano’s flagship titles, from Octopath Traveler to Bravely Default II.

Given their involvement with the Octopath franchise, it’s no surprise they were also tasked to work on a number of side materials, the most notable of which ended up being its tabletop RPG adaptation, Octopath Traveler TRPG, back in 2022, which has just been announced for an English October release by Dark Horse.

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Yura Kubota, whose connection with videogame RPGs started in the late ‘90s with some contracted scenario work for the all-ages versions of Dragon Knight IV and Siesta’s forgotten PS1 JRPG, Sarara, has been a tabletop RPG enthusiast since the days of Ryo Mizuno and Group SNE’s Sword World ruleset (itself getting an English localization soon), and it’s likely that unique Japanese tabletop lineage that informed some of his design choices for Octopath Traveler TRPG, like its focus on a 2D6 system, which shouldn’t be confused with the Western strand of 2D6-based tabletop RPGs that developed separately in its own context, like with the Powered by the Apocalypse line.

Set in the continent of Orsterra, TRPG apparently doesn’t just include material focused on the first Octopath game, but also some references to Champions of the Continent, its gacha spinoff which ended up being adapted and remade into Octopath Traveler Zero a few months ago. Obviously, though, the timing of Kubota’s work also meant Octopath Traveler II and its world, Solistia, couldn’t be discussed in this volume, even if that would likely still have happened even if OT2 had already been released given the extremely loose connection between those two settings and, indeed, their many differences in a number of noticeable ways, like their pantheons.

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While providing a generous helping of Orsterran lore, including a detailed chronology, regional guide, calendar and plenty of other interesting tidbits expanding on the game’s original material, Kubota’s effort also tried to address an issue pen and paper RPG adaptations of properties born in other media have had since decades ago, when Weis and Hickman’s Dragonlance setting, itself born as a D&D campaign but popularized by its novels, had to work around its focus on its main characters in order to open up the world of Krynn to other adventures.

Likewise, Kubota compromised by allowing players to retrace the JRPG’s eight scenarios by picking up a number of pre-built characters, including some known faces, while also making it perfectly viable to start an adventure in a different timeframe with a party of completely original characters, mostly defined by their backgrounds and classes.

Given the peculiar traits of Octopath Traveler’s combat system, let alone Champions of the Continent’s, I’m looking forward to finally discover the finer details about how Kubota managed to adapt the unique Brave\Default flow of the tabletop version’s combat system, and how deep the systems will end up going regarding its narrative and social elements, especially considering how Hobby Japan’s FF14 TTRPG apparently ended up de-emphasizing those very relevant contexts, almost as if it was trying to appeal to the enthusiasts of the OSR (Old School Renaissance) movement focused on old school dungeon crawling, albeit in a fairly unique way given its MMORPG theming.

While an amazing effort by the English-speaking community allowed Octopath TRPG to get fantranslated last year, the team chose to held back on its distribution, only allowing those who could demonstrate to have bought a Japanese copy of the manual to download its translated version.

Ultimately, this choice was vindicated with Dark Horse’s unexpected localization announcement, which, alongside the success of Octopath Traveler II and Zero, could end up revitalizing an interesting system that has seen no updates in its home market in the past four years and, possibly, open up the gates to a number of other JRPG tabletop adaptations, even just in the context of Square Enix’s lineup, with Akitoshi Kawazu’s SaGa franchise as one of the most obvious, and potentially interesting systems-wise, choices.

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So far, the Found in translation column has been devoted to English fantranslations of Japanese and Korean titles, but there are plenty of other unofficial localization efforts going on involving a variety of RPGs created in wildly different contexts, not just in terms of language but also regarding themes, art direction and local industry trends.

Eastern Europe, for instance, long had a thriving scene of RPG developers focused on adapting Russian, Ukrainian and Polish sci-fi and fantasy novels to the videogame space, a trend that boomed in the mid to late ‘00s with a number of successful examples that were able to make waves in the international markets, like Poland’s CD Projekt with their sequels to Sapkowksi’s The Witcher saga and Ukraine’s GSC Game World with their STALKER franchise, based on the Roadside Picnic novel by the legendary Soviet authors, the Strugatsky brothers and its movie version by Tarkovsky, not to mention 4A Games’s rendition of Russian Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro series, with its FPS formula mixed with light RPG elements.

Alongside those better known efforts, though, there were many others developers that also attempted to rework into PC games a number of Russian-language literary works, many of which hailed from the Russian Federation, like with Hard to be a God, the Borut-developed sequel to the Strugatskys’ homonymous novel which I discussed last year in its own retrospective, Akella’s Requital, adapting Maria Semyenova’s Wolfhound series (known as Volkodav in Russian), or KranX’s A Farewell to Dragons, based on Lukyanenko and Perumov’s own novel.

Of course, there were also a number of those attempts that didn’t manage to get localized, whether because they were based on historical novels that publishers felt would have had little appeal in Western Europe, like with Borut’s Russian RPG adaptation of Gogol’s Taras Bulba, or because the license on which they were based was mostly popular among Russian speakers, like with Ukrainian Rostok Software’s Beltion: Dark Ritual (2009), whose recent fantranslation effort finally allowed English speakers to discover its world.

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Release date: April 2009
Developer: Rostok Software
Country: Ukraine
Language: Russian
Platform: PC
English Fantranslation: July 2025

Beltion has quite an interesting history, being an Ukrainian-developed, Russian-published game based on the works of two Russian-language authors born during the Soviet Union in what, back then, was the Ukrainian SSR, operating first in their own Ukraine and, later on, in the Russian Federation.

The author who created Beltion’s world, Alexander Zorich, is actually just a nom de plume used by two different writers, Yana Botsman and Dimitry Gordensky, who started their own partnership back during their days as university students, working together as fantasy writers and, later, as assistant professors at the Ukrainian Kharkov University’s Philosophy Faculty before relocating to the Russian Federation in the mid ‘00s, focusing on their novels and, later on, on their new side-gig as videogame scenario writers.

Even if by 2008 Botsman and Gordensky were already living in Russia, Beltion, one of their very first videogame efforts, was actually developed by an Ukrainian studio, Rostok Games, whose name could possibly be derived from STALKER’s Rostok exclusion zone, while publishing duties ended up being handled by Moscow’s Noviy Disk. While the Zorich duo provided the setting and concept for the game’s scenario, the game’s director, Yuri Dobronravin, likely ended up having a much more hands-on creative input while also contributing to Beltion’s story.

Set in the world of Sarmontazara, fleshed out in Zorich’s Svod Ravnovesniya novel tetralogy, the game follows the adventure of Orvin, a young initiate in the Vault of Equilibrium order that gave the series its title, serving the Varanian Principality against monsters and sorcerers while enforcing a ban of all manners of magic. This, at least, until he is forced to reconsider what he knows about his world, and his own order, starting a quest to slowly piece together the truth while navigating shrewd politicians, seedy wizards and scheming queens and developing new powers.

Aside from the narrative merits of this literary-inspired dark fantasy journey through politics, intrigue and the occult, Beltion also aimed rather blatantly at following in the footsteps of the Gothic series, the sandbox German RPG franchise that made Piranha Bytes beloved among many Eastern European CRPG players.

Back when Beltion was released, after all, there were quite a number of attempts to craft a Gothic-style experience, with Poland’s Two Worlds (2007) and Ukraine’s Heart of Eternity (2009) as some of the Eastern European titles trying to capture Piranha Bytes’ magic while also contributing to a growing library of Eurojank RPGs, which will later expand to different strands of RPGs, like with the Soviet Fallout-like Atom RPG (2021).

Beltion, despite being a much more linear affair both in terms of roleplaying and level design, also followed some of the tenets seen in this kind of titles, with a rather clunky combat system that feels a bit dated even for its time while still being a fairly competent affair, imaginative areas and ambitious story beats whose potential isn’t fully supported by the game’s rather poor budget and a number of bugs.

This also explains why, despite also enjoying a later Steam re-release by Strategy First, Beltion ended up only being released in Russian, with a partial English script hidden within its game files hinting at an early attempt to bring the game to a larger audience. Happily, there were a number of attempts to bridge this gap, with an earlier English machine translation being reworked into a proper effort by valiant Litmanen that was finally completed in mid 2025.

Now that I have finally completed Tobira no Densetsu, a fantranslated gem I will likely return to quite soon here on my RPG-focused Substack, I hope I can give Beltion some attention in the near future in order to fully explore its world, and possibly write a proper retrospective later on!

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In the long history of artists contributing to the aesthetic trajectory of videogame RPGs, there are a few instances where one can observe the same trend that already affected classic art for centuries, with young painters learning from the masters and building their own manieristic islands by preserving their style while slowly improving on it in a variety of ways or, in other contexts, being forced to adapt their work to the sensibilities of a renowned predecessor they would end up succeeding in a number of key tasks.

This is likely why, back in the early ‘00s, for a time I ended up mistaking Shinobu Tanno’s pieces for a part of Jun Suemi’s portfolio, and one could say the rather blatant technical and stylist similarity between those two Japanese artists is actually rooted in their own peculiar context, and in the way they ended up interacting, with Tanno apparently fated to pick up Suemi’s work both in the literary and videogame space.

-THE PAINTER FROM RITSUMEIKAN

Tanno was born in 1973 in the Ibaraki prefecture, situated in the northern stretches of the Kantou region mostly known for the Tokyo Urban Area, stretching far from the old Edo. Since his early days, he was fascinated by classic oil painting and by sword and sorcery art, showcasing a set of artistic sensibilities more in line with the previous generation of Japanese artists, like Noriyoshi Ohrai, Jun Suemi or Hitoshi Yoneda, rather than with his coetaneous character designers, often dabbling in manga and animation with a more stylized take on anatomy and beauty, like Satoshi Urushihara, which will end up slowly forming those broader aesthetic trends nowadays many associate with Japan’s entire entertainment output.

Later on, in 1997, when the old guard of Japanese RPG artists had already left their mark, he graduated in a non-artistic field, possibly economics, from the Ritsumeikan private university in Kyoto, an institution with a rather unique history linked with Kinmochi Saionji, a prominent member of Imperial Japan’s old, pre-Meiji Kyoto nobility, the kuge, who ended up fighting in the Boshin Wars and contributed to the changes that saw the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the rise of the new, centralized Empire under Mutsuhito.

Regardless of his academic efforts, Tanno had kept pursuing his love for painting as a self-taught artist while studying at Ritsumeikan and, after graduating, he finally had a chance to search for a professional outlet for the talents he had developed so far.

His style, which by then had developed a nostalgic, solemn quality to it compared to most of his contemporary artists, already had a hint of grittiness rooted in Frazetta and Vallejo’s sword and sorcery art, even if it would be impossible to ignore how Tanno’s aesthetic was, since the onset of his career as a professional illustrator, mediated by the Japanese compromise with Western pulp art already established by one of Japan’s pioneers in that field, the abovementioned Jun Suemi, whose varied contributions to fantasy and sci-fi literature and videogame RPGs, including his own reworked sprites for the Famicom port of the first Wizardry trilogy, I already tried to dissect in the retrospective devoted to his body of work.

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-KONAMI GOES GRIMDARK

After debuting as a fantasy illustrator with a number of cover arts for Japanese novels, Tanno ended up landing the biggest videogame-related contract of his life in 1998, working on the character designs, key artworks and box art for Konami’s Vandal Hearts II on PS1 (1999), released in the West right after Final Fantasy tactics built a whole new audience for tactical JRPGs, even if the first Vandal Hearts had been actually localized long before Final Fantasy Tactics itself, while also reaching the European markets Squaresoft neglected when publishing Ramza’s quest.

This unique tactical JRPG, featuring simultaneous turn activations, item-based skill learning and a dark fantasy war story that tried to out-Matsuno Matsuno’s own work on Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics by offering players one of the most grim and melodramatic JRPG war stories to date, was a perfect fit for Tanno’s somber, realistic style, and it managed to give him a brief window of popularity among JRPG fans that still persists nowadays among retrogaming enthusiasts.

While Vandal Hearts II was mostly unrelated to its first entry, aside from the Vandalier making an appearance during the True Ending scenario, working on the art direction of the second entry in this franchise did mean following in the footsteps of an industry legend like Hitoshi Yoneda, the Seiun Award winner Japanese master of sci-fantasy that managed to work one of his alien-looking dragons into the cover art of the first entry in Konami’s tactical series.

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-HOLY ROMAN SENGOKU

After Vandal Hearts II’s release, Tanno unfortunately didn’t manage to keep his foot in the videogame development scene, instead turning back to his cover art work for a number of Japanese novels, like Kenshin’s Successor by Konoe Ryuharu, an alternate history tale set during the Sengoku age and exploring the conflicts between the Oda and Uesugi factions.

Around this time between late 1999 and early 2000, he also started working on the historical novel series penned by Hikaru Ayuho, Court Knight Grauben, focused on the eponymous German knight solving a number of mysteries and conspiracies set in the Holy Roman Empire ranging from unjust murder accusations to a plot to make the Imperial City of Cologne secede from the Empire, an interesting setup that immediately enticed me when I learned of those novels’ existence thanks to Tanno’s work.

Unfortunately, this series isn’t just unlocalized, but also utterly undocumented outside of Japanese sources, meaning Tanno’s cover arts were actually the only way it could manage to finally get some spotlight outside Japan, albeit a few decades after those novels were printed.

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-ULTRATANNO

In 2002, Tanno was also contracted for one of his most unique partnership, the one with the Ultraman franchise. This long-standing tokusatsu TV series, first aired in 1966, had also produced a number of adaptations, like the Ultraseven novel series by Junko Takegami Tanno ended up illustrating, with its cover arts being one of the very few sci-fi pieces in his mostly fantasy-oriented portfolio.

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-JUN SUEMI THE SECOND

After working on a videogame franchise whose art direction had been previously graced by Hitoshi Yoneda, it was perhaps fated that Tanno’s career would also see him illustrating a franchise, Kaori Kurimoto’s Guin Saga, one of the world’s longest and most prolific fantasy novel series that, up until that moment, had long been one of the purveys of the artist whose style Tanno himself had adhered the most, Jun Suemi.

The first 88 volumes of this series, detailing a fantasy epic that brought the tiger-header warrior Guin from the kingdom of Parros to a long adventure, ultimately including sci-fantasy elements, had their cover mostly illustrated by Suemi after a brief, early stint by Naoyuki Kato and Yoshitaka Amano but, in 2003, he suddenly left the series with Tanno immediately taking over cover art duties.

Given how poorly documented the relationships between Japanese illustrators are and how private their lives mostly end up being, it’s unfortunately impossible to say why Suemi ended up leaving the Guin Saga franchise, if he was actually the one suggesting Shinobu Tanno as his successor due to their stylistic similarities, or if Kurimoto herself ended up picking up Tanno for that very reason.

In fact, while it’s absolutely reasonable to imagine Suemi and Tanno knew each other since the late ‘90s given how they worked in the same space and ended up catering to a similar aesthetic niche, that relationship is also completely undocumented.

Tanno, whose style was already very much in line with Suemi’s tenets, ended up resembling his involuntary mentor even more, working on the series’ cover non-stop since 2003, even after Kurimoto’s untimely passing in 2009 left the franchise to be continued by other authors.

Almost as if 2003 was meant as a watershed moment for Tanno and his work, that’s when he also published his first compilation artbook, Eien no Zanshou, with a second one being released later on, in 2010, to showcase his work on the Guin Saga.

While the exact circumstances about Suemi and Tanno’s relationship and the latter succeeded the former in this series are hard to ascertain, the Guin Saga granted Tanno’s career a huge boost, which he would acknowledge with a second, Guin-focused compilation artbook later on. In 2007, Tanno also joined the likes of Amano, Suemi and Yamada by providing a Japanese cover for a Western fantasy novel, Tanith Lee’s unique sci-fi opus Venus Preserved.

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-THE BLACK PRINCE

A few years after he started working on the Guin Saga covers, Tanno managed to land yet another videogame collaboration which, ironically, ended up strenghtening even more his connection with Jun Suemi and the compatibility between their art styles.

Tecmo Koei, which had long worked with Suemi for its freeform turn based JRPG Zill O’ll series, culminating with its Trinity action JRPG spin-off on PS3, ended up choosing Tanno as the character designer of Bladestorm (2007), a peculiar directly-controlled wargame with RPG elements set during the Hundred Years War between England and France.

Interestingly, Tanno’s depiction of England’s Black Prince, the historical Edward of Woodstock, son of king Edward III, followed in a tradition of Japanese fantasy black knights which echoed his own portrayal of Daryun, one of Arslan Senki’s key character he would end up depicting a few years later, not to mention the iconic Ashram in Record of LodossWar, Lantis in Rayearth or even Cecil in Final Fantasy IV.

-TANNO’S CULDCEPTION

After a few years, Tanno’s partnership with outsourcing illustration agency Joe Down Studio (better known for their work as a music label) brought him to a new JRPG work, handling some illustrations in Omiya Soft’s Culdcept Saga on Xbox360 (2008), one of the least known localized titles in that platform’s Japanese lineup alongside the likes of Operation Darkness, Zoids Assault and Spectral Force 3.

Tanno’s contribution to Culdcept Saga ended up being quite small, though, with Shishizaru handling the game’s character design duties while a number of other illustrators, with Omiya Soft’s co-founder and chef (not even joking), Kairou Ketsu, doing most of the work.

Tanno returned to Culdcept a few years later with Culdcept Revolt on 3DS (2016), gaining a slightly more prominent role while still mostly working on card artworks, with character designs handled by Kinu Nishimura and a number of other industry legends working as guest artists, like the master of Japanese cyberpunk and early Seiun Award winner, Noriyuki Kato.

As the wise reader may well expect by now, Jun Suemi’s shadow also covered Tanno’s Culdcept effort, with Suemi also working on both Saga and Revolt, even sharing the same agency as Tanno for their Saga guest artworks.

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-A PERSIAN PARTNERSHIP

Between the two Culdcept collaborations, and while keeping himself busy with the Guin Saga and other, smaller literary illustrations, Tanno managed to work on yet another renowned series, Heroic Legend of Arslan by Yoshiki Tanaka, also known as the author of Japan’s foremost space opera, Legend of Galactic Heroes, whose 110-episode OVA adaptation is also one of the most accomplished works in its own field. This was likely a nostalgic affair for Tanno, considering how illustrating one of Legend of Galactic Heroes’ volumes had been one of his first paid works as an illustrator back in 1998.

Same as Guin Saga, Arslan Senki was another series that had enjoyed a number of incredibly gifted illustrators, from Yoshitaka Amano working on its earliest edition by Kadokawa, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, to Akihiro Yamada, an incredibly prolific watercolor artist who also worked on countless Japanese RPGs, lending his watercolor skills to its second edition in the early ‘10s, this time by Kobunsha.

Tanno, again following in after some truly awe-inspiring artists of the previous generation, gave his own rendition of Arslan Senki’s fantasy Sasanian Iran around 2015, for a new paperback version of those novels, contributing in no small way to this storied franchise’s overall aesthetic.

-A NIGHTMARISH RETURN

Tanno’s involvement in the videogame space was soon renewed in 2016, when Koei chose to re-release Bladestorm with an additional, fantasy scenario, Nightmare, alongside the original historical plotline featured in its first version.

This time, though, Tanno wasn’t the only character designer and, considering how most of the concept arts for this game are actually reworked renders, it’s hard to ascertain whether all new characters were designed by him, or if they were just modeled in a way that could be compatible with his previous designs for Bladestorm’s 2008 release.

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With his involvment with the Guin Saga finally ending in the middle ‘10s after having slown down since around 2010 and his videogame partnership coming to an end after Bladestorm Nightmare, Shinobu Tanno ended up focusing on building his own portfolio while keeping busy with a steady stream of cover arts for fantasy and historical novels even if, much as Suemi and most other Japanese fantasy illustrators active in their timeframe, nowadays it seems he has mostly retired.

Still, Tanno’s relevance in preserving and bringing to a new generation the artistic compromise between the Western sword and sorcery aesthetic and Japan’s own traditional art, already embraced by Suemi and, in different ways, by Noriyoshi Ohrai, Amano and Yamada, can’t be understated, and one can hope this legacy will continue to be upheld by a number of other Japanese illustrators, like The House in Fata Morgana’s Moyataro or Uncharted Waters’s Michio Uno.

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Even among diehard fans of Nihon Falcom’s storied action JRPG series, Ys, devoted to the adventures of redhead swordsman Adol Christin in a world reminiscent of Earth’s distant past in a previous historical cycle, a bit like Howard’s Hyperborean Age in his Conan saga, the fifth entry is likely the most neglected.

This isn’t particularly surprising, though, once you consider how Ys V, detailing Adol’s quest to discover the past of the ancient city of Kefin in the Afrocan deserts near Xandria, rather blatantly inspired by our own Egypt, had a bit of a troubled development history.

Released on Super Famicom in late 1995, the game never managed to find its way to the Western markets, much as Ys IV, and its reception wasn’t so hot in Japan, either, to the point that Falcom felt a re-release was in order and gave the game another chance with the Expert version just four months later, in March 1996, with an amped up challenge and additional contents like a bonus dungeon and additional contents, not unlike what happened decades after with Ys X’s re-release.

While the first three games in the Ys series got a metric ton of remakes and ports over the years and even the elusive Ys IV finally became widely available with the Memories of Celceta remake on PSVita, Ys V kept being sidelined until the valiant Aeon Genesis team fantranslated its original version in 2013, which was for the best considering how, later on, Falcom chose to set Ys VIII right after an Ys V most fans never had a chance to enjoy!

That still left out the other, even more elusive, version of Adol’s sandy adventure, though.

Developer: Taito
Platform: PS2
Release date: March 2006
Fantranslated: December 2025 (Kaisaan Siddiqi and his team)

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Unknown to many, in the mid ‘00s Taito had worked on a number of PS2 JRPG remakes from a variety of franchises, covering the likes of Masaya’s Langrisser III and a number of entries in the Ys series, including the most faithful Ys III remake ever made, still retaining its original side-scrolling gameplay, and even their own rendition of Ys V.

The Kefin remake’s release, in March 2006, coincided with a rather turbulent time for its own developer, with Taito getting acquired by Square Enix and becoming a wholly owned subsidiary in the same timeframe Ys V was released, which also meant their remake efforts were terminated, making this version of the quest for Kefin even more meaningful for those dabbling in RPG history.

While most forgot about this line of products, even more so since none whatsoever managed to be localized in English despite Falcom’s own Ys VI making a comeback on both PS2 and PSP in the Western markets, thankfully fantranslators came to the rescue yet another time, with the team led by Kaisaan Siddiqi providing their own English beta patch for Taito’s Ys V remake in December 2025, just in time to celebrate the Super Famicom version’s 30th anniversary.

Exchanging the original’s top-down view for an isometric one and sporting a rather gorgeous mix of sprites and low-poly 3D maps coupled with plenty of new story twists, this Taito remake ends up providing a distinct experience compared to the original, Falcom-developed version, while also trying a bit more to tie its story to the series’ continuity, at least for what it was back in 2006.

With Ys V still missing from Falcom’s otherwise plentiful remake and porting efforts (despite Kondo hinting at it over the years) and Ys X’s latest version, itself mirroring Ys V Expert’s re-release pattern, being published in the West a few weeks ago, it’s a good time as any to revisit Adol’s least known adventure, and I hope to serve my readers a proper retrospective soon!

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Developer: Nihon Falcom
Publisher: Refint (2025 remastered version)
Director: Toshihiro Kondo
Soundtrack: JDK Falcom Sound Team
Genre: Arena fighter with some light RPG elements
Progression: Linear
Country: Japan
Platform: PSP (original Japanese release), PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5 (remaster)
Release date: 2010 (original PSP release), 2025 (remaster)
Status: Completed on 16\10\2025

In the eyes of those invested in videogame history, each title is able to provide an unique snapshot about the state of the industry when it was published, not to mention that of its own genre, developer and franchise.

Crossover titles, in turn, offer a window to a more complex web of relationships, influenced by popularity just as much as by the narrative, stylistic and ludic compatibility of the different IPs they include. Because of this, a crossover’s unique mixup of licenses, and the way they interact with each other, can also become obsolete soon after a game’s release due to a number of unforeseen circumstances, further defining the uniqueness of the moment in which it was created.

Super Robot Taisen, Banpresto’s tactical JRPG series mixing mecha anime licenses since the days of Game Boy, is a pretty good example of this situation, with the selection of franchises in each of its dozens of outings reflecting their own popularity among Japanese enthusiasts and how well they’re perceived to synergize with each other. Sometimes, this also meant trying to build on their original material, like with the way Gundam’s Char Aznable’s character arc was fleshed out in Super Robot Taisen Alpha 2’s own continuity after the Char’s Counterattack movie.

-A DIFFERENT FALCOM

Then again, there are also more specific examples, such as crossovers that allow us a closer look at single developers like Ys vs Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga.

This 2010 PSP action-JRPG crossover between two of Falcom’s most storied franchises, despite staying in Japan back then, unexpectedly resurfaced fifteen years later in late 2025 thanks to Refint finally localizing it in English by partnering with a renowned group of Falcom fan translator, Geofront, while also porting it to most platforms under the sun.

Due to those unique circumstances, Alternative Saga ended up being a time capsule of sort, showing us the unique situation Nihon Falcom was experiencing fifteen years ago.

While Ys, the action-JRPG franchise featuring redhead adventurer Adol Christin’s sword and sorcery adventures in a Hyperborean-style rendition of our own world, was one of Falcom’s core franchises since their days as home PC developers in the mid ‘80s, back in 2009 the series had experienced one of its most traumatic moment when Ys Seven turned what had always been a solitary adventure with very little narrative oomph into a story driven, party-based affair, a trend that later became the series’ new standard with Ys Memories of Celceta, Ys VIII: Lacrymosa of Dana and Ys IX: Monstrum Nox.

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Trails in the Sky, on the other hand, back then in 2010 was just known as Sora no Kiseki, with its English title only existing in XSEED’s announcement since the localization of Estelle and Joshua's debut adventure was still underway.

Even in Japan, though, Sora no Kiseki was actually a fairly recent affair, a far cry from the humungous thirteen-game (not even counting remakes and spinoffs) interconnected epic that it has morphed into since then.

Indeed, Trails wasn’t even considered a proper franchise, being just the latest trilogy in the Legend of Heroes series, collectively considered as its sixth entry, with the upcoming Zero no Kiseki being also labeled as Legend of Heroes VII in its early promotional material. After all, in Falcom’s intricate gaming genealogy, Legend of Heroes itself was born as a mere spin-off of their ancient Dragon Slayer line, and already featured two autonomous continuities before Trails, Iselhasa and Gagharv.

Even so, 2010 would be a turning point for Zemuria, Trails’ world, since Sora no Kiseki would become just Kiseki when, a few months after Alternative Saga, the abovementioned Zero no Kiseki, localized more than a decade later as Trails to Zero, ended up expanding this universe to a different area, the Crossbell City-State.

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-KATO, KONDO AND FALCOM’S PSP TRANSITION

This era of Falcom is ripe with memories for yours truly, too. It was the age where I had to import Falcom’s PC games from Himeya, Paletweb and Playasia after Deuce and Nightwolve’s Ys fantranslation efforts, later being overjoyed to learn about XSEED starting to localize their PSP ports and having the pleasure of interviewing Tom Lipschultz for one of the magazines I had recently started to write on.

This enthusiasm also meant that I tried to spotlight Falcom’s titles on my country’s message boards, attempting to bring more people on board of the Ys bandwagon and to generate interest for the upcoming Trails in the Sky while also replaying the Gagharv trilogy’s PSP editions, enjoying them quite a bit despite their well-known localization woes.

In a way, one could say this was a key moment in Falcom’s transition from an Asian-focused PC developer which had just transitioned to PSP in order to escape the dire realities of PC software distribution (back then, the Japanese PC market was still focused on physical copies) to a more international team which, fifteen years later, has become an established player for Western JRPG fans, too.

It’s no surprise, then, that this snapshot was jointly captured in Ys vs Trails in the Sky by two industry legends which represented Falcom’s past and future, with Falcom founder Masayuki Katou (who sadly passed away two years ago) acting as producer, a role he held for most Falcom releases over the decades, while his successor, Toshihiro Kondo, who started out as an ardent Falcom fan before being coopted into the company, working as its director while also contributing to Alternative Saga’s script.

Considering how long Falcom had been one of the key non-adult PC Japanese developer, it isn’t that surprising that Kato and Kondo’s Alternative Saga ended up having a certain doujin feel to it, reminding one not just of the Touhou and Fate fangames that often populated that space, but also of the commercial beat’em up-style crossover efforts ripe with unlockable goodies, bonus artworks, wallpapers and various kinds of fanservice, a bit like with Melty Blood (2002) for Type Moon’s franchises or, later on, Aquaplus’ Aquapazza for Utawarerumono, Tears to Tiara and others, not to mention Nitroplus’ own crossover fighter a few years later.

As we will see, Alternative Saga will follow this template up to a point, opting for a 3D, top down combat system akin to Power Stone rather than going with a traditional 2D fighting game adaptation, while also including plenty of RPG systems to spice up its four-character fights and its admittedly few boss encounters.

This choice was likely due not only to creative reasons, but also to Falcom's own development constraints, since, as we will see, building Alternative Saga as an arena fighter allowed them to integrate already available assets and systems while also keeping its development in-house.

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-A DRACONIC BRAINWASHING

Like plenty of other JRPG crossovers, Ys vs Trails is set in an alternate dimension, Xanadu (itself a callback to Dragon Slayer’s second entry), where the power of an evil dragon, Galsis, calls out across the dimensions, summoning heroes to be enslaved by his will, which is able to rewrite the minds of planar interlopers in order to turn them into willing helpers.

Unless one of those heroes happens to be the protagonist chosen by the player, that is: while not all of the game’s playable characters can be used in its Story Mode, there are still plenty of unique options in Alternative Saga’s roster, from the obvious Ys and Trails in the Sky protagonists Adol Christin and Estelle Bright to the princess Chloe or Geis, the brooding, anti-heroic axeman helped by three elemental fairies Adol met during Ys VI Ark of Napishtim, only to finally make him into an ally during Ys Seven.

As another consequence of it being a 2010 title, Alternative Saga’s cast is also quite nostalgic, with Oath in Felghana and Seven being heavily represented on the Ys side while Trails, rather obviously, focuses on the Liberl trilogy.

Then again, even Kiseki fans got their own interesting tidbit, since Zero no Kiseki’s Lloyd Bannings, the Crossbell Police Department investigator, actually debuted with Alternative Saga, being teased alongside his city in this crossover effort a few months before his own game was actually out in Japan. While this could be a clever promotional tactic back then, in 2025 it was yet another reminder of the unique context of Alternative Saga’s development.

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While the overall scenario featured in the Story Mode ends up being unchanged regardless of the protagonist you chose, with the player slowly progressing toward the dragon’s castle while beating the rest of the cast and recruiting them, the banter exchanged between the characters (including Adol, despite staying true to his nature as a mute protagonist by having the player pick up between fairly samey dialogue options) absolutely does, which is reason enough to complete this fairly short story mode a number of times if you happen to be a lifelong fan of Ys and Legend of Heroes, including the option to unlock different difficulty level for scenarios you already cleared.

Story events are also dubbed, which isn’t something one could take for granted considering how niche of a release Alternative Saga was, and the visual novel-style portraits are able to make a convincing impression of their original character designs while also unifying them with a singular style, possibly trying to subtly adhere to Katsumi Enami’s designs in Ys Seven and in what, back then, was the upcoming Zero no Kiseki.

It’s rather frustrating how, due to Falcom’s policy of not crediting its own internal character designers, it’s quite hard to discern who actually illustrated Alternative Saga’s character artworks, even more so considering the number of people involved with the game’s broader asset creation effort.

Interactions aren’t limited to Ys and Trails characters, despite the obvious focus on those franchises: Gagharv fans, all three of them, are in for a treat, and there are plenty of cameo and callbacks to many other Falcom series scattered not just in the main storyline, but also in the unlockable artworks and promotional material featured in the game, which can be purchased in the same shop that also features new weapons and equipments for the heroes themselves.

True to its arena fighter roots, Alternative Saga also includes arcade and versus modes, both local and online, where all the characters are finally able to tackle Xanadu’s challenges, albeit in an abridged way, or to fight non-canon four person battles, which can be freely adjusted in order to have free for all or team matches.

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-BURSTING IN GRANCEL

Despite being rooted in Power Stone-style arena fighters, Alternative Saga’s combat is actually a retooled version of Ys Seven’s combat system, featuring a fast paced, combo-heavy setup with plenty of skills you can associate to button presses, consuming SPs obtained through normal attacks, and a decent number of very nostalgic stages (not just because of their locations, but also due to their memorable remixed and arranged tunes) providing their own unique fighting environments. Then again, Alternative Saga’s arenas never attempt anything as unique as Capcom’s series in terms of stage hazards or heavily impactful stage-specific gimmicks.

While Alternative Saga keeps Ys Seven’s emphasis on Flash Guard, the timed defence system that knocks the attacker back while granting a window of critical hits after a successful input, it also introduces a number of systems that Adol’s adventure in Altago didn’t feature, like a jump button complementing the roll evasive action and a stamina gauge, used to prevent Flash Guard spam. Of course, powerful finishing moves are also available, not to mention support actions dependent on the ally selected by the player and the Energy Burst, a stun breaker move that allows your character to escape enemy combos at the price of a fraction of their HPs.

While the roster offers quite a bit of diversity in terms of playstyles, with each characters also having a decent pool of skills to unlock, accessories end up providing one of the most interesting trait of this game, customization-wise. Each character can equip a variable number of them until they exhaust their AP pool, with each accessory having its own cost, providing not just the usual stat boosts and status effect protections, but also a number of modifiers that can break some of the combat system’s rules and make the overall experience more varied.

-REMASTERING NOSTALGIA

While its combat is pleasant enough for an arcade-feeling crossover action RPG experience aimed at what was a niche cohort of enthusiast Japanese fans, the main charm of Refint’s remastered version can possibly be found in something Falcom couldn’t really intend to deliver back in 2010, namely the ability to spirit us away to a different time, where Falcom itself, their IPs, writing style and art direction ended up having an unintended nostalgic quality to them.

Alternative Saga’s uniqueness in Falcom’s lineup ended up being further emphasized later on, since Falcom never revisited the crossover space in any of its following efforts, aside from the usual cameos and references in mainline Ys and Trails games, far too busy to develop its own franchise to conjure yet again that peculiar doujin flair that made Ys vs Sora no Kiseki possible to begin with.

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Among the Japanese artists who contributed to videogame RPGs in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, one can often distinguish between those that had a traditional art education, conveying their style through oil and watercolor illustrations and paintings while being strongly influenced by sword and sorcery Western artists, Moebius, Art Nouveau, surrealism and a variety of other sources, and those who started their careers as graphic designers or animators, later focusing on more traditional character design works even outside the anime space. Satoshi Urushihara’s career, as we will see, is an example of the latter trend.

The father of Lemnear and Plastic Little was born in 1966 in the Hiroshima prefecture which, by then, had mostly recovered after the devastation imparted on its capital by the United States’ Little Boy atomic bomb in August 1945, despite the severe long term consequences on the surviving local population, even outside the old urban area, making themselves tragically apparent for decades.

While other Japanese RPG artists of his generation were mostly inspired by their Western peers, Urushihara’s origin story as an illustrator is a bit unorthodox, with high school, rather than university, as its turning point.

In 1983, during his time at the technical high school in Miyajima, an eerily beautiful location on the Seto Inland Sea, Urushihara met Kinji Yoshimoto, a coetaneous student who was already developing his skills as an illustrator. Being both fascinated with Japanese animation, they choose to pursue a career as animators together, back when that industry in Japan was still young and booming with new studios and productions.

-KENYAN TRANSFORMATIONS

It was so that a few months later, in autumn 1983, while Naoyuki Kato worked on his landmark cyberpunk art, Akihiro Yamada was developing his own unique watercolor aesthetic, Hitoshi Yoneda dreamed about Moebius and sci-fantasy, Jun Suemi started forging his Japanese take on sword and sorcery art connecting videogames, tabletop games and fantasy novels and Yoshitaka Amano had just left his own animation gig at Tatsunoko to focus on his work as an illustrator, monopolizing the Seiun Awards for a number of years in the process, an eighteen-years old Satoshi Urushihara landed a position as animator at Toei for Shounen Kenya (1984). Nowadays forgotten by most, this was the animated adaptation of a 1951 manga by Souji Yamakawa that had already received two live action versions, recounting the bizarre tale of a Japanese boy stranded in British-controlled Kenya at the onset of World War II, having to fend for himself while searching for his father.

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While Urushihara was overjoyed to work at Toei, which was (and still is) a pillar of Japan’s animation industry, ending up as the animator for The Transformers (1987) soon after he was done with Shounen Kenya, he had just graduated from high school and was still so young that he hadn’t really developed the signature style most people would end up associating with his work later on.

It was only in the next five years or so that he gradually progressed in his passionate search for beauty, conveyed through his trademark highly idealized, glossy, almost plastic portrayal of anathomy, fabrics and armors, a stark departure from both the grim Western sword and sorcery art that inspired many of his Japanese peers and the traditional Japanese art forms that often served to balance them.

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-SUBSUMING OVAs

In a way, one could say that Urushihara’s pursuit of his own peculiar stylistic identity was informed by slowly piecing together traits desumed by the work of other mangaka and animators of the early ‘80s and by his own work in that field, including the allusive or outright adult manga and animation efforts he worked on since 1987, after he stopped working on The Transformers and branched out to other studios and genres.

Also, while his explicit works are outside the scope of this retrospective, they did end up constituting a very relevant part of his output in the next two decades, to the point that, outside of the JRPG space, they’re by far the most famous part of his works.

Acting as one of the animators for series such as Bubblegum Crisis (1987) and Record of Lodoss War (1990) while also working on his own allusive works, such as the Lemnear (1989) manga and later the Plastic Little (1993) OAV (which were respectivelu adapted as a manga and OAV, with Kinji Yoshimoto being involved as well), one could say Urushihara subsumed the highly detailed and cinematic feel Japanese Original Animated Videos tended to have from the late ‘80s to the early ‘00s, with their richer animation budget allowing them to set different targets compared to regular anime series.

This link became apparent to me years ago, when a friend of mine who became invested in Urushihara due to Growlanser told me how, at first, he thought he had also worked on Legend of Galactic Heroes and Gundam Stardust Memory, and that he had also believed his role in Record of Lodoss War was much larger than it was.

While that wasn’t the case (even his involvement with Lodoss, as we will see, was actually limited to a single episode, likely contributing to the look of a number of animation cels there), my friend’s line of thought did betray how those series’ highly polished, exquisitely detailed animation, their attention to costumes, their pursuit of stylized beauty and their expressive character close-ups were also some of Urushihara’s key stylistic traits, in a way that sometimes could make his pieces feel similar to a number of other artists, like Nobuteru Yuki or Toshihiro Kawamoto, especially when considering the animation cels based on their works, rather than their actual artworks.

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-MASAYA’S WAR SONG

Of course, despite his focus on manga and animation, which brought him to start up his own company in 1990, Earthwork, alongside his longtime friend Kishimoto, Satoshi Urushihara couldn’t escape the wider trend of his craft in ‘90s Japan, such as the crosspollination with tabletop gaming, fantasy and sci-fi novels and, of course, videogame RPGs, even if he did visit those contexts some years later compared to many of the artists we discussed above.

The key connection that allowed him to develop his talent in the videogame space ended up being the one he developed with Masaya, known until a few years before as NCS, which allowed him to work on both the sci-fi and high fantasy settings he loved.

Considering how many Japanese artists started working on videogame RPGs with titles that are now obscure or utterly forgotten, Urushihara was lucky enough to have his first work in this genre also being one of the most meaningful, seeing how he was asked to provide key arts and character designs for the original Langrisser (1990), developed by Masaya’s Career Soft team.

Langrisser, originally developed on Mega Drive, ended up being the first entry in what would end up becoming an epic tactical JRPG series, featuring heroic fantasy storylines, large battle maps with mook soldier units available to the player alongside more powerful hero units and, later on, heavily branching scenarios with countless different endings and a number of alternative scenarios, usually featuring a Light and Dark faction alongside the neutral Empire forces, with each game reworking those archetypes in a variety of ways.

As one could expect, the first entry ended up also being the simplest one, which was also true for Urushihara’s own work: compared with most of his gorgeous cover arts, Langrisser’s original box art is a rather mediocre affair composition-wise, even if one can’t fault him for this situation given we don’t know which kind of directives he was given.

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Considering how iconic Urushihara’s work on Langrisser ended up being, it’s rather sad that, like most localized JRPGs in that decade, the first game in the series, which was also the only one to get an official localization until twenty years later, ended up being thoroughly de-Urushiharaized when it was brought to the United States as Warsong, changing not just its cover art, but also its in-game portraits in a way that made their connection with his character design less obvious.

Later on, in 1992, Masaya asked Urushihara to also work as character designer for Cybernator (also known as Assault Suit Valken), a side-scrolling mecha shoot’em up game directed by that Toshiro Tsuchida, who was also working on the mecha tactical JRPG Vixen 357 on Mega Drive. Tsuchida would later become a legend among mecha and tactical JRPG enthusiasts due to his Front Mission franchise, not to mention the Arc the Lad series.

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-DRIFTING TO FORCELIA

While working for Masaya and continuing his lifelong career as a mangaka and animator, Urushihara also ended up illustrating the Crystania novels (1993) by Ryo Mizuno, the legendary creator of the Forcelia setting which included the Lodoss saga, alongside plenty of other stories set in the same world, not to mention what was back then Japan’s foremost tabletop RPG system, Sword World (1989), which later on would end up getting quite a number of JRPG spin-offs, like the recently fantranslated PC88 and Super Famicom Sword World RPG title.

Urushihara’s work on Crystania was perhaps inevitable, considering how almost every single Japanese artist back then collaborated with Mizuno in some capacity, but it could have also been caused by his abovementioned involvement in the animation of Record of Lodoss War’s Episode 5, whose ballroom party at the court of king Kashue of Flaim didn’t just provide a brief respite to Parn and Deedlit, but was also the episode that tried to push that glossy, beautified aesthetic we just discussed into a series that could otherwise be way grittier.

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-THE MYSTERIOUS ACHIRAMAN

1993 also saw Urushihara working on another JRPG series, Amaranth, the only Masaya-unrelated videogame project he will end up undertaking before Masaya itself disappeared later that decade. This franchise, nowadays completely forgotten even withing the niche invested in unlocalized JRPGs, was one among many such series developed during the genre’s boom on Japanese home PC platforms such as MSX2, NEC’s PC88 and PC98 or Sharp’s X68000.

Amaranth’s developer, Fuga, was actually born as a Sharp-focused computer club made up by a number of enthusiast programming students in the Toyama Prefecture, which started developing indie (doujin) titles in the late ‘80s before specializing in PC98 JRPGs, with Amaranth as their core franchise alongside other stand alone games, like Oersteda (no relations with Live A Live’s iconic character!).

Now, while Urushihara is only credited for the box art of the third Amaranth game, the style of the key arts for Amaranth II and Amaranth IV, credited to an Achiraman that never worked on any other title before or after, is suspiciously similar to that of of our Lemnear creator, to the point that I strongly suspect Urushihara actually worked on the cover art and key art of all numbered entry in the series starting with Amaranth II, even if the in-game CGs were actually drawn by Moriyasu Taniguchi, himself a veteran illustrator and animator.

While I have no way to prove my theory, nor can I guess which personal or contractual circumstances may have caused Urushihara to prefer being credited with a pseudonym for the first and last game he was involved with in this franchise while using his own name for the middle one, one could theorize this could have had something to do with the terms of his partnership with Masaya. Then again, even if this mysterious Achiraman was indeed a different character designer, the fact his style mirrored Urushihara’s so much makes discussing his work still appropriate in a retrospective devoted to this author.

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-THE WINDS OF EL SALLIA

Whatever the situation with Achiraman and the Amaranth franchise may have been, Urushihara soon after ended up not having much time to spare for his non-Masaya videogame projects.

A few years after the first Langrisser, Masaya went back to the continent of El Sallia with a second entry, Langrisser II (1994), which heralded a veritable avalanche of new releases, with Der Langrisser (1995), a Super Famicom expanded remake of Langrisser II, as one the series’ most renowned entries before its transition to the fifth console generation, which saw Langrisser III (1996), IV (1997) and V (1998), not to mention a PC-FX version of Der Langrisser (1996) and yet another remake of both Langrisser I and II, dubbed Dramatic Edition (1997), released first on Sega Saturn and then on Sony’s PS1 and even a Langrisser Premium Package, a sort of bundle with all the series’ Saturn entries.

Now, it’s hard to argue this wasn’t the best moment in Urushihara’s gaming-related career, with dozens of increasingly alluring artworks, character designs, key arts and box covers gracing not just Japanese videogame shops, but also what was back then the budding import community. While not even a single game in this new wave of Langrisser releases ended up being localized, at least until fantranslators provided English versions of both Der Langrisser and Langrisser IV’s PS1 port many years later, Urushihara’s art was so iconic that it trascended the franchise it was meant to promote, tackling a number of archetypes in a way that turned his pieces into a visual commentary of a certain age of Japanese entertainment.

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This meant that, even in my own corner of Europe, one of the main shops dealing with import videogames went so far as to use Urushihara’s Langrisser pieces as promotional art for their ads on a number of local videogame magazines, which themselves weren’t shy of using his pieces out of context just because of how beautiful they were (something like this had also happened with Western fantasy artists like Caldwell and Elmore, after all).

A few years later, I still remember how, at local manga and anime conventions, at least one stand always had a number of Langrisser artbooks on sale, which attracted an audience that likely had no interest whatsoever in unlocalized Saturn tactical JRPGs, and yet was immediately drawn to its artworks.

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-COHESIVE IDENTITIES

While Urushihara’s art for Langrisser and Langrisser II looked a bit like a tamer version of Lemnear’s glossy, stylized take on sword and sorcery themes, from scantily clad heroines, shiny heroes, heavily armored old knights and the dark knight Boser, reminiscent of Lodoss' Ashram, his aesthetic slowly changed while working on the next few entries, likely to accomodate their own narrative twists, like a growing emphasis on politics and war themes, some sci-fi elements allowing for a number of unique costumes in Langrisser IV and especially V and a growing sense of place, that allowed El Sallia and Yeless, the western continent where the series moved to later on, to acquire a distinct visual identity, even compared with Urushihara’s other projects, together with its already distinctive German elements and peculiar sword worship themes.

Even then, while one could say Langrisser’s aesthetic become more varied over the years, allowing for a wider variety of characters and costumes, and yet the last two numbered entries in this storied franchise are also the ones with the most cohesive overall character design and, despite featuring some sci-fantasy elements, also push even more strongly the knightly archetypes featured more loosely in the first three games.

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-DRAMATIC PORTRAITS AND EARTHLY OPENINGS

While Urushihara’s box arts became much more ambitious as the series progressed, with poster-style compositions and multiple takes created to give a distinctive visual appeal even to new versions of already available games, from Langrisser III onward his character design work ended up becoming much more relevant even in-game, with Langrisser I and II’s smaller portraits being replaced by animated portraits taking quite a bit of screen real-estate, visual novel-style, a transition that also affected a number of other artists, like with Yoshitaka Amano’s work finally getting properly showcased in Legend of Kartia.

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Then again, we shouldn’t forget Urushihara started his career as an animator, and his talents in this regard were also put to good use by Masaya as soon as their hardware and budget allowed them to incorporate proper animated openings for their Langrisser games, a growing trend that had been pioneered, albeit in a simpler way, by home PC JRPGs. While most of those efforts were rather cleverly made of still CGs handled with dynamic camera movements, limiting the actual animation to a smaller set of scenes, Langrisser III’s opening was still a respectable effort, while Langrisser V’s is one of my personal favorites among fifth generation JRPG animated openings, alongside the likes of Wild Arms, Sakura Taisen, Tales of Destiny, Valkyrie Profile, Tales of Phantasia’s remake and a few others.

That those openings were so accomplished isn’t that surprising once you consider how the one directing them was actually Urushihara’s abovementioned Earthwork colleague and lifelong friend, Kinji Yoshimoto, showcasing just how much Urushihara and his own company ended up synergizing with Career Soft during those extremely dense development years.

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-GLOSSLANSER

With Langrisser’s Team Career leaving Masaya after Langrisser V in late 1998, building a partnership with Atlus that would later lead to their acquisition by the latter in 2001, ultimately being being rolled up into Atlus for good, the Langrisser IP was off the table for Urushihara, too, with its later entries on Dreamcast and Nintendo DS being developed by other teams which ended up contracting different artists, ultimately damaging their efforts given how Urushihara’s work had defined Langrisser’s tone and visual identity.

Considering Langrisser V had wrapped up most of the series’ underlying storylines, though, this situation also provided a great opportunity for Career to pivot to a new franchise with a different take on their trademark tactical combat, Growlanser (1999), which would end up exploring the real time tactical space in a way a bit akin to what Real Time With Pause WRPG combat systems were doing in the Infinity Engine-era titles, from Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale to Planescape Torment.

Compared with Langrisser’s first few entries, Growlanser since the onset was much less focued on a traditional fantasy aesthetic, rather building on a modern fantasy style that went even further than Langrisser’s latest entries in mixing current day fashion, more subtle armor pieces (giant-sized pauldrons, for instance, were very common in Langrisser, but went mostly unusued in its successor franchise), almost to the point of feeling like it could have been influenced by current J-Pop trends.

Aside from being an impressive, ambitious effort, as I tried to detail years ago in my own retropective, Growlanser tried to push its production values as much as possible, not in terms of its spriteworks, which were absolutely serviceable but still a bit basic, but rather in terms of portraits and dub, with Japanese voice overs covering most of the dialogues.

Even its opening pushed Career Soft’s boundaries even further, not just because of its quality and more dynamic feel, emphasizing the quality of Urushihara’s character design work, but also because it included two different versions, with a focus on male or female party members and a different take on the game’s theme song, composed by the legendary Noriyuki Iwadare whose Growlanser songs are still mostly unknown by most of his fans.

Predictably, Growlanser’s openings, same as Langrisser III and Langrisser V’s, were also directed by Earthwork’s Kinji Yoshimoto, even if his involvement unfortunately didn’t continue with the series’ next few entries, something one can easily appreciate by comparing the quality of Growlanser I’s OPs with the much simpler ones featured in Growlanser II and III.

In a different world, Growlanser could have been brought to the West soon after its Japanese release, and Victor Ireland’s Working Design tried doing just that, licensing the first three Growlanser games all at the same time, a bit like he already did for the Arc the Lad series.

Unfortunately, SCEA’s refusal to allow Growlanser to be released as a stand-alone PS1 game and, at the same time, to allow a multi-platform bundle including both Growlanser I on PS1 and Growlanser II and III for PS2, doomed this effort and meant that only the next two entries actually ended up being released in English, even if a number of fans worked on a translated script and a proper English patch has finally been released in late 2025, even if it’s still in beta.

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-PRE-SEQUEL

This created a bit of a conundrum for Western fans, since Growlanser II and III were, respectively, a direct sequel and a distant prequel to the unlocalized Growlanser I, and that isn’t even considering how both games had to cope with a noticeably smaller budget in different ways, with Growlanser II skipping explorations and focusing on scenario battles, almost like a traditional tactical JRPG, while Growlanser III kept explorable cities and dungeons but did away with the connective overworld areas featured in the series’ first entry.

Then again, thankfully Career Soft and Atlus didn’t skimp on those games’ art direction, with Urushihara producing some memorable characters and key arts for both games while also having his in-game portraits becoming almost indistinguishable from his illustrations due to the transition to PS2. This was a key factor in granting some measure of popularity to Growlanser Generations (2004), as this American bundle containing Growlanser II and III was called, with many flocking to give it a chance simply because of Urushihara’s involvement.

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-WAYFARER OF MEDIA

Thankfully for the franchise, its next entry, Growlanser IV: Wayfarer of Time, ended up being an awesome return to form for its series, starting a new continuity while restoring the overworld field explorations abandoned after G1 and pushing the amount of optional contents and endings to a new level while preserving the signature real time tactical combat and war stories Career Soft was known for.

This was true for Urushihara's own work, too, with Growlanser IV being one of his most accomplished line of character designs yet, including a number of callbacks to Langrisser V and Growlanser I, not to mention another opening directed by his Earthwork friend Yoshimoto.

Growlanser IV also brought the series to a number of new places, first with its spin-off visual novel, Return, based on a series of short stories meant to expand the original's narrative or many of its endings (though the character-specific scenarios required a Growlanser IV final save with the correspondent ending unlocked), which was the first foray of Urushihara's art in a genre well suited for making the most of character art, and then with a short promotional OVA bundled with the game.

This was also the first time in more than a decade that Urushihara worked on a non-adult OAV and, so far at least, also the last time his art was featured in that format at all.

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-THREE-DIMENSIONAL WOES

Sadly, despite Growlanser IV's decent success, Atlus actually cut the budget for Career Soft's next title which, mixed with Career's own decision to abandon 2d sprites and pre-rendered backdrops in order to explore 3D assets without thr budget needed to make the transition less jarring, made Growlanser V and its direct sequel, Growlanser VI, less visually appealing and more controversial than their actual stories and gameplay deserved to.

Set in yet another new world and continuity, Growlanser V explores a number of interesting topics, like the moral quandaries of armed peacekeeping, where a host of warring nations are forced into a sort of perpetual Vienna Congress by the threat of an ancient flying fortress unearthed by Seldous, which also acts as the prologue’s protagonists before the actual main character is introduced, an idealist that uses it to bring about an uneasy peace constantly monitored by an independent group of peace enforcers.

Growlanser V featured some unusual character designs, with my favorite being Randy, a gentleman acting as an archeologist while traveling the world and fighting demons and enemy soldiers wearing a top hat, a ruff and a pink boa!

As usual with Growlanser, political and war themes mix with environmental issues and magic, and the resolution of Growlanser V’s story opened up the continent to the rest of the world, with Growlanser VI introducing the new area of Monopolis, whose characters ended up having a sci-fantasy flair way bolder than in any of Urushihara’s other RPG works so far.

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-AN HANDHELD CODA

While the Growlans er franchise was basically dead after Growlanser VI’s release, with no localization in sight due to Heritage of War, Growlanser V’s Western version, dramatically underperforming (happily, Risae and their team did produce an English fantranslation patch later on, though), the series managed to squeeze two new releases in the late ‘00s, with an expanded PSP port of Growlanser and, later, Growlanser IV that acted as a sort of Der Langrisser-ization for both games, adding new characters, scenario branches and endings.

This also meant new Urushihara art, thankfully, and, while Growlanser I’s handheld version was left in Japan since Atlus USA was still drunk on Demon’s Souls’ success and, for a time, tried pursuing Western and indie titles while foregoing a number of JRPG series they had recently worked on, at least Western fans were lucky enough to get a localized version of Growlanser IV Over Reloaded, albeit without its Japanese dub, which, due to its quality, did a lot to rekindle the interest in a franchise that, after that moment, was basically abandoned by Atlus.

-END OF LEGEND

With Growlanser’s demise closing off the last vestige of Masaya’s JRPG heritage, Urushihara mostly retired from the Japanese videogame industry in the early ‘10s, allowing himself the occasional collaboration and guest art while still working as an illustrator in a variety of other contexts, from cover arts to artbooks related to his previous body of works.

One rather glaring exception was Cybernator’s new Declassified release on Nintendo Switch (2023), which he celebrated by creating a number of brand new artworks, both completely original and reinterpreting his older 1992 Valken illustrations.

Then again, sadly it’s difficult to expect to see him resurface in new JRPG efforts, given Growlanser’s demise more than fifteen years ago and how even the new right holders of the Langrisser IP ended up choosing other artists for the series’ last console outings, even if Langrisser I and II’s latest remakes at least had an option to toggle Urushihara’s character designs instead of forcing series fans to accept the very different style of Ar Tonelico’s Ryo Nagi.

Still, even if one just focus on his JRPG output, ignoring his adult works or his previous career in animation, Urushihara’s art still possesses a timeless quality that speaks to anyone who enjoyed anime and manga in the ‘90s, transcending even his own body of works given how his style ended up becoming a sort of coalescence of a variety of aesthetic trends typical of this industry in that unique, pivotal timeframe.

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-BONUS GALLERY:

Urushihara’s Street Fighter-themed illustrations:

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Despite its relevance in Japanese RPG history, Tales of Phantasia, the first entry in Namco’s flagship action RPG series, originally released in December 1995 on Super Famicom, has a rather bizarre localization history, or lack thereof if one only considers official efforts.

While its original version, left in Japan by Namco, was fantranslated early on thanks to DeJap’s iconic English patch, whose memetic power has kept it alive even decades after its release, the fantranslation of Phantasia’s PS1 remake, which was for a long time the definitive version of Cless’ adventure, was a grueling marathon of sorts that saw Phantasian Productions work on their own translation for almost a decade, ironically only releasing it a few years after Absolute Zero, a renowned team made up of Gemini and throughhim, had published their own, much faster (and stylistically quite different), English localization patch in 2007.

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Meanwhile, Namco itself had finally decided to bring Tales of Phantasia to the Western markets in 2006 but, as a sort of Monkey Paw situation, unfortunately it was just its GBA version that saw the light outside of Japan, which was arguably the worst way to experience the game both contents-wise and due to the debatable quality of its translated script.

Just a few months after, in late 2006, Japanese fans could enjoy the release of Tales of Phantasia’s PSP port, Full Voice Edition, based on an improved version of its PS1 remake. Considering how this edition would have actually been a great way to reintroduce the game to the English-speaking world, rather predictably Namco choose to left it stranded in Japan.

To add insult to injury, in 2014 Namco did produce a brand new localization effort for Phantasia’s free to play iOS port, itself based on the Full Voice Edition version, only to delist it soon after its release due to the backlash by the Tales fanbase, appalled by the way microtransactions were grafted haphazardly on a classic that truly deserved a better treatment.

Considering this string of misguided decisions, it isn’t surprising that Phantasia's latest version was also forgotten by Namco: we’re talking about Tales of Phantasia Cross, a 2010 PSP release produced in a rather convoluted context, given how it was bundled with the remake of Narikiri Dungeon X, itself a sequel of Phantasia originally released on GameBoy Color.

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Title: Tales of Phantasia Cross
Platform: PSP (2010)
Fantranslation: Life Bottle Productions - January 2026

Cross, built on the Full Voice Edition’s contents, themselves an expanded version of the PS1 remake, while adding plenty of new contents, like a whole new playable character, Rondoline, meant to provide a connection with Narikiri Dungeon and to flesh out the backstory of Phantasia’s main antagonist, Dhaos, while also streamlining its combat system by making its spells less invasive and updating the party members’ battle sprites.

Thankfully, the Tales fanbase once again came to the rescue, providing English-speaking players a way to enjoy its Japanese-exclusive entries, with Life Bottle Productions, already known for their awesome work on Tales of Destiny Remake, Tales of Innocence R and Tales of Rebirth’s English patches, releasing their English patch for Tales of Phantasia Cross in January 2026.

Crucially, the awesome people at Life Bottle don’t plan to stop with Tales of Phantasia Cross, either, since a Narikiri Dungeon X translation is already in the works and will bring the Western Tales fanbase a step nearer to the dream of finally having all the series’ entry available in English, even more so since Namco’s own 30th anniversary initiative has, so far, only covered the PS3 Tales games, like with the remasters of Tales of Graces f, Xillia and Berseria, without going back to the series’ storied past.

Long-time readers of this Substack by now have likely noticed my affection for this series, so it will hardly come as a surprise that you can expect to read more about Tales of Phantasia Cross in the future.

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My readers here on Substack have likely noticed I’m enjoying Japanese RPG Maker darling Tobira no Densetsu quite a bit, due to a multitude of interesting choices both on a narrative level and systems-wise that made its English fantranslation last December one of the best Christmas presents I received in quite a while. Even then, though, back when I started this journey, I wouldn’t have imagined it would allow me to take an unexpected digression between RPGs, art and theology, even if it was actually an external coincidence that triggered this small detour.

This 2007 title features in a rather prominent way the theme of paintings as an allegory for accessing others’ experiences, in a way that is both more concrete and a bit subtler compared with other RPGs such as, say, Clair Obscur and Atelier Lydie and Suelle, with the first main quest right after the prologue seeing young adventurer Lucia roaming her world in a freeform journey to gather paintings for the Lestarian Royal Gallery, whose masterpieces were sold a few years before to fill the kingdom’s coffers during its struggles.

This fantasy art odyssey, that saw Lucia roam her world searching for paintings while stumbling upon a number of hints regarding Tobira no Densetsu’s actual main scenario, took on an unexpected meta overtone when the first masterpiece I discovered, by finding an elusive master painter hidden in a secluded village due to a random rumor, was actually titled Jacob’s Ladder, making me wonder if this was just one of many random Old Testament references in Japanese RPGs or, given how peculiar Tobiden’s lore can be, if Lucia’s world actually had some knowledge of the Book of Genesis, where Jacob, son of Isaac and nephew of Abraham, saw an angelic ladder leading to God’s transcendent abode while sleeping during his long journey to Harran, a vision that also inspired a number of artists over the centuries, with William Blake’s painting, originally part of a series of a Bible-themed artworks commissioned by his mentor Thomas Butts at the turn of the 19th century, as the most famous example.

[28:10] Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran.
[28:11] He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.
[28:12] And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

While I soon forgot about the real worl connections of my Lestarian search, a curious coincidence brought me back to Jacob’s Ladder just two days later, in early January, while I was visiting an exhibition focused on Leonora Carrington’s surrealist paintings alongside my daughter. It was she that brought my attention to a painting I had never seen before, which was in fact yet another rendition of Jacob’s Ladder!

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Carrington, an author as interesting as her life was difficult, with the horrors of World War II and her traumatic stay in a Spanish mental asylum as some of the most noticeable challenges she had to face, could have titled that work this way as a reference to Blake’s own Jacob’s Ladder, which one could rightfully consider a proto-surrealist painting in its own right due to the peculiar way it tackles this fascinating religious theme and which, due to its fame, is likely the painting Tobira no Densetsu’s writer, Denjirou Jr., was referencing.

Then again, it’s also true that, despite her love for sincretistic occultism (or, more likely, because of it), Carrington produced quite a number of paintings based on a variety of religious themes, like with her own rendition of Noah’s Ark and the Song of Gomorrah, or the Temptations of Saint Anthony, possibly inspired by Mexican Catholic art pieces Carrington saw during the last stretch of her earthly journey in the country that became her second home, and that isn’t even considering the peculiar Zoroaster meets his own image in the garden, which repurposed Zoroastrian dualism by having its own prophet face his Doppelganger while following the verses of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

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Long before Blake’s own watercolor rendition of the dream of Jacob-Israel, after all, countless religious and lay artists had worked on their own versions of that allegoric dream, like with the 12th century icon found in the Coptic monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai, portraying Jacob’s Ladder not just as a reference to the Book of Genesis, which Hebrew mystics had explored with the concept of the heavenly stairway, sulam, but also to that monastery’s founder back in the 6th century, Saint John Climacus (which actually means “of the ladder”), a master ascetic who had likely lived in Gaza before becoming a monk in nearby Sinai, conceptualizing the thirty steps for ascending Jacob’s ladder and reaching transcendence in his Climax, known as Scala Paradisi among Catholic theologians and mystics, which became wildly popular over the centuries not just among monks and cenobites but also among those laypeople who dreamed to reach a mystic epiphany, following in the footsteps of Jacob’s own numinous dreamscape.

Framing dreams as paintings, and in turn paintings as gateways to a variety of dreamscapes, also brings us back to Tobira no Densetsu, whose protagonist, Lucia, isn’t just tasked with restoring Lestaria’s Royal Gallery, but can also access a mental gallery of her own while sleeping, which includes a number of visions related to her world and its denizens she can actually use to advance their own plot threads, ultimately unlocking yet another mental construct of hers, the Fortune Doors (which tie to Tobiden’s own developer, who named his team Door), to progress a story that often feels like an inner journey into her memories and perceptions.

Given this theming, it isn’t particularly surprising that painters are also common during Lucia’s journey in Tobira no Densetsu, from her own late father to a number of artists she will be able to befriend, recruit or even fight, as in one rather sad side event later on.

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While this concludes our brief foray into Tobiden’s reference of Genesis 28 and its related art pieces, paintings in RPGs and RPG-adjacent titles have a long history, whether as portals to their own meta-worlds inside a game’s proper setting, like in Final Fantasy VI’s Owzer gallery, Soul Hackers’ VR Art Gallery, Dark Souls’ Ariamis, Witcher III Hearts of Stone, the abovementioned Clair Obscure and Atelier Lydie and Suelle and countless others, or as an additional thematic layer to flesh out a game’s setting and its puzzles, like with many other games, whether occasionally, like beloved Terranigma with its Sylvain Castle, or in a much more committed fashion, such as with Cyanide’s peculiar adventure-RPG hybrid The Council, whose veritable overload of classic paintings, almost to the point of feeling like proper edutainment (including a sequence that gave me a chance to introduce my son to Guido Reni’s portraits of the Apostles) I really enjoyed right before starting Tobira no Densetsu itself.

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Developer: Monolith Soft
Publisher: Nintendo
Director: Shingo Kawabata
Scenario writers: Tatsuya Takahashi, Soraya Saga
Character designer: Tadahiro Usuda (Xenogears, Threads of Fate)
Soundtrack: Yasunori Mitsuda
Genre: Hack & slash action-JRPG, taking some clues from Neverland’s PS2 Shining action-JRPGs
Progression: Linear
Country: Japan
Platform: Nintendo DS
Release date: 28\2\2008
Status: Completed on 5\1\2009

While nowadays it’s routinely hailed as one of the best examples of a first-party videogame developer acquisition, back in 2007 Nintendo gaining 80% of Monolith Soft’s shares was actually a bit of a controversial topic, at least in the circle I used to debate Japanese RPGs with.

While some were excited about the possibilities such a major publisher could open up for Takahashi and his team, others were still sad, if not furious, about the way the Xenosaga trilogy had been handled by Namco (and that’s not even considering how we Europeans only managed to get its second entry, making importing the only option) and feared Monolith could end up getting the short end of the stick yet another time. The fact that Monolith’s first Wii project was Disaster Day of Crisis, a strikingly different game compared to the Xenosaga and Baten Kaitos franchises, obviously didn’t help.

In the years before Xenoblade Chronicles had been introduced to the world with its 2009 E3 trailer (back then, it was known as Monado) and people started to clamor for its localization, building fan-driven initiatives such as Operation Rainfall, the first RPG Monolith effort under Nintendo was actually a smaller, lesser known action-JRPG on Nintendo DS released in early 2008, Soma Bringer, which some took as an early sign of Nintendo’s unwillingness to provide Monolith with a decent budget allowing them to build a more ambitious project.

-HANDHELD TRANSITION

To this day, Soma Bringer still stands as one of the least known games from this developer, with its lack of localization and rather low production values as the most likely reasons. Happily, the fantranslation scene for Nintendo DS titles back then was absolutely stunning, and Soma Bringer ended up getting a lightning-speed English patch released less than one year after its Japanese debut which, back then, was actually faster than many official localization efforts.

In hindsight, there was actually some truth to the abovementioned worries about this game being a reset of sort for Monolith Soft, not because Soma Bringer heralded some sort of dark age for its developer, far from it in fact, but rather because it hinted at Takahashi’s willingness to leave behind the cinematic, linear, turn-based style of the Xenosaga games (and, with the obvious stylistic and technical differences, Xenogears) most of us associated with his works in favor of a more gameplay-focused, freeform experience, where explorations and character customization played a larger role and turn based systems left the stage to real-time battles aimed at providing a more frantic experience, seamlessly integrating fights with the rest of the game by avoiding instanced arenas.

In fact, back then when I finally had a chance to tackle Soma Bringer, the first comparison I could make wasn’t with Monolith’s previous titles but, as we will see later, with Square’s Seiken Densetsu-Mana series and Neverland’s hack&slash action JRPGs, like Shining Force NEO and Shining Force EXA, themselves some of the first Eastern attempts at pursuing the core design elements introduced by Blizzard’s Diablo in the Western RPG space.

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-SAGA & SLASH

Directed by Shingo Kawabata, a Monolith veteran who had previously worked on Alpha Unit’s Khamrai, a very interesting and unfortunately still unlocalized PS1 JRPG, Soma Bringer’s being developed on Nintendo DS meant its overall experience didn’t just have to convey the hack&slash design paradigm, something Nex Entertainment already achieved with the Shining Soul games on GameBoy Advance, but also allow for quick play sessions while still preserving a modicum of Monolith’s trademark narrative gravity, including plentiful theological and esoteric references thanks to the scenario developed by Takahashi and Kaori Tanaka (better known as Soraya Saga), his wife and lifelong partner in writing. In fact, Soma Bringer’s scenario marked the last major contribution by Soraya Saga, who, after her announcement confirming her intention to leave the videogame industry a few weeks ago, I would also like to celebrate with this little retrospective.

According to Takahashi’s own post-mortem interview, Soma Bringer’s narrative was actually developed as a setting first, scenario second affair, with three continents’ worth of lore, factions and politics being painstakingly detailed before the team decided to only focus on Barnea, leaving the lands of Trouvere and Bel Canto as possible hooks for a sequel that never ended up materializing.

As it often happens when world building has such a major role during a JRPG’s development, like with Bandai Visual’s Ecsaform which I had a chance to discuss just a few months ago, Soma Bringer also features an in-game Encyclopedia constantly updated during the game, which the player can access from a terminal in the game’s hub, the airship Schildkroete.

-FINDING IDEA

Soma Bringer’s world, a sci-fantasy affair mixing magic, an ancient orbital ring shown right during its intro sequence, anthropomorphic races and train-cities, is based on the titular Soma, a mana-like energy that can be harnessed to power up a variety of devices by using Soma Cages, but also provoke natural distasters if it ever gets out of balance, including the appearance of the mysterious Visitors, which can possess other creatures acting as a sort of spiritual parasites and have destroyed a number of cities since they first appeared a few years before the game’s start. The party, made up of members of the para-military unit Pharzuph, acting as part of the international peacekeeping and Soma-monitoring organization Secundady, will be thrown into an unexpected chain of events by searching the site of a mysterious Soma anomaly and finding a young amnesiac girl, Idea, inside a cocoon.

Contrasting Monolith’s previous JRPG efforts, Soma Bringer doesn’t have a proper protagonist like Fei, Shion or Kalas, rather allowing the player to pick one among Pharzuph’s soldiers as their main avatar while still being able to play alongside the other ones and customize them (aside from Idea, who is only unlocked after beating the game for the first time). From a narrative standpoint this could be an interesting choice and, to the game’s credit, all party members do have their own small story arcs tackled directly by the game’s main scenario but, on the other hand, the focus put on the characters tends to be rather uneven, with some of them getting some much-needed development only later on and novice warrior Welt being not-so-subtly pushed as the game’s frontman, despite commander Einsatz or clergy drop-out Cadenza, just to name two, having more potential due to their own roles and unique backgrounds.

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-RULE OF TRITHEMIUS

Then again, while Soma Bringer still has a major story focus, coming from the Xenosaga trilogy (which also had an oft-forgotten 2006 Nintendo DS entry, combining a demake of sorts of Xenosaga I with an expanded and revised version of Xenosaga II, which sadly is still unlocalized) it was impossible to ignore how its cutscene to gameplay ratio was dramatically reduced, with major story events happening between chapters while scenes triggered while exploring towns and dungeons tend to be fairly brief due to the abovementioned need to complement the game’s own handheld and fast-paced nature.

As one can expect from Takahashi and Saga, the game features plenty of esoteric references, even if they are far tamer compared with Xenosaga’s: this is true for Secundadei (localized in the fantranslation as Secundady), used by occultists such as the German Benedictine Johannes Trithemius to allude to a cadre of archangels “second only to God” (secunda Dei) assigned to oversee celestial bodies in the context of his esoteric heliocentric system, a belief that was already discussed a few centuries before by Albert the Great, or Pharzuph, the apocryphal name of a fallen angel, not to mention Soma itself, which goes back to the mysterious Vedic ritual drink, soma, also used in Sasanid Iran, as haoma, by the Zoroastrian Magi clergy. Compared with Xenogears and Xenosaga, where references were often very much relevant for the games’ own lore and narrative, in Soma Bringer none of them are really meant to synergize by building a meaningful theological or esoteric system, mostly existing as a form of rule of cool.

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-SOARING OVER THE WORLD

Aside from the game’s own script, it would be impossible to ignore the role played by its soundtrack and character design in contributing to Soma Bringer’s overall tone, albeit for very different reasons. Yasunori Mitsuda, the legend behind JRPG OSTs such as Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Xenogears and Xenosaga I, had been working on so many smaller projects, including some of rather uneven quality that, in the mid to late ‘00s, naming him wasn’t enough anymore to assume a soundtrack would end up being great.

Then again, his work on Soma Bringer ended up being an awesome return to form, with one of the opening tracks, Ring, played out as a mysterious meteor falls on the continent of Barnea confirming since the game’s onset the OST’s overall quality, greatly contributing to flesh out the setting’s tone.

The involvement of Mitsuda’s own production studio, Procyon Studio, is likely behind another very welcome option I really liked back then, namely the ability to switch between different mixes depending on the player using the NDS’ speakers or playing with their trusty 3.5 headphones.

The character design, on the other hand, felt like a complete mismatch since the first Japanese preview became available and, unfortunately, that feeling ended up cementing itself soon after I started playing Soma Bringer’s fantranslated version.

It isn’t like Tadahiro Usuda was a mediocre artist, far from it in fact, but the style he chose for Soma Bringer, a bit reminiscent of Yoshida’s Ogre Battle or of his own work on Dew Prism (known as Threads of Fate in the West) on PS1, wasn’t really a good fit for a game that mostly eschewed humor and playfulness, favoring a serious, dramatic tone during most of its story beats and, in fact, I would even say it ended up slightly undermining the tone of a number of events without serving as a foil of sorts, as it often happens when such dissonant choices are made intentionally.

While this is far from the only example of a JRPG’s character design feeling a bit mismatched with its contents, with another example being provided by Sting just a few years later with Gungnir, it’s also true that, from a purely visual perspective, Soma Bringer’s anthropomorphic races were a better fit for Usuda’s talents, and his colorful style was also in line with the game’s assets.

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-DUAL SCREEN VISTAS

Speaking of the game’s locations, despite likely having a fairly small budget, Monolith really outdid itself with what they were able to achieve on Nintendo DS: while its characters and monsters are rendered with rather unimpressive 3D models, dungeons and towns are actually 2D, with cities featuring hand-drawn scenarios that, at the time, were some of the most beautiful vistas on the system, especially when the locations were briefly shown on both screens, turning DS’s dual screen setups into alluring digital pixel art paintings, an aesthetic that, some years later, CyberConnect 2’s Solatorobo, another looker among NDS JRPGs, ended up sharing.

Despite providing such a visually striking setting, the game never allows you to freely explore Barnea, rather limiting Pharzuph’s explorations to the regions concerned by each chapter’s mission, with their airship acting as an hub and providing a number of welcome facilities that the characters can peruse before tackling each region’s dungeons, including a warp point you can use to quickly get back to each map, which is quite necessary since Soma Bringer’s quick save option, upon loading, makes you restart from the Schildkroete itself, rather than the area you were exploring.

Each region include a new urban area which, as gorgeous as they are to look at, are mostly simple affairs with little interactions aside from NPC dialogues offering some lore tidbits or a small number of chapter-specific sidequests. On the other hand, the fields are often fairly expansive, providing plenty of opportunities for explorations and detour, including Pillars granting a variety of perks, secret bosses, unique enemies and, of course, plenty of loot to power up your party, all in the context of a game that, despite its fast-paced formula and gameplay focus, is still able to provide roughly thirty hours of enjoyment, including a number of extra scenarios unlocked later on.

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-SOMA BREAKER

This brings us to Soma Bringer’s main features, its dungeons and action combat system: while at first one could mistake Kawabata’s game for a simple adaptation of hack & slash design concepts to the handheld space, in hindsight Soma Bringer ended up being something a bit more unique, acting as a sort of missing link between the unique turn based systems featured in the Xenosaga trilogy, especially in its oft-bemoaned second entry, and the real-time, MMO-style Xenoblade Chronicles, transitioning to the action space while emphasizing the Break system-heavy combat system Monolith had already explored and keeping a three-character party with two AI-controlled allies, in line with Secret of Mana, the Neverland Shining games or the post-Origin Ys titles (Seven hadn’t even been announced when Soma Bringer was out, though, and would only be released a year later, in September 2009).

Compared with most action JRPGs, Soma Bringer doesn’t feature a proper combo system, nor does it pursue the quick action also favored by Western hack & slash RPGs, rather opting for a more deliberate, if still often frenetic, pacing. While Secret of Mana tried something similar with its charged attacks, Soma Bringer avoided the pitfalls of that system, like long charging times and unreliable hit rates, by building its own combat system around class-specific skills, special attacks that can be mapped by the player to the NDS’ face buttons that end up being the go-to moves against most enemies, since they’re pivotal in breaking their guard and getting them to the Break status in order to stop their attacks, dramatically amp the Pharzuph soldiers’ damage output and often even juggling them.

This could have been discouraged a bit by making the SPs used for skills harder to replenish, or by incentivizing regular attacks in a number of ways, but spamming special moves is already fairly easy by the mid game. Then again, while healing items can indeed be hoarded, the game doesn’t allow you to stop time to consume them, meaning choosing to use potions actually carries some risk in the tensest situations since you need to disengage from the enemy and switch to the quick item interface by pressing the L button, which means you won’t be able to use the attacks and skills mapped in the battle mode until you switch back, with a cooldown after each use making sure you don’t trivialize fights too much.

-CUSTOMIZING PHARZUPH

Thankfully, those UI shifts, as taxing as they may be during some of the most challenging fights, where your own characters risk being guard broken and comboed to death, are handled quite gracefully, partly because of Nintendo DS’ unique hardware. While the DS’ upper screen is devoted to portraying Soma Bringer’s world, as usual with JRPGs developed on this system the lower one offers plenty of valuable screen real estate for the game’s menus and shortcuts, including mapped actions and the Zoom option, which allows the player to get a better view of the decent 3D models showing the characters, even if at the price of making combat and explorations gradually less readable and, ultimately, turning many otherwise visually delightful areas into pixelated messes due to their assets’ poor resolution.

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The UI’s friendliness extends to yet another very relevant facet of any RPG, character menus and customization. Right at the beginning, the player can choose not just which character to impersonate (which has little to no effect on gameplay, given they’re basically blank slates), but also their starting class, which influence the weapon types they are proficient with, their skill trees, special moves, spells and unique roles, while also requiring a different setup for their stats, which the player can adapt by devoting points to different traits after each level up. Crucially, for a game whose classes and weapon types end up being fairly unconventional and obscure in the beginning, Soma Bringer allows the player some leeway in terms of build experimentation by permitting to change their class and skills loadouts, even if stats are locked in.

-NO LOOT FOR YOU!

For a title with such a focus on loot and unique equipments, including weapons with their own distinctive appearance which can be further customized in a number of ways, it’s quite disappointing that the only character the player can actually equip is the protagonist they choose, while their AI-led followers will have to content themselves with adopting different strategies and behaviors, upgrading their kits at fixed times upon reaching a certain level threshold.

Then again, unused loot is handled much better than in most hack & slash titles, allowing the player to switch between the main inventory and the Schildkroete’s stash, including when selling items at shops. Pieces of equipment unfit for your build could also get some additional use thanks to the game’s locale three-player multiplayer mode, which endearingly Takahashi tested alongside his own children.

Local multiplayer modes were indeed a feature quite a number of Nintendo DS JRPGs included back then, even if, aside from titles heavily skewed towards it, like Dragon Quest IX, they have became a bit of a forgotten part of seventh generation RPG history, no doubt also due to the inability to properly emulate them.

-AN INTERLUDE BEFORE GREATNESS

Despite the care devoted to its production, Soma Bringer was far from a smashing success in Japan, likely because the kind of fanbase Monolith Soft had cultivated in the previous years, with cinematic, graphically impressive PS2 turn based JRPGs, was unlikely to be on board with an handheld hack & slash game (after all, even Xenosaga’s own NDS version had performed quite poorly two years before). According to Famitsu data, it only managed to sell 53k copies during its first week, doubling that number roughly one year later when its LTD result was published by the same source, which contrasts quite noticeably with Xenosaga’s debut weeks, ranging from Xenosaga I’s 300k copies to Xenosaga III’s admittedly declining performance at 119k, which of course could be also explained with the backlash regarding Xenosaga II and with it being the last part of its trilogy.

Soma Bringer’s poor Japanese performance was likely the reason it wasn’t able to get greenlighted for an official English localization by Nintendo’s American and European branches, possibly also playing a part in Nintendo of America’s perception of Monolith Soft’s lineup as somewhat niche and Japanese-focused, which would famously continue with Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii, itself debuting at 79k copies in Japan, until Operation Rainfall and thousands of fan requests thankfully caused them to change course. While this last bit is just a matter of speculation, one could also imagine having Soma Bringer’s extensive world building effort neutered ended up contributing to Soraya Saga’s distancing from active development, only briefly resurfacing in Xenoblade Chronicles II as a guest designer for some of that game’s Blades.

Then again, Soma Bringer marked a pivotal moment for Monolith Soft’s history, showcasing that developer’s gradual transition between their earlier turn based effort and their real time future with the Xenoblade franchise. Despite its experimental nature and a number of issues both in terms of narrative and gameplay arising from this, Soma Bringer also ended up being a polished and fairly accomplished title in its own way, confirming yet again the potential of Nintendo DS as one of the most diverse JRPG platforms of its generation, at a time when Japanese RPG development efforts started focusing on handhelds like Nintendo’s dual screen flagship or Sony’s PSP due to the new challenges of HD development at the onset of the seventh console generation.

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Note: I originally reviewed Soma Bringer on my country’s GamesRadar board back in January 2009.

Developer: Big Bad Wolf - Cyanide
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Director: Sylvain Séchi
Scenario writer: Thomas Veauclin
Genre: adventure RPG, with combat-style systems, like exploitable weaknesses and Action Points, being actually mixed with dialogues in order to gamify the interactions and confrontations of De Richet with key NPCs
Progression: chapter-based, with alternate events and quest resolution depending on the player’s choices
Country: France
Platform: PC, PS4, XBO
Release date: 13\3\2018
Status: completed on 16\12\2025

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Since the mid ‘80s, French RPG history has seen a unique crosspollination between adventure game elements and more traditional RPG systems, from the likes of Fer et Flamme and Sapiens to Captain Blood with its unique interface, a rather peculiar trait that survived the shifting perception regarding the differences between RPG and adventure games since the early ‘90s, when the two started being perceived as completely different contexts, with long-term design consequences such as the emphasis on choice and consequences featured in Quantic Dream’s lineup, predating TellTale’s own signature brand of cinematic adventures.

Considering this unique context, it isn’t so surprising that one of the few actual attempts at merging proper RPG systems with adventure game sensibilities, alongside ZAUM’s Disco Elysium, Obsidian’s Pentiment and a number of Gamebook-style efforts like The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, Fabled Lands and Roadwarden, also came from a French developer, Bordeaux-based Big Bad Wolf, itself a Cyanide subsidiary, whose Thomas Veauclin envisioned a unique alternate history scenario, building an episodic tale directed by Sylvain Séchi that ended up being originally published in five chapters, released from March to December 2018 on PC, PS4 and XBO, later repurposed as a complete edition.

-PRENEZ MES JOURS

The Council starts during one of the most tense moments of the 18th century, in early 1793, right before king Louis XVI was condemned by the French revolutionary National Convention and killed, after his failed attempt at escaping from his own kingdom was cut short at Varennes-en-Argonne.

In this pivotal historical scenario, with the Terror already looming on the horizon, Louis De Richet, a French occultist part of the Golden Order (whose rather unmistakable roots in the real world, late 19th century Golden Dawn group based on Rosicrucian and Masonic concepts is never directly addressed), is suddenly invited by the mysterious English nobleman Lord Mortimer to visit his secluded island in order to search for his missing mother, Sarah De Richet, the leader of the Order, who had reached the island to take part in a secret international meeting.

-LIMINAL CONSPIRACIES

The so-called Council, whose nature is initially shrouded in mystery, involves some of the most prominent figure of their times, from American president George Washington to Cardinal Piaggi, acting as an envoy for Pope Pius VI, Prussian minister Von Woellner, Spaniard favorite and future Prince of Peace Godoy and a number of others, including a young and still obscure French officer, a certain Napoleon Bonaparte.

This bizarre setup, with some key political players consorting in secret outside of diplomatic norms and without any security detail, immediately sets the tone for the whole game, mixing an historically detailed backdrop with an utterly surreal situation (something De Richet acknowledges since the very beginning of his quest) which will soon provide plenty of intrigues, ranging from European and colonial geopolitics, economy, personal relationships and the supernatural, while gradually introducing more traditional murder mystery elements which, considering The Council’s secluded island setting, immediately reminded me of the branch of mystery novels popularized by the likes of Agatha Christie’s seminal And Then There Were None, including its videogame epigons, like a number of wildly imaginative visual novels and adventure games such as Ryukishi’s Umineko no Naku Koro Ni, Kazutaka Kodaka’s Danganronpa 2 or, more recently, Rika Suzuki’s upcoming Dark Auction.

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The Council’s writing itself is built to emphasize the contradiction between its two core elements, showing a remarkable level of care in examining the political situation of early 1793 and the unique ways European powers reacted to the start of the Terror and the assassination of king Louis XVI, while subtly hinting at unexplicable inconsistencies that foreshadow the story’s later developments.

This often brings about interesting details one wouldn’t expect to see discussed in such a game: right at the beginning, for instance, you have Cardinal Piaggi trying to secure the safety of Catholic priests escaping France, a very much historical, if oft-forgotten, crisis that saw hundreds of them martyred for refusing to swear allegiance to the revolutionary government, while others managed to ran away in time, escaping to the Italian States, England, the Holy Roman Empire or even the United States, like then-bishop Talleyrand, who had actually been excommunicated in 1791 for supporting the Revolution and still thought it was more prudent to flee, living for a time in Philadelphia, back then serving as the States’ temporary capital, before starting his new career as a layman diplomat.

Then again, there are also a number of instances where the writing does end up testing one’s suspension of disbelief a bit, for reasons wholly unrelated to the story’s occult themes. When one of the characters outlines the real reasons for his outspoken support of Revolution and the establishment of new universal rights, for instance, they are so Machiavelian and malicious they would likely have seemed too on the nose even to proper 19th century Reactionary authors such as Joseph De Maistre or Monaldo Leopardi (even if the context of that conversation is, admittedly, quite unique).

On a less controversial note, there are instances where De Richet’s dialogue options include fiery rebukes about themes such as slavery and colonial oppression which aren’t just a fair bit more progressive than almost anyone of those actually living in a 1793 Europe that hadn’t even started to properly question colonialism would have been, which one could understand as the game providing a way for the player to interpret De Richet in a way that is compatible with modern views regarding those themes, but also quite noticeably written in the tone of someone discussing them two centuries later, trumping the tone of even the most ardent Abolitionists of the late 18th Century (most of which, due to their upbringing, still held pro-colonial ideological stances, albeit with a number of nuanced differences) with arguments that are based in the modern anti-colonial language which started to develop this way only a century after The Council’s events with proper anti-colonial movements and whose main thinkers, crucially, often hailed from colonized populations, like Edward Said or Frantz Fanon (interestingly, the Martinique-origined creole literary movement itself influenced French adventure games early on with Muriel Tramis’ own Mewilo).

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Later on, when murder shatters the apparent peace of the island and supernatural elements become more central to the story, almost like a bizarre 18th century French Umineko, it feels like the historical themes pursued so interesingly in the first chapters end up almost becoming window dressing for a conspiracy that ultimately devours its own setting, even if one could excuse this sudden shift given how a number of plot twists end up reframing the whole story, while also explaining some situations which, as mentioned, initially seemed like inconsistecies far too much at odds with The Council’s setting.

Those issues, though, extend to other sides of the game’s narrative: while the first chapter provides plenty of choices and alternative events, which very noticeably influence De Richet’s relationships with a number of Mortimer’s guests and the information he unveils regarding his mother’s disappearance and the nature of the Council, the story gradually becomes less and less open in the following episodes, ultimately making most decisions taken early on fairly meaningless considering the scope of the story’s later revelations.

This is also reflected in the way the game handles its endings: while the final chapter does provide quite a number of ways to deal with the last few plot twists, the epilogue itself is fairly railroaded (aside from a very much relevant optional conversations right before the ending) and, after the final event, the game only cares to offer some brief character-specific slides detailing the fate of Lord Mortimer’s guests, which doesn’t seem to actually change that much depending on your actions (which is truly bizarre, since the fate of, say, Napoleon, should have changed completely depending on the game’s outcome), while bizzarely mostly ignoring De Richet himself, possibly because Big Bad Wolf was musing to keep using him as the protagonist in a future effort of theirs that hasn’t materialized as of yet.

Then again, even if The Council had been a commercial success, I suspect developing a sequel accounting for all its different endings would have proven to be quite difficult, unless they arbitrarily picked one as the story’s canon outcome instead of allowing the player to import their own save.

-THE MAN IN THE ISLAND CASTLE

Being the only location you will explore during the game’s five acts, the developers knew making Mortimer’s island castle into an interesting place not just to traverse and explore, but also to look at, providing visual clues about not just its denizens, but also its setting, could make or break their efforts.

In this regard, happily, The Council delivers in a tremendous way: while character models often have a cartoony, uncanny quality to their physiognomy, likely inspired by TellTale’s lineup, the locales explored by De Richet are a veritable feast for the eyes, at least unless you utterly despise the flamboyant, somewhat kitsch mix of baroque and neoclassic Mortimer employed for his island abode.

Aside from its interior design, the castle is also a joy to navigate due to its very intuitive and reasonable layout, despite still providing plenty of of secret passages and puzzle opportunities, and it also offers a veritable treasure trove of real-world art pieces depicted with a level of care seldom seen in videogames, like with oil paintings being textured in a way that lets light sources show the creaves in their canvas.

-GALLERIA MORTIMERIANA

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Paintings are so abundant in this game, and so thematically relevant, that one can excuse the game for brazenly populating Lord Mortimer’s abode with pieces from the likes of Rembrandt, Ingres, Rubens, Rafaello, Da Vinci, Velazquez and plenty of others that had really no business in being outside their own very peculiar geographical contexts back in early 1793, even more so since the game never tries to portray them as copies, which would have made more sense given Mortimer’s connections while making their presence there a bit more believable.

Then again, given a number of later events, one could imagine the copies could have actually been those shown outside the castle, and it isn’t like Napoleon’s campaigns won’t end up displacing to the Louvre countless work of arts from the courts of the Italian States or the Holy Roman Empire’s many principalities mere years after The Council’s story.

Mortimer’s use of paintings isn’t just related to their aesthetic pleasantness or to the necessity to build the context for a number of puzzles, but also ties subtly with his attempt to influence his guests, having strongly thematic pieces shown in each one’s private chambers in order to implicitly suggest something about their role or their place in his grand scheme, something De Richet ends up understanding after a while.

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-APOSTOLIC PUZZLES

Still, suspending your disbelief, this artistic overload is itself quite glorious, and it granted me a memorable moment when my son visited my play room while I was solving a puzzle involving the cycle of Guido Reni’s portraits of the Apostles, allowing me to discuss those masterpieces with my little one almost as if we were taking a virtual stroll in an exhibition featuring pieces taken from Brera, Capodimonte or the Pinacoteca Vaticana, giving The Council an unexpected but very welcome edutainment feel.

The Council’s puzzles tend to vary wildly in terms of challenge and uniqueness, from some rather bland initial encounters that barely test the player to some satisfying romps that do their best to showcase the game’s attempt to mix story, art, theology and occultism in order to flesh out De Richet’s challenges.

Some of the most satisfying puzzles feature giant, barely plausible contraptions that add to the game’s surreal tone quite a bit, marking a visual distance between the rational space occupied by the Council’s guests and the esoteric, liminal domain of Mortimer’s secrets, a feature that showcases the deep connection between level design and story progression in titles such as this.

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-BETWEEN XENOPHON AND ZELAZNY

Books, obviously, are the other recurring objects you will end up interacting with, with the Epistles of Paul providing an amusingly unique opportunity for a New Testament-based puzzle early on while De Richet slowly builds his own collection of stolen tomes, which can be equipped between missions in order to passively raise his skills, complementing the points already obtained by levelling up our protagonist by reading classics such as Xenophon’s Cyropedia or Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, political treatises such as Machiavelli’s Il Principe or Hobbes’ Leviathan and even more recent essays, such as Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published just two years before the events depicted in The Council.

Here the developers have allowed themselves some anachronisms and cross-media references, like with De Richet debating Dworkin from the Chronicles of Amber series by Roger Zelazny (interestingly, amber here is also used as a collectible that, upon reaching a certain quota, confers additional effort points to De Richet), or name-dropping “Atrus, by the Miller brothers”, which is actually a reference to the renowned Myst adventure game series and its creators.

Considering how Lord Mortimer’s castle ends up being almost a giant Wunderkammer, it’s only appropriate the game also features ancient coins as collectibles, which was heartwarming to me as a lover of numismatics.

Then again, the way De Richet built his own little collection of is kinda dubious, given how he keeps “finding” coins in the castle, including other guests’ own rooms.

-DEBATING NAPOLEON

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Then again, as mentioned, behind The Council’s TellTale-inspired cinematic adventure veneer there are quite a number of intervowen RPG systems you will have to be mindful of during your playthrough, focused on conversations and explorations, with rhetorical confrontations taking the place of boss fights and all manner of environmental or social interactions providing experience points allowing you to further customize De Richet, expanding on the skillset chosen right at the beginning, when the game allows us to pick between diplomat, occultist and detective as possible backgrounds, or classes, for your character.

While each class has its set of unique skills, initially unavailable unless you picked that career, skill points are class-agnostic and can be used to unlock proficiencies in different areas, while also allowing to power up those you already have in order to decrease the number of effort points needed to use them depending on each task’s difficulty check.

This action points-style resource economy is actually the core of The Council’s gameplay: while normal dialogue options and interactions are free, those requiring the use of a skill cost accordingly to their difficulty level, which can quickly get troublesome since De Richet’s initial allocation of effort points is quite low and can get hampered even further by status effects imparted by the NPCs when he is caught off guard or uses a skill against a character that is actually immune to it.

Then again, as mentioned, an action’s cost does decrease if you levelled up that ability and you can also regain Effort Points by exploiting each NPC’s weaknesses to certain themes or debating styles, which isn’t just about picking the most effective argument, but also understanding which one could faze your opponent and make them reveal some secret you can later use against them or to progress the story.

This set of systems offer the player a number of interesting choices: go wide by trying to have at least a basic command of most skills, enabling most dialogue and interaction options while still having them be quite pricey, or specialize in a select few, making them costless while risking to be powerless when they can’t be used? This conundrum, which has a rather noticeable impact on the story’s first act, ends up being trivialized later on not just by the plentiful amount of skill points you end up accruing, especially if you plan ahead while also carefully choosing which books to read in order to boost the skills that are already about to level up, but also by items, which allow De Richet to regain effort points, get one free action or recover from status effects (amusingly, though, consuming too many items also nets you the Intoxicated status!).

-HERMETIC SKILLS

The supernatural elements introduced later in the story, regardless of how one feels about their inclusion, are also conveyed through their own unique systems grafted on the game’s previous systems, even if the way they were tackled, alongside the abovementioned rushed feel conveyed by The Council’s last few acts, makes one question if this title was initially envisioned as a much longer adventure whose final acts ended up being noticeably shortened for budgeting or development reasons.

While the game devotes quite a bit of time to introduce those otherwordly features, (whose nature I will detail in a note, considering their spoilerific nature1) with a dedicated story sequence acting like a sort of tutorial and a whole new resource pool linked to those skills, including its unique rules and synergy with effort points and regular abilities, they are dropped almost immediately, with one being used just a few times before actually becoming a liability in a number of confrontations during the late game and the other never being used again at all, which could have been perfectly reasonable if this was a choice by the player himself.

Instead, those powers do affect De Richet’s story regardless of how one feels about them and the veritable moral conundrums linked to their use which, in fact, are sparingly explored compared with the care with which a number of themes were developed early on in the story.

-AN HISTORICAL MASQUERADE

Despite a number of tonal inconsistencies that likely went even further than Veauclin intended, the rushed feel of the story’s last few episodes and its consequences on The Council from both a narrative and gameplay standpoint, once De Richet’s adventures is finally over one can’t help but notice how Big Bad Wolf’s effort ended up bringing the mix between adventure and RPG elements to some very interesting places while also exploring an historical context that, despite being often featured in French-developed games for rather obvious reasons, RPGs have mostly ignored over the decades, contributing to a rising wave of historical-themed Western RPGs.

While it’s almost impossible to comment on The Council’s commercial success due to the lack of meaningful sales data for what ultimately was a digital-focused release despite a limited physical print, one can hope the new attention brought to French RPG efforts by the success of Sandfall’s Clair Obscur, as wildly different as it is in pretty much every possible way from De Richet’s adventure, alongside the visibility gained by Big Bad Wolf’s game with its recent PS Plus partnership, can help Veauclin, Séchi and their fellow developers to tackle similar subjects in the future while building on the unique adventure-RPG framework they envisioned for their first effort, something they already tried doing with their second title, a Vampire the Masquerade licensed spinoff released a few years later, which admittedly was a great fit given this developer’s focus on mixing alternate history with esoteric elements.

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Developer: Artdink
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Director: Naoyuki Tasei
Scenario writer: Soichiro Morizumi
Genre: action JRPG with instanced missions accessed through a home base, with unlockable mobile suits and allied pilots
Progression: linear, albeit with optional missions and replayable story quests
Country: Japan
Platform: PC, Switch, PS4
Release date: 25\8\2022
Status: completed on 4\12\2025

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There are few anime series more influential than Yoshiyuki Tomino and Sunrise’s Gundam, which back in 1979 helped to the define the real mecha subgenre alongside Ryosuke Takahashi’s Dougram (1981) and Votoms (1983) or Tomino’s own Aura Battle Dunbine (1983), continuing to flesh it out over the years with countless sequels and spin-offs set in the original Universal Century continuity, focused on the conflict between the Earth Federation and a variety of space-bound factions, starting with the Principality of Zeon, before branching out to new timelines in order to explore the same themes in different ways, like with Gundam Wing and its prescient condemnation of unmanned drone-like robots, post-apocalyptic Gundam X and many others.

As a long-time Gundam fan who kinda lapsed in the past decade or so, in mid 2025 I went back to Tomino’s franchise and started a marathon of all the Universal Century Gundam series alongside my children, which didn’t just net some unexpected result in terms of RPG history, like when I found some Wizardry and Ultima-themed Zeta Gundam easter eggs, but also spurned me to explore many unlocalized Gundam-related RPG spin-offs, from Family Soft’s line of PC98 tactical JRPGs, like Advanced Operations and Return of Zeon, to Cross Dimension on Super Famicom, which saw the debut of a number of mobile suits, like Gundam Pixy or Zeon’s Efreet.

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Then again, the flow of RPGs exploring Gundam’s many timelines never really stopped, not just with the better known Super Robot Taisen tactical crossover efforts, which always feature a number of Gundam series as some of their main contents over the decades, but also with plenty of dedicated titles like the Super Deformed line, which over the years involved both titles set in the wars explored by the franchise’s main properties and an unique, comedic continuity featuring cutesy super deformed mobile suits.

It’s because of this that I ended up giving a chance to one of the latest entries in the SD Gundam series, Battle Alliance (2022), which was outsourced by Bandai to Artdink, a veteran team which, over the decades, worked on countless RPG efforts, including Tactics Ogre LUCT’s PS1 port and one of my favorite tactical JRPGs among those released in the past few years, Triangle Strategy, while also developing the unlocalized Gundam Battle sub-franchise on PSP.

Compared with many other entries in the SD Gundam franchise developed by Bandai itself or by other teams like Tom Create, Battle Alliance isn’t a tactical JRPG but a mission-based hack & slash action JRPG, whose story kicks off during the Battle of Odessa between the Earth Federation and the Principality of Zeon.

It’s during this fateful confrontation that the Gatheroad platoon of Federation GM mobile suits (which, in the original canon, still had to be mass produced!) is involved into a bizarre timeline shift phenomenon, with the silent protagonist and his helper, engineer and intelligence officer Juno Astarte, being suddenly thrown into a virtual world acting as a sort of multiverse-wide historical database, G-Universe, where a rather messy AI, called Sakura Slash, recruits them as temporary defenders of Gundam canonicity, eliminating anomalies and out of place characters from a variety of timelines in the hope of returning to their own universe.

Artdink ended up outsourcing Battle Alliance’s scenario to a veritable crossover expert, tri-Crescendo’s Soichiro Morizumi, a Banpresto veteran who worked on a number of Super Robot Taisen games before directing the whole line of Monolith Soft crossovers, from Namco X Zone to Project X Zone, which ended up being one of the most successful niche JRPG crossover efforts ever in the Western markets, leaving Monolith in 2017.

Then again, compared to his Monolith crossovers, Morizumi’s Battle Alliance scenario ended up following a more traditional Super Robot Taisen template, albeit with a few key differences: instead of the usual setup seen in crossover JRPGs, where characters from a variety of series are spirited away from their worlds in order to face a common challenge, Battle Alliance has the player and its original characters act as timeline fixers for the Gundam Universe system, reliving battles from all the Gundam continuities in order to correct anomalies, like characters from other timelines showing up and changing the canon events, which feels fresh enough while still offering plenty of opportunities for interesting mixups between a variety of characters (or versions of the same character, like the three versions of Char Aznable from the One Year War, Z Gundam’s Gryps War and Char’s Counterattack).

The fact that only the original characters know about the real nature of their struggles also means the Gundam pilots are free to focus on their own conflicts and character development, which is actually all one could ask from a game such as this, and yet is often elusive when the crossover scenario takes center stage and the guests from other worlds have to cope with it, rather than focusing on their own original contexts, as was the case with plenty of crossover-themed JRPGs in the past.

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Given their role, both in the story and in the G-Universe space, Astarte and Sakura are delightfully nerdy about Gundam lore, going on tirades about character development, alternate histories and political and war commentaries during the missions, almost acting as a complement to the player’s own musings while seeing the story unfold with all its bizarre crossover occurrences. In this regard, the game is refreshingly open about its nature and its core narrative objectives, and one can definitely see director Naoyuki Tasei and scenario writer Soichiro Morizumi having a lot of fun planning its events and the way they were handled, like with Astarte being stunned by a number of cruel plot twists (which, being canon, can’t be altered by our Gatheroad pilot) or trying to hide her curiosity for the future events of her own Universal Century timeline.

The Gundam Universe virtual space, called Illion Stable, also acts as an hub the player can use to customize the game and read tutorials and series-specific lore dumps (which aren’t spelled out during the story events, whether because the developers didn’t want to spoil them for those who still have to watch all the Gundam series, or because they acknowledged this could kill the pacing of a number of story events), not to mention customize the mobile suits unlocked by gathering parts during missions.

The missions themselves, rather obviously, are the meat of the game, coming in a variety of forms: Break Missions are story events from a number of Gundam continuities (with the Universal Century, the After Colony and the Post Disaster timelines being the most featured) where anomalies bring about dramatic story changes, with pilots and mobile suits from different worlds breaking in, exploiting a concept already seen in SD Gundam titles in the past while also providing a decent amount of variety not just in terms of backdrops, but also of unique gimmicks.

Then, after completing a number of Break Missions, the game opens up alternate versions for all of them, called True Missions, where the player, Astarte and their AI assistant must guide the events in order to restore canonicity to the G Universe registers, all the while facing a number of iconic enemies, including a generous helping of awesome boss fights often treated as their own set pieces. Each chapter also provide a few duels set in virtual spaces against a mysterious enemy that has quite a number of surprises, not to mention optional Chaos Missions where you can replay a Break battle in order to fight new sub-bosses and acquire additional parts in order to unlock even more mechas, which unfortunately can prove to be a bit grindy in a number of instances.

Battle Alliance’s selection of mobile suits, while falling short of beat’em up spinoffs like Extreme Versus, is still quite decent, with a lot of representation for Universal Century classics and a number of my own favorite making the cut, like War in a Pocket’s Kampfer and GM Sniper, and the super deformed style is so well integrated with the mechas’ core traits that, after a while, I almost forgot I was playing a SD game.

Then again, while I could jokingly bemoan the absence of a number of my favorite obscure Universal Century mechas, like the Zudah or Marasai, there are a number of series or even continuities that were almost completely neglected, like with Gundam X, Gundam F91, Gundam Victory, Reconquista in G or Gundam Age, which either got throwaway cameos or were utterly missing in action, and that isn’t even considering a number of pilots and mobile suits that are actually featured in-game without being playable, such as Bernie’s Zaku Kai.

Obviously, DLCs ended up fixing some of those issues, covering many series absent in the original Battle Alliance while also spotlighting some rarely featured stories, like the unique manga spinoff Moon Gundam.

Even putting aside roster choices and the grind to unlock a number of mobile suits, the real issue ends up being related to how powering up those you already have in the mid to late game does require quite a lot of resources, meaning you will likely end up focusing on a small set of favorites instead of being able to freely experiment with new mecha at will, at least until the missions start providing a sizeable amount of cash in the very last chapter, countering this issue a bit while still not making upgrades a painless affair.

The combat system is a nicely simple affair that is still able to provide a decent level of depth, with two basic melee attacks, a main ranged weapon and two sub-weapons, all with numbered shots and a stamina meter to recharge them, plus a variety of guarding options, aerial attacks, chain breaker moves and mecha-specific supermoves which can get quite awesome, like with Cha-I mean, Quattro’s Hyakushiki.

Dodging and using your boost meter correctly is also quite important, not to mention the skill gauge you can spend to do special combination attacks or class skills, special abilities linked to the three classes each mobile suit is associated to, like with Sharpshooter mechas being able to instantly recharge all of their ranged weapons which allowed my beloved Kampfer to net a ludicrous combo total by spamming its multi-hit shotgun and subweapons, just one example of how each mobile suit’s unique options can be seamlessly used both on their own and to seamlessly extend combo strings.

Battle Alliance does feature a multiplayer mode, even if unfortunately the local variety is only available on Nintendo Switch (no split screen, though), while other platforms can only count on the game’s own online matchmaking service, which is still somewhat active but, after three years, is understandably sparsely populated.

Then again, you can also bring two allied pilots to battle alongside you, even choosing which mobile suit they use according to their own canon experience, but unfortunately they just act as AI support, without a chance to do combination moves or to switch mobile suits on the fly, which one can justify with the actual protagonist being the player himself but still is a bit silly considering it would have made things even more interesting. Allies do provide passive bonus, though, including some possibly linked to specific couples of pilots. Pilots also level up, whether our own Gatheroad officer, who can unlock a variety of skills influencing a number of game systems, or the allied ones, whose friendship level slowly increases.

Where allies do end up being quite helpful is in repairing your mobile suit if you end up being defeated: while your pilot starts each mission with a fixed number of repair kits, which can be used to heal part of your HP or to recover from a K.O., an ally bringing you back into the fight consumes none, offering an interesting choice between wasting resources to immediately get back into the fight and support your admittedly clumsy AI helpers or wait for one of them to remember you exist, which can get tricky if they end up being wasted while you wait, or if their repairing effort ends up being cancelled by enemy attacks.

As the reader may have noticed, while Super Robot Taisen has conditioned mecha fans to expect little challenge from crossover titles, SD Gundam Battle Alliance does provide a decent amount of tension due to its ace fights, including optional ones depending on the route you chose, and absolutely doesn’t reward a mindless button mashing playstyle, even more so since it doesn’t allow to retry boss fights and, upon death, it forces the player to redo the whole mission, which can be a powerful incentive to play as best as you can given the longest ones can take half an hour.

While licensed titles usually merit the caveat about being fully enjoyable only by those already familiar with their franchises, Battle Alliance possibly goes even further: of course anyone could understand its simplistic and self-contained plot, but to properly appreciate its scenarios and their implications you will need to be a bit of a Gundam savant, catching references between multiple continuities, the logic behind some character switcharoos and the way some heroes are repurposed in stories where they were never featured to begin with.

In a way, though, I feel this is the right way to go for a title such as this, since it provides exactly the kind of fanservice someone invested in this storied franchise could desire, instead of trying to build up its own narrative and ultimately displeasing both newcomers and veterans by failing to provide either an interesting stand-alone story or a lore-intensive take on its source material. The fact that Battle Alliance is also a fairly interesting romp gameplay-wise, providing a decent amount of challenge while also featuring plenty of unique maps and mobile suits with their own distinctive playstyles, ultimately makes it a surprisingly satisfying option for those searching for a themed crossover with action RPG trappings.

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Mere weeks after discussing Progenitor, the Japanese RPG scene saw yet another fantranslation effort originally kickstarted by a small group of ardent fans, whose passionate coverage was able to spotlight a title previously unknown outside Japan, to the point that it finally became available to English speakers last December.

We’re talking about Tobira no Densetsu: Kaze no Tsubasa (meaning Legend of Door: Gale Wings), often called Tobiden, a unique 2007 RPGMaker game developed by indie (or rather doujin, a term which in Japan had its own connotation long before the indie scene was popularized in the West in the late ‘00s) team Door, centered on Denjirou Jr, whose merits were first introduced to the English-speaking audience by Hadler and Quof respectively in 2017 and 2018, with yours truly learning about its existence from the latter.

That it took quite a while for its English fantranslation to materialize hasn’t just to do with how niche this game was, but also with its truly gargantuan scope, which is actually the main reason a select few started to praise its virtues almost a decade ago. Happily, the challenge was met by the valiant team led by Ningen Desu, which produced an early Christmas present to Japanese RPG enthusiasts, not only tackling a truly massive amount of texts, but also polishing their English patch to a level I honestly didn’t expect while also providing an extremely useful walkthrough, detailing all manner of triggers, subquests and, crucially, true ending requirements.

Given Tobira no Densetsu was a free game to begin with, those interested can download its English PC version without issues from Ningen Desu’s own page, but what makes this RPG Maker game so interesting, exactly?

Developer: Door
Genre: turn based JRPG
Release date: 2007
Fantranslation: 18\12\2025

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While plenty of RPG Maker games developed both in the West and Japan (like with the VIP-RPG subculture, which could well deserve its own piece) have been able to show that engine’s versatility to the point of making their origin hard to guess, whether with customized graphical assets or unique systems, sometimes even mimicking completely different genres, Tobira no Densetsu at first glance seems like one among many rather samey RPGs created with that platform.

That first impression, however, is soon dispelled when you realize how the journey of young Lucia, an adventurer initially focused on defending her village and securing the funding to cure her ill sister, is built like a Matryoshka of sorts, gradually opening up a number of times while upping its stakes at each turn in unexpected ways.

Lucia’s quest starts with a fairly linear prologue, subtly foreshadowing a number of later developmenta, which then gives way to a timed, freeform main quest focused on gathering paintings for an art gallery by traveling all over the continent, while also allowing you to pursue countless side-activities, from optional, Guild-based dungeons to story-driven quests, libraries with a slew of books hinting at a number of secrets or random lore tidbits (actually, in the first ten minutes you can read an hidden treatise on Lestarian numismatics, which mirrors some key traits of real-world Sasanian coinage), simulation-style jobs, opening up market stalls and many others, all linked to a number of layered systems that are slowly introduced to the player.

The core of Tobiden’s unique mechanics is its Info system, a number of unlockable topics or objectives Lucia can choose to prioritize that, once selected, actually change the world state, including available location on the world map, NPC dialogues and other triggers, forcing you to actually commit to each quest, but there’s also a system that forces the player to decide whether to look for secret treasures or traps while exploring, or another one linked with building Lucia’s character in many different ways, obtaining unique traits you can spend in a number of events to change their outcome, acting as skill checks of sorts (there is even a “doubt” feature to call out lies and dubious statements), and this is barely scratching the surface of a game whose complexity, even more so for a RPG Maker title, is frankly amazing.

While you could complete the game at this stage by gathering enough paintings for the Lestarian Royal Gallery, if you do you would barely experience a tenth of the game’s actual story, never even hearing about its main villains, which itself is quite fitting in a number of ways.

To glimpse the ills of the world and start the actual main story, which also allows to remove the time limit (which was extremely generous to begin with), Lucia will have to explore, learn and be curious and crafty enough to realize there’s something wrong in the first place, suddenly unlocking a whole new section of the game, including an airship acting as a Suikoden-style home base and allowing you to gradually visit all the floating island in Lucia’s world and the ability to recruit dozens of characters while pursuing a number of intervowen quests that build upon each other while also showcasing the awesome world building effort by Denjirou Jr.

This, of course, isn’t even considering Tobira no Densetsu’s more traditional RPG trappings, which still offer a fairly challenging turn based combat system with plenty of customization options you can find by perusing the game’s highly customized Quick Menu interface, and even then we’ve barely scratched the sheer amount of contents provided by this adventure, including optional visual novel-style events, airship battles, the Fortune Doors and many others.

Quantity, as they say, can have a quality of its own when it’s built on a core informed by an highly coherent vision, and this is exactly how I feel after spending twenty hours or so on Tobira no Densetsu which, as mentioned, means I’ve barely got started with its main quest.

Readers of my RPG-focused Substack can look forward to more Tobiden-related coverage in the near future, possibly including a new piece focused on an unexpected surrealist connection I chanced upon days ago.

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With 2026 starting out, it’s time to unwind a bit and recount the tale of yet another year spent adventuring in the multiverse of videogame RPGs, almost like a digital version of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion bent on exploring a variety of worlds crafted in different periods by people from wildly diverse cultural backgrounds, from vintage-inspired Japanese roguelikes allowing us to remember the days of university-based online connectivity before the advent of the World Wide Web to a French adventure RPG centered on 18th century revolutionary conspiracies, featuring a young Napoleon Bonaparte searching for political support by visiting a mysterious English nobleman on a distant island alongside an occultist searching for his missing mother.

-JANUARY: ROGUE HEARTS KIRYU

In fact, my RPG journey in 2025 started right after celebrating the first day of the year along my family: while my wife and children were finally asleep, something brought me to revisit Rogue Hearts Dungeon, an obscure PS2 roguelike game developed by Compile Heart and Jun Ota, a unique figure in the Japanese Rogue community who worked on Rogue Clone back in the days.

What I couldn’t expect is that I would end up completing the game in one sitting, rushing through its final story dungeon by miraculously surviving that game’s rather cruel difficulty curve, including the need to escape from the last floor in order to be able to get out. Writing about the history of its game and its director also allowed me to glimpse at the history of Japanese Rogue forks, including an early attempt at a university-based intraweb and the Kunio Kun creator’s role in obscure roguelikes effort.

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Leaving behind this tense dungeon foray, in the next few weeks I kept pursuing Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s second half, getting enamored with its Kiryu-based chapters and with the way their nostalgic charm complemented so well The Man Who Erased Himself, which I had completed back in December 2024.

What I really didn’t expect, though, was the not-so-subtle religious theming the game ended up pursuing, something I could have anticipated if I took more seriously the Last Supper-themed artworks Sega released before the game’s debut, going so far as to produce a number of different version to avoid having a single character take the place of Judas.

I must say I had my doubt about Infinite Wealth during its very first hours, and I didn’t always feel its Hawaii setting, but in the end I positively loved what the Ryu Ga Gotoku team was able to achieve there and can’t wait to see more, with Majima’s own pirate-themed spinoff as one of the most likely candidates for my early 2026 playtime.

Meanwhile, while I was enjoying Ichiban and Kiryu’s adventure, I started up two side-games that couldn’t be more different if they tried: the first was Fabled Lands, a Bulgarian adaptation of a wonderful American gamebook series that used its books not as single adventures, but rather as regions of a wider sandbox world the player could explore by literally traveling between volumes, including an intricate keyword system meant to reference your progress and to make the world react to it, often in unexpected ways.

While I loved the original analog version of Fabled Lands, I also had a wonderful time with its adaptation, even more so since I tackled it when all its books were implemented.

Soon after, likely feeling Ichiban’s adventure at sea weren’t enough to satisfy my craving for seafaring, I finally gave a chance to Sailing Era, a wonderful celebration of Koei’s Uncharted Waters franchise by Chinese developer GY Games, mixing Age of Discovery explorations, commerce and battles with a number of different scenarios focused on noticeably diverse protagonists, like a Bahreini pearl catcher, Abdullah, whose scenario I greatly enjoyed or, say, a Japanese shipwright, a Chinese savant and a Portoguese explorer.

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-FEBRUARY: KAMITANI’S SATURN DELIGHT

Completing both Infinite Wealth and Sailing Era in early February meant I finally had a chance to delve into Princess Crown’s fantranslated version, a Saturn side-scrolling action JRPG gem directed by George Kamitani before he founded Vanillaware which, while foreshadowing his later efforts, was also noticeably different due to its unique, almost fighting game-style one-on-one combat system, also featuring a peculiar defensive option which required the player to invest stamina in order to counter the enemy actions.

While I had wanted to tackle Princess Crown since decades ago, the hype was well worth what the game was able to achieve and, despite its final scenario bringing it down somehow with one of the most asinine chain of fetch quests ever, it was still an awesome experience and one of the best 2D game in the fifth console generation alongside titles such as SaGa Frontier 2, Legend of Mana, London Seirei Tanteidan and a number of others, with large, beautifully animated sprites that made it quite a visual spectacle for my children. One of the funniest memories about this game, in fact, is when my daughter called me out for having poor Princess Gradriel eat countless servings of grilled food as a ploy to game the HP growth system!

-MARCH: RYZA AND TOKYO GAME FACTORY’S RENAISSANCE

After seeing to the end my Saturn adventure in the kingdom of Valendia, I was ready to return to the present, at least for a time, by starting out Atelier Ryza 3, the last part of a trilogy that, itself, is part of the alchemy and slice of life-focused Atelier series by Gust. Considering it had been a few years since I played Atelier Ryza 2, I went into the game craving the usual Atelier loop, but I found something a bit different.

While I was surprised by how ambitious the last game in Ryza’s story ended up being, with a number of large regional maps to explore including lots of secrets and environmental interactions, plenty of subquests and tons of character development, including some very interesting tidbits about one of my favorite characters in the whole trilogy, Empel, I also felt it often struggled to find its footing on a narrative level, starting out quite strongly but then losing its focus far too often in its mid stretch.

The game’s aggressive level scaling, the ATB-style combat introduced by the first Ryza that still makes me miss Atelier’s old conditional turn based combat systems, the magical keys that I felt never managed to find their proper place and some item gathering issues linked with the game’s free roaming explorations also made me pause, even if I was still impressed by how Gust was able to push Atelier’s formula forward in a number of ways.

If they’re able to build on their achievements in Atelier Ryza 3, the next trilogy could take us in some very interesting places, even more so if it was joined with the kind of narrative Gust pursued in the Dusk trilogy, or with the more freeform sandbox formula showcased by the wildly experimental Atelier Firis a few years ago.

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The latter half of March was dedicated to two recent Square Enix titles I had put into my backlog when they were released a few years ago, Tokyo Game Factory’s Oninaki and Actraiser Renaissance. Oninaki, despite a number of issues, ended up being a fairly unique experience because of its incredibly bleak scenario, pushing that trait even more compared with I Am Setsuna and Lost Sphear due to its setting’s rather unique relationship with the concepts of life and death, and that isn’t even considering how it also distanced itself from this developer’s previous titles by opting for a fast-paced, almost Diablo-style action RPG combat system, with dimensional shifts and spirit helpers as its key gimmicks.

In the end, while Tokyo Game Factory ended up falling short of Square Enix’s expectations, I feel that they were able to achieve something with their works, and that being marketed as some sort of nostalgia-bait JRPG developer since I Am Setsuna actually did them a disservice in the long run.

In turn, Actraiser Renaissance was indeed a nostalgic experience for someone deeply invested in Quintet’s SNES lineup, even if this ActRaiser remake did change things up quite dramatically by introducing side-stories and named heroes for all the regions saved by our godly avatar, making the town building segments by far the main part of the game while also introducing tower defence game-style battles to defend your settlements and progress the story. The original ActRaiser’s other half, platforming levels with some light RPG trapping, is still there, of course, including some new mini-levels used to break up the monotony of building your cities, but ends up being far less relevant to the overall experience.

In the end, Renaissance feels like a reimagining rather than a remake, and ends up being its own thing despite retaining the original ActRaiser DNA in a number of very relevant ways. While initially I was a bit disappointed, I ended up liking the game’s own vision and, by the final credits, I was glad they tried offering something different rather than simply rebuilding Quintet’s SNES classic, something that could have gone wrong in a number of ways.

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-APRIL: INDONESIAN MECHAS AND KOREAN FIRE EMBLEMS

After the last two months’ almost complete focus on action RPGs, I felt I had to change pace a bit by exploring the demo scenario of an extremely promising Indonesian mecha-based tactical RPG which was praised by Front Mission legend Toshiro Tsuchida himself, Kriegsfront Tactics.

Its Prologue, which is available on Steam, mixes an accomplished take on simulative mecha combat with an unique sandbox map which, in the final version, should include a number of roguelike-inspired elements related to resource management and, possibly, dynamically developing narrative in a setting inspired by Indonesia’s own indipendence war, albeit with a rather obvious nod to the Vietnam conflict.

Then, still craving for more tactical goodness, I ended up picking up a title which was in my backlog since a few years ago, Ocean Drive’s Lost Eidolons, the first Korean RPG I completed since my beloved Arcturus’ fantranslated version in 2018.

Lost Eidolons ended up being quite a wild ride, mixing Fire Emblem-inspired systems (albeit with a number of unique twists), an explorable camp that felt like a more manageable take on Three Houses’ early academy segments (its Musou-style spinoff, Fire Emblem Three Hopes itself, had went that way later on, after all) and, surprisingly enough, a dark fantasy scenario that was actually a fairly faithful retelling of the Chu and Han Contention period in Chinese history, something I really didn’t expect and figured out after a few hours simply by the sheer amount of similar events and characters, despite the game being firmly anchored in an European medieval fantasy aesthetic.

This also impacted its mission and map design, with an unusual amount of maps focused on surviving or escaping, instead of just obliterating the enemies, that I ended up loving.

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-MAY: A GANGSTER ON HUFFMAN ISLAND

After completing Ocean Drive’s tactical romp and briefly returning to Trails of Cold Steel III to see its first chapter to the end, I spent May alternating two very different titles, Souls of Chronos and Front Mission 1st’s latest remake.

Souls of Chronos, by Chinese developer Futu Studio, was a game I had mostly forgotten until I decided to give it a chance after seeing it on the Play Store, and it focused on a small seaside town, with a criminal protagonist helped by a time-controlling humanoid companion facing a number of political intrigues and a number of unexpected CRPG-inspired traits to complement its decidedly Japanese-inspired super deformed art direction, which itself clashes pretty heavily with its dark, sometimes even edgy tone. Its short runtime fits nicely with the amount of contents it’s able to provide and with its fast paced, if fairly simplistic, action combat system.

After seeing all the endings Souls of Chronos could provide, I turned to Forever Entertainment’s Front Mission 1st remake which, by mid 2025, had been patched so thoroughly it had solved most of the issues people experienced at launch. Replaying its two scenarios in all their tactical mecha goodness rekindled my love for Tsuchida’s series, which I hope to tackle yet again in the near future by finally delving into Front Mission 2’s own remake.

May was also a nice month for my RPG-themed writeups, with Clair Obscur’s acclaim motivating me to write an history of French videogame RPGs which kept balooning in size and complexity until I had to divide it into three parts, focused on the early period from the mid ‘80s to the Dot Com Crash, on the Western-inspired French RPGs by directors such as Colantonio and Rousseau and, last but not least, on the growing scene of Japanese-inspired French RPGs, from the Dragon Trap remake to Clair Obscur itself.

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-JUNE: SLUG OBSCUR

This focus on French RPG history meant that, as soon as I was done with Front Mission’s UCS scenario, I jumped into Expedition 33 itself, which is a bit unusual since I rarely play games during their release windows nowadays.

Having followed the game for quite a while before it became a sensation, I was pleased to see what Sandfall had been able to achieve and, contrary to most, I actually appreciated the story’s last stretch way more than its second act, possibly because some of its themes were among my personal favorites and I hadn’t expected the game to tackle them, especially in such a way.

Without having envisioned it, after completing Clair Obscur I immediately transitioned to another Franco-Japanese RPGs, Metal Slug Tactics, which I found conceptually interesting due to its mix of roguelike and tactical element but ended up putting on hiatus soon after since I was in the mood for a very different kind of titles, Italian Gamebook RPGs.

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-JULY: GAMEBOOK BUSTER

Thus, the beginning of July saw me replaying Profezia, my own country’s very first videogame RPG, and then jumping to Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf, an Italo-British spinoff to the storied Lone Wolf gamebook series whose combat system, in a way, anticipated a number of Clair Obscur’s traits while introducing some resource management and a romantic interest that ended up getting her own, stand-alone gamebook adventure later on.

This Gamebook journey required some arcade gameplay to balance it out, and so July also saw me playing Namco’s old side scrolling classic, Dragon Buster, thanks to its Arcade Archives version, which also motivated me to write a piece about its different versions, including Tales of the Abyss’ Dragon Buster-themed minigame and its PS1 remake, Dragon Valor, which I had enjoyed back in the days without even knowing it was meant to iterate on Namco’s vintage 1984 offering.

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While the end of Lone Wolf’s quest was near, I decided to finally cave in and buy a Rog Ally X, which proved to be an incredibly sound decision for my RPG playtime during the Summer break, inaugurating Asus’ handheld PC with a playthrough of the fantranslated version of PS2’s Tales of Rebirth (which I had played ages ago while perusing Spekio’s localized script) during a seaside vacation with my family.

The sixth entry in Namco’s Tales action JRPG franchise, Tales of Rebirth isn’t just a visual spectacle featuring some of the best sprites and backdrops in PS2 2D JRPGs, but also an endearing tale of acceptance and a showcase of the talent of battle designer Tatsuro Udo, whose tri-linear combat system, reminiscent of Guardian Heroes and Fatal Fury, still makes Rebirth unique to this day in its own franchise and in the broader context of action-JRPGs (Tales of the Tempest tried following in its footsteps, but without much success).

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-AUGUST: POMS AND BUGS

With Tales of Rebirth finally completed in the first days of August, my Rog Ally X was put to good use playing two fantranslated PS1 JRPGs I had long wanted to tackle, basically side by side since I felt they complemented each other quite nicely.

While many fantranslated JRPGs are best described as flawed gems, Community Pom, an action JRPG by forgotten team Fill In Café, was actually an incredibly polished production that managed to stay true to its funny, fairy-tale style reimagining of Zelda: A Link to the Past while mixing its formula with some RPG trappings and a robust city building and monster raring part focused on the eponymous Poms, cute bunny-like moon dwellers that can join the heroine during her rather adorable quest.

This game ended up being even more memorable since I played it alongside my daughter, which acted as the game’s heroine and had me narrating all the dialogues while we explored the world of Arth together. In the end, I feel Community Pom wasn’t just one of my personal RPG highlights in 2025, but also a game that could have achieved some well-deserved popularity if it had been localized by, say, Working Design back in the days.

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Ecsaform, the other PS1 JRPG I played alongside Community Pom, couldn’t be more different if it tried: not only was it a tactical JRPG focused on a dystopian, sci-fantasy world where a young girl used as a test subject, Suseri, escapes alongside a mysterious humanoid found in a ruin, but it was also a rather obvious victim to its creators’ overreach and excessive ambitions.

For instance, Ecsaform’s development included a fascinating world building effort, so large it ended up taking a whole CD used as an encyclopedia of sorts, while the actual game barely uses many of those concepts and is plagued by pacing issues, a variety of situations where it’s blatantly obvious plenty of contents had to be cut, like with a huge city almost bereft of interactions, with plenty of buildings serving no function whatsoever, dungeons that are directly explorable and yet are nothing more than short corridors between mandatory fights and plenty of filler battles.

Still, its actual combat system ended up being very interesting on a conceptual level due to its unique action economy, with unused Action Points turning into a shield of sorts, and the last stretch managed to give this world a nicer send off than one could expect given the issues experienced for most of the game, and that isn’t even considering the game’s incredibly charming art direction.

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-SEPTEMBER: LINDA SQUARED

The first week of September saw me finally completing both Community Pom, with my daughter delighted to see this journey to the end, and Ecsaform, whose final stretch managed to close its story in a surprisingly decent way considering that game’s glaring pacing issues.

Still in the mood for some fantranslated PS1 goodness, I finally decided to dig into Linda Cubed Again, a positively bizarre game I had followed since decades ago but never found the right time to tackle even after its English patch was released.

Now, Linda Cubed’s setup, imagined by its director Shoji Masuda, is as unique as it can get: imagine a sci-fi turn based JRPG set on a colonized wild planet doomed to be destroyed in a few years by an incoming asteroid, where your protagonist, Ken Challenger, must capture a couple of every kind of animal in order to fill a mysterious God-given Ark that will depart before the coming catastrophe, all the while pursuing a love story with an amnesiac tomboy, visiting a city where everyone is dressed like Santa Claus and getting involved in a bizarre murder story presented in a disturbingly detailed way, with rather prominent psychological horror overtones.

As if this wasn’t memorable enough, that’s just one out of three scenarios you can choose right at the beginning (there’s also a secret one you can unlock later on, which is more of a challenge related to the game’s own system), all featuring different story events, often having the same characters acting in different ways due to each story’s own circumstance, while still preserving the same monster-capturing loop.

After completing the first scenario and playing part of the second one, I ended up learning about the sudden passing of Carpe Fulgur’s Andrew Dice, a key figure in introducing Japanese games to the Western PC audience and platforms such as Steam and GoG, which moved me to write a piece celebrating his unique role in videogame RPG history.

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-OCTOBER: PRISONER IN CROSSBELL

October finally saw me complete Prisoner, a unique fantranslated PS1 JRPG mixing adventure, dungeon crawling, top down shooter and RPG elements in the context of a sci-fi dystopian narrative, with young Fry slowly unraveling the mysteries of his isolated community and of the world they live in.

I had actually started playing Prisoner back in June, but I ended up putting it on hiatus since some of its countless puzzles were, well, puzzling enough that I ended up prioritizing other games before finally getting back to it which, in hindsight, wasn't the best choice I could have made given how this game relies on the player's memory to figure out the best routes between the various floors (which are themselves mapped in-game, thankfully), meaning you could feel more than a bit lost returning to the game after a few months, depending on how abruptly you departed.

In late October and early November I returned yet again to Trails of Cold Steel III, completing its second, Crossbell-focused chapter while starting the next one, which finally allowed me to visit the Lamare province I had been curious about since a decade ago, when it was namedropped in Cold Steel I and then became the power base of Duke Cayenne during the conflict in Cold Steel II.

Going back to Crossbell was a fascinating experience, highlighting just how well developed this city was in Trails to Zero and Trails to Azure, to the point that it felt like home even when revisiting it with new characters and a dramatically different political situation.

Interestingly, this was also the month that finally saw the release of Nihon Falcom’s Ys vs Trails in the Sky crossover, originally released on PSP ages ago, which made for a nice distraction due to its bite-sized scenarios and arcade-style combat inspired by Power Stone and Ys Seven. As a curiosity, this was actually the first game featuring Crossbell’s Lloyd Bannings, before Zero no Kiseki’s original version was even out!

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-NOVEMBER: BETWEEN SPIEGELS AND ZAKUS

Then again, in November I left behind Lamare’s seaside metropolis, Ordis, to tackle a wildly different game, SD Gundam Battle Alliance, which I had sought after researching a number of old Gundam-themed RPGs due to the ongoing marathon of the Universal Century anime series I and my children had started back in June, which also allowed me to discover two RPG-related easter eggs in Zeta Gundam.

Battle Alliance proved to be a very entertaining romp, providing countless scenarios with mismatched characters interacting with each other across different series and timelines, all the while allowing me to pilot a number of my favorite mobile suits, including the Ez08 Gundam and the Kampfer.

At the tail end of November, I was incredibly happy to see the release of the English fantranslation of Progenitor, a unique PC98 Koei game built as a space opera reimagining of Uncharted Waters which I had spotlighted with a retrospective back in February, apparently inspiring Bonoko, Progenitor’s awesome and talented translator, to start working on this patch a few months later!

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-DECEMBER: NAPOLEON VS OERSTED

December was a very unique month in terms of my own RPG consumption, being neatly divided between two very different games.

The first was the 2DHD remake of Takeshi Tokita’s Live A Live, with its peculiar anthological structure and extremely diverse scenarios, which I found just as captivating now as I did back in the days when I tackled its fantranslated Super Famicom version.

That its unique narrative framing and some of its scenarios are still so distinctive more than thirty years after its release does speak about the power of Tokita’s original vision, which the remake conveyed quite faithfully to a new generation of RPG enthusiasts.

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The game that shared December with Tokita’s quest against Hate was itself as unique as it gets, The Council, a French RPG I had in my backlog since ages ago. In fact, for the longest time I was sure this episodic game developed by Big Bad Wolf was a Telltale-inspired cinematic adventure game and, while I was kinda right about this, it’s also true I was wrong to dismiss its RPG elements, which were an integral part of the experience rather than a cosmetic feature meant to gamify a purely narrative experience.

And what narrative! The Council, set in January 1793 right before the French revolutionary tribunal killed king Louis XVI heralding the age of Terror, is about the adventure of a French occultist, Louis De Richet, searching for his missing mother on a lone island where a mysterious English nobleman has gathered a number of international figures to discuss the fate of Europe and of the world at large, from American President George Washington to Prussian Minister von Woellner, Catholic Cardinal Piaggi acting as an envoy of then-Pope Pius VI, French revolutionary army hopeful Napoleon Bonaparte and a number of other interesting figures.

If this sounds utterly bizarre, things get even weirder later on and, while the game’s last two chapters were pretty noticeably rushed and the first act is still the only one fully realizing the game’s potential in terms of non-linear narrative and environmental storytelling, with classic art and theology playing key roles, the overall experience was so peculiar I couldn’t help but love it despite its uneven quality. Solving a puzzle based on a room filled with Guido Reni’s paintings of the Apostles alongside my son almost immediately turned into a virtual museum tour of sorts, which will also stay as a cherished memory.

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-A DOOR TO 2026

Then, when I thought I was done with RPGs for this year, Tobira no Densetsu’s English patch was finally released, allowing me to tackle what is likely the most ambitious RPG Maker game I have ever played, and a game that has been surprising me time and again in the past few weeks with its unique systems and peculiar narrative. While Hadler and Quof’s glowing reviews back in 2017 and 2018 had hyped me quite a bit, the actual game ended up being even better than I could envision.

But this, as they say, is another story!

I would feel remiss if I didn’t take this chance to thank all the readers that have followed me during my RPG journey in 2025, even more so considering how much fun I had working on my pieces and how writing has returned to be an integral part of my gaming experience, something I had missed quite a bit in the years after I stopped writing on my country’s videogame magazines.

I’m deeply grateful for your patience and your support, and I hope my pieces can end up piquing your curiosity for this unique gaming genre in the years to come, too!

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This past year hasn’t just been a treasure trove of interesting videogame RPG releases, but also a landmark of sorts for RPG accessibility and preservation, with a number of key efforts, some of which fans had waited for since many years ago, finally materializing on a variety of platforms, not to mention a sizeable number of very interesting English fantranslations which focused on a broad set of platforms and franchises, increasing the options for genre aficionados to explore a variety of previously poorly explored contexts, and that isn’t even considering how those topics have became increasingly more relevant due to initiatives such as Save the Games.

Rather than focusing on discussing new releases, I think a space such as this, with its focus on RPG history, can provide a better service by discussing the veritable avalanche of classics resurfaced due to initiatives such as those, following them month by month while retracing this eventful 2025 that is soon coming to an end.

-JANUARY: BY THE GRACE OF NAMCO

Our tale of RPG porting efforts starts, quite appropriately, with the return of the Tales series, which in the past few years Namco seemed to have abandoned despite the success of Tales of Arise and Vesperia’s remaster. Starting a new effort to make the series’ older entries more widely available, Tales of Graces f was the first to be remastered, escaping the PS3 jail it was confined into up to that moment and showcasing its qualities to a whole new audience.

Compared to 2011, when Tales of Graces f was the first new Tales game to be localized after years of fan requests, when the series seemed fated to stay a Japanese exclusive, the audience experiencing this remaster is likely less familiar with Tales, one of the most storied franchises in the party-based action-JRPG subgenre alongside its sister franchise Star Ocean.

Tales of Graces f, developed by what was then known as Team Destiny, a subdivision of Namco Tales Studio devoted to 2D titles, ended up offering one of the best, most dynamic and most stylish combat systems in a series already known for its quality battle mechanics, and that isn’t even considering one of the most addicting customization systems in the franchise, making Titles finally central to the experience, a streamlined crafting system and a funny cast of characters with a talent for banter.

Happily, Tales ended up resurfacing yet again this year with Tales of Xillia and Tales of Berseria’s own remasters and, while I feared Namco would end up limiting its remastering efforts to the series’ PS3 entries, series director Tomizawa hinted at older entries being on the table, too, which could end up making 2026 an even bigger year for Tales fans, which is fitting given the series celebrated its 30th anniversary in December.

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-FEBRUARY: COSMICALLY NICHE

Things started out slowly back in February, when Edia made available the second part of the Cosmic Fantasy collection, bringing to the English audience for the first time the 3rd and 4th entries in this Telenet-developed sci-fantasy JRPG series, a sort of turn-based Star Ocean which had actually stopped releasing new entries before the first Star Ocean game was even out, with just one among its entries coming West thanks to a notorious TurboGrafx localization by Working Design which still has one of the… most peculiar localized JRPG covers in the history of westernized Japanese box arts.

While this collection does have some limited quality of life upgrades, it being essentialy a port of two games that felt a bit dated even by the mid ‘90s, not to mention its Limited Run Games-only physical run for those who care about physical availability and preservation, made it a very niche release aimed at genre historians and the precious few Western Cosmic Fantasy fans, rather than trying to make the franchise more popular among the broader JRPG audience.

-MARCH: SUIKOSAGA X

Then, the first major release of this kind happened in March with a veritable banger, the Suikoden collection including one of my favorite JRPGs ever, Suikoden I, which back in the days I contributed to translate in my own language and is still one of the better paced JRPGs to date, and of course its sequel, which made a name both for itself and its franchise by expanding on everything the first game did right while also showing yet again Murayama’s skills in world building and developing interesting character dynamics.

People had been waiting for this collection for a number of years, and one can hope the Suikogaiden games get a chance, too, alongside the rest of the series, but it’s already great news to see the franchise’s PS1 entries be widely available, even more so considering the original versions have got extremely pricey over the decades and the PSP collection was never released outside Japan. The fact this collection also got an easily available physical print across a variety of Asian, American and European markets made the whole deal even sweeter.

Then again, while the remasters were in good taste and respected the original versions’ identities, which was even more important considering Murayama’s passing in early 2024, a number of graphical oversights, especially regarding the tileset assets, do make the original versions still worth considering in the eyes of the most invested series purists, instead of posing the remaster as the unequivocally definitive and only way for people to experience the conflicts in the Scarlet Moon Empire and Jowstone Federation.

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Still reeling from Suikoden’s collection, fans of PS1 JRPGs were taken by storm by the sudden announcement and shadow drop of SaGa Frontier 2’s remaster. This new version didn’t just update the game, but also introduced a number of new events and additional contents while making it noticeably more accessible by providing a very welcome stats inheritance feature and by scaling down the challenge to the original Japanese version, foregoing the Working Design-style upgrades seen in the original Western version, which made a number of events decidedly frustrating back then.

Still, not only is SaGa Frontier 2 one of the best looking 2D PS1 JRPGs alongside the likes of Legend of Mana and London Seirei Tanteidan, but back then I also loved its Darksword-style scenario and its heavy political focus, not to mention the way it was partitioned into chronologically discrete events, almost as if the player was perusing a chronicle while discovering the lives of Will, Gustav and their heirs.

This is an atypical game even in the context of a series like SaGa, itself devoted to experimenting a variety of unusual design traits like sandbox questing and scenario-based narratives, and I’m really glad it got a fresh coat of paint, joining the rest of the series (Unlimited Saga is still biding its time, though) in Square Enix and Kawazu’s line of remasters and remakes, with Romancing SaGa 2’s back in 2024 as yet another very relevant example.

Last but not least, March also brought us the port of what many fans who got to know Xenoblade with its Switch entries considered as the series’ lost entry, so far stranded on the unsuccessful WiiU.

Sporting a number of improvements, both technical and contents-wise, including a whole new epilogue, the Switch version finally rescued the most sandbox game ever developed by Monolith Soft, with its free-roaming explorations on foot or using mechas, giving it a new home and finally bringing all the franchise’s titles on the same platform.

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-APRIL: ALTHENA IN TAMRIEL

Then, just a month after Suikoden hit, it was time for yet another classic franchise to return with the Lunar collection, going straight for the original versions rather than attempting to fully remake them as it had happened with the Silver Star Harmony PSP version of Lunar around fifteen years ago.

This release, including both main Lunar games, Silver Star and Eternal Blue, was also a huge win for the Western JRPG community, which had lacked any official way to properly enjoy the series outside of pricey Sega CD and PS1 versions or suboptimal remakes like the Legend GBA version of Silver Star Story or the abovementioned Harmony, which sacrificed quite a bit to its revamped looks.

The release window was a bit marred by the initially vanishingly small physical print for the North American markets, an issue that happily didn’t affect European countries, but, as annoying as that may have been, reflecting some of the issues GungHo has had in the past few years with the logistic of their Western releases, this release was still very much welcome, even acknowledging the issues diehard Working Design fans had with the remasters’ new localizations.

While the hopes to see new Lunar games are basically nil due to Studio Alex’s demise and by the disaster called Lunar Dragon Song, one can hope the forgotten Lunar spin-off, Magic School, ends up being remastered one day, maybe alongside the two main entries in a remaster in the distant future.

While both Suikoden and Lunar’s remasters were announced long ago, Oblivion’s remake came as a surprise, announced and immediately shadow dropped the 22nd of April, a stark contrast with Bethesda’s usual modus operandi despite rumors and leaks making its surprise launch less impactful than it could’ve been.

Developed by Sino-Singaporean Virtuous Studio, Oblivion Remaster was actually much more in line with a faithful remake, sporting an update to Unreal Engine 5 alongside revamped controls, new options like sprinting and plenty of other QoL features, despite the game’s contents being themselves extremely faithful to the original and its expansions, which will likely be a good thing for most, but a bit of a missed opportunity for those that, since its original release, always felt that Oblivion could have done more in representing the seat of the Empire and resented its scaling system.

-JUNE: THE DEMONIC FRONT

June, a really crowded month for JRPG remasters this year, brought us another interesting re-release with Raidou Kuzunoha vs the Soulless Army, a remaster of the first Raidou-themed Devil Summoner PS2 spinoffs by Atlus, focusing on an unusual action-JRPG journey in Taisho-era Japan.

While the fate of the second Raidou entry is still up in the air, same as other PS2 Atlus games like the Digital Devil Saga, which I think could be a hit with Atlus’ new fanbase which mostly hadn’t have a chance to experience them, it’s nice to see this developer return to their untapped non-Persona library after Shin Megami Tensei III a few years ago.

Maybe, one day, it will be Growlanser’s turn and we will toast to a remaster of that Growlanser trilogy collection that Victor Ireland tried to publish back in the days, before being forced to leave Growlanser I in Japan to focus on its PS2 sequel and prequel (yeah, that’s as likely as seeing an AAA Lodoss game in 2025, but one can dream).

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Putting aside Raidou’s adventure, June also brought us 3DS turn based classic Bravely Default’s own remaster, acting as a launch title of sorts for Nintendo Switch 2.

Possibly because of this context, this new version, dubbed Flying Fairy to reference the very first Japanese release rather than to the For the Sequel expanded edition that Westerners ended up experiencing on 3DS back in 2012, proved to be a competent but rather milquetoast effort, introducing a number of quality of life improvements to a game that already featured plenty of them while also regrettably removing some Bravely Default Second-related contents, which is truly bizarre aside from the abovementioned idea of offering a sort of “pure” version of Bravely Default.

As we will see when discussing Ivalice Chronicles’ September release, this won’t be the only time Square Enix will make debatable choices with its 2025 remasters and remakes in the name of faithfulness. Regardless of this remaster’s unique circumstances, purely in terms of preservation it’s also fair to mention how this NS2 physical release was also affected by the widespread use of Game-Key cards, making it unsuitable for those interested in physical software and preservation.

Then again, June brought us a port that I honestly would have never expected to see the light of day, saving hunting game action JRPG Freedom Wars from the Vita lineup and giving it a new chance on PC, Switch and current Sony platforms.

While I have not been in the mood for an hunting game in years, it’s still nice to see an imaginative game such as this resurface, and one could hope to see the same happen to Soul Sacrifice, too.