Developer: Yoshio Nishimura - Digitalis Publishing
Publisher: 15 Industries
Director, scenario writer, character designer: Yoshio Nishimura
Soundtrack: Hitoshi Sakimoto
Genre: Gamebook RPG
Progression: each section has an increasingly higher amount of freedom, with countless choices punctuating their paragraphs, but the story’s main structure is actually fairly linear
Country: Japan
Platform: PC
Release date: July 2026
Status: Completed both scenarios on 26\7\2026

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For those who were introduced to Gamebooks in their heyday, those interactive novels ended up being perceived as a revolution of sorts, providing the sword and sorcery flavor we craved mixed with a hint of what would later be called solo RPGs, fostering player agency while still offering a narrative-driven experience.

After the first Choose Your Own Adventure books were introduced in the United States by Edward Burt Packard's Bantam-published lineup in the late ‘70s, Games Workshop's Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson popularized this concept in the United Kingdom, and series such as their Sorcery! and Fighting Fantasy, Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf or, later on, Dave Morris’ Fabled Lands, ended up creating a new audience for Gamebooks all over the world, with dozens of volumes being localized in German, Italian, French, Spanish, Russian and Japanese, among other languages.

This new international Gamebook readership, enamored with the peculiar mix of sword and sorcery archetypes, player agency and increasingly complex systems those interactive novels could convey, with Fabled Lands going so far as to spearhead keyword-driven, multi-volume sandbox action in this medium, ended up recreating them in their own cultural contexts, soon drifting from the analog to the digital space with a number of videogame RPG efforts, such as the Italian Profezia that, even after the slow demise of proper Gamebooks in the early 00s, is still going strong with contemporary efforts such as The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, Roadwarden, 49 Keys or Fabled Lands’ adaptation.

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-RADICAL READERS

In ‘90s Japan, aside from translated versions of the main British Gamebook series, local authors worked on their own offerings, sometimes based on popular Western RPG series like Richard Garriot’s Ultima, whose Japanese-exclusive GameBoy spinoffs were adapted by Wataru Inukai as interactive novels.

The influence of Gamebooks was also felt in the Japanese videogame space, where it ended up mixing with that country’s already established adventure and early visual novel landscape, resulting in efforts such as The Blue Crystal Rod on Super Famicom, Namco’s unsung textual fourth entry in their seminal action-JRPG Druaga franchise, or Squaresoft’s Radical Dreamers, the esoteric Chrono Trigger spinoff developed for Super Famicom’s Satellaview digital delivery system.

Compared with visual novels and the kind of story structure that genre slowly established after shedding its adventure elements, often featuring multiple discrete paths and long stretches of text between choices (and that isn’t even considering subgenres like sound or kinetic novels, featuring no choices at all), Gamebooks, with their faster pacing, paragraph-based sections intermingled with plentiful choices hiding the stories’ smaller scope and more guided narrative, provided a subtly different kind of experience that, later on, ended up resurfacing much less frequently in Japanese gaming.

Despite some occasional throwbacks like Yoko Taro’s Nier Forest of Myth minigame or the Voice of Card series, the Gamebook theming always played second or third place compared with the overwhelming success visual novels, sound novels and their hybrids with adventure and RPG elements enjoyed in Japan since the days of home PCs, and it would take a few more decades to finally see a full-fledged, unabashedly Gamebook-inspired Japanese RPG, Yoshio Nishimura’s Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle.

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-SHADOW OVER VANILLAWARE

Yoshio Nishimura is an awesome example of how eclectic Japanese developers could be in the ‘90s: falling in love with Gamebooks such as Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series, he later transitioned to pen and paper RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, exploring the analog side of RPGs while also enjoying the very first Western RPG series localized in Japan, Wizardry and Ultima, which ended up having an outsized role in inspiring countless Japanese creators (and animators, given the Zeta Gundam callback).

As a young Japanese graduating from Art School in the early ‘90s, despite the Japanese job market crashing down due to the financial crisis that heralded the Lost Decade, Nishimura managed to find a place in a booming Capcom that, back then, was at the forefront of both arcade and console gaming.

There, Nishimura was lucky enough to see his love for tabletop RPGs rekindled with his very first work, starting his career with Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara, one of the finest arcade side-scrolling beat’em up in the library of a developer already known for its excellence in that field.

Shadow over Mystara, the direct sequel of Dungeons & Dragons Tower of Doom, was the second TSR-licensed Capcom side-scroller set in the world of Mystara, the official setting of D&D’s Basic edition, sporting a number of action RPG trappings already established in previous atcade games like King of Dragons and Knights of the Round, not to mention Taito’s Dungeon Magic and a number of others.

Compared with its predecessor, Shadow over Mystara had a noticeably more Japanese art direction due to the role played by another Nishimura, Capcom’s legendary character designer Kinu Nishimura, while sprites and animations were made a bit less realistic and more fluid in a way that, back then, made me compare Shadow over Mystara to Street Fighter Alpha as opposed to Tower of Doom’s Super Street Fighter II.

After Shadow over Mystara, Yoshio Nishimura worked on countless titles at Capcom but, after being awed by the artistic skills of a coworker during Monster Hunter’s development, felt he needed a smaller pond to grow as an artist and make his skills shine. Having just discovered Vanillaware and George Kamitani’s art, he transitioned to that company, immediately being tasked with directing the unique vertical-scrolling RTS JRPG Grim Grimoire on PS2.

Vanillaware’s founder and main artist, George Kamitani, was himself an ex Capcom staffer who started out his own career on Tower of Doom before developing Princess Crown on Sega Saturn and finally creating his own company, so one could say theirs was a fated meeting.

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-THE LOST SPINOFF

It was during his stay at Vanillaware that Nishimura finally had a chance to return to his beloved Gamebooks with Dragon Crown Pro’s PS4 preorder-exclusive minigame, Akuryoto no Hihou.

While this effort was sadly never localized by Atlus for that game’s Western versions, risking to become lost media if it isn’t preserved somehow, it served as the blueprint for the UI and overall concept Nishimura would later bring to life with Veritas Tales, a game he spent six years developing mostly on his own after leaving Vanillaware and retiring for a number of years in his native village, Soni in the Nara prefecture.

Wthile Nishimura left Vanillaware, it seems Vanillaware didn’t leave Nishimura: not only did he claim Kamitani supported his independent effort in a number of undisclosed ways, but JRPG composer legend Hitoshi Sakimoto, who worked on most of Vanillaware’s soundtracks, lent his own skills and that of his recording company, Basiscape, to Veritas Tales’ soundtrack.

In a way, it feels like Nishimura’s quasi-solo indie effort could actually be a sort of experiment by Vanillaware itself to test the way a smaller title would be received by the international PC audience, given Witch of the Dark Castle ended up debuting on Steam while Vanillaware’s own lineup is still console exclusive, with the upcoming Muramasa re-release possibly breaking this stalemate.

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-SEARCHING FOR INGEBORG

Since the very beginning, Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle makes its Gamebook roots quite obvious by creating two different narrative layers, with a bearded wizard that could pass for a Grim Grimoire character introducing the player to their play session, represented by the gamebook itself plus a character sheet and a number of useful contraptions like dices, an eraser and a coin the player can freely interact with.

The first step in this journey is choosing which character to impersonate, with gladiator Havelock and sorceress Paneri both having their own personal reason to travel to the besieged city of Erishing, where the evil court witch Ingeborg has betrayed the regent, turned most of its poor citizens into zombies and made the royal castle her own abode, with a generous helping of monstrous creatures and unruly mercenaries.

Both characters share most story beats and, regardless of the one you end up impersonating, the other will end up playing a very relevant role as soon as you reach the city and make your way to the only area still controlled by the royal army.

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-STEINS;CASTLE

In terms of story structure, Witch of the Dark Castle follows in the footsteps of a renowned classic, Dave Morris’ Castle of Lost Souls, later repurposed as an adventure module for Fabled Lands and then adapted in digital form, with the player slowly discovering the nature of their own quests while interacting with human NPCs in a foreboding context that still allow some rather relaxed pacing, reaching the castle, making their way through a number of tense challenges as the map opens up allowing you to explore plenty of areas in whatever order you prefer, finding some Mc Guffins and finally confronting the final foe.

Then again, this is a Japanese game and, behind the Gamebook structure and aesthetic, Nishimura built an underlying narrative tapestry that is actually heavily reminiscent of the twists featured in visual novel series such as Uchikoshi’s Infinity and Zero Escape, Kodaka’s Danganronpa, 5pb’s Science or Vanillaware’s own hybrid, 13 Sentinels, where he created a number of backgrounds.

While most Gamebook characters are blank slates that share the player’s knowledge, both of Veritas Tales’ heroes have a complex role to play and plenty of secrets of unravel and, to discover what this story is actually about, including on a meta level, the player will have to complete both scenarios, gaining additional insights and, possibly, unlocking the game’s true ending.

The second playthrough, in pure visual novel fashion, will see a number of events change dramatically, whether because the character mysteriously know something is going to happen (or rather, already happened in the scenario you just completed), with additional choices spicing things up, or because the previous character already solved a number of mysteries or found the abovementioned Mc Guffins (which, incidentally, can make the second playthrough way shorter for reasons we will discuss later).

Ceompared with most videogame Gamebook RPGs, those peculiarities end up making Veritas Tales a noticeably Japanese take on this subgenre, incorporating both the best traits found in the CYOA books of old, including a welcome sword and sorcery vibe that often made me think what I was reading could pass for a late ‘80s or early ’90 classic, and the metanarrative developed over the years by visual novels, including their gamification of different paths and story scenarios as complementary, rather than alternative, story units.

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-DALI’ THE LOREMASTER

While its narrative can be quite unconventional by genre standard once you rub off its Gamebook veneer, the rest of Veritas Tales does stay true to its nostalgic promises in all other regards, starting with the beautiful UI Nishimura developed for Akuryoto no Hihou fifteen years ago.

Nishimura’s work as character designer and art director, for instance, paid off handsomely in his own first solo effort, with beautiful animated portraits for the wizard and the main characters making them feel alive and countless imaginative illustrations detailing the friends and foes you will end up meeting during your journey, including unique and amusing ones like an Earth Spirit cosplaying as Salvador Dalì (or is it the other way around?) detailing the world’s history through his paintings, an alchemy shop owner that is suspiciously similar to a Shadow over Mystara NPC that will make the story’s last stretch much easier, a Cho-Aniki inspired Mandragore, a D’Artagnan lookalike and an enigmatic thief.

Despite a number of stylistic differences, like with body proportions being a bit more realistic at least for human characters, the influence of Kamitani and Vanillaware’s aesthetic is unmistakable in Nishimura’s work, to the point that I wouldn’t have doubted it for a second if the game had been presented as that team’s latest effort. I mean, you even have Kamitani’s trademark food art!

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-HOW A GHOST COOK BROKE MY GAME

Purely in terms of systems, Veritas Tales closely follows the simple and yet endearing tenets of Gamebook combat and character customization while still spicing things up in a number of ways. Character levels, for instance, act as modifiers for the 2d6 hit rolls both the player and the enemy will end up making in order to see who will actually land an attack each turn, with a number of powerful items reducing your base level in order to compensate their effect.

Once you hit a foe, the damage is calculated by subtracting the enemy’s defence stat from your damage stat, which means there are fights where both the character and their enemies could be unable to deal damage at all through regular attacks. Then again, both weapons and armor have a durability stat, meaning someone will end up giving way in the end, and there are also plenty of options aside from duking it out with swords and staves.

Havelock, for instance, can execute special moves depending on the weapons he equipped, while Paneri has a wide array of spells she can cast thanks to her grimoires and staves. Spells, same as consumable long-range items like crossbows and throwing knives, are kinda game breaking if you manage to spam them, given they bypass the hit roll phase and basically have the enemy skip whole turns until you’re forced to return to regular attacks and they finally get a chance to play again.

In fact, keeping true to the spirit of a number of Gamebooks, even if fights can be challenging for most of the game, becoming even more intimidating once you reach Ingeborg’s Castle, with absurdly strong bosses scattered around while guards, evil clerics and zombies surprise you while you travel between areas, there are plenty of ways to cheese the game later on.

For instance, a certain late game posse of ghost cooks allows you to play a dangerous game of dice, betting your own HPs with the hope of gaining much-needed coins. Problem is, the economy is so skewed toward the player I was swimming in gold soon after, filling my inventory with healing potions provided by the local friendly alchemist while buying countless defensive items (as I discovered, Havelock can actually equip as many layers of chainmail as he desires!), a loop that immediately reminded me of Fabled Lands’ knightly joust in Golnir, where you could get rich simply by selling the armor left by your unseated foes.

Atdmittedly, all of this is only possible in the game’s very last area, and after you do your fair bit of adventuring but, due to the way the game is structured, most of that progress will be immediately available when you return there during your second playthrough with another character, contributing to make whatever scenario you play last quite a breeze.

Then again, this isn’t some roguelike romp sporting a Souls-something marketing byline about providing a crushing challenge and, while one could decide to make an ironman run if they fancy to do so, Nishimura was kind enough to provide the player with the option of saving the game whenever they want, likely remembering how he, like most of us, at least one time immediately retried lost fights instead of restarting the whole adventure while perusing the Gamebooks of old.

While explorations are initially handled purely through texts and choices, soon Veritas Tales makes some concessions to its digital nature by allowing you to select which area to explore from a number of maps, even if one could imagine them being handled à la Fabled Lands if this was an analog adventure. To spice things up, there are also a number of chase events handled board game-style, with your character and the foe (well, it’s actually a scared monkey in one of those scenarios, but I digress) rolling dices to move throughout grid maps, which is something much harder to imagine in a single player, pen-and-paper environment.

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-HOLGER AWAITS

Ultimately, this mix of loving, respectful nostalgia and innovation is the core of Nishimura’s own Japanese take on Gamebook RPG design, providing an experience unlike those conveyed by Western authors who ended up drawing their design concepts from adventure games, tactical WRPGs and gamebooks themselves rather than being influenced by JRPGs and visual novels.

Nishimura’s effort is also quite ambitious lore-wise: while the game is set in Erishing and its environs, the larger world where those events are set is quite detailed, including a number of political, religious and magic details that, even with some of the twists revealed later on, could still provide countless hooks for more adventures, or for expanding the tale of our two protagonists, a possibility the author is currently evaluating depending on the game’s sales.

Given how Nishimura has already finetuned the Veritas Tales systems and UI and established his own brand of digital Gamebooks, Digitalis Entertainment, one can hope in due time this will become a new franchise filled with sword and sorcery goodness in the way Sorcery!, Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf were back then, albeit with a noticeably Japanese flair both in terms of design and narrative.

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Developer: Empty Clip
Publisher: Square Enix
Director: Francois Bertrand
Character designer: Sam Deats
Soundtrack: Bill Killey
Genre: side-scrolling beat’em up with RPG-style character growth actually gated behind game progression
Progression: Linear
Country: United States, Canada
Platform: PS4, XBO
Release date: 2016 as a preorder bonus, later released as a stand-alone digital game
Status: Completed in July 2026 after a decade of procrastinating

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Much has been written about Final Fantasy XV’s development woes, from its early days as Nomura’s Versus XIII to its rocky debut as a new numbered entry under Tabata’s watch but, even if one could ink dozens of pages with the criticism about the way this project panned out, one thing even its most ardent detractors can agree with is that it was quite an ambitious effort, if often in misguided ways.

For example, what about its attempt to build an early crossmedia presence in order to engage with a variety of audiences? While many remember Kingsglaive, the CG movie complementing FF15’s very beginning, or the midquel Brotherhood anime exploring Noctis’ friendship with his retainers, just to name the most obvious examples, there was also King’s Tale, a sidegame that, in a way, encapuslates a number of trends affecting Japanese developers during the seventh and early eight console generations.

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-HOW TO OUTSOURCE A FORTRESS

In those troubled years, when the WRPG vs JRPG agenda was pushed by many due to the return of Western RPGs to the console space and the HD development-induced woes experienced by Square Enix and a number of other JRPG developers, with Final Fantasy XIII’s lack of proper towns becoming a hot point of contention regardless of how plenty of other JRPGs did feature them in the same timeframe, some commentators and industry figures urged for Japanese franchises to be at least partially outsourced to Western developers, like Capcom did under Keiji Inafune’s tenure.

At a time, Square Enix also pursued this trend with Fortress, the Final Fantasy XII sequel outsourced to Swedish developer GRIN around 2008, even if its cancellation later on stopped such an effort and the only FF12 sequel ended up being the very much Japanese Revenant Wings on Nintendo DS. While in 2010 Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada said they were still considering Western development input for the series, a sentiment that was reasserted by Hashimoto in a 2013 interview, the idea ultimately went nowhere and even the elusive sci-fi Project W, developed and pitched by Eidos Montreal, shared Fortress’ fate.

In the end, our King’s Tale ended up being the only Western-developed Final Fantasy spinoff to see the light, and its very nature as a side-scrolling beat’em up meant to complement FF15 as a preorder bonus also reminds us of the popularity of sidegames, another rather notable trend in Western RPGs of the late ‘00s, like with browser games Dragon Age Journeys or Legends, The Witcher Versus or, a few years later, Mass Effect Infiltrator on iOS and Android platforms, even if there were also a number of JRPG-related examples like Tales of Hearts R: Infinite Evolve.

While Final Fantasy XV ended up being released quite a bit later, its overlong development meant some of the choices that informed it and its expanded universe were made when those trends were actually still fresh, which helps to explain how King’s Tale could exist in 2016 as a side-scrolling beat’em up developed by Empty Clip, a Californian team later expanded to Quebec that, back then, had just worked on other side games like Dead Island Retro Revenge or the VR Ghostbusters: Now Hiring with their own Rapid Fire engine.

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-DREAMING OF ULTROS

The concept Empty Clip envisioned for King’s Tale was amusingly self-aware regarding this game’s relevance, not even trying to position it as some marginally important part of the FF15 universe’s lore. Instead, what the game amounts to is a bedtime tale narrated by king Regis to a young prince Noctis, and one that may well be a self-indulgent tall tale at that.

In a pixel art sequence reminiscent of ols arcade beat’em up openings, urged by kid Noctis, Regis recounts the events of thirty years before, when he had to repel a mysterious invasion from the lands of Insomnia, reclaiming crystals and recruiting a number of allies before facing the mastermind in a tense confrontation. Or not so tense, considering the final boss ended up being none other than Final Fantasy VI’s Ultros (also featured in Kingsglaive) in all their octopoid absurdity.

Noctis keeps chiming in during the story, interrupting Regis or, amusingly enough, providing disparaging commentary if his father ends up being defeated by the enemy hordes (he can immediately retry though, which makes sense given it’s his tale to begin with). Even the post-game challenge battle scenarios are reframed as the dreams Noctis ends up having after being impressed by Regis’ quest, a nice way to wrap up the game’s contents without losing focus on its peculiar premise.

Not unique, though, as exploring a kid Noctis’ dreamscape was also the way the Platinum Demo’s prequel scenario was integrated into FF15’s broader narrative.

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-SIDE-SCROLLING INSOMNIA

Embracing the pixelated, faux-retro aesthetic that was (and still is) popular among indie devs back then, with spriteworks being outsourced to Joe Rothenberg Animation’s team, King’s Tale’s main campaign is a rather short affair, lasting a bit more than one hour while offering a number of levels set in four different biomes, from the futuristic streets of Insomnia to a mysterious cave.

The younger Regis featured in his old self’s tale is the only playable character, but his moveset ends up being quite satisfying, even if it does take a bit too long for all the options to be introduced since Empty Clip decided to have them being unlocked as fixed tutorials scattered through the main story rather than as new moves gained through a traditional RPG-style progression.

Regis starts his quest with three different attacks, light, strong and shield bash, already showcasing the Insomnian royal line’s unique ability to summon their collection of weapons at will. Each one can be comboed into a variety of special moves, and enemies have their own weaknessess to each of those three attack types.

Then you unlock a variety of elemental spells that can be cast at three different power levels depending on how long you charge them, plus three assist attacks where Regis can call his friend Weskham, Gladius’ father Clarus or a young Cid. Last but not least, doing long combo strings (unfortunately the game doesn’t have a proper combo counter, aside from a charge bar) unlocks the super-powerful Armiger special move, which gets additional hits if the combo you built also included a number of assists.

Provided Regis doesn’t get hit, building long, fluid combos and chaining multiple Armiger activations will become the way to go, with the final battle as a good testing ground before the post-game challenge missions.

Since even a bizarre sidegame like King’s Tale wouldn’t be a Final Fantasy without summons, Regis also gets a number of scripted Astral attacks, activated by touching crystals in a few stages, which are rendered ad gorgeous pixel art affairs and are easily the highlight of Empty Clip’s work on an aesthetic level.

Aside from Regis’ vast array of skills, monster themselves often have their own unique mechanics going on in order to make the fights less samey, like with wasp needles you can send back to the enemy by countering at the right time, Bombs you can shield bash to break enemy groups or Tonberrys whose lantern can slow down Regis unless you manage to turn it off.

While those quirks aren’t enough to fully mask the campaign’s underlying repetitivity, something that is made even more apparent by the rather samey backdrops, they do a nice enough job at spicing up things during its short runtime.

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-FROM INSOMNIA TO KAMUROCHO

While I ended up procrastinating my King’s Tale playthrough for a decade since the first few fights didn’t impress me back then, once I actually gave it a chance I admit I was pleasantly surprised by how fluid Regis’ moveset felt after it was fully unlocked and by how tongue-in-cheek the interactions between Noctis and Regis were.

While King’s Tale is still undeniably a short, low budget sidegame, I ended up respecting how Empty Clip pursued the unique chance to develop a Western Final Fantasy spinoff despite those hurdles, and the choice to avoid RPG progression may be seen as the right one purely in terms of game design coherence regardless of how baffling it could feel given the franchise it’s part of.

Even if sidegames have gone a bit out of fashion since the days of King’s Tale, itself following trends that were somewhat outdated even back then, Bertrand’s team ended up revisiting the retro-side scrolling spinoff space later on with a mostly forgotten Streets of Rage-like Yakuza spinoff, Streets of Kamurocho, while King’s Tale still stays as the lone Western-developed Final Fantasy spinoff no one would have envisioned, and as one of the very last JRPG sidegames developed outside of smartphones alongside Kickstarter-fueled efforts like Eyuden Chronicles: Rising and Penny Blood: Hellbound, with the latter possibly having the sad honor of complementing a main game that could end up being cancelled.

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Despite being a decent success in Japan and sporting some rather awesome character designs by Wizardry veteran Jun Suemi, many Western fans over the decades ended up treating Front Mission Second as a sort of afterthought, if not as the red-headed stepchild of Toshiro Tsuchida’s mecha-based sci-fi tactical JRPG franchise.

While the series’ first outing on Super Famicom managed to get ported or remade no less than four times on PS1, WonderSwan, Nintendo DS and current platforms and its third entry was always beloved not only due to its quality, but also as the first one to be localized as part of the post-Final Fantasy Tactics tactical JRPG localization rush, the second part of this storied franchise, published in mid 1997, was often treated like a footnote, same as the even more obscure Front Mission Alternative.

Of course, this was due to a number of factors, like the lack of an English localization and, for those who managed to research it, the smaller scope of its story, focused on a civil war in Alordesh, real world Bangladesh, with the involvement of the Oceanian Cooperative Union (OCU)’s army and a number of mysterious operatives with their own goals and the crisis spiraling down to much higher stakes later on. In fact, this interesting and unusual setting, mixed with its gritty, disillusioned vibe, was apparently one of the reasons Squaresoft ended up skipping its localization, even if mixing jungle fights with real mecha has proven to be quite alluring, as shown across media by wildly different products like Gundam’s 8th Mobile Suit Team OVA or the upcoming Indonesian tactical RPG Kriegsfront.

Last but not least, Front Mission Second acted as a sort of rough transition between the simpler tactical systems of the first Super Famicom entry and the more intricate, Action Point-based ones later popularized by Front Mission 3, with some rather samey map designs to boot.

Then again, as the first Front Mission game of the fifth console generation, Front Mission 2 also brought its series to 3D, and this futuristic trait was also emphasized in-game by the pseudo-internet Alordeshi OCU soldier Ash and his brother in arms could peruse to obtain information, leverage intel to discern the next map’s layout or obtain some rare part for their Wanzers, from the German Wanderung Panzer, or walking tanks, Front Mission’s mecha.

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-HALLUCINATING PATCHES

Front Mission Second’s place in its series’ history was finally acknowledged in the late ‘00s by the Front Mission Series Translation Project fantranslation group, which tried popularizing Tsuchida’s series in the West after Square Enix sadly left the series’ epilogue and last numbered entry, Front Mission 5, unlocalized.

This team’s work soon materialized with some great results, like Front Mission 5’s own English patch, released in late 2009, and some rather bizarre twists, like when someone inside the team apparently hallucinated a mysterious Front Mission Zero manga, acting as an early foreshadowing of the franchise’s later entries, except it likely never existed to begin with.

Before the team ceased their activities in 2013, they also managed to work on Front Mission 2, but they were only able to publish a partial patch since implementing a number of cutscenes and in-game texts proved to be too much of a technical hurdle hacking-wise, meaning they were offered as a separate file one had to peruse separately.

For fifteen years, it seemed like the original PS1 version of Front Mission 2 would never be fully localized, and the fact Polish publisher Forever Entertainment licensed the game from Square Enix, publishing their own Front Mission 2 Remake in mid 2023 with plenty of issues of its own that were slowly fixed in the next two years through a steady stream of patches, meant it was even less likely to imagine any fantranslator trying to complete the PS1 English patch.

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Title: Front Mission Second
Platform: PS1
Release date: 1996 (PS1, Japan only), 2013 (Front Mission Translation Project partial English patch), 2023 (Forever Entertainment-published Remake), 2026 (English Extended PS1 version by Grand_Veterinarian68)

Then again, fate has a way to prove this kind of assumptions wrong against all odds and, right when I was completing my own playthrough of Front Mission 2 Remake, which I will discuss in a separate piece later on, the news came out that the hacker Grand_Veterinarian68 had finally managed to implement all in-game texts in the PS1 English patch, producing their own English Extended version.

This patch’s translation was still based on the Front Mission Series Translation Project original PS1 localization, rather than Forever Entertainment’s own localized script, even if some system texts that were still unlocalized ended up being based on the Polish version, later being added to the English Extended patch’s new revisions.

Considering how faithful Front Mission 2 Remake ended up being both in terms of aesthetics and gameplay, with some inside the Front Mission fanbase attacking it exactly because it didn’t even try to fix a number of the original version’ known issues, the PS1 version, which doesn’t really have any notable difference, is one only a small subset of Front Mission enthusiasts will likely explore, even more so considering the long loading times for its combat cut-ins, which happily can be disabled, and the lack of some much welcome QoL options introduced in its 2023 version.

With that said, from a preservation standpoint this patch is an important milestone for Tsuchida’s series, with all of its five numbered entries’ original versions now being finally available in English.

Hopefully, in a few years this Found in Translation feature may end up discussing the English patches for Alternative, the abovementioned obscure Africa-focused real time spinoff, and 2089, the last tactical JRPG Front Mission game before the series, now outsourced to different developers and trying to make itself more relevant by ditching its own identity, moved to completely different genres with Double Helix’s Front Mission Evolved and Ilinx’s Left Alive.

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While the issues around the looming end of physical support for the videogame medium in the console space aren’t specifically related to those videogame RPGs I usually discuss on this platform, my Substack’s focus on videogame history, not to mention my own thoughts as a videogame collector and preservation enthusiast, mean this is a topic I want to address in order to spotlight how the issues centered on the end of physical media aren’t just limited to some niche subset of nostalgic gamers left behind by the shifting realities of an industry that is suffering from an existential crisis after its sudden, unsustainable COVID growth, but will actually end up affecting digital-only gamers and the gaming medium as a whole.

The ongoing, almost slow-mo demise of videogame physical media isn’t some sort of crisis triggered by Sony’s sudden announcement about their 2028 deadline for PS5 BluRay gaming pressing facilities, but is actually a multifaceted phenomenon that has been going on since at least twenty years ago, when PC physical gaming gradually became rarer and rarer due to the overwhelming success of platforms such as Steam, not to mention oft-forgotten contenders like Direct 2 Drive or Gamersgate, opening the way to other attempts either trying to directly compete with Valve’s store, like with the Epic marketplace, or to offer their own unique take on PC digital delivery, like with CDProjekt’s GoG and its DRM-free, archivable installers, not to mention a plethora of publisher-specific options from Blizzard’s BattleNet to EA and Ubisoft’s own takes, and that isn’t even considering Sony’s late PC ports requiring PSN accounts to be played (or to be bought at all).

At the same time, in those mid ‘00s that were a pivotal moment for the development of the videogame medium, the rise of Xbox Live Arcade and PSN for Microsoft and Sony’s seventh generation platforms heralded a new age where AA and AAA games were increasingly offered digitally alongside the usual physical version, while indies were often digital-only experiences, at least until a number of them received late physical prints later on, often when ported to eight generation consoles. This, of course, happened alongside the rise of DLCs and season passes, followed after a few years by free to play business models often inspired by yet another novelty, smarthpone gaming, which, like most of the few titles developed on previous feature phones, was itself a fully digital experience posing a set of fresh issues for those invested in videogame preservation, like I tried to outline last year while discussing the way gacha RPGs could be repurposed, if not truly preserved, in a variety of ways.

Now, digital delivery systems had actually happened long before all of this, like with Nintendo’s Satellaview and Sega Mega Modem during the fourth console generation or, even earlier, with mainframe-based games like the original Rogue distributed through pre-World Wide Web intranet university networks, not to mention peculiar contexts like those MUDs whose fans are still a passionate niche to this day, but for obvious infrastructural, technological and business reason the impact of those delivery models could only be felt in the mid ‘00s, which also caused consoles to switch from simple ROM-loaded BIOS allowing just a few options like deleting saves from memory cards or playing music CDs to full-fledged Operative Systems with fully integrated online play and marketplace functionalities, greatly expanding on the online functionalities already seen on Dreamcast, PS2 or Xbox.

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-EXTRACTIVE VECTORS

Broadly speaking, since the seventh console generation the vector we could observe for all console platform holders, albeit with obvious differences in terms of speed and strategy, was one of using those new technological possibilities to centralize and control the sales of games in increasingly closed marketplaces while maximizing the extractive potential of their ecosystems.

This intent was conveyed in a number of different ways even outside the sales of games themselves, with XBLA’s monthly fee acting as a precursor for Sony’s paid PSN a generation later and, soon after, to the development of a variety of subscription and monetization models for digital gaming consumptions like GamePass and its epigons, which themselves went from heavily subsidized forms early on to tiered, and increasingly expensive, ones as soon as the growth in their userbase slowed down.

Cloud streaming, which has been attempted a number of times by different players since the days of OnLive in 2010, including outsiders like Google’s Stadia, so far is still the Satellaview of our current digital delivery landscape, but it would be naive to ignore how the growing potential of data centers could make it a more viable technology in a few years for a number of relevant markets, thus prompting the same industry players to finally push it in a major way with obvious, and devastating, effects even compared with the already overwhelming issues linked with console digital delivery systems.

The phenomenon we have described so far has obviously coincided with a growing disdain for physical gaming by the three major hardware houses, aiming at making their own platforms a closed garden where a single monopolistic entity can act on its own, setting a major difference with PCs and their competing storefront landscape, coexisting with the whole emulation scene.

This ongoing battle has progressed silently but rather obviously for the last fifteen years, with each of the three hardware houses monitoring the physical-to-digital sales ratio in every market year after year while subtly discouraging physical games with a variety of strategies, like publisher-championed DLC codes meant to curb resales, code-in-a-box pseudo-physical releases and their Game Key Card heir on Switch 2, not to mention scrapped attempts like Xbox One’s notorious debacle when Mattrick and his crew tried to introduce online checks for physical games, all the while hoping new technological realities like required HDD installations due to faster reading speed, day one patches making physical data partly obsolete (which is far from the overwhelming issue some try to paint, playability-wise, especially for those following the AA space) and the late push to sell disc readers separately from consoles may finally make physical games such a niche reality that eliminating it altogether wouldn’t even require a fight, with people casually accepting it since things had already progressed too far.

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-ONE OUTRAGE, THREE CONUNDRA

In this regard, as we just discussed, Sony’s recent announcement of their 2028 deadline for physical games, affecting the presumably long tail of cross generation titles that will release on both PS5 and digital-only PS6, is just the last step in a much bigger and longer story, one whose consequences are as diverse as its causes are.

To better understand said consequences, I feel it’s vital to acknowledge how the possible demise of videogame physical media isn’t a single issue, but rather three interlinked but discrete problems that are often confused with each other, sometimes with dubious, or even outright bad-faith, arguments using one of them to dismiss the others without acknowledging their common traits. We can sum them up as preservation issues, consumer rights and love for physical media. Let’s start with the one that should concern anyone invested in gaming history.

-DIGITAL ARCHIVAL AND PHYSICAL MEDIA

Frank Cifaldi, long-time videogame preservation enthusiast and director of the Videogame History Foundation, caused a bit of a stir with his answer to the recent outrage after Sony’s announcement, mostly because his advocacy for digital archival and a new take on the legal framework on topics such as copyright exclusions for preservation-oriented non-profits and piracy and emulation as the only factual way to preserve a frankly huge percent of videogame software published from the ‘70s till today were seen by some as a sort of pushback against the axiom of physical games as a bastion for videogame preservation, but I feel those reactions ended up mischaracterizing his stance.

As mentioned above, I find the argument regarding day one patches potentially invalidating physical games doesn’t get truer regardless of how many times people use it given how the vast majority of software, even in the eight and nine generations, is actually usable as is, despite the relevance of many games operating the other way and the fact that patches can and will change a game’s identity (which is a very real issue that can be debated without pretending the majority of printed BR games are useless husks without patches). Still, I feel Cifaldi wasn’t using this or the other points he made, like the existence of thousands of digital-only games, to belittle the relevance of physical games, but rather to showcase just how far the industry has gone in not caring about preservation, whether in the digital or physical space.

In fact, the points Cifaldi made are absolutely correct, even lapalissian one could say, since digital archival, whether of the curated or bucaneer variety, has long been the main way to preserve whole gaming libraries that would have otherwise been lost to time, like with Western and Japanese home PC software, and the rarity and rising costs of physical copies in the post-COVID collector markets only made this situation more obvious.

Still, even this doesn’t really say anything against physical games’ value, as those large archival efforts have been possible exactly because of coordinated efforts by collectors and researchers dumping physical copies and scanning their box arts, manuals and inlets for decades, like with Japan’s Joseph Redon-led Game Preservation Society that was instrumental in saving PC88, PC98 and MSX2 games, and the fact digital only platforms such as feature phones and smartphones are home to the largest amount of lost media in gaming even just considering single player games only corroborates this.

Still, as meritory as they are, it’s also important to remember how both Cifaldi and Redon’s archival efforts so far can’t be legally shared with the public and, at least in the Game Preservation Society’s case due to its recent funding woes, a precarious financial situation going south may compromise decades of work and potentially make those archival efforts lost media themselves, which again shows all the current limits making legal digital preservation initiatives an incredibly frail lifeline for the videogame medium’s heritage.

Considering how the material collected by those association can also end up being lost or even sold (like the Game Preservation Society had to do with some of its Falcom-related pieces during one of its most difficult moment, albeit in a fully ethical way), having a wide variety of physical collectors as a backup is also yet another failsafe that could prove quite fruitful if the legislation regarding digital preservation efforts and emulation ends up worsening, instead of improving.

In a few decades, especially if cloud-based streaming will take on as a relevant reality in the industry, the digital preservation enthusiasts of the 2030s and 40s may actually end up bemoaning the demise of physical media, with each new generation proving less manageable on a preservation level compared with those where physical media was still an option, albeit an incomplete one due to patches and digital-only offerings. Sony sunsetting the PS3 and Vita PSN stores, for instance, will make countless titles physical only, with those that were digital-only even back then risking to become lost media.

Sto, regardless of the confrontational way some have tried to paint his contribution, I think both Cifaldi and the most zealous supporters of physical media could likely agree that the fact the legal framework for digital videogame preservation efforts should evolve to recognize the dignity of this medium instead of locking down decades of software with no commercial relevance behind the same norms focused to fight proper piracy doesn’t really equate to underselling the relevance of physical media as another front of the same broader conflict.

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-IMMATERIAL RIGHTS, FROM RENTALS TO DIGITAL DELISTING

Speaking of legal frameworks, consumer rights, our second issue, are another topic whose relevance can’t really be overstated, connecting with the issues faced by both videogame archivists and simple gamers invested in the concept of buying a title, gaining the right to resell it or handle it in whatever way they see fit.

Then again, it has been decades since videogame publishers and platform holders have tried reframing the legal status of software bought by private customers, revising it from ownership to license, but buying a functional physical game meant those were destined to be EULA-level technicalities that often didn’t even hold their water depending on a player’s jurisdiction, with EU countries, for instance, often having a noticeably different take on those subjects compared to the USA or Japan.

The first round of this battle, in a way, was the one fought against renting companies offering the same games to a large number of users, like with Nintendo suing Blockbuster in 1989 for their manual photocopying since they knew they couldn’t legally oppose the rentals of the games themselves in the context of US legislation. This, in turn, was the byproduct of a previous lobbying battle at the US Senate, where opposing interests represented by the Software Publishers Association and Video Software Dealers Association ended up conceding computer software couldn’t be rented while cartridge games were protected by the first sale doctrine, allowing companies like GameFly to keep existing even long after the DVD and rental boom embodied by Blockbuster in the decades before.

Japan, in turn, ended up bowing to its own publishers’ lobbying efforts even earlier, to the point of making videogame rentals illegal outside of a few specific situations, with hardware console rental services still being allowed and somehow still surviving in the ninth console generation.

Of course, while trying to curb a number of videogame rental-focused companies was increasingly easy for large publishers, gamers reselling their own titles either to stores or fellow players represented a much larger issues that couldn’t really be solved by lobbying, since it would involve an uphill battle that would involve countless other economic contexts and run afoul of consumer rights in basically all jurisdictions.

Of course, as mentioned in the opening, attempts were still made, like with the push for DLC codes included in the box, making used copies less appealing, or with Don Mattrick’s Xbox One disaster. Nintendo’s recent push for Game Key Cards tried to establish some sort of middle ground by providing a transferable digital license that can be collected, stored and resold as a pseudo-physical medium despite the lack of actual game data (something publishers didn’t even try to dispute, with companies such as Capcom listing GKC sales as digital), but it’s rather obvious this solution was established as a stopgap in order to avoid completely alienating the noticeably physical-oriented Switch userbase during their transition to Switch 2 with a digital-only platform, with actual physical carts still being possible on Nintendo’s new flagship despite becoming sparingly rare (outside of Nintendo’s own releases, to their credit) due to the cards’ cost.

Even then, the backlash against GKCs was fierce enough to signal how physical-oriented gamers and collectors didn’t really appreciate this middle ground despite it still allowing for most consumer rights usually associated with physical games, even if the alternative recently provided by Microsoft and Sony, with new platforms posed as digital-only and physical support ceasing even for their current hardware, ended up being way bleaker and less nuanced, albeit in a slightly longer timeframe, with both companies not even trying to sugarcoat the end of physical gaming in their ecoystems by introducing some token upgrade to their digital marketplaces, be it in terms of consumer rights or even just added functionalities.

In fact, even those loathing physical games should be fully cognizant that their demise will likely usher in a marked worsening for digital-only gamers, too, simply because finally acquiring a fully monopolistic control over each platform’s library will make hardware houses into even bigger enemies of consumer rights, with the potential to lobby their way out even of those jurisdictions that so far had tried to limit their shenanigans with no actual incentive to improve their storefronts and to make them more customer-friendly with easier ways to get refunds or contest account bans locking one’s whole digital library.

Even Steam, despite being comparatively more consumer friendly, has ruled out against digital libraries being transferable to the heirs of a deceased gamer due to the personal nature of each license, which can sound a bit bizarre of an issue but will end up becoming a greater concern as the years go by and a new generation of gamers takes over after their parents, not to mention how such accounts can easily amount to thousands of EU or USD of games being lost, including titles that can’t even be purchased anymore.

Of course, not all concerns regarding consumer rights are rational: for instance, there have been apocalyptic takes heralding the end of digital sales due to the lack of competition with physical media, which risks being a short-sighted piece of criticism since they are an effective way to drive traffic and revenue and companies like Sony and Microsoft have no reason to stop using them (careful about using Steam as an example, though, as their situation isn’t really the same).

Then again, sales still existing in a future all-digital, monopolistic console ecosystem doesn’t mean they will end up being a great option compared with what we have now: not only have physical games provided much better deals for countless games on a number of storefronts, driving more aggressive sales even for exclusives that never saw huge digital discounts, but publishers themselves are often deprived of the ability to operate autonomously on such platforms, with PSN allegedly driving sales by invitation instead of allowing each developer to act on their own accord, a trait that is hard to see improve once hardware houses get even more control and features like dynamic pricing become commonplace.

By now, even those digital enthusiasts that see physical game as a reactionary relic of a past they aren’t particularly interested in should acknowledge physical titles have been one of the failsafes preventing the digital storefronts from becoming much worse in basically every conceivable way, from UI and maintenance to pricing structure and consumer rights.

Delisting digital games is yet another elephant in the room that is usually handwaved by claiming it isn’t that bad of an issue since those who already bought those titles can reliably re-download them at will for what feels like forever, yet another argument that ends up folding when considering how Sony is now closing the PS3 and PSVita stores themselves (just as they closed the PS Mobile store more than a decade ago), something they already tried doing before being forced back by yet another bout of fan outrage, and how they just announced they are removing Studio Canal 551’s movies from PSN users’ libraries (as opposed to just removing them from their marketplace) due to expired lincensing agreements.

Those aren’t videogames, of course, but I think claiming license revoking will never happen in our medium’s publisher-envisioned all-digital future, even in slightly different situations like remakes or remasters making original versions unwelcome liabilities for publishers (just think about Dragon Quest XI or Yakuza 0’s delisted original versions), could end up being quite a naive take just a few years from now, even more so since the legal initiatives to make hardware houses adopt consumer protection rules in their storefronts have been lagging in the past few years, alongside meritory efforts like Save the Game which managed to get some high-profile support, like the EU Parliament Vice-President, but factually couldn’t overcome the lack of interest by both politics and the companies themselves to fix the issues in their business models from a consumer right standpoint.

Again, physical games, even in their current status as an increasingly niche option compared to higher and higher digital adoption rates, do provide a sort of passive defence against this kind of lobbying and pushback against consumer rights-focused initiative, offering gamers an option that publishers can curb but not really remove unless they go all-in with the plans of platform holders like Sony and Microsoft.

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-SELF-AWARE WUNDERKAMMERN, OR UGLINESS’ HISTORICAL MERITS

Last but not least, there’s the emotive, cultural, historical and aesthetic attachment to physical media, which of course is connected with the plentiful preservation and consumer rights issues discussed in the past two paragraphs, and yet is actually a demon of its own that trascends even aesthetics and ends up building recursively on physical media as the silent documentary witness of the industry’s trajectory, marking a deep divide between collectors purely moved by nostalgia or treating games as merchandise and those invested in building their Wunderkammer into a representation of the medium itself, or of a select part of it, seeing in physical games the quidditas of the medium even outside the actual use of the supports themselves.

Even if physical games stopped being dumpable due to some unhackable technical wizardry or if some draconian law prohibited their resale and forced them to mirror the price of their digital versions, they would still provide a connection to the historical roots of this medium and to its unbroken continuity, something neither digital games nor baffling compromises like Limited Editions sold without discs or cartridges will ever be able to replace.

The latter example also completely misses the point of a software-focused collection, acting instead as licensed merchandises posing as the vacuous Doppelganger of a physical game, even if the first instance of this phenomenon, Kenji Eno’s Enemy Zero Limited Crate made in just 20 copies and crammed full of extras aside from the Sega Saturn game itself, is still an uniquely bizarre and interesting oddity compared to more recent examples like Dragon Age Veilguard’s sad steelbook deprived of a BluRay disc.

Of course, despite having built a collection focused on videogame RPG history since my childhood, I have no issue recognizing how the current state of physical gaming can be worrisome if not outright disappointing in a number of ways, but I also think using this issue as an argument against the continued existence of physical media isn’t rooted in a proper videogame history hermeneutics, where physical games aren’t just goods to be exhibited or flaunted online or offline, but parts of a diacronic dialectic that acts as the physical representation of the medium’s historical trajectory.

Collectors of ancient coins, for example, can bemoan the growing ugliness of Roman Imperial coinage in the fourth and fifth century compared with the beautiful, personalized and much more realistic imperial portraits of the first three centuries, but those stylized copper coins of the the late Tetrarchy and of the Constantinian and Valentinian dynasties are still a precious testimony of the changing economic, monetary, aesthetic, cultural and religious realities of that age.

In the same way, the glaring disparities between the way videogames packaging, manuals and even supports have been handled over the decades, like with Japanese home PC’s awesome large plastic case, Western home PC and early PC huge cardboard boxes, NeoGeo Aes shock boxes and plenty of others compared with the current landscape of fairly boring cases with little to no extras, does speak about the industry’s gradual shift in terms of its relationship not just with hardware and software, but also with store outlets and the consumers themselves.

Those Switch and PS5 boxes may be fairly mundane compared with those gorgeous packagings, and their manuals (while present) are rarely even a poor match for the awesome booklets full of lore, artworks and information older PC and console game provided, and that’s without even discussing those maps which were the delight of any RPG enthusiasts back then, but they still tell their own story of an age of growing industry pains which deserves to be heard even if the best attempts by current boutique publishers are still often inferior to the glorious days of old, much like a golden augustale of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II is notable for trying to imitate Roman Imperial aurei or solidi despite being rather obviously a product of its own 13th century reality.

In this regard, defending physical gaming on its own, outside the usual debates focused on its role as a facilitator for preservation or customer rights, doesn’t mean ignoring or refusing to consider the plentiful issues this context has experienced in the past fifteen years, which have partly compromised a number of its past traits, but can also signify the attempt to reframe on an historical hermeneutic basis the very act of collecting, and the meaning behind what would otherwise end up being a pile of plastic and cardboard, connecting each piece with a story spanning decades.

While acknowledging the complex history of the videogame industry’s push against physical gaming and of the connections and differences behind the arguments used to defend it was the whole point of this little essay, I feel obliged to point out how my intent isn’t to belittle anyone of those ardently defending physical gaming for their own reasons, but simply to discuss the implications behind the more relevant issues behind such a battle, and the roots of my own zealous support for such a relevant, if possibly doomed, cause.

Despite the bleak scenario offered by the current videogame industry in this regard, if the reader allows me to borrow one last example from numismatics, one could envision a future where, much like the rough coinage minted by the Visigoth, Ostrogoth and Frankish Kingdoms after the fall of the Western Empire, when the role of currency itself was redefined even aside of its aesthetic traits, the likely demise of physical gaming on a mainstream level doesn’t mean it couldn’t end up surviving the current crisis in a rougher, less official and incredibly niche form, a bit like privately printed Japanese doujin PC games sold at conventions for long years before Western fans even acknowledged their existance, before making a return in new ways in a future industry landscape whose traits we can’t even envision right now.

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Developer: Nihon Falcom
Publisher: Working Designs
Director: Yoshio Kiya
Genre: Side-scrolling action JRPG with plenty of platforming
Progression: Linear, with a few sidequests unlocked later on
Platform: PC88, PC98, Super Famicom, PC Engine, Mega CD
Release date: 1994 (American Sega CD version)
Status: completed around 2005 (WD version), then again in early 2026 (Un-Working Designs version)

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While Zelda II briefly popularized side-scrolling action JRPGs after its 1987 Famicom release, partly inspiring titles like like Telenet’s Exile series, Ax Battler, ActRaiser or Demon’s Crest, that budding subgenre had already been uplifted by a number of arcade efforts, like Namco’s Dragon Buster or Westone’s Wonder Boy in Monster Land, not to mention the pioneeristic work of Nihon Falcom, which experimented with its core traits on Japanese home PCs like NEC’s PC88 and PC98 with the second entry in its Dragon Slayer franchise, Xanadu (1986), and greatly expanded them with the fourth, Legacy of the Wizard, and fifth, Sorcerian (1987), which allowed the player to control not just a single hero, but a whole four-character party, not to mention spinoffs like the widely known Faxanadu on NES.

Sorcerian’s group side scrolling action also featured a freeform quest system that was expanded with a number of add-on discs themed on a variety of settings, from ancient Egypt to the Japanese Sengoku era, some of which weren’t even developed by Falcom, and which provide, alongside Xanadu’s own Scenario II and Epyx’s Temple of Apshai, some of the earliest example of expansion packs in videogame RPG history, long before the likes of Diablo: Hellfire (1997) or Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast (1999) popularized the concept in the CRPG space.

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-SCROLLING HISTORIES

Even Ys, which quickly became Nihon Falcom’s flagship action-JRPG franchise (especially since Dragon Slayer’s last spinoff, Legend of Heroes, went turn based), was influenced by this side-scrolling trend with Ys III Wanderers from Ys (1989), even if its later remakes (aside from Taito’s surprisingly faithful PS2 remake) eliminated its side-scrolling traits while keeping a number of simple platforming elements by reusing Ys VI Ark of Napishtim’s engine. Ys III wasn’t the end of Nihon Falcom’s forays into this peculiar design space, though.

While this subgenre’s fortunes slowly dwindled in the home PC and console space and side-scrolling RPG-themed efforts later on ended up resurfacing in a completely different space, arcade brawlers, with Capcom’s Tower of Doom as a turning point that would strongly influence young George Kamitani, inspiring him his future efforts, from Princess Crown to Odin’s Sphere and Dragon’s Crown, Falcom gave this design space a quirky and unique sendoff with its Popful Mail (1992), the last Falcom game directed by the legendary director of Dragon Slayer and many early Falcom titles, Yoshio Kiya, before he left that company and continued his career at Nihon Application.

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-ENTER THE ELVEN TOMBOY

Initially developed on NEC’s PC88 home PC and soon ported to PC98, Super Famicom and PC Engine, with each version sporting a number of meaningful differences both in terms of art and gameplay, Popful Mail was quite peculiar in a number of ways, sporting a cutesy, flamboyant, sometimes even a bit risque (especially with its PC98 version) art direction that was noticeably different from anything else Falcom had developed until then, not to mention a quirky, funny story that spared no effort to avoid taking itself seriously while narrating the adventures of elven tomboy bounty hunter Popful Mail.

This was a bit of a tone shift, considering it happened right when Falcom was tackling traditional shounen fantasy themes not just with Ys, whose red-headed protagonist, Adol the adventurer, is one of the best impression of a sword and sorcery hero in JRPGs, but also with Legend of Heroes’ Seiros saga, the precursors of the Gagharv trilogy and of the Trails continuity, which gradually introduced Falcom to dense world building efforts and long-form scenarios.

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-POPFUL THE HEDGEHOG?

Popful Mail’s whimsical style, mixed with its side-scrolling and platforming elements, was likely the basis for one of the most bizarre chapters in Falcom, and indeed early Japanese RPG, history, namely the 1992 Sega-Falcom partnership aimed at reimagining Falcom games on Sega’s platforms by changing their setting to, say, the Sonic universe in order to make them more appealing to the Western markets.

Popful Mail’s Mega CD remake, the first chapter of this collaboration, should have actually been a reskin of the original game, with poor Popful being swapped with Sister Sonic, a female, allusive, bounty hunter relative of the Blue Hedgehog.

While a number of Sonic Team’s staffers did have some previous experiences in RPG development due to their early work on titles like Fatal Labyrinth and Dragon Crystal, not to mention how this would have been far from the first time a prominent platform franchise repurposed an entry in another series to pass it as its own, as the reskinned Doki Doki Panic becoming Super Mario 2 in the West showed much earlier, RPGs and their audience were quite a different context, as both companies would soon learn.

After the first reports of the partnership and Popful Mail’s changes appeared in the Japanese videogame press, with a feature in Beep Beep! Mega Drive’s November 1992 issue, they were met with astonishment by the small but fierce home PC-focused Falcom fanbase, which started mail-bombing (that is, sending letters en masse, since back then the internet was barely a thing) both Falcom and Sega, asking them to rethink their plan.

Taken aback by this early display of fan rage, which made news even outside Japan on magazines such as EGM, both companies ended up complying and thus Popful Mail stayed an elf, Sister Sonic became a forgotten footnote in Sonic history, the Sega-Falcom partnership tanked before truly starting and Sonic ended up getting its first RPG more than a decade later, and from a Western developer to boot, with BioWare’s Dark Brotherhood on Nintendo DS.

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-LOCALIZING CHALLENGE

Then again, despite all those issues and drama, Popful Mail’s Sega CD port was indeed released, becoming the best version of that game in a number of ways. Being localized outside Japan, though, was a completely different matter, considering not just how few Western publishers dabbled with niche JRPGs back then, but also how Mega CD (renamed Sega CD in the US)’s small install base as a Mega Drive add-on made things even more complicated.

There was one localization company, though, which even back then was specialized in making the impossible possible: Victor Ireland’s Working Designs, whose relationship with Sega of America and previous localization experiences on Sega CD made it a good fit for tackling this game. Then again, Victor Ireland also had a number of unique localization habits, especially in his early works, which deeply impacted Popful Mail’s only English version.

This isn’t just related to his well-known penchant for rather liberal localization, including an abundance of dubbed jokes and pop culture references, which, compared to the rest of Working Designs’s lineup, were actually surprisingly in line with Popful Mail’s own whimsical and hilarious tone, but also touched on the game’s own difficulty in a number of rather devastating ways, improving enemy HP and damage and making stage hazards way more lethal while dramatically raising the cost of equipments, in a game where those are the only actual upgrades for Popful and her allies.

The first time I tackled Popful Mail, years after its US release since I never even saw an import copy in my corner of Europe, I had a vague idea about the changes introduced in the American version and, as prepared as I was to a rather brutal experience, the game was still a masterclass in frustration in a number of instances, even more so since you could easily glimpse how the game’s many good traits ended up being compromised by those choices.

Revisiting it many years later with the Un-Working Designs patch, which reverts the game to its original Japanese difficulty while keeping its localization and American UI optimizations (like the timer and pause features) proved to be a much better experience in a number of ways, highlighting the unique traits of this quirky adventure without the additional layer of punishment provided by Ireland and his crew, as I will try to outline in the rest of this piece.

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-A DYNAMIC TRIO

Popful Mail starts off with a long animated sequence, one of the main benefits of its Sega CD remake, having the titular elven tomboy beauty tackle a band of marionette outlws and their leader, which has no qualms in detaching his head and using it as a bomb to confuse poor Mail, with this bizarre and silly interaction setting up the tone for the whole game.

Having recovered from her setback, our bounty hunter sets off for a new adventure searching for the evil wizard Muttonhead, a journey that will lead her to meet the other two playable character, timid wizard apprentice Tott and cute flying monster Gym, while also unveiling a dark conspiracy with much higher stakes than the heroine and her friends could initially imagine.

The world is rendered through a series of large areas divided into connected side-scrolling levels, themselves split in a number of maps, featuring platforming elements, stage hazards and plenty of monsters, not to mention treasures, towns with the usual set of shops and some small puzzle. While at first the game features a completely linear progression, later one Mail and her friends can revisit previously explored regions in order to complete a number of quests that required the traversal skills made available by Gym.

In an age where minimaps weren’t really a thing, Popful Mail’s levels keep a commendable balance between intricate layouts and navigability, incentivizing explorations without making the player feel lost, with an early Metroidvania-before-Metroidvanias feeling reminiscent of the Wonder Boy and Monster Boy series (actually, 1994’s Monster World 4 on Mega Drive could have been influenced by Popful Mail itself) that also affects its light platform elements, which are never particularly bothersome despite requiring a modicum of attention.

Monsters, by far the biggest challenge, have their own attack patterns that require a bit of thought in order to avoid wasting healing items while exploring, even if things are still vastly better compared to the Working Designs version, where even the lowliest denizens could turn into a lethal menace. Even then, the game always featured a failsafe of sorts in its save system, which allows to save at any time during your travel, even if reloading brings Mail and her allies back to the start of the map they were exploring (which can actually be gamed, especially in the old US version).

Bosses, which were outright brutal affairs in Ireland’s take, are quite manageable in the original, while still requiring a fair bit of trial and error in order to learn their attack patterns and to figure out the better hero and weapons to tackle them. Characters also act as an HP buffer of sorts, since you can switch between them before one dies in order to avoid wasting your precious Elixirs, an item able to automatically resurrect a character upon their death. Amassing elixirs, as one can expect, does prove invaluable later on, too, when bosses become much more deadly.

While character customization is purely based on the equipments you can buy in the different cities Mail visits during her platforming travels, things are actually a bit more complicated given how there are a number of weapon types whose usefulness is heavily dependent on the enemy, or boss, you’re facing, and that isn’t even considering the differences between the three playable characters, with Tott having long-range magical attacks while Gym can float around while jumping, for instance.

From a visual standpoint, all three heroes end up being fairly impressive and well animated, with their sprites oozing personality and showing a remarkable care in building their own visual identity, not just through their own distinctive playstyles but also thanks to idle poses and minute details you will learn to appreciate only while exploring Mail’s world.

Then again, the game isn’t shy about making the three protagonists shine during story events, either: long before the Gagharv trilogy and Trails in the Sky made conversing with NPCs and discovering their stories and unique interactions after each main story event a core part of its lasting appeal, Popful Mail was the first Falcom game to make talking with NPCs a funny and diverse affair, not just because most of them were quirky in their own way, but also because their script changed completely depending on which character the player controlled when triggering the event, making the game highly replayable since you could keep watching the story unfold through one out of three different perspectives, even if one could just let fate decide which hero ended up doing the talking in a given scene, or switch depending on the NPC.

While Popful Mail’s final gauntlet can still be challenging even in the original version due to how its subverts one of the systems the game was built upon until that moment, it’s a far cry from the test of patience the American release ended up being, closing what sums up as a quirky, fairly short affair that can be completed in less than ten hours once its bosses stop acting as a sequence of roadblocks due to their stats.

Even then, despite finding the original version’s balance closer to the game’s overall playful and easygoing identity, I’m still glad I also experienced its Working Designs release long ago, not just because that playthrough colored my perception of Popful Mail in a way that let me appreciate its Japanese edition even more later on, but also because Ireland did provide a polished release with its own distinct flair, regardless of how one may end up feeling about his work and the eternal debate about localizers often carving their own authorial space on the titles they work on.

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-KYOTO MAIL

Same as Monster World IV and a few others, Popful Mail stands as one of the last representative of an once-booming game design trend whose well dried up fast in the mid ‘90s, basically disappearing from the industry until side-scrolling beat’em ups, Symphony of the Night-inspired Igavanias and the later wave of Metroidvania-styled indie efforts of the past two decades, not to mention Vanillaware’s unique lineup, brought back this kind of titles in full swing, albeit with a number of key design differences in terms of level design, platforming, combat systems and progression.

Despite this resurgence of sorts, Popful Mail ultimately ended up staying as a niche, poorly known oddity in Nihon Falcom’s library, even more so with Western fans who could only access it through an hard to find game on a niche platform (and that isn’t even factoring the European markets), with Gurumin and the Zwei series inheriting its slapstick vibe while offering a noticeably different kind of action JRPG experience.

Compared with its early avalanche of home PC and console ports, poor Popful’s adventure unfortunately never saw any meaningful re-release or remastering effort since its Sega CD localization, with D4’s Project EGG preservation effort providing a lonely exception with its Switch eShop port of Popful Mail’s PC98 version.

Still, Falcom’s surprising Kyoto Xanadu announcement in February 2026, unveiling Tokyo Xanadu’s successor not as an hack & slash action JRPG but as a side-scrolling effort, means Toshihiro Kondo’s company still remembers its roots and is willing to return to one of the design spaces that defined most of its venerable Dragon Slayer meta-series, despite its focus on the Trails and Ys franchises.

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Developer: Imageepoch
Publisher: NIS America
Director: Dai Oba
Scenario writer: Kazushige Nojima
Character designer: HUKE
Soundtrack: Manabu Namiki
Genre: A unique hybrid of real time JRPG with third person shooter elements
Progression: Linear, albeit with optional quests unlocking a different ending
Country: Japan
Platform: PSP, Vita compatible
Release date: 2011 (Japan), 2013 (EU and NA)
Status: Completed in May 2013

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A few days ago, while visiting one of the local manga stores, my daughter asked me about Hatsune Miku, whose presence was kinda hard to ignore given the veritable wall of action figures placed near the Gundam kits we came to buy.

“Dear, she doesn’t actually have a story”, I tried explaining her, “she was born as a virtual singer and a number of artists have redesigned her likeness over the years, that’s why all those action figures are so different” to which, as one could expect, she returned me a puzzled stare. “Actually”, I continued, taken by my love for nerdy digressions, “one of her songs has its own heroine, and that one did have a story, albeit a rather sad one, told by a game I played long ago”.

This aside, which was able to finally pique her interest, is the story of the mysterious, dark haired Black Rock Shooter, and of how a character who started out as an artwork and was popularized by the choreography of the Hatsune Miku song she inspired later managed to repel an alien invasion on the PSP’s grainy screen, long before my daughter was born.

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-SUPERCELL;GATE

Back in 2008, the unique Japanese subculture focused on Vocaloid, synthetized singers given an appearance as virtual idols while performing songs written by human authors, was in full swing and managed to gain ground even outside Japan due to a number of hits, some of which were penned by ryo, the lead of the supercell band, or rather collective.

Black Rock Shooter, performed by emerald-haired Vocaloid leader Hatsune Miku, was one of such songs by ryo, and one that managed to quickly get popular on both Niconico Douga and Youtube. This, of course, wasn’t just due to the song itself, but also to its source material, since ryo had written it after being inspired by an illustration posted on Pixiv by artist and character designer Huke in 2007, wih his artwork providing a powerful coreography to ryo’s hit.

Huke’s popularity back then was going to rise quickly soon after thanks to his successful character design work on Steins;Gate, the 2009 Nitroplus-5pb game that popularized Japanese sci-fi visual novels to a new generation, right when a wave of fantranslations had brought new attention to classics such as Kotaro Uchikoshi’s Ever17 (which had actually been translated commercially long before by the forgotten Hirameki) and Remember11 or more niche works like Romeo Tanaka’s Cross Channel, not to mention Chaos;Head, the previous entry in the Science series that later featured Steins itself.

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-DIGITAL ADAPTATIONS

At the core of Black Rock Shooter’s popularity, of course, was the eponymous character, a mysterious, black-haired girl with a dark light shining from her eye roaming a world of ruins and technological menaces given life by Huke’s art, which immediately captured the imagination of many. It isn’t that surprising, then, that this character and her adventures ended up being fleshed out later on with a number of unrelated adaptations, from an anime series to a 2011 JRPG developed on Sony’s PSP by Image Epoch.

Back then, DS and PSP were a goldmine of JRPGs, plenty of which unfortunately never managed to get localized, so I honestly didn’t expect a game such as this could have a chance to get outside Japan and, for a time, it seemed like it won’t happen. Its license apparently proved to be too alluring to pass for NIS America, though, even if its localization took two years and ended up as a digital-only affair, a far cry from its Japanese limited edition bundled with an action figure, since by mid 2013, when its Western versions were released, publishing a physical game on UMD was quite problematic in a number of ways, at a time when NISA was fairly risk-averse even with PS3 releases like Legasista or Battle Princess of Arcadias.

-POST APOCALYPTIC SHOOTER

Instead of being handled by Ryoei Mikage, Imageepoch’s president and main decision maker, Black Rock Shooter: The Game was basically the brainchild of Dai Oba, an ex Capcom staffer who worked as one of Okami’s planners under Kamiya and Inaba and then jumped ship after Clover Studio’s demise, joining Mikage’s new company around late 2008 and contributing in a number of ways to all the titles it released until its closure.

Given he very obviously had to work with a shoestring budget, with Imageepoch likely allocating a non negligible part of it to Ufotable’s opening and the game itself being one of the shorter JRPGs of the seventh generation alongside From the Abyss and Last Rebellion, lasting less than ten hours despite not being shy about recycling assets and enemies, Oba tried to make the most out of a beloved niche IP such as BRS, compensating the lack of volume with the attempt to offer a unique set of systems and a cinematic flair to the story’s progression.

This sort of experimental take on JRPGs was fairly common with Imageepoch’s lineup in the early ‘10s, even if back then I felt like a number of their attempts ended up falling flat in terms of executions, marred as they were by a number of issues even aside from the budget and scope typical of low budget handheld productions.

Then again, one has to acknowledge Imageepoch did start out strong with the Luminous Arc series, not to mention the Kazuya Ninou-directed, Capcom-published Last Ranker or the 7th Dragon franchise

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-THE DIRTY DOZEN

Being essentially a setting-agnostic IP, Black Rock Shooter: The Game’s narrative was developed separately from its anime adaptation, likely because the latter was released by animation studio Ordet in mid 2012, almost one year after Imageepoch’s PSP effort, with no known attempt to connect those releases or to even attempt building a shared universe aside from the main heroine and Huke’s trademark aesthetic.

Contrasting Ordet’s mahou shoujo-adjacent story, The Game, whose scenario was outsourced to the prolific (if sometimes hit-and-miss) Kazushige Nojima, offered a rather grim post-apocalyptic romp, set in a 2051 Earth where humanity has been eradicated by a mysterious alien menace to the point that, in the beginning, the only known humans alive in the whole world are a dozen special forces soldier and Black Rock Shooter herself, here also known as Stella, humanity’s freshly awakened secret weapon who will have to explore a world reduced to a droid-infested wasteland together with her oversized cannon in search of her past, and of a way to finally repel the invaders.

While this setup may have been quite unique and interesting as far as JRPG go, part of its potental was squandered by the game’s lack of meaningful characterization, with its cast unable to get properly fleshed out despite a promising start due to the game’s almost action game-style pacing and the way its story was developed, not to mention some rather forgettable writing, both for the enemies and for Stella’s few allies, even if, despite those issues, the game deos have a few intense, sometimes unexpected moments that do stand out long after completing the game.

In this regard, I felt that later on The Game ended up having its more convincing narrative moments in the absence of actual custscenes, exploring the ruins of New York, Moscow and Tokyo while listening to Manabu Namiki’s evocative, eerie soundtrack that ended up contributing to the game’s overall atmosphere in an outsized way (I still dearly remember a number of tracks to this day, like with Fuji Jukai’s theme).

Interestingly, the game did try to balance its edgy brutality by providing an alternate, or true ending unlockable after completing the main story, altering the fate of a number of key NPCs in order to make Stella’s journey less tragic and lonely.

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-FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO MOSCOW

Due to the abovementioned attempt to turn Black Rock Shooter The Game into a cinematic experience of sorts despite not having the resources to flesh out this kind of lofty ambition, traversal in Black Rock Shooter The Game tend to be a fairly unimpressive affair, with the areas organized as separate, mostly simple levels, each sporting a number of stages with story-based and optional missions and even a stage select screen allowing the player to revisit previous areas, which proved to be key during the quest for the true ending.

In those early ‘10s where the debate about Final Fantasy XIII’s lack of town explorations was still a popular topic among JRPG fans, making it way more noticeable when low budget efforts ended up following the same road, Black Rock Shooter: The Game at least managed to escape that conundrum due to its setting’s unique circumstances, even if the way the game was built was possibly even more skewed toward cutscenes and combat, making explorations a distant third priority.

In the beginning, though, the game did try to convey the scale of Black Rock Shooter’ adventure through a few Final Fantasy VII-inspired motorbike minigame sections designed by Imageepoch’s Tsukasa Toya, who will later work on another road trip themed JRPG, Final Fantasy XV, even if Stella’s trips with her trusty Striker ended up being much more tense and eventful than Noctis’ comfy rides on the Regalia.

Then again, given the way its contents were balanced, it’s the combat rather than the journey that makes Black Rock Shooter stand out, for good or ill.

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-THIRD PERSON DODGING

Given the heroine’s huge cannon was a part of her visual identity since Huke’s early artworks, Dai Oba tried to incorporate a number of third person shooter elements in what was likely a turn based template back in the planning stages, later changed to an instanced, real time combat system where Stella can shoot and combine attacks and skills in real time by pressing the face buttons associated with each one, a bit like Valkyrie Profile.

Despite the combat system’s dynamism, with enemies trying to close up their distance and maul Stella or to hit her with devastating range attacks, it didn’t really went into action RPG territory, with the only actual movements Stella can execute in battle being directional dodges timed in order to avoid enemy fire, albeit without the strictness of a Tsugunai or a Clair Obscur.

Compared with a number of Imageepoch experimental combat systems, like Fate Extra’s rock-paper-scissor combat or Time and Eternity’s heroine swap system (which back then when I completed Stella’s quest I still had to experience), Black Rock Shooter felt like it had a bit more depth, sometimes nailing the kind of tension Oba was aiming at while also offering a number of meaningful attack options that can efficiently deal with bosses or with larger groups.

Then again, the fact that, despite its rather quick runtime, the game still managed to recycle the same monsters (and their attack patterns) a number of times, with plenty of throwaway fights made to pad out the levels and their extra missions, ended up making the combat system feel shallower than it could have been otherwise, and it’s likely it could have been much more accomplished if Imageepoch had allocated The Game a more reasonable budget and had handled its encounter design in a more thoughtful way.

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-AN EPOCH’S LAST SHOT

While Black Rock Shooter’s PSP outing suffered from a noticeable lack of contents and from an identity crisis of sort, never being able to fully land the hybrid JRPG-third person shooter vision Oba aimed for, despite its many faults it did provide a rather unique experience, acting as one of the last send-offs for the seventh generation’s experimental handheld JRPGs which had accompanied us for almost a decade since NDS and PSP’s 2004 release.

Despite Nintendo 3DS’s strong success and Vita’s passionate niche fanbase, their JRPG lineups didn’t manage to capture the same unique mix as their predecessor due to the industry’s changed realities during the early years of the eight generation, like with the shift from handheld to smartphone development many franchises and developers experienced.

Even just in terms of quantity, this decrease was fairly obvious for those keeping track of obscure, Japanese-only handheld JRPG releases, even if the fact that roughly during this period English localization companies managed to translate most JRPG releases for the first time in history (though not all, like with the Japan-only Exstetra, Labyrinth no Kanata or Tales of Innocence R) managed to make this less obvious for many.

Imageepoch’s own journey, which had started at the dawn of the seventh console generation, covering Nintendo DS, PSP, Wii and PS3 with a wide variety of wildly different games, ended up not surviving long into the seventh, with the company going bankrupt after publishing Stella Glow on 3DS just two years after Black Rock Shooter’s Western release and Mikage even disappearing for a time, while many of its talented staff members, like Ninou, Oba or Toya, managed to land their careers into Square Enix in a variety of roles.

In a way, Stella’s post-apocalyptic PSP journey thus ended up becoming a peculiar snapshot to a bygone age of handheld videogame RPG history, showcasing some traits of an industry that has since changed in a rather dramatic way while offering a glimpse to the day where virtual singers and songwriters inspired by sci-fi artworks felt positively cyberpunk, long before the current technological landscape made efforts such as those endearingly passé otaku artifacts.

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Developer: Door
Publisher: None (Tobira no Densetsu was published as a freeware, or furige, doujin game)
Director: Denjirou Jr.
Scenario writer: Denjirou Jr.
Character designer: Sumeragi Kohaku
Soundtrack: sekisuki (original soundtrack), Nakazawa Akiko and est (opening and ending songs)
Genre: Turn-based JRPG with an unique array of systems, from keywords used while adventuring to different exploration styles aimed at finding traps or secrets
Progression: Initially linear, then a unique mix of sandbox and story driven progression having countless optional side events, quests and secrets act as triggers to unlock the main story’s chapters
Country: Japan
Platform: PC
Release date: 2007 (fantranslated by Desu Ningen in December 2025)
Status: Completed on 3\23\2026, after a three-months long run

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Since ASCII democratized RPG development with the first versions of RPG Maker back in the ‘90s, there have been quite a number of titles developed with that engine that have been able to trascend most people’s expectations, whether by using unique art assets and tilesets or by working out customized scripts to include a variety of unique systems, sometimes going well beyond the usual Dragon Quest-style turn based template.

In Japan, those attempts have fostered an unique niche, reminiscent of the golden age of home PC JRPGs with their experiments, including landmark titles like Ruina and adventure and horror games like Corpse Party, Yume Nikki or Ao Oni, some of which ended up getting commercial re-releases and remakes on different engines. Over the years, indie Japanese RPGMaker developers have also developed a whole subculture around so-called VIP-RPGs (taking their name from 2channel’s VIP board), RPGMaker titles which are often highly experimental game-design wise or focused on pursuing a variety of memes.

Unfortunately, despite their unique nature and scripting quality, it has been quite rare to see doujin RPG Maker titles getting spotlighted outside of their own home turf. That this happened at all with team Doors’ obscure Tobira no Densetsu is already telling regarding its ambitions and its overall quality, with bloggers Hadler and Quof writing glowing reviews about it back in 2017 and 2018, the latter of which caught my attention back then and quickly made this unique adventure something I dearly hoped to be able to play in English one day.

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-A LIFELONG FURIGE

Released in 2007 as a furige (a loaned Japanese portmanteau of furii geemu, or free game), Tobiden, as it was often called, was the final product of a decades-long, ever-evolving labor of love by its main developer, Denjirou Jr, initially based on the tabletop and videogame RPG adventures he shared with his brother, culminating in a four year development cycle which saw the involvement of a number of helpers from 2ch and Japan’s RPG Maker scene.

Denjirou’s opus was finally made available to the English-speaking audience in late December last year, when the valiant effort by Ningen Desu produced a complete and incredibly polished English fantranslation patch that, when combined with the EasyRPG tools and their plentiful quality of life features, made it surprisingly easy to access this title without any additional tinkering, which frankly surprised me a bit since it had been years since I last had to deal with a RPGMaker game.

What I found surpassed every expectations I could have had, mixing some of the best traits of series such as Suikoden, SaGa and Legend of Heroes in an uniquely captivating way, ultimately enthralling me for almost three months in which, uncharacteristically for my own long-standing habits, I barely touched any other game.

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-DECEPTIVE COZINESS

While at first glance Tobira no Densetsu may seem less impressive compared with a number of RPG Maker titles that managed to aesthetically dissimulate their origin by using custom-made assets in very different styles, like with The Amber Throne or Fear and Hunger, its scope and systems are actually more ambitious than anything I’ve seen developed on this engine in a long time.

Sporting a narratively dense and yet freeform 150-hour adventure in a huge, painstakingly developed world of floating islands, the journey of young swordswoman Lucia gradually opens up by dramatically changing its own framing multiple times, each time unveiling one of the game’s different facets.

Initially, Lucia’s adventure seems like a fairly linear affair, focused on defending her village from serious and not-so-serious threats and securing the funding to cure her ill sister, with a strong narrative focus also conveyed by a number of visual novel-style sequences, but it quickly develops into something larger and much more ambitious once Lucia has a chance to travel outside her native region.

After joining the Hangers Guild and becoming a professional adventurer, Lucia is tasked by a certain princess with the restoration of the Lestarian kingdom’s Royal Gallery, whose paintings were liquidated years before during a crisis, an apparently cozy timed quest almost reminiscent of traditional Atelier games, say Marie or Rorona, focused on exploration, resource management and freeform questing in the style of an often ignored family of sandbox, tabletop-adjacent Japanese RPGs ranging from Digan no Maseki, Lunatic Dawn, Soul & Sword, Traverse, Zill O’ll or a number of SaGa games.

The shift is immediately obvious, with Lucia being introduced not just to simulative elements like the day and night cycle, the necessity of keeping consumable provisions well stocked, the commodities you can trade by gaming prices in different regions or the unique way the game handles disarming trapped treasure chests, but also a karma system called Sensitivity that depletes over time and is needed to unlock all manners of events, not to mention a handful of character traits influencing a variety of contexts, called Spirits, that we will have a chance to dissect later on.

That isn’t even considering the sheer variety of Guild quest available since the very beginning, including mundane day jobs meant to farm character traits, more involved quests, monster hunts (often acting as hidden triggers for some of its story events, introducing new NPCs and allies in an organic way before they are featured in more relevant situations) and story missions with plenty of unique scenarios, including their own unique systems, but also a sprawling, multi-level labyrinth you will end up visiting plenty of times before completing the game and the access to yet another part of the world, focused upon the positively huge, Venice-like market city of Ukanets, the main port of this world’s sole sea, placed at the center of its biggest flying continent.

Speaking of cities, the fact Tobiden has Lucia refraining from entering private homes outside of very specific situations means the game can provide a huge number of fairly large explorable settlements, many of which hidden on the countless floating islands, which further cements the world’s scope.

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-DREAMING OF DOORS

While this could be more than enough to flesh out a less ambitious title, it’s barely scratching the surface of Tobiden’s journey, something the game won’t push into your face, even if the player is bound to figure out there’s more to this story than collecting paintings after accessing Lucia’s dreamscape for the first time after resting at an inn and witnessing the array of mysterious dream doors whose role is initially mostly obscure.

Indeed, you could well complete the game and get to an ending of sorts by driving Lucia to restore the Royal Gallery by just finding enough paintings, discovering new masterpieces (one of which caused me to write a small piece a few months ago, musing about an unlikely connection with Blake and Carrington) and stumbling upon cryptic story events and subquests, but that would mean skipping the game’s actual storyline and barely seeing a tenth of its contents, blissfully unaware of what is truly going on in this world behind its cozy veneer, indeed without having any idea about the antagonists existing at all, even if the consequences of their actions are indirectly apparent since the beginning and foreshadowed in interesting ways that are retroactively very obvious and quite clever.

Understanding something isn’t right and choosing to act on this feeling by committing to a number of apparently unrelated plot threads and rumors isn’t a scripted, linear part of Lucia’s quest: instead, it will require the player themselves to explore the world in an extremely thorough manner, piecing together a number of clues and committing their time and wits to see if those hints are actually meaningful or are just red herrings.

And then, after twenty or so hours of familiarizing with Tobiden and Lucia’s role, is when the game actually starts, and when the cruel nature of this world is made apparent.

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-SKIES OF TOBIRA

Unlocking the main story means expanding yet another time the game’s scope, its systems and its overall loop, slowly exploring the whole world and its countless flying islands, well outside of the two main areas available until that moment, and adding a whole new layer on top of the open-ended sandbox already introduced during the quest for the Royal Gallery. All of this, in turn, immediately brought my mind to a number of other series, whose core traits Tobiden managed to combine in a seamless way, likely without even wanting to.

The airship Lucia will end up using as her home base, for instance, act as a callback to both Skies of Arcadia and Suikoden with its sprawling castles, with the latter being also referenced by the sheer amount of allies Lucia can recruit during her journey, some forty characters sporting not just unique abilities, but also completely new systems, like a dragon that levels up by eating gems, a kunoichi you can send to search for items and optional dungeons, an immortal that will return to life after a set amount of turns and plenty of others, including a Mimic box that will protect Lucia from a certain follower in one of the silliest story events in recent memory.

Given how many floating islands and Guild missions end up having their own side stories, it was hard not to connect them with Dragon Quest’s trademark vignettes, with those featured in Dragon Quest VII as a particularly apt comparison in a number of instances for how both games pursued a larger narrative tapestry while still developing discrete plot threads with a large variety of tones and, sometimes, their unique systems, like with a murder investigation turned into an adventure-style werewolf hunt, shoot’em up and gallery shooter sequences, a variety of puzzles, an old fortress conquered by demons luring adventurers with a fake quest, a town of monsters enslaved by an ancient pact, a village whose inhabitants suddenly forgot whose menace was afflicting them, a kid afflicted by a grave illness dreaming of visiting the elusive city of Ihatov, a reference to beloved author Kenji Miyazawa, and many, many others.

While those tonal shifts are common in Tobiden’s side stories, its main quest, despite some funny traits like its rather blatant tokusatsu inspirations in a number of instances, is far bleaker, not just because it suddenly unveils the horrifying logic hidden behind this world’s pleasant facade, but also because of how unabashedly evil Lucia’s enemies are depicted since the onset, in a way that, due to a number of similarities, often made me think of the antagonists in games like Arc the Lad II or Octopath Traveler Champions of the Continent, or even a version of Trails’ Ouroboros group that had been portrayed since the very first moment as unforgivable monsters and consistently kept as such, without any attempt to make them more sympathetic and humanize them later on.

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-A COMMENTARY ON EVIL

In fact, if I had faced Tobira no Densetsu’s main antagonists in 2007, when the game was released, chances are I would have loathed them and the way they were written, because their ungraceful mix of silliness, depravity, cruelty and sadism, with human trafficking, drugs and all manners of horrifying abuses, both natural and supernatural as the obvious consequences, is a gut punch to anyone whose sensibilities tend to veer toward grey villains with goals and motivations you can understand and relate to, if not agree with.

Then again, the uncomfortable truth that gradually emerges while playing Tobiden is that those villains are actually quite believable: their utter materialistic stance on life, the assumption that homo homini lupus is the only truth to the world, their ability to ignore the common humanity they share with their victims and their proclivity for justifying their crimes in increasingly self-indulgent ways, to the point of turning them into a pastime of sorts, aren’t bad writing at all, but rather a scathing, if surely edgy, way to suggest how ontologic evil can manifest itself in fantasy fiction not just with grandiose demonic rituals or complex evil schemes, but also through the sheer egotistic banality of human disposition.

In a sad twist of irony, as extreme as their actions are and as stark the contrast they bring to the game’s otherwise relaxed atmosphere may be, those villains’ irredeemable nature, their utterly dehumanizing stance towards their fellow human beings, including children and the elderly, and the oppressive pervasiveness of their plans end up making them more believable and interesting, hidden as they are behind the veneer of normalcy that they allow the world to enjoy up to a point, and the way their role plays into the nature of Tobiden’s world further helps to build this unique setting’s overall mood.

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-A WELCOME BUSYBODY

To Denjirou Jr.’s credit, despite a rather undeniable penchant for edginess due to the themes it ends up covering, Tobira no Densetsu never wallows in this vileness, mostly thanks to Lucia herself: this young woman, which by the end of the game may well be one of the best fleshed out heroines I’ve met in Japanese RPGs, starts out her adventure after having already undergone a lot of growth due to her past trauma, affecting the way she looks at the world and at all those she will meet during her journey and giving her character an underlying sadness that comes through her funny and jovial facade.

Those traits are somewhat reminiscent of a number of other JRPG protagonists, like a non-delinquent version of Vesperia’s Yuri Lowell or a sadder and more deliberate take on Trails in the Sky’s Estelle Bright, even if this comparison isn’t based on her Trails in the Sky FC self, when she began her adventure as a green Bracer, but later on during its sequel and during the sad events of The 3rd, whose own Door system was curiously developed alongside Tobiden’s, with both titles being released in the same timeframe.

While Lucia’s long journey will see her reassess a number of stances as she discover her own role, with the stakes getting higher and higher for both her and the player, what will never change is her unwavering positivity, her inner duty to help others, which actually reflects her attempt to escape regret, and the flawed, and yet so very human way she interacts with other people, with her catchphrase, “just a world-class busybody passing through” showcasing her inability to let evil fester and her attempts to take upon herself her world’s ills while slowly piecing together the truth behind them in a way that felt to me genuine and relatable despite, or perhaps because, of the sheer scale of the challenge she had to face.

This is also a game that isn’t afraid to show how selfless and heroic people can get crushed under the weight of their own good actions, and in fact Lucia will slowly discover the role played by no less than two other heroic parties who tried to protect this fragile world before she even started her journey, with their own backstories becoming increasingly relevant in the game’s second half.

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-WORLD TRIGGERS

Then again, while Lucia is the undisputed heroine of this story, the player themselves will have to share her burden in a unique way which is deeply rooted in Tobiden’s game design choices.

In fact, Tobira no Densetsu may well be one of the most accomplished hybrid between JRPG and adventure games I have ever played, because almost everything is linked with a keyword system, the Info, which aren’t just keywords you can choose while talking with NPCs, like with Final Fantasy II or Feycraft’s Prisoner, or topics to select during conversations like in countless WRPGs or JRPGs with visual novel-style choices, but actually full-fledged triggers able to switch to different world states.

Choosing an Info to focus on doesn’t just cause the appropriate NPCs to react to it, but can also unlock new areas or dungeons on the world map, or make a number of buildings in cities that would normally be closed off finally accessible.

Back in 2017, Hadler and Quof both praised this feature, and with good reason since, despite being likely born out of RPG Maker’s own limitations when Denjirou Jr started working on Tobiden, it blossomed into an elegant way to foster active roleplaying efforts from the player, making them invested in exploring the world while thinking carefully about who may be best informed about a certain plot thread, and which locations may be more interesting to visit with that goal in mind.

Before long, you will feel like an explorer when piecing together the data you were given and discovering how an unassuming flying island was actually home to an hidden elven village, or a mysterious cavern, or an ancient magical library from a fallen, continent-spanning empire rather blatantly inspired by Alexander the Great, and that isn’t even scratching the proverbial surface since there are dozens such locations, all carefully integrated in their own stories and in the world’s overall lore and main narrative.

What this means, ultimately, is that the player can’t expect to progress by stumbling upon events, but actually has to earn them, searching on their own, exploring the world and piecing together hints and clues until they are finally able to open up (literally, as we will see) the game’s main story chapters.

This, of course, wouldn’t mean much if the game wasn’t filled to the brim with secrets, missions and side events that are actually meant to introduce a certain NPC, present Lucia with a new piece of Info or foreshadow a certain plot point that will became crucial later on, while also acting as their hidden pre-requisites.

In fact, if you want to see the game’s dreaded but also quite satisfying True Ending, there isn’t really much optional content anymore stricto sensu, since almost everything needs to be done sooner or later to fully unlock the game’s deepest secrets, showcasing the incredibly intricate links between countless apparently unrelated plot threads that ultimately blossom into a single, incredibly complex tapestry made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of discrete story triggers interacting with each other in ways that are initially obscure but end up feeling perfectly consequential.

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-A STORY-DRIVEN SANDBOX

This unique game design formula makes Tobira no Densetsu succeed in something most RPGs fail to accomplish, or don’t even try pursuing, namely providing an organic, believable fusion of freeform, sandbox progression fully based on player agency and an extremely story driven campaign.

This also means that, in a way, Tobiden manages to cheat its way out of the “show, not tell” storytelling debate since, while it has absolutely no qualms in offering the player huge amounts of lore through NPC dialogues, long cutscenes, side events and books (one of the first tomes being a treatise on numismatic immediately set the game’s tone for me!), with whole libraries to consult to unlock new Infos, you will soon realize you can meet every single character you see mentioned, no matter how elusive, and explore every single place you read about, no matter how shrouded in legend it may seem.

This is also why, despite the Info system providing plenty of red herrings and headaches, I opted to progress on my own, relying on the fantranslators’ strategy guide (itself of remarkable quality, due to Ningen Desu’s painstaking effort in mapping each trigger and event) just for a number of missable events and Premium Treasures related to the True Ending, which likely lengthened my playthrough by 40 or so hours, but also made it that much more genuine and memorable, even if I freely admit there were a number of times I was quite frustrated and didn’t know how to progress (chiefly when pursuing Fortune Door 8, whose requirements include most optional quests up to that point), only to finally see things work out in ways I didn’t expect.

While Tobiden’s length may sound daunting even to JRPG players already used to fairly long games, Tobiden’s pacing is expertly planned to make play sessions short and sweet, with most dungeons being very quick affairs (the long ones, though, can be amazing in their own right) and RPGMaker’s save anywhere feature, mixed with Easy RPG’s 10x speed up toggle, trivializing what little backtracking the game requires.

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-A SENSIBLE SEARCH

Tobira no Densetsu also has countless underlying systems influencing its event triggers, mixing an alignment system of sorts with stat-checks more common in Western RPGs: take the abovementioned Sensibility, accrued in a variety of ways, including listening to bards or eating out, which is necessary to trigger a number of events, or Learning, which you can improve by reading new books and in turn allows you to access new ones (provided you can read them), but there are also a variety of Spirits that can be obtained with quests or player choices and later used in the most tense situations, for instance spending a Wisdom point to discover a new way to fight a boss, or a Pugnacity one to impress an enemy, a Trust one to convince an NPC, a Benevolence one to undertake a very difficult quest and so on, and that isn’t even considering how Tobira no Densetsu also allows you to assess if an NPC is lying (provided your Sensibility is high enough) and to call them out by negating suspect greyed out statements.

Even more, Tobiden sports a full fledged array of systems related to how you tackle dungeons, prioritizing finding items and strange spots or being careful about traps and monster attacks, which is obviously vital to progress even in the game’s early stage, when traps are extremely common and can be either lethal or trivial depending on the way Lucia approaches explorations, but is still extremely relevant later on, with whole questlines depending on having the Search action toggled on at the right time.

Then you have a Metroidvania-style feature with Party Items, useful tools that help Lucia do away with obstacles, reach new, previously inaccessible areas or interact with the world in new ways, like with a Cat Hat allowing Lucia to speak with animals (and potentially recruit some of them!).

Then, in true JRPG fashion, late in your quest you will start accruing Sentiments from all the people Lucia helped all over the world, and you will actually be able to use the bonds built all over this long journey to make the final boss much easier, while also unlocking the game’s True Ending.

As the reader has likely picked up by now, Tobira no Densetsu isn’t shy of implementing plenty of systems that harken back to tabletop RPGs, something Denjirou Jr acknowledged in the game’s own commentary unlocked after the ending, where he detailed the journey that led him to build Tobira no Densetsu with the help of his own brother, who by then had become a lawyer, a number of artists, musicians and 2chan denizens who helped him debugging a game that is quite possibly one of the most intricate titles ever developed on RPG Maker.

Crucially, though, those systems aren’t throwaway game design experiments implemented for an hour or two, only to be forgotten for most of the game and suddenly brought up later when you forgot they even existed, but rather defining parts of Tobiden’s identity and its core loop, to the point that you will familiarize with them and start constantly being mindful about their role. In fact, I can see myself missing a number of those unique, like the alternative stances related to searching for secrets or for traps, in the next few turn based JRPGs I will end up playing.

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-FORTUNE GAUNTLETS

True to its nature as a veritable game design rollercoaster, despite everything you’ve read so far likely giving the impression of a systems-heavy experience, Tobiden also provides some of the most compelling story scenarios I’ve seen in a while due to the way they are able to twist its simulative and resource management elements from mostly harmless window dressing to a tense, compelling affair.

While visiting Lucia’s dreamscape, available by sleeping for a full day while resting at inns, the player can unlock a variety of features conveyed through a number of Doors, from optional scenes seen from the perspective of a number of characters, conveyed as paintings, or a collection of the game’s dreaded Premium Treasures, legendary items with their own twists in terms of systems, like the one allowing to cause a rainfall, thus allowing to easily trigger a number of events linked to it, and, last but certainly not least, the Fortune Doors.

Those doors, unlocked by pursuing the game’s unique mix of triggers and sub events, are the story’s main episodes, providing instanced, fairly linear scenarios that completely change the game’s framing by forcing the player through bosses marathons, long dungeons without the opportunity to rest at will and other situations focused on tense, strategic resource management, while also providing fast-paced story beats with an urgency linked to each crisis’ sudden development, marking a stark contrast from the rest of the game that make those events feel even more distinctive and exciting.

What they have in common with Tobiden as a whole, though, is that they require commitment, and that in turn means you can definitely land into an unwinnable state if you go into a Fortune Event while being unprepared, making rotating save games, a staple for any RPG enhtusiast, a mandatory affair in this regard.

Doors aren’t only found in Lucia’s dreams, though, but also in the heart (or, rather, character sheet) of the heroine herself and of a number of other playable characters: unlocking those gates, and their Character Events, follows a similar, if somewhat more obscure, pattern and, as the reader may imagine by now, their secrets aren’t unimportant, random tidbits but rather a fully integrated part of the game’s main narrative, themselves acting as triggers to unlock Fortune Events later on in a number of instances.

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-BEWARE THE SWORD OF GALE

Tobiden’s adventure-style systems and intricate progression are undoubtedly its major achievement in terms of gameplay, and yet its actual combat system and character customization are also very competent and serve the game quite well despite not trying to be as innovative.

In this regard, Tobiden adopts the usual Dragon Quest-style RPGMaker turn based template, with first-person battles, four character parties (with Lucia being a mainstay) but, while its combat system may seem fairly typical and unremarkable, its simplicity, which still allows for a number of unique quirks due to its plentiful array of status effects, buffs and debuffs and different skills and magics, is actually a great complement to the game’s myriad of other systems, providing a challenging battle environment that shines with a nice number of well-thought, often hard as nails boss fights while still allowing the player to focus on what makes the game truly unique.

Be they monsters, members of the main enemy organization presented as villains of the week, demons or the occasional kaiju or mecha (amusingly, Denjirou Jr couldn’t resist a few Gundam references, as is normal for a Japanese creator already active in the ‘90s), Lucia will have to face almost every kind of menace one could imagine, while also unlocking a powerful, almost Mahou Shoujo-style transformation later on that is able to grant her some incredibly powerful skills while costing her one level per use.

Customization itself tend to be mostly linear, unlocking new abilities either through by consuming Character Points on the character sheets or by consumable items like magic books rather than allowing characters to progress in different ways, but the sheer number of wildly diverse characters means there’s also a huge amount of horizontal variety despite each one staying true to a number of basic traits.

The fact that enemy encounters are presented as symbols, with random battles only being related to ambushes, also makes battles much more bearable, and the aforementioned Easy RPG speed toggle also means you can breeze through regular battles when revisiting lower-level areas later on. True to its nature, Tobiden also offers way to trivialize grinding, which could otherwise pose an issue given how some characters, like Tia, require hefty amounts of Character Points to unlock their stronger skills.

For instance, once you recruit a certain number of characters, a savant living in a small island east of Cradle Island will gift you a Premium Item, unlocking the option to talk to him in order to gift Lucia’s excess CPs and XPs to weaker party members. Another Premium Item, a cursed gem whose powers are revealed after a certain number of fights, further trivializes leveling by providing a fixed amount of bonus experience points after each fight, including the easiest ones.

Indeed, one could say the few issues one could have with Tobiden are there just to reward the player with hard-earned solutions later on, showing that Denjirou Jr did know not giving experience points to benched party members was an issue (contrary to plenty of professional JRPG developers), but he wanted the solution to be earned, like so many other things in this beautifully crafted, and yet often puzzling, game.

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-MASTERFUL AGENCY

After the curtain fell on Lucia’s world, I felt moved in a way that I didn’t experience in quite a long time in the videogame medium, despite being a lifelong RPG enthusiast. What I witnessed in Tobira no Densetsu wasn’t just an amazingly ambitious effort, or an heartfelt story that felt more compelling after 150 hours than it was at the very beginning, but also a masterful blueprint convincingly addressing the possibility of mixing in an organic way sandbox and story driven progression, putting player agency at the forefront and making every step of this journey feel earned by having every single event trigger count toward the whole narrative while still feeling something you had to find and piece together by making a conscious effort.

From an videogame history-focused point of view, calling any given game a masterpiece is always a thorny issue, not just because of the inescapably subjective nuance behind most such evaluations, but also because the few ones that can be argued as objective tend to reflect the way a title impacted on this medium, or on its genre, while obscure games tend to be automatically dismissed since they were unable to make themselves heard and weren’t able to influence the overall vector of their genres.

Then again, if a piece of media could be worthy of this qualification due to its developer’s mastery of their craft and of the original and unique trajectory they followed, regardless of it being ignored by all following efforts in the same space, then I would feel quite comfortable in calling Tobira no Densetsu a masterpiece in its own niche, and one I dearly hope more people can experience not just for the sheer enjoyment I hope it will bring them, but also to finally popularize its unique balance of game design concepts and, possibly, allow them to resurface, and to be further refined, in other efforts.

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Developer: Namco - Team Souls
Publisher: Namco Bandai
Director: Tetsuya Akatsura
Combat designer: Ryouji Ichikari
Character designer: Osamu Fukumitsu, with guest artworks from a number of series veterans
Subgenre: hack and slash with action RPG elements
Progression: linear, mission-based
Platform: Nintendo Wii
Release date: 20\11\2007 (Japan), 2008 (North America)
Status: completed in April 2008

Weapons-based beat’em ups franchises often had a symbiosis of sorts with alternate history settings, from Samurai Shodown’s fantasy Edo period with samurai, Shinto mikos and dubious gaijin like a Prussian gladiator and a mix of Jean D’Arc and Lady Oscar duking it out with katanas, rapier and cannon arms to Last Blade’s more grounded but still decidedly unique Bakumatsu era and, last but not least, Soul Calibur’s own take on the 15th century, from Spain to the Holy Roman Empire, Ming-era China and Sengoku Japan.

Back when arcade sensation Soul Edge was ported to PS1 as Soul Blade, Namco was kind enough to include a full-fledged, quasi-RPG single player story mode, Edge Master Mode, giving each character its own small campaign and allowing them to gather a rich suit of weapons, gifted not just with their unique aesthetics, but also with a number of peculiar properties.

While similar modes were also included for its sequels, Soul Calibur, Soul Calibur II and Soul Calibur III, with the latter pushing single player contents to the limit and including a brand new fantasy story as its backdrop, it would take a decade for the series to finally delve into its lore with an unique, and uniquely bizarre, spinoff, Soul Calibur Legends.

-LOW-DEF SOUL

Back when it was announced, Legends made waves as the lone Wii entry in the series, at a time when Soul Calibur IV had already been announced as a X360 and PS3 exclusive (including its oft-forgotten Star Wars cameo characters) and Namco scrambled to produce something, anything on Nintendo’s new platform right as its popularity and sales were balooning, likely having underrated its potential due to Game Cube’s role in the sixth console generation (even if it did house what for most is still the best home console rendition of Soul Calibur II).

Still, producing a Wii exclusive fighter to directly compete with the main entry in the same franchise made no sense, and Namco had to be creative about how to adapt Soul Calibur to this unique but underpowered hardware, while also taking into account its peculiar control option, with the Wiimote and Nunchuck allowing for both traditional and motion controls, including a plethora of hybrid control styles that were put to test over the next few years by countless developers. This series of circumstances is likely what moved Namco and Legends’ director Tetsuya Akatsuka (who later worked as producer for Vision of Mana, an amusing connection considering I completed that game mere weeks before writing this piece) to create an hack & slash spinoff with a number of action RPG elements.

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-A TALE OF SOULS AND HOMUNCULI

Set in 1586, between Soul Blade and Soul Calibur, Legends’ new “tale of souls and swords” starts with Siegfried von Schtauffen, the fallen German knight of the Holy Roman Empire who killed his father and just recovered some semblance of sanity after Soul Blade’s events, confronting Spanish pirate lord Cervantes and reclaiming Soul Edge, only to unleash a mysterious pillar of light that summons hordes of Evils to the world. In disarray, Siegfried ends up being saved by a squad of knights sent by the Holy Roman Emperor, immediately summoning him to the imperial court in Vienna.

The imperial capital, seat of the Habsburg dynasty who monopolized the elective imperial title for more than three centuries (with poor Charles VII of Bavaria as the lone exception, and one he kinda regretted given he ended up as a French pawn who lost his own lands and never managed to exert any influence) is currently under siege from the forces of the Ottoman Empire, a rather familiar scenario for anyone interested in that period, except the actual sieges of Vienna were in 1529 and 1683.

Then again, some historical liberties can be expected given how Legends has the Ottomans led by a demonic giant of a sultan, Barbaros, who actually usurped the Ottoman throne after finding the holy sword Soul Calibur, while the Holy Empire is led by the enigmatic Masked Emperor, a far cry from the historical rulers of both empires, that Murad III who tried to build a coalition with France and England against Spain and the Empire and that Rudolf II who allowed the Holy Roman Empire itself to drift away while he entertained himself with sorcery and alchemy in his own Prague, unknowingly planting the seeds of neglect that would later bloom into the Thirty Years War.

Both those fantasy figures, though, are kind of rooted in history in their own way, with Barbaros being based on the Ottoman general Khayr al-Din, also called Barbarossa (meaning redbeard, an Italian nickname he gained for his Islamic piety which he shared with Frederick I of the Hohenstaufen dynasty), who had been dead for four decades before Legends’ beginning, while the Masked Emperor nods at Rudolph II’s passion for alchemy given he is actually a (female) homunculus posing as the Emperor.

Scouring Japanese sources for more bizarre Soul Calibur Legends lore back when I had just completed the game, I noticed Namco’s official character profiles had the Masked Emperor born in Ghent, in the Flanders, which is an incredibly specific piece of data that points at this character actually being envisioned as a replacement for Charles V, the only Emperor born in that city, and the one who was also nominally in control of Vienna during the first 1529 siege, even if the one actually defending the city was his brother Ferdinand.

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-TALES OF SOULSIA

This overlong and overly bizarre pseudo-historical detour leads us back to our Siegfried, who is tasked by this same Masked Emperor to break the siege by finding the fragments of the demonic sword Soul Edge, the only one that can oppose Barbaros’ Soul Calibur.

Siegfried’s quest will bring him all over Eurasia, slowly piecing together the demonic sword with the help of a number of other Soul characters like Mitsurugi and Ivy, even if the roster is soon enriched by a number of other allies, including series veterans like Taki, Astaroth and Sophitia and a bizarre (or not, given that game’s popularity among Game Cube JRPG enthusiasts) cameo from Tales of Symphonia’s Lloyd Irving, in search of Exspheres in our own world and mistaking Soul Edge as one for its own horrifying corrupting powers.

This long quest will see Siegfried pursue a number of different scenarios, discovering secrets like Cervantes’ current situation, Hungary’s plight at the hands of the Ottomans (which will later become a central part in definining the real antagonist’s motivations) and even the role played by the mythological Nordic dragon, Fafnir, leading to an unexpected final confrontation that will prelude to Siegfried’s later transition to Nightmare.

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-SIEGFRIED MAY CRY

As much as its plot can be an entertaining, messy romp for anyone enamored with bizarre Japanese renditions of world history events, an admittedly narrow field, Soul Calibur Legends, likely due to a mix of low production values, Wii’s own hardware and a rather short development cycle, ended up being more than a bit unimpressive on a technical level, with detailed but poorly animated characters mixed with far lower quality NPCs and monsters, even more so considering the bestiary consisted of a handful of bosses and around twenty enemies recolored and recontextualized in various levels.

Also, this isn’t even considering the boxy, simplistic environments most levels ended up being built upon, with a variety of biomes and architectures recycled a number of times with different layouts in a way that could be unfavorably compared with quite a number of PS2 hack & slash action JRPG titles, from Omega Force’s Musou line, which reached some of its highest highs with titles such as Dynasty Warriors 3 and 5, Capcom’s Chaos Legion, Konami’s Sword of Etheria or Square Enix’s admittedly janky Cavia-developed and Yoko Taro-directed Drakengard franchise, which later opened up the gate to the Nier series, even if Legends’ visuals are at least more palatable than more obscure titles like Idea Factory’s Neverland Senki Zero (whose localization history could well deserve its own piece).

Still, as low budget and low effort as its graphics ended up being in a variety of ways, Legends’ art direction was quite decent in its own right and somehow managed to salvage its overall visuals, with fairly well directed cutscenes and visual novel-style CGs punctuating its opening and main events, often showcasing the character designs by Osamu Fukumitsu (who will later work on Dragon Quest XI and Final Fantasy XVI) and the illustrations made by a number of assisting artists, including Soul legend Takuji Kawano.

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-SHAKING THINGS UP

Then again, despite its rather shoddy level design, the make or break factor for Legends was undoubtedly its combat system, as envisioned by Namco veteran Ryouji Ichikari, the one that planned Soul Blade’s Edge Master Mode and worked as senior game designer for Soul Calibur III, acting as a sort of frontman for the series’ more single player-oriented modes and entries.

As an hack & slash Japanese game from the late ‘00s, Soul Calibur Legends was thought as a sequence of quick, instanced levels with simple puzzles and secrets the player could access by roaming a menu-based world map, with each area offering a number of environmental challenges in the form of a variety of traps while waves of enemies and the occasional bossess tested the characters’ mettle.

Being based on the Wiimote and Nunchuck combo, controls were fairly atypical compared with similar games of the previous generations, with motion controls on the Wiimote providing four different directional attacks depending on the input and opening the way to fairly complex (and decently accurate, which surprised me back then) directional combos, including quite a number of character specific strings.

Motion controls on the Nunchuk, on the other hand, were used for dodges and dashes, again depending on the input’s direction, meaning you had to coordinate both motion and traditional inputs on the two halves of Wii’s control scheme, which often translated to flailing like a madman while discovering new combos.

This fairly unique setup, which took a bit to get used to, was coupled with traditional button inputs for moving the controlled character, not to mention activating the Charge Mode, allowing powered up versions of the ongoing attack strings, plus blocking attacks and swapping your controlled fighter and, as clunky and occasionally inaccurate as it was, it ended up working much better than I initially envisioned, likely because my expectations in this regard were so low (and, I admit, I was never a fan of motion controls) I was surprised the game didn’t immediately fall apart after Siegfired’s first confrontation. The main issue actually proved to be the game’s lock-on system, not a rare occurance back then but still a bit of a distressful one in a game such as this.

Missions were also useful to power up your characters, introducing Legends’ admittedly filmsy RPG trappings, with Siegfried and his allies being able to level up in order to improve their stats, equip different weapons à la Edge Master Mode and get new titles which in turn helped to unlock other options, almost a nod to Namco’s own Tales series. While character customization was indeed lacking, the variety of playstyles introduced by its playable characters did help liven up things quite a bit, even more so once you realized how its deceptively simple combat system actually allowed you to use many of the moves and strings seen in the main Soul Calibur games, albeit risking a carpal tunnel while wildly flickering Wii’s controllers.

In the end, Soul Calibur Legends’ quick bouts, coupled with its rather short length (it took me less than 15 hours to see the credits, I think) and decent replayability due to the option of retrying every quest to unlock a number of extras made it a nice palate cleanser between more accomplished titles back in 2008, when I used it to test my Wii’s region-free option, and a unique, if mostly forgotten (when not despised), oddity almost twenty years later.

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-A POORLY AGED LEGEND

While Legends’ canonicity in its own franchise has been mostly questioned in the decades after its release, even more so given Soul Calibur V and VI’s twin reboots, (albeit following a different logic each time), some of its events had to have happened in at least one of the series’ timelines, given how Acht brought up to Siegfried his time as the Holy Empire’s most valiant knight, and the defeat the Ottoman Empire suffered at his hands.

Even then, I feel this sort of unconfirmed, vague canonicity is a fitting place to be for a game that even its developers didn’t really know how to handle and opted to forget after its rather devastating critical reception, which back then I felt had at least as much to do with the game’s very real issues, especially budget-wise, as with the unfortunate hardware wars still raging at the time. In this context, I remember both sides of this “conflict” having their own issues with Legends, with some Nintendo players angry at Namco for providing Wii a technically messy, non-beat’em up, spin-off entry in a series they had learned to love on Game Cube while PS3 and X360 gamers, including most Soul Calibur fans on those platforms, not giving it a chance since they were waiting for Soul Calibur IV and were quite negative about motion controls to begin with.

With the game’s peculiar nature, its shoestring budget, its mediocre word of mouth and chilling reviews, it unsurprisingly performed quite bad, with Japanese Media Create data having 6,9k copies sold during its first week before it completely disappeared from charts, and no Western data to speak off.

Still, Soul Calibur Legends is an interesting oddity in beat’em up and action RPG history, following in the footsteps of a number of other beat’em up series’ attempts to RPG-ify their single player contents with dedicated modes or, like in this instance or with SNK’s Samurai Shodown RPG and King of Fighters Kyo, with spin-offs aimed at fleshing out each franchise’s lore and characters by finally giving them that breathing space they couldn’t get in their main entries.

Also, Legends’ own structure speaks of a different time when instanced levels were still the main paradigm for hack & slash action JRPGs, a trend that survived well into the seventh generation with titles like Trinity Souls of Zill O’ll and the first Dragon Quest Heroes, not to mention most of the hunting game subgenre which shared some of those design traits, but was ultimately countered by the trend of providing sandbox overworlds, like in more conventional action JRPGs, that involved titles like Nier or Dragon Quest Heroes II, Samurai Warriors: Spirit of Sanada or Nights of Azure, albeit each in their own ways.

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Back in the early ‘90s, when tactical JRPGs were still a fairly young subgenre, Masaya and Team Career’s Langrisser franchise immediately left its mark on the Japanese audience due to its mix of unique systems involving both heroic units and regular soldiers, epic war stories with a German theme and a curious emphasis on sword worship and, last but certainly not least, Satoshi Urushihara’s character design, who managed to actualize Western sword and sorcery archetypes through the glossy lens of late ‘80s and early ‘90s Japanese OAVs.

While its first entry on Sega Mega Drive was fairly successful, even getting a Western release as Warsong (albeit with a completely reworked art direction and naming convention), it was its second chapter who really secured Langrisser’s place in tactical JRPG history, especially when its Super Famicom re-release, Der Langrisser, ramped up the game by offering plenty of additional scenarios and endings.

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In 1996, with the series transitioning to the fifth console generation with its first Sega Saturn entry, though, Team Career decided to make a fresh start instead of simply expanding on Langrisser II’s core traits. Langrisser III wasn’t just a distant prequel that partially rewrote the continuity established by Career’s old Elthlead series, exploring the origin story of Langrisser’s legendary swords and recounting the war tales that involved the ancestors of the heroes seen in the rest of the franchise (including the protagonists of future entries that, by then, had yet to materialize), but it was also a fresh reimagining of its core systems, with units moving in real time à la Ogre Battle, almost as a precursor to Careers’ later Growlanser, soldiers fighting alongside their generals as squads, combat sequences being reworked in a way that resembled Dragon Force or Idea Factory’s later Spectral Force and Generation of Chaos titles (albeit without proper grand strategy trappings) and plenty of other differences, which obviously affected the game’s overall pacing and balance in ways many Langrisser fans, used to its previous entries, didn’t appreciate.

This mixed reputation, which likely caused Career to backtrack and mostly return to Der Langrisser’s core traits in Langrisser IV and V, was even more difficult to unravel for Western players, since Langrisser III not only didn’t manage to get any official localization, same as most titles in the series, but also proved quite troublesome to fantranslate due to a variety of technical hurdles, meaning the only option for English speakers was perusing the admittedly good translated script produced by Akari_Dawn back in 2016. Happily, a decade later, not one but two valiant fantranslators rose up to the challenge.

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Developer: Masaya - Team Career
Subgenre: Tactical JRPG
Platform: Sega Saturn
Released: October 1996 (Sega Saturn, Japan), April 2026 (Ralf Guth’s fantranslated version)

In early 2026, Langrisser III had a finished English translation and a number of useful hacking tools developed by Theo Berkau (better known as CyberWarriorX) ages ago for their partial menu patch (this fantranslation legend also worked on the Princess Crown translation Eadmaster used later for their own patch), but for more than a decade no one had used both to finally attempt to produce a complete patch.

With the Sega Saturn fantranslation scene getting quite hectic in the past two years thanks to a number of high-profile releases like Princess Crown and Sakura Taisen 2, though, early this year two different attempts were made almost symultaneously by Ralf Guth and Vermillion Desserts, with the latter contributing to the former’s effort later on.

Ralf Guth’s Langrisser III patch started out strong, solving one major issues related to the number of displayable characters by converting the original Japanese version’s 16x16 single-character tiles to a bigram based on two 8x8 letters per tile, effectively doubling the available letter density and text real estate in menus and dialogue boxes and allowing for a proper translation.

After fixing a number of issues still present in its 0.4 release, Ralf Gruth’s patch now offers a pretty great experience with its 0.5 version, even if it’s quite likely it will get polished even more in the upcoming months, marking yet another success story for Sega Saturn’s awesome, and yet long misappreciated, JRPG lineup.

With all numbered Langrisser games finally localized aside from Langrisser V, which hopefully could also follow sooner rather than later, you can look forward to see more Langrisser coverage on my RPG-focused Substack in the near future!

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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.