A King's Tale: Final Fantasy XV, the lone Western Final Fantasy spinoff where a young Noctis dreamt of unruly octopuses

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

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.

-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.

A concept art for the Swedish FF12 sequel that never was

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.

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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.

-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.

-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.

-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.

After King’s Tale, Empty Clip revisited the retro side-scrolling spinoff space with Yakuza’s Streets of Kamurocho

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.

Eiyuden Rising is one of the few console JRPG sidegames released after King’s Tale