What even is the point of professionalism if all I’m trying to do is buy more silly video games anyway? The entire pipeline of paycheck to gaming should be silly. I don’t have enough time on this earth to lie about my personality for money.
Happy April! Join Ash as she gives a detailed look at a formative game from her childhood and examines the health of the industry with a spotlight on Threads of Fate, one of the lesser known titles from Squaresoft's golden age.
Now more than any time in recent memory it seems like the health of the video game industry is a hot topic pretty much across the board. Games take more time and resources than ever to release and it seems like no matter how well they do the games and companies are at risk of going under at a moment's notice. Massive flop Highguard only managed to existed in a playable state for 45 days before being taken offline, meanwhile EA is decimating the teams responsible for a "record shattering" Battlefield 6 launch. Street Fighter 6's sales have blown away the previous entry, only for the team to be almost completely unable to keep up on delivering content or balance patches and for the game's competitive scene to be saddled with a pay-per-view ticket scheme.
Microsoft's tumultuous time in the gaming space as a major player is something we've touched on before, but their continued freefall punctuated by studio closures, game cancellations and relying heavily on temporary workers who are shuffled out after their contracts end and as a result take their accumulated knowledge with them to the unemployment line is emblematic to me of the current situation in not just gaming but society at large, our hypercapitalist hellscape finding no shortage of horribly obtrusive ways to try and draw blood from a stone in the pursuit of increased profits.
But if Microsoft's slow motion crash and burn is emblematic of the current health of video games, Squaresoft's output from roughly 1990 to 2002 is emblematic of just how healthy the industry used to be. This legendary run saw the release of almost a hundred titles around the world, all of varying sizes and genres, and the five years between 1997 and 2002 alone saw the release of a whopping five mainline Final Fantasy titles. Square-Enix, now knee deep into production on the massive Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, has only managed to release two new mainline Final Fantasy titles in the past seven years and although there has been a renewed focus on smaller titles with a quicker turnaround, many of them have been forgettable and lackluster.
That brings us to Threads of Fate, otherwise known as Dewprism in Japan. Threads of Fate released towards the tail end of Square's legendary tear through the 90s that saw them rise to heights perhaps only rivaled by Nintendo and Capcom in the Japanese game space. It is a smaller, relatively modest title worked on by a mere 20 staff members mostly cobbled together from remnants of the Xenogears team reconvening with the goal of making a game far less dark and complicated than Xenogears that could hopefully create a new generation of Square fans.
It is a 3D action RPG not unlike Kingdom Hearts, though occasionally operating in 2.5D, with plenty of platforming segments to boot. Its primary writer, Daisuke Watanabe, had never worked on a video game before and cited his work on Threads of Fate as what taught him to write female characters well, with this ultimately delivering some of Square's most fondly remembered characters with his work on Final Fantasy X before again being leaned on to round out Final Fantasy XII after Yasumi Matsuno's sudden departure the company.
In many ways Threads of Fate has been overshadowed not only by the games that came before it but those that came after it. It certainly stands in the footsteps of giants, and you'd be tempted to say it's more noteworthy for the titles it's connected to than for any relevance of its own. But the remarkable thing about this small title is just how much it punches above its weight, feeling right at home in Square's all-timer run in the dying days of the century and into the new millennium.
Threads of Fate, as previously mentioned, is a 3D action RPG not too dissimilar from Square's eventual work on the first Kingdom Hearts game in particular, and as such immediately sets itself apart from most of the work they'd done at the time (with the only other big comparison being 1998's Brave Fencer Musashi). Its story is split between two different playable characters, Rue and Mint.
Runs through the game with each character is encouraged through clever usage of this split, with most major events being roughly the same but diverging often enough to give them game enough structure while also feeling different enough to justify two runs.
Rue is something of a prototypical male lead of the golden age of Square somewhat a cross between Cloud Strife and Roxas with all the right flavor to set the tone of expectations of a Square game and feels almost like a warm hug from that golden age we are now so far removed from.
And then there's Mint, the exiled former princess of the Eastern Heaven kingdom and one of the most gloriously terrible people on the entire platform. Despite being lazy and spoiled, she lives up to her potential through sheer spite and makes for a pretty unique and compelling character some may feel some friction with.
Each character has their own goals and motivations and although there are a good bit of story similarities between the two, there is indeed plenty different as well and each character largely has their own supporting cast.
Underscoring the justification for more than one through the game is that Rue and Mint both having their own unique gameplay elements, with Rue able to transform into monsters to harness their abilities and Mint having a multitude of magical attacks. Each character is well worth a run through the game's story not just for the story's merits but for all the fantastic audio and visual treats that the game boasts.
Junya Nakano, rarely utilized and given a real chance to shine in his time working on video games, absolutely stuns in his work on Threads of Fate's soundtrack defined by interesting and unique instrumentation and beautiful compositions that blend to create some of the biggest and most memorable earworms on the entire platform, no small feat given how iconic this era of not just Square music but video game music as a whole is. Nearly 30 years on more than one song from the game still gets stuck in my head regularly.
And then there's the sheer visual wonderment. Tsutomu Terada, starting out with monster art in Chrono Trigger before graduating to playable character design in Xenogears, did a fantastic job creating some very charismatic character designs together with his colleague Tadahiro Usuda. Helping bring those designs to life was Takeshi Kanda who did some really great animation work to help bring out each character's personalities, even animating the game's clothes and hair physics by hand.
And then there's Yaeko Sato's cinematographic eye that adds a lot of clever dimension to scenes and outpaces much of the work that was seen in other JRPGs not only of its era but well into the next millennium. These characters and animations play in a really beautiful almost watercolor fantasy world with breathtaking texture and color work, all of which work incredibly well and lend to the appearance almost of an early PS2 game rather than a late PS1 game.
Threads of Fate is not an overly long nor particularly difficult game (with the exception of Fancy Mel's hellish gauntlet) that doesn't overstay its welcome, especially helpful for a game that wants you to play it twice. Beating the game as both characters will unlock a secret ending that sadly leaves the story on a cliffhanger that will likely never be followed up on.
Rarely ever acknowledged by the company in the almost 30 years since its release, Threads of Fate did not sell particularly well and the team was ultimately folded into the Final Fantasy X and XI teams, putting perhaps the final nail in the coffin for any hope of a followup.
One of the only overt nods to the game after its release from Square comes in the form of selectable avatars of the cast in Final Fantasy XI's PlayOnline infrastructure, and although the game was eventually made available to PS3 users as part of its purchasable PSOne Classics line, it has yet to make any further appearances and remains a somewhat unlikely addition to the PSPlus Classics line. But our fingers remain crossed.
Threads of Fate to me contains so many lessons that today's game industry would do well to learn from. Smaller titles with quicker turnaround that still manage to pack quality in all areas of the project, maximizing small budgets and time constraints to create titles that are enjoyable for players and proving grounds for company talent.
Fostering young talent that will go on to color some of your most resonating works is absolutely vital, rather than relying on temp workers who's contracts will not be renewed, replacing them with yet new temp workers who will have to learn institutional knowledge from scratch if there's even anyone left to teach it anymore.
There's so much to be said about why projects like Threads of Fate are important, but perhaps most important of all is that at the end of the day it's just a fantastic game well worth your time and well deserving of the love that its small fanbase still carries for it almost 30 years on. You probably missed this game during its launch window, but the love letter that it is to the era of games that it's from is all the more poignant and worth experiencing today.
A gem hidden among the stones, Threads of Fate is undoubtedly stardust.
This is a wonderful review for Threads of Fate! I am always surprised to hear about this game as it is rarely ever talked about. It truly deserves more attention
90% of google search ai summaries feel like this guy leaning uncomfortably over your shoulder and pointing at stuff on your screen reading out the exact same text you're already looking at
Footage of ‘SEGAPede’, a game pitched at SEGA Technical Institute in 1993 by Craig Stitt. The concept pitched used the Hidden Palace Zone tileset which Craig had made for 'Sonic 2’.
Source: The Video Game History Foundation: https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/e5fb6e15-a799-4430-ba20-83b49936f8ff
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