So what exactly did Square develope before Final Fantasy...?
LOL Shit you find out when you start digging in the history of your favourite game developer.
(Hi)Story Time!
So, earlier this week I’ve been researching the origin of some FF cameos and Easter eggs in FFXIV for a video. One of them happened to be the Cruise Chaser enemy, which (I thought) was borrowed from FFIX, since its design and transformation animation strongly resemble the Ark summon.
And then something quite interesting caught my attention.
See, Ark from FFIX was already a cameo. Its original design was taken from an extremely old Squaresoft space first person RPG called Cruise Chaser Blassty for NEC PC of the 8800- und 9800-Series.
Fuckin NEC PCs! Most people nowadays don’t even know what it is! Lol
And this is when it kinda hit me.
Final Fantasy was supposed to be Squaresofts last game. It was so successful that it saved the company from bankruptcy and raised it from the ashes. It’s like the gaming equivalent of Uncle Ben dying. Fuckin EVERYONE knows that.
But what exactly did Square do before they began bathing the world in glory that are the Final Fantasy games?
The answer is: fuckin EVERYTHING! I’m not kidding. The list begins with point-and-click adventures from the time before they even were independent and continues with arcade-style run-n-gun shooter, racing games, dungeon crawler all the way to high school dating-sims LOL
But the best part about it is that Square still keeps bringing references to these old games in their current titles, Cruise Chaser Blassty being only one example. Another one is also in FFXIV: Palace of the Dead is greatly considered to be one gigantic reference to the Ogre Battle games, which is true. But another name for the Palace is “Deep Dungeon”, which was a series of dungeon crawlers Squaresoft released in the late 80s.
But the biggest “IN YOUR FACE!”-moment I had when scrolling through the list of old Square games was a different one. During FFXV there is one small reference that keeps poping up very regularly. There is a mobile game the guys play together during breaks. Yeah guess what? King’s Knight is a vertical shooter Square released in 1986, in which you can pick one of the 4 characters and save the princess.
I KNOW RIGHT?! I THINK I JUST BLEW MY OWN MIND! LOL
And shit like that makes me wonder how many more references I completely missed. Like, of course, it’s nothing special, a very minor thing, who gives a shit, right? But I just found it really funny how FFXV keeps rubbing it into your face with fuckin sandpaper and it made me wonder how many other absolutely obvious references I didn’t get during my playthroughs.
