Square Enixhasn’t been slacking in the realm of remasters. Bravely Default: Flying Fairly HD Remaster is, as of this writing, the latest in a long line of them, with the highly-anticipatedFinal Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chroniclesen route. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion was a big one. Tactics Ogre: Reborn was another. The list goes on, including several full-blown remakes as well.
But Square Enix, formerly just Squaresoft (or just Square, depending on where you live) is nothing if not a publisher that is positively bursting with classics. Frankly, I want ‘em all. But if I’ve got to choose, here are the biggest of the bunch, the games I’d leap at the chance to replay with a shiny new coat of paint.
7Brave Fencer Musashi
I played the demo for Brave Fencer Musashi via a Pizza Hut promotional disc. If you weren’t familiar with that bizarre collaboration, well, now you are. Those discs had quite a few demos, actually, and you’ll read about another before this list is done.
Anyway, Brave Fencer Musashi. Remarkable, charming-as-heck, and ahead of its time in some nifty ways - it’s got a day/night cycle, real-time sword-based combat, and a pretty nifty take on 3D gameplay. None of this wasnewat the time, but it combined in exciting ways.
Mind you, there’s a pretty big caveat in all of this. The game’s extreme adherence to early-3D polygons does its visuals no favours, and smoothing them over big-time, as a remaster might well do, could lead to its own brand of disaster. The rapid-fire puns in this script won’t please everybody, but I think they’re funny enough. Even so, Brave Fencer Musashi rules.
I’m far less keen on the sequel, Brave Fencer Musashi: Samurai Legend. Most are, I’ve found. I could do without a remaster of that one, but the first game warrants a modern revisit!
6Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
Some out there will claim a remaster of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is “inevitable” since its far darker predecessor is almost upon us. I beg to differ. I live by a simple belief in the gaming world: never take anything for granted. Nothing’s guaranteed, least of all with Square Enix.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a vastly different game from Final Fantasy Tactics. Its storyline, while periodically melancholy, is many shades lighter in tone. Unlike other games with Ivalice as their setting, it’s noncanon; it’s a dream world variation of Ivalice save for the very beginning and end of it. The Judge system, in which each fight is given a restriction as ordained by an almighty interloper of sorts, is hit-or-miss with fans.
All the same, FFTA is a great time. It evolves many of FFT’s concepts in meaningful ways, even as it disregards others, and it adds plenty of its own quirks along the way. It gave us the origins of many Ivalician races - the bangaa, the viera, the seeq, and more. It deserves to be brought forward for old players and new ones alike.
5Bushido Blade
As with Brave Fencer Musashi, I prefer Bushido Blade over its sequel, the aptly-titled Bushido Blade 2. The sequel’s pretty good, but Bushido Blade has a cooler approach to its single-player story, with “dishonourable” actions being penalized up to the point of a game over later in the campaign. It fits the theme to a tee (although, notably, Bushido Blade is set in the modern era, rather than the heyday of the samurai).
So, I’m not big on fighting games. I think they’re very cool; they’re just not for me. Super Smash Bros. is the major exception, and some will tell me it barely counts. But Bushido Blade was a rare exception to the rule. You see, the Bushido Blade duology didn’t bother with a health gauge. It lacked a time limit, too. It was about landing the first blow. Most strikes are fatal; this is the reality of swordfighting. Some are not, but they’ll still be plenty crippling in their own right.
That is, as far as I’m concerned, an amazing approach to the genre. Maybe there are more fighting games which adhere to this - I’m obviously not an expert on the matter - but this is the one that’s always stuck with me, and I want to get lost in it all over again.
Inevitably, at least a handful of readers are going to shout “Ehrgeiz” when they realize I’ve omitted it. That’s a cool fighting game, too, and I love that it had some serious Final Fantasy VII representation. It just didn’t click with me, and I don’tthinkit’s all that beloved by the Square-adoring masses for its overarching gameplay, either. Maybe I’m mistaken. Let me know!
4Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire Of The Rift
Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift is the great unsung entry in its sub-series. Every time I mention it among friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, at least one person proclaims that they’ve never even heard of it. Heck, a little inside baseball here, but I was browing images in our database of both FFTA and FFTA2, and the former had dozens. The latter had seven, three of which I’ve added, myself.
Released for the Nintendo DS, it further evolved much of what makes Final Fantasy Tactics Advance tick, with the bonus of being set in the real Ivalice, and even bringing back several familiar faces from Final Fantasy XII.
Grimoire of the Rift’s story is pretty bad. I don’t love FFTA’s, but the sequel’s barely exists. That’s honestly fine; the game is more about building your clan and participating in umpteen fights. It’s about the day-to-day adventuring more so than any desperate rebellion against a devilish scheme. I like it for what it is, is my point here, even if I can readily agree that it’s not good. (And there is, in fact, a devilish scheme - it’s just not particularly pronounced.)
Regardless, I’d sooner see it remastered than I would with Advance. If I had to choose one or the other, this would be it, because so few people even seem to know that it exists. It’d make more sense to roll with FFTA first, and if Square Enix has to pick one, that’d still make more sense. People have greater nostalgia for it. But heck, give me what I want, too!
3Final Fantasy XI
I’ve never played much Final Fantasy XI. I was put off by its MMO nature for so many years, and when I finally did get around to it, the PS2 version was long gone. A console player at heart, this made things all the more challenging for me, but I pushed through, and at last, I gave it a whirl on PC. I logged around 90 hours in it, and it’s rather wonderful.
A respectably savvy script, an overworld that matters far more than FFXIV’s (I love FFXIV, by the way), and such a multitude of compelling content that I barely know where to begin with this sentence, combines to concoct a classic-feeling Final Fantasy that desperately needs some current-gen love.
Did you know FFXI recently hit its highest CCU in ten years? More people were playing it at once than at any point since 2015. The game won’t die.It will not die. Square appeared to have hoped it would when FFXIV first launched, and for years, they gave XI mere table scraps, but that eventually changed. It receives more substantial updates, these days, and it’s totally worth playing on PC.
But a remastered facelift, playable on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch 2? Yes, yes, yes.
2Vagrant Story
“Enough with the Ivalice entries,” I can hear some shouting. “Stop projecting your predictions on what I’m going to say,” others are now muttering. Well, whatever - Ivalice is great! And Vagrant Story is up there with Final Fantasy Tactics itself for the best of the bunch.
Vagrant Story has a weird battle system. I mean, it’sweird. It’s harder than its designers likely intended it to be, and it can even feel counterintuitive at times. This is a problem, to be sure, but it’s made up for in spades by its expertly-crafted storytelling. The trials and tribulations of one Ashley Riot, the deliciously conflicted protagonist, are as personal as they are epic, as deep in meaning as they are thoroughly adventurous.
I truly cannot sing the script’s praises enough. You’ve got to experience it firsthand - and if you’ve never owned older hardware, there’s a decent chance you’ve not yet done so. Fix the problem, Square Enix!
1Xenogears
Xenogears is epic. I already used that word for Vagrant Story, and I don’t regret the repetition, but there is nothing in Square’s catalog quite like Xenogears. Its story is vast beyond measure, its cast is as sprawling as it is compelling, and its soundtrack is the stuff of legends. It could have been the first in a series, as its world is massive in scope and its creator wanted desperately to see it continue, but instead, it’s spun off into entirely separate franchises.
The combat can be a little rough around the edges, but it’s fun enough, and the Gear-versus-Gear clashes are up there with the best of the mecha genre across any medium. A remaster could smooth it all out, besides. And yeah, the story speeds up later on, skipping over key beats that would have been more fun to haveplayedfirsthand than to be told about, but it rises above that problem, which was driven more by an inexperienced development staff than any particular budgetary issue (as is commonly believed).
The odds aren’t all there for a Xenogears remaster to ever come to fruition. I’m just not sure Square Enix has a ton of interest in doing so when Monolith Soft has utterly usurped Xenogears for a larger degree of popularity with the (excellent) Xenoblade Chronicles series. Heck, even before Xenoblade, there was Xenosaga, a Namco-run endeavour (also developed by the then-nascent Monolith Soft). Series creator Tetsuya Takahashi is fully enmeshed in both, and Xenoblade shows no signs of slowing down.
But there’s hope. Square certainly sees the continued financial usefulness of marketing Xenogears via merchandising. Those buildable Gear kits must be selling more than softly if they’ve got a watch en route and haven’t stopped several concerts from being performed in its honour. Hence, we’ll see. Xenogears has a diehard audience the likes of which most games cannot rival, even if it’s a slim one. It could be far wider, if we ever see it remastered.
Or remade entirely, filling in the blanks in its second-disc story. But, well, that’s far less likely, so I can only dream so big.
