DETAILED SQUARESOFT HISTORY (1986-1999) A legend in the industry, Square's games have been favorites of gamers for years, from Final Fantasy to Secret of Mana to Xenogears. Square has created games in almost every genre, but their primary success has been in making some of the best RPGs ever. Square Co Ltd. was established in 1986. Square first made the games Death Trap and Blasty for the PC, and then Rad Racer, King's Knight and 3-D Worldrunner for the Nintendo Famicom Disk System. Hironobu Sakaguchi, not pleased with his prior efforts, came up with a new game to compete with Enix's Dragon Quest, and called it Final Fantasy, because he believed it was his last chance to make something really good. When Hironobu Sakaguchi went to his boss with the idea for Final Fantasy, his boss had never heard of an RPG. He asked: "Will it be fun?", to which Sakaguchi replied "Yes" and he had the green light to go ahead and make the game. Hironobu Sakaguchi wrote and produced the game, with character designs by the artist Yoshitaka Amano and music composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Final Fantasy detailed the quest of the Light Warriors, as they restored light to the four orbs of the world. In 1990, Nintendo brought the first Final Fantasy over to the states, accompanied by a major marketing campaign and contests in Nintendo Power magazine. Square released two more Final Fantasies for the Famicom, but Nintendo did not release them because they thought they looked too much like the original. Incidentally, Final Fantasy 3 was where the classic Moogles made their debut. On the Game Boy, Square released Final Fantasy Legend, called SaGa in Japan, but renamed to capitalize on the popularity of Final Fantasy on the NES. SaGa games are known for their very freeform battle systems, allowing you to mold characters in a number of ways. In the coming years, Square would release two more Final Fantasy Legend games for the Game Boy in the US. Another game given the Final Fantasy name was Seiken Densetsu ("Sword Legend"), renamed Final Fantasy Adventure, an action RPG similar to Zelda imbued with RPG elements like experience points and HP. In '91, Square released their first Super Famicom game, Final Fantasy 4, a major step up from the previous three, taking advantage of the new system's features with improved graphics, music and storyline to fully showcase Uematsu and Amano's work. Final Fantasy 4 sold extremely well in Japan, and Square expected similar success in the US. As Final Fantasy II it was released in late '91, as one of the earliest titles for the recently released Super Nintendo. Unfortunately, it did not sell nearly as much as they had hoped. Final Fantasy 5 was another Final Fantasy that wasn't released in the US, Square believed the job system that it used was too complicated for American gamers. The job system is a major part of Final Fantasy 5, allowing you to customize the characters to your liking. Only released in Japan, Romancing SaGa kept the free form battle style of the SaGa series but this new SaGa gave you a cast of characters to choose one from as your main character. Romancing SaGa used the "free scenario system" to let you choose the direction the story will go. Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 continued the basic plot of line of the first, and added more skills and improved graphics. The sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure, Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2) is the game that all action RPGs are compared to. Secret of Mana was the first RPG to support the multi-tap, allowing three people to control the three characters in the game at the same time. The sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3, utilized the "triangle story system" where you choose three of the six characters at the beginning and that determined how the story would go. It was not released in US because it was extremely buggy and considered too costly to fix for American release. Final Fantasy 6, renamed Final Fantasy III in the US, was Square's biggest title yet, with an epic story, and amazing and detailed graphics taking advantage of many of the SNES's special effects to their fullest, including Mode 7 for flying in the airship. Each of the 14 characters had their own unique skill (mainly based on skills from jobs in Final Fantasy 5), but any character could use all of the spells using the Esper system. At certain points in the game, you receive some magicite (the remains of a dead Esper), which when equipped on a character, teaches them certain spells. Yet another Square game not released in the US was the strategy RPG Front Mission, in which you fight in giant combat robots called "wandrung panzers" (wanzers for short). In the game, you could completely customize the wanzers, from the weapons to the armor to the engine to the paint job. A spin off of Front Mission, Gun Hazard, was a action platformer, rather than a strategy game. Almost a year after Final Fantasy 6, Square released another big RPG, Chrono Trigger, with character designs by famed Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama and over 10 endings, many only accessible through the game's most innovative aspects of any RPG, New Game +. After you beat the game for the first time, you can use New Game + to carry your previous games' character stats over into your new game where they can build up more, or even beat the game at a different point in the game and get a different ending. Chrono Trigger is required gaming at the PC game developer Ion Storm. The only game that Squaresoft US developed, shortly before it was disbanded, was Secret of Evermore, with gameplay modeled after Secret of Mana and a mix of B-movie like plots including jokes and puns that make sense in English (since it was developed in America). The game's magic system was also unique. Instead of magic points, you had to mix ingredients such as roots, ash and oil to cast spells. After Squaresoft US closed it's doors, a new company was established, Square LA, that would be used to research new CG techniques. One of the biggest selling RPGs of 1996 was Super Mario RPG, using characters from Nintendo's famous Super Mario series, and developed by Square with all the graphics being high quality prerendered CG. The mass market appeal of Mario allowed the game to be a massive seller in both the US and Japan. Square's final releases for the Super Famicom in Japan were Treasure Hunter G, a strategy RPG about a family of treasure hunters, Bahamut Lagoon, another strategy RPG allowing you to use magic spells to change the landscape, and Rudra's Treasure, which featured a unique "vocabulary-based" magic system, which allows you to combine words to cast spells. In late 1996, Square ended their 11 year relationship with Nintendo when they announced they would be developing Final Fantasy VII on the Sony PlayStation rather than the Nintendo 64, shocking many long time fans. To begin this new partnership, Square developed a innovative fighting game for the PlayStation called Tobal No. 1 that Sony published in the US. Tobal included a 'Quest Mode', where your fighter was sent into a deep dungeon to purge it of the monsters within. The quest mode had randomly generated mazes and status affecting potions that changed with each play. Tobal No. 1 sold moderately well, but people weren't buying it for the game itself, but for the Final Fantasy VII demo included. The demo was the public's first taste of Final Fantasy VII, spotlighting the first dungeon, along with showing off high powered spells and epic summon beasts. The release of the demo only made the wait for Final Fantasy VII longer, as people eagerly anticipated it even more. A sequel to Tobal was released in Japan, and was significantly improved over the original, with over 200 characters to be gained in a much larger and improved quest mode. Square opted not to release Tobal 2 in the US because they felt the first Tobal's success was only because of the inclusion of the Final Fantasy VII demo. In early 1997, Final Fantasy VII was released in Japan, quickly selling 2 million within mere days. Costing around 25 million dollars to make, Final Fantasy VII made the leap to 3D with beautiful prerendered backgrounds and computer generated FMV on 3 discs. Final Fantasy VII's US release in September 1997 was backed by a huge marketing campaign by Sony (reminiscent of Nintendo's backing of the original Final Fantasy) including commercials on MTV showing the games' cinematic sequences. The game went on to sell over a million units (including the sales of the PC version released by Eidos) in the US, a record for an RPG. Square continued the Front Mission franchise on the PlayStation with Front Mission 2, and Front Mission Alternative. Front Mission 2 took many of the aspects of the original that made it so great, and put it in full 3D. The price of the 3D was horrendous loading times, as the game went back and forth from the map and battle views. Front Mission Alternative, as the name suggests, was not like the others, with a unique realtime strategy engine where you placed "waypoints" on a map that directed where your wanzers would go and just watch them destroy the enemy. To capitalize on the popularity of the Chocobo, Square asked the developer Chunsoft to make a game starring the Chocobo based on their popular Mysterious Dungeon series. Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon can be compared to the PC game Diablo, with bland, monotonous, randomly generated dungeons, but with many unique gameplay features to spice it up (one dungeon is supposedly bottomless, going on forever). After Final Fantasy VII's US release, Sony announced they would bring over four more Square games. Bushido Blade, a revolutionary fighter where only one hit kills, and Einhander, a 2D side scrolling shooter that allows you to steal the weapons of your enemies. Then came the brilliantly executed Final Fantasy Tactics, often heralded as one of the greatest strategy games ever. Square hired members from the team who made Quest's Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre, so they could recreate the gameplay of that game, but add a Final Fantasy feel to it along with a more versatile job system similar to the one in Final Fantasy 5. SaGa Frontier was the first SaGa game for the PlayStation and the first to come to the US since Final Fantasy Legend III for the Game Boy. SaGa Frontier kept the free form aspects of earlier SaGas and added to them by splitting the game into seven different stories. However, many people were disappointed with lack of direction and unappealing look to the game. In Japan, Square released the long anticipated Soukaigi, an action oriented RPG with interesting story and stat building system. Even if it's concept was good, it's execution wasn't, with bad control and blocky and pixelated graphics. Some think the PlayStation just wasn't powerful enough to handle their idea and they gave up. Meanwhile, in the US, Square and Sony's publishing contract was about to run out. Many wondered whether Square would publish games on their own or find another company to publish for them in the US. Shortly before E3 '98, Square and Electronic Arts announced they would form two new companies, Electronic Arts Square in Japan to publish EA's games in Japan and Square Electronic Arts to publish Square's games in the US. The first four titles to be published in the US would be Parasite Eve, Bushido Blade 2, Brave Fencer Musashi and Xenogears. Parasite Eve, labeled the first 'cinematic RPG', was the first game to be made partially at Square USA in Honolulu, where much of the CG in the game was created. Based on the book of the same name, Parasite Eve revolves around the relationship between Aya, a New York City police officer and Eve, a entity who inhabits the body of Melissa, an opera singer and is able to use the power of mitochondria (the power source of a living cell) to mutate living things. Described as cross between Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII, you wandered modern day locations pursuing Eve, similar to Resident Evil. In Final Fantasy fashion, there are random battles but you are allowed to move around to avoid attacks. Bushido Blade 2 continued the tradition of the original where one hit kills, and told the story of two rival schools, the Narukagami, and the Shainto. It was uncertain whether Xenogears would come out in the US because of it's somewhat religious content, but it's release was confirmed when Square Electronic Arts was formed (some say Square just wanted free press for Xenogears by casting doubt on whether they would port it). Along with a fantastic story (and well translated too), Xenogears had two innovative combat engines. One for hand-to-hand combat where you could execute multi-hit combos, and the other for Gear (giant combat robots) battles, which require you to conserve fuel for stronger attacks. Brave Fencer Musashi was loosely based on a Japanese legend, about a great swordsman named Musashi. Gameplay was somewhere between Secret of Mana and The Legend of Zelda, with a very cartoony look and voices. While being a good game, like Tobal No. 1, it included a demo of a highly anticipated game, this time being Final Fantasy VIII, probably causing some percentage of the buyers to be only looking for the demo. Looking ahead, after releasing Final Fantasy VIII in Japan to rave reviews (and over 2 million preorders), Square will release it in America later this year, along with 6 other games, including the fighter Ehrgeiz. Also expected is an upcoming racing game and maybe even Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 2 (with much improved graphics over the original), both starring the Final Fantasy constant Chocobo. There's speculation that even the upcoming Final Fantasy Collection, will be brought over. And in 2001, Square will release the Final Fantasy Movie, created totally in CG at Square's Hawaii based company, Square US. This movie is expected to be the pinnacle of the CG animation, with near photo-realistic quality.