•Square Enix is synonymous with role-playing games, thanks to series like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts. But very few titles have enjoyed that kind of longevity. Over the years, the company has released plenty of games with enormous potential that didn’t turn into long-running franchises or are nearly impossible to play today.
Here is a handful of Square Enix RPGs that deserve a comeback—whether through a port for modern hardware, an attentive remaster, or a full remake. These games may not have been forgotten by fans, but all have suffered some neglect from the developer-publisher, for one reason or another.
Parasite Eve
Long before Insomniac’s take on Peter Parker “really made you feel like Spider-Man,” Parasite Eve had Manhattan. Set in December 1997, the game follows police detective Aya Brea as she tracks a mutant entity called Eve through locations including the Natural History Museum, Central Park, Chinatown, the Chrysler Building, and Carnegie Hall. Eve possesses an unusual power—she can cause the mitochondria in people’s cells to “awaken,” leading them to spontaneously combust.
The story is a sequel to Hideaki Sena’s popular novel of the same name and part of a worldwide late-’90s surge in popularity for Japanese horror. It was built on a modified version of the Final Fantasy 7 engine, and contemporary critics described it as a mash-up of that game and Resident Evil.
Parasite Eve inspired sequels—1999’s Parasite Eve 2 and 2010’s The Third Birthday for PlayStation Portable—but the original feels especially ripe for rediscovery. Both games that inspired it are more popular than ever, and its action-oriented combat system was ahead of its time.
Bloodmasque
Would you play a splashy, stylish Square Enix RPG set in an alternate version of 19th-century Paris taken over by vampires? That game already exists: it’s 2013’s Bloodmasque. The problem is that it launched exclusively for touchscreen Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad, which is probably why few have heard of it.
Last September, Kazutoyo Maehiro, director of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, said he had written extensive lore for Bloodmasque while working on it as a scenario designer. “I wrote about 3,000 years worth of lore for that game,” Maehiro said. “This is the first time I heard that name in such a long time — I basically just remembered it myself. But now that I’m remembering it, I do feel it’s a game that would maybe be interesting to launch, even in this day and age.”
“The intention for that game, we really wanted to be able to make it so you can have the story take place at any point in time, from a chronological perspective. So yeah, I had depicted or written out the story of the history of these vampires throughout a very long course of time, ultimately into outer space.”
Kazutoyo Maehiro
Xenogears
Game developers were taking bold creative risks throughout the late ’90s, and Square Enix was no exception. First conceived as an early pitch for Final Fantasy 7, Xenogears is notoriously overambitious and very obviously unfinished—think FF7 meets Neon Genesis Evangelion.
The last half of the game plays more like a visual novel interspersed with occasional boss fights. Despite that, it was a commercial success that drew widespread critical acclaim. At one point, Square considered making a sequel, but scrapped those plans to make the flop CGI movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within instead.
Creator Tetsuya Takahashi went on to create the Xenosaga and Xenoblade Chronicles games at Monolith Soft, so the Xeno series is alive and well today. Even so, it would be fantastic to experience a 3D remaster of this daring 1998 game—ideally one that actually includes dungeons and combat in the second half.
“Remaking something that came from that era, as an experienced person who has gone through the [FF7] Remake series, sounds like a tough game to make,” said Naoki Hamaguchi, director of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, recently commenting on a potential Xenogears remake.
Final Fantasy Type-0
The release of every mainline Final Fantasy game is inevitably accompanied by navel-gazing from creative leads about how the series can remain relevant to modern audiences. Back in 2011, the creators of spin-off Final Fantasy Type-0 posited “what if the future of Final Fantasy was actually Persona?” Then the game came out and Square Enix decided the answer was an emphatic no.
Type 0 follows a group of 14 students at an elite school who must balance the humdrum demands of school life with escalating supernatural threats. Like the Persona games, there’s a calendar system and classmate bonds, but its storytelling hews closer to Final Fantasy 6 by focusing on an ensemble cast instead of one main protagonist.
Sure, some elements didn’t quite work, like the real-time strategy “Regional Dominance” sequences. Even so, it feels like fans are missing out by not having a recurring Square Enix franchise set in a magical school. Type 0 got an HD remaster back in 2015, but we’re long overdue for a new entry in this subseries.
Chrono Trigger
Widely hailed as one of the best RPGs ever made, Chrono Trigger was developed by the creators of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy—Yuji Horii and Hironobu Sakaguchi. It featured art by Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest) and music by legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu. Back in the day, Square called them the “Dream Team,” and they weren’t wrong.
This iconic 1995 SNES title featured 13 endings and an unforgettable cast. It also introduced the concept of New Game+ and still has what many consider the best time-travel mechanic in any video game.
Back in 2022, Square Enix released Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition, a remaster of the PS1-era sequel to Chrono Trigger. That prompted speculation that the company was working on a remaster of the original for its 30th anniversary in 2025. That window has now come and gone. At present, it’s impossible to buy a copy of this classic RPG for any modern console—it’s only available for Steam and mobile devices.
Ever since the company introduced HD-2D with 2018’s Octopath Traveler, fans have been clamoring for a Chrono Trigger remake in that sumptuous art style. We’re right there with them.
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