From Secret of Mana to Final Fantasy, there’s no denying that Square Enix have been behind some of the biggest and most beloved JRPGs of all time. With that in mind, the idea of every single one of the company’s games being available in one place digitally is enough to make me salivate like a cartoon child over a pie cooling by a window.
In a recent talk with Game Informer, Square Enix President and CEO Yosuke Matsuda revealed that making the company’s entire games library available digitally is actually something that is being discussed, and so help me God if I can pay a fiver a month for access to Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VIII, you can bet your arse I will.
Chrono TriggerMatsuda said:
As far as our major titles go, most of those, we still have variations out that you can play now. The more classic titles that you might have played on NES, we are still working hard to make it so you can play those. We actually have launched a dedicated project internally to port those, so we are working to make them available on a variety of platforms. Certainly down the road, we would like to see that on a subscription or streaming service, so we’re exploring the possibility of creating a dedicated channel for ourselves.
The only real roadblock to this glorious future is that Square don’t actually know where the source code is for a lot of their old games. While Matsuda says he’s quite embarrassed by this fact, it’s not the craziest thing in the world to have happen.
Just look at how the BBC either lost or taped over the majority of Doctor Who episodes from the 1960’s, as if they didn’t know Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were going to turn it into a globally beloved smash in the 70’s, before David Tennant turned up a few decades later to make it even more popular. Any idiot could have predicted that.
For now, all we can do is hope that Square manages to find the source code for some of its older games to make this digital library a reality. These things are always in the last place you look, so maybe Matsuda will dig out Final Fantasy II from his sock drawer soon.
MarvelIn terms of Square Enix’s current output, we can expect two of the biggest games of 2020 from them. We have Marvel’s Avengers in May (which seems… alright), and Final Fantasy VII Remake in March (which is bloody excellent).
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.