The director of the best Final Fantasys is putting out his first new game in 15 years

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The activity in this trailer does not look like a huge deal. Truly, it appears like the furthest matter absent from a huge offer: just a little, experimental video game by some means being printed by Sq. Enix. But to me it’s a even larger deal than everything else Square Enix has built in years—bigger than the Final Fantasy 7 Remake or Final Fantasy 16 or Guardians of the Galaxy. That’s since of 1 title: Hiroyuki Ito.

I will not feel there is a sport developer at Square Enix with a much better resume than Ito, who’s been at the corporation considering that 1987, his complete vocation. Ito worked his way up from a battle designer on Ultimate Fantasy 4 to the director of Closing Fantasy 6, second only to collection creator and producer Hironobu Sakaguchi. A number of decades later on, Ito directed Closing Fantasy 9, and a several years soon after that, when Remaining Fantasy 12 was in problems, he stepped in to co-immediate it in addition to directing its battle procedure.

But just after 2006, Ito seemingly vanished inside the bowels of Sq. Enix, racking up a lot of “specific many thanks” credits and a couple of fight system credits across 15 years. I did not believe we might ever see Ito direct an additional activity, and I certainly didn’t imagine Sq. Enix was likely to announce one particular on a random Friday two months prior to it is obtainable. But here we are: Dungeon Encounters, a dungeon crawler for Pc, PlayStation and Change out on October 14.

All right, so Dungeon Encounters appears to be fairly bizarre. It is really directed by one of the company’s most acclaimed designers and has songs by Nobuo Uematsu, but it really is clear from the trailer earlier mentioned that this is a small, minimal budget video game. The activity map fundamentally appears like an untextured crossword puzzle, and combat just isn’t genuinely animated, however it does have some pleasant illustrations. This is plainly a dungeon crawler for players who appreciate puzzle-y layout and numbers and never treatment a little bit about presentation.

Dungeon Encounters has the vibe of a individual job that proved interesting more than enough for Square Enix to dedicate the bare minimal means that it needed to be posted, but I’m just delighted to see Ito’s title connected to a new match all over again. Even though he directed the finest Last Fantasy online games in the series’ record, his other design and style credits above the decades suggest he is usually specialized in planning recreation and battle systems—he’s credited with creating Energetic Time Struggle, for example. A activity that strips absent all the things but the quantities would seem like it is quite much his jam.

Dungeon Encounters may well hint at Sq. Enix striving to be a little bit more agile, greenlighting smaller, cheaper RPGs to see what operates: Yoko Taro’s Voice of Playing cards is another example coming out before long as very well. At $30, I think Dungeon Encounters’ art is heading to make it a difficult provide, but it’s possible the pen-and-paper group will give it wings.