5 Forgotten Square Enix RPGs That Deserve a Comeback

Square Enix is synonymous with fantastic role-playing games, thanks to series like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts. But very few games are lucky enough to enjoy that kind of longevity. Over the years, the company has released plenty of games that had enormous potential, but for one reason or another, didn't turn into a long-running franchise or are nearly impossible to play today.

Here are a handful of Square Enix RPGs that deserve a comeback, whether it's simply a port for modern hardware, an attentive remaster, or a full-on remake. These games may not have been forgotten by fans, but all of them have suffered a bit of neglect from the developer-publisher, for one reason or another.

1 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 in locations like the Natural History Museum, Central Park, Chinatown, the Chrysler Building, and Carnegie Hall. Eve has 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 was described by contemporary critics as a mash-up of that game and Resident Evil.

Parasite Eve inspired a couple sequels — 1999's Parasite Eve 2 and 2010's The Third Birthday for PlayStation Portable — but the original feels especially ripe for rediscovery today. The two games that inspired it are more popular than ever, and the action-oriented combat system was ahead of its time. Heck, Square Enix could repeat history and use the FF7 Remake engine for a reimagined Parasite Eve.

2 Bloodmasque

Would you play a splashy, stylish Square Enix RPG set in an alternate version of 19th-century Paris that's been taken over by vampires? I sure would! As it turns out, that game already exists, and it's 2013's Bloodmasque. Problem is, it launched exclusively for touchscreen Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad, which is probably why you haven't heard of it. Last September, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles director Kazutoyo Maehiro told me that he'd written extensive lore for the Bloodmasque, which he worked on as a scenario designer.

"I wrote about 3,000 years worth of Iore for that game. 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," Maehiro said. “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." Let's reboot this idea! The children yearn for more Bloodmasque!

3 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, and you'll get a sense of the vibe.) 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 — and preferably one that actually includes some dungeons and combat in the second half. Don't hold your breath on that, though. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi recently commented that a Xenogears remake would be a huge undertaking: "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.”

4 Final Fantasy Type-0

The release of every mainline Final Fantasy game will inevitably be accompanied by a lot of navel-gazing from the creative leads about how the series can continue to be relevant to modern audiences. (See: FF14 and the rise of MMORPGs, FF15 and the vogue for open-world environments, and FF16 as a Sony-esque character action game.) 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, there were elements of the game that didn't quite work, like the real-time strategy "Regional Dominance" sequences. Even so, it feels like we're missing out by not having some kind of recurring Square Enix franchise that takes place 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.

5 Chrono Trigger

You knew this was coming. 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 Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest's Akira Toriyama and music by legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu. Back in the day, Square (no Enix then) 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 the best time-travel mechanic in any video game, period.

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 game for its 30th anniversary in 2025. Welp, that window has 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 this sumptuous art style. We're right there with them.