Final Fantasy is a different beast than it used to be. The most recent game in the series, Final Fantasy XIII-2, is a game about a scantily clad schoolteacher and the fashionable last boy on Earth travelling through time, collecting monsters and new outfits, while trying to save a lady wearing a feather dress. In fairness, that description fits most games with the Final Fantasy name released over the last ten years, but there was a time when the series was known for high fantasy, beautiful artistry, stirring music, and coherent, memorable stories.
Crunge Products’ new iPhone game Borderwalker, out this week in Japan, was made by some of the people behind Final Fantasy’s best-loved entries.
Composer Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy 1 through 10), Hideo Minaba (art director from Final Fantasy VI and IX), and Kazuhige Nojima (scenario writer of Final Fantasy VII and VIII) are behind Borderwalker, a role-playing game about a world that is divided into two halves, one where it is perpetually daytime and another where it’s always night. You play as a “borderwalker,” someone that can pass between the two realms.
The game isn’t the most visually thrilling iPhone game out there, with static, bland environments and still images of enemies in battles where you swipe the screen in different motions for spell attacks. The talent behind the game makes it worthy of at least a cursory glance. No word on whether the text-centric game will be released in English though.
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