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The director of Final Fantasy Resonance says that turn-based RPGs are hitting the mainstream once more because that's the sort of combat the people making games these days grew up with, and you only need to look as far as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for proof.
Following Final Fantasy Resonance's big reveal at last week's Nintendo Direct, some of the game's developers are doing the media rounds to keep the excitement coming. Naturally, as the JRPG is quite the throwback, some of the conversations center on what's old becoming new again. One half of that is how an HD-2D art style puts a modern shine on a nostalgic art style, though the other half comes down to turn-based combat.
Speaking to IGN about the latter, Final Fantasy Resonance director Hiroto Furuya is asked about the resurgence of turn-based combat in RPGs. Atlus has long been holding the fort with the likes of Persona, sure, but Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3 have swept enough awards between them to make turn-based feel trendier from a triple-A perspective than it has been in a hot minute.
For Furuya, the reason we're seeing more turn-based goodness isn't mere development trends, but because developers are putting a spin on what they grew up with.
"I feel like a lot of us creators who had grown up playing turn-based games are now creating games ourselves," he explains. "It feels like there's this general movement towards revisiting and potentially reassessing or reworking some of the experiences we personally had when we were younger."
He adds: "When we're talking about Clair Obscur, I believe they are creators who grew up playing JRPGs."
Furuya then says that this kind of relationship with your inspirations isn't unique to games, and is the sort of thing we're also seeing in anime, manga, and beyond.
"Creators are now revisiting past projects, remaking them, and reimagining them," he says. "That's also potentially a factor that contributes to this kind of resurgence that we're seeing right now."
While it's important to say upfront that turn-based combat never went anywhere – Persona continues to do just fine – some of the triple-A developers you see at places like Square Enix have gradually shifted to real-time under the idea of 'modernizing' what they offer in flagship titles to reach a broader audience.
Obviously, the recent success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3 shows you don't have to emulate the likes of The Witcher 3. It's also worth shouting out the many excellent indies like Deltarune and Sea of Stars, also finding success. Heck, Team Asano – the developers behind Octopath Traveler and most things you see that are HD-2D – are doing just that under Square Enix's very roof.
What Furuya touches on, though, is why I'm so intrigued by Final Fantasy Resonance. It's by no means a mainline, triple-A Final Fantasy, no, but it does imagine what a mainline Final Fantasy might look like if Square Enix stuck closer to its roots. I have little doubt we're years away from seeing what Final Fantasy 17 will look like, but as Furuya mentions, the ongoing resurgence of turn-based combat and fans of old-school JRPGs now creating games paint an interesting picture of where things might go. Let a man dream.
