Square Enix has made plenty of RPGs with real potential that never grew into long-running series. Some are now hard to play, while others haven’t had a modern release. Here’s a partial list of five games that could return as modern ports, careful remasters, or full remakes.
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1. Parasite Eve
Set in December 1997, Parasite Eve follows New York police detective Aya Brea as she hunts a mutant entity named Eve across Manhattan. The chase takes her to the Natural History Museum, Central Park, Chinatown, the Chrysler Building, and Carnegie Hall. Eve can make the mitochondria in people’s cells “awaken,” causing them to spontaneously combust.
The story continues Hideaki Sena’s popular novel of the same name, and the game arrived during a worldwide surge of interest in Japanese horror in the late 1990s. Built on a modified version of the Final Fantasy 7 engine, it was described by contemporary critics as a mix of that game and Resident Evil.
The original spawned two sequels: Parasite Eve 2 in 1999 and The Third Birthday for PlayStation Portable in 2010. The first game feels especially ready for rediscovery. The two games that inspired it are more popular than ever, and its action-focused combat was ahead of its time. Square Enix could even repeat history by using the FF7 Remake engine for a reimagining.
2. Bloodmasque
Bloodmasque is a 2013 RPG set in an alternate 19th-century Paris ruled by vampires. It launched exclusively on touchscreen Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad, which helps explain why it’s easy to overlook. Kazutoyo Maehiro, director of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, worked on the game as a scenario designer and wrote extensive lore for it.
Maehiro said he had written about 3,000 years of lore. “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,” he said.
He also described an ambitious timeline for the story: “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.” A modern release could make that vampire history accessible again.
3. Xenogears
First pitched as an early concept for Final Fantasy 7, Xenogears is an overambitious, visibly unfinished 1998 RPG. Think FF7 meets Neon Genesis Evangelion. In the second half, the game shifts to visual-novel storytelling, with occasional boss fights breaking it up.
That uneven finish didn’t stop the game from becoming a commercial success and earning widespread critical acclaim. Square once considered a sequel but scrapped the plans to make the flop CGI movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Creator Tetsuya Takahashi later made the Xenosaga and Xenoblade Chronicles games at Monolith Soft, keeping the Xeno series alive.
A 3D remaster could make this daring RPG easier to play and add some of the dungeons and combat missing from its second half. A remake would be a much bigger undertaking, though. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi said, “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.”
5. Chrono Trigger
Chrono Trigger is widely considered one of the best RPGs ever made. Yuji Horii and Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creators of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, developed it. Akira Toriyama, known for Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest, created the art, while legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu wrote the music. Before its merger with Enix, Square called the team the “Dream Team.”
The 1995 SNES game has an unforgettable cast and 13 endings. It introduced New Game+ and is still praised for its time-travel mechanic. Yet it’s hard to play on current consoles: it can’t currently be bought for any modern console and is available only on Steam and mobile devices.
Square Enix’s 2022 release of Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition, a remaster of the PS1-era sequel, prompted speculation that the original would get a remaster for its 30th anniversary in 2025. That window has passed. Since Square Enix introduced HD-2D with Octopath Traveler in 2018, fans have called for a Chrono Trigger remake in that style. A modern console release would address the game’s current availability gap, whether it came as a port, remaster, or remake.
