Fame is certainly not getting to Square Enix’s head. That’s not to say that the company hasn’t always been popular, but you don’t secure exclusive rights to work on Marvel games without adding an extra bit of swagger in your steps. I recently praised the company for making all the right moves over the last few years in regards to setting itself up as a premiere developer of western AAA titles and finding a balance to still work on the classic kind of games we saw from the company in the 90s. And to think we have Bravely Default to thank for all of that. It might have only sold a million copies worldwide, but with each passing year, the little “Nintendo 3DS game that could” is becoming the company’s defining game of the decade. That’s really saying something in the face of the blockbuster success of Final Fantasy XV, but on the Japanese side of the big pond, no game has done more for to inspire the company to get back to its roots and not only make classically stylized JRPGs but also original ones. With all due respect to Final Fantasy XV, it sort of represents the big-headed Square Enix that the company is desperately trying to leave behind but can’t seem to thanks to the continued interference of Final Fantasy VII Remake. It’s the Square Enix that ran amok with DVD space in the PlayStation 2 days and got a little too big for its britches in the previous console generation, announcing heaps of Final Fantasy XIII games and not fully delivering on any of them. Final Fantasy XV and both Final Fantasy XIII sequels might have taught the company how to adopt modern day development cycles, but it was an outsourced project to a promising, fledgling company that showed us all how to love the company again. Bravely Default came out of nowhere. Rumor has it that Square Enix didn’t even want to localize it until Fire Emblem: Awakening and Etrian Odyssey IV gave a glimpse into the hidden potential of the handheld JRPG crowd, and even then, it turned to Nintendo to handle the risk and publish it. As the two companies plugged away at making this retro throwback a hit, something struck many of us as “off” about this title. It looked like Final Fantasy, but indeed… it was an original title. Prior to its North American release in 2014, the last original Japanese title to get international recognition from Square Enix was the 2007 game The World Ends With You. That’s seven years with no fresh IP from its Japanese studios seeing the light of day in North America.

Nintendo did such a fabulous job on the localization as well. It took what was a tiring little JRPG and turned it into something truly great. It allowed for the game to speed up time, so battles would not feel like a slog, and the voice acting and translations were top of the line, some of the absolute best that the genre had seen in a while. And that soundtrack… my goodness, I don’t think I’ve heard anything that beautiful in the last ten, maybe twenty years! This praise burst through from enthusiastic critics, and gamers were convinced to respond with a purchase. 1 million copies later, Square Enix issued a full-on apology for overlooking the JRPG audience in North America and promised to do better. And this is a promise it has fullfilled on, much more so than with Fabula Crystallis Novella. Since Bravely Default launched, not only have we seen the mega blockbusters on the home consoles, we’ve also seen plenty of niche hits from the company too. The Square Enix prior to the success of Bravely Default might not have given NieR: Automata a chance, but here we are with a release date less than a month away. This was after the critical drubbing that its sister-series Drakengard 3 got back in 2014. No matter, this is the new and risky Square Enix, the one that’s not afraid of following up on a critical flop. NieR: Automata looks like a much better game than Drakengard 3, and Square Enix has both developed it and published it with a new level of confidence, practically guaranteeing that it would succeed in a year that is already showing tough competition.