There are some names in the realm of JRPGs that are next to royalty: Yuji Horii, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Nobuo Uematsu and, if you’re of a certain vintage, Hiroyuki Ito. Okay, so perhaps Ito’s not so much a household name, but a look at his CV should assure you of his credentials; this is the man who invented the Active Time Battle mode that’s been a mainstay of the Final Fantasy series and more than that this is the director of Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy 9 and Final Fantasy 12. No matter where you stand on what the very best Final Fantasy game might be (it’s Final Fantasy 12, by the way), I’m sure you can agree that those three earn themselves a place among the greatest we’ve seen to date.
Dungeon Encounters reviewDeveloper: Square EnixPublisher: Square EnixPlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out now on Switch, PS4 and PC
And for almost 15 years now, Ito’s whereabouts have been something of a mystery, frequently picked at by Final Fantasy’s fanbase, his name only fleetingly appearing in the credits of a handful of mobile projects or as special thanks in bigger games. There was some speculation he might emerge as part of the Final Fantasy 16 team, given how it leans into the more classical era of the series Ito is associated with, though when its reveal finally came to pass there was no mention of one of the grandees of the series.
DUNGEON ENCOUNTERS | Announce Trailer Watch on YouTube
But then, seemingly out of nowhere, something bizarre happened. On October 1st, Square Enix put out a trailer for a new project called simply Dungeon Encounters (a name so nondescript I’d forgotten it since starting writing this piece and had to go and double check), a shall-we-say JRPG that looks like its budget might not have been too much more than the £20 that’s being asked for it on the eShop and whatever other digital stores you might frequent. It might have been entirely unremarkable, if it weren’t for the project’s director: one certain Hiroyoku Ito.
The game, you won’t be surprised if you’ve any affinity with his prior work, turns out to be quite remarkable itself: an RPG that’s aggressively stripped back until there’s nothing but the bare essentials, and a dungeon crawler that explicitly feels like it’s been scrawled together with pen and parchment. It reminds me, in many ways, of Yasumi Matsuno’s own offbeat hymn to RPGs of paper and pen, 2012’s Crimson Shroud – a game that was similarly pared back, and an antithesis to the overblown, grandiose adventures associated with the series that made both developer’s names.