Square

And so they decided, "You know what? Never mind.

We're not gonna worry about renewing this trademark." Um, Dragon Quest, which was still merging, Enix was merging with Squaresoft at this time, just jumped right on it, 'cause I mean, you have Dragon Quest, which is one of the biggest series in Japan and is looking to really expand, uh, globally.

And now you get to call it Dragon Quest everywhere.

And so in the early 2000s, they were able to snap back the copyright for Dragon Quest and be able to use it in the United States.

This game comes out in 2017.

But it's part of, like, a larger, we'll call it meta-series I guess, uh, that started in 1998 with Xenogears, which was a Squaresoft RPG, was originally pitched...

Uh, I'm not sure if this is apocryphal or not.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here, Salosi.

Just more that, in spirit, they feel more like major games that tell this epic story with very engaging characters that you fall in love with that completely captures your attention, your imagination, has great gameplay systems at play that really beg you to dive deep into them, and it absolutely allows you to do that, and I love it.

Now, again, no idea if this feeling that I have right now continues into the future story arcs of this franchise, but I will say that As of what I've played thus far, and keep in mind these are the original versions, not the remakes, it feels like Falcom has inherited that sort of mantle from the old Squaresoft, right? The old classic sort of feeling of this is a very epic, very engaging JRPG that...

It's just kind of the stuff of dreams if you're into this kind of game.

Similar to the old school Final Fantasies, right? The Final Fantasy of today has not been able to hit the same sort of crescendo that they used to have back in the day, right? I'm thinking about Final Fantasy...

So I guess I'll just find somewhere to cut it.

Uh, after the credits, there, uh, is a really good Squaresoft logo title drop.

Oh, yeah.

I did like th- uh, did like that.

Musashi puts Lumina in the crest or whatever, and, uh, it gets surrounded by a red crystal, and then the red crystal becomes the, uh, red thing in the A in the Squaresoft logo, and it, it's great.

It's very good.

Um-

And because this is a PlayStation game by Squaresoft, it was, of course, composed by Nobuo Uematsu.

I had no idea about this.

When the Super Nintendo CD projects fell apart, the game that Squaresoft was making that planned to use the CD space had to be cut way down in scope to fit on a cartridge, which became Secret of Mana.

Then the rest of the ideas got put into Chrono Trigger.

I had no idea about that.

Uh, and you know that, I still remember the commercial.

You hear the square saw, or it was still Squaresoft at the time, I believe.

Mm.

And it did the little ding, and then you just hear Utada Hikaru with, uh, Simple and Clean, and there's flashing images of Disney characters.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, um, it's an RPG that Squaresoft, well, Square Enix, then Squaresoft, made- Uh, in between Final Fantasies VIII and IX, in the year 2000 I think it came out.

And a very strange, unique game with a very stubborn, hard-to-understand battle system.

[laughs]