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In 1990, Enix would publish ActRaiser, a game combining strategy and action platforming, developed by a newly-formed team made up of former members of Falcom's sound team named Quintet. Quintet would go on to produce six more games with Enix within the decade, including a sequel to ActRaiser, Robotrek and The Illusion of Time (aka Illusion of Gaia). Quintet would slowly partner up with other parties in their later period, before becoming presumably defunct in 2008. 2021 saw a release of a remake of ActRaiser published by Square Enix, leading many to believe that Square Enix has at least some of the rights to Quintet's back catalogue.
Another dev team with a similar history would show up late in the SNES's life cycle. Made up of members of Wolfteam, a studio formerly owned by Telenet Japan (where they had the created, among other titles, the first game in the Valis series) and having just released Tales of Phantasia for the SNES with Namco, the newly-founded tri-Ace would release Star Ocean in 1996, which received a sequel a few years later on the PlayStation, where they also published the first entry to the Valkyrie Profile series. After the merger with competitor Square(soft) in 2003, both series were still retained on the company's game roster and received two new entries this year in the form of Valkyrie Elysium and Star Ocean: The Divine Force, though only the latter would be made by tri-Ace themselves, who had been purchased by mobile gaming company Nepro in 2015.
Throughout the 1990s, Enix would work together with various other companies, such as Almanic/Givro (E.V.O. Search for Eden, Wonder Project J), Tose (Dragon Quest Monsters) and Produce (The 7th Saga), as well as handle publishing duties in the West for Japanese companies (notably, the first entry in the Ogre series by Quest Corp. was localized for America by Enix) and vice versa (including the Sega Saturn and PlayStation versions of Riven and the PlayStation version of Tomb Raider III). They would also, in 1993, create their own manga imprint named Gangan Comics, which, across many magazines, publishes titles such as Kingdom Hearts, High Score Girl, My Dress-Up Darling, Inu x Boku SS, The Mandalorian (Yes. The Mandalorian has a manga adaptation) and Fullmetal Alchemist.
The end of the 90s would spell trouble for Enix, as various titles such as Dragon Quest VII (developed by Heartbeat, who had taken over development duties from Chunsoft starting with Dragon Quest VI) and Dragon Quest Monsters II experienced delays. Especially the release of DQ VII being delayed from 1999 to 2000 had cut into the company's profit-to-sales ratio for FY99 and ended up hurting Enix's evaluation on the stock market. In 2000, Enix would begin talks with former competitor Square Co. Ltd about merging the companies, which was delayed by the financial losses of Square's first foray into film, 2001's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Two years later, following the success of titles such as Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy X, as well as a capital injection by Sony, the merger could go through and both companies became Square Enix (officially: Square Enix Holdings) on April 1, 2003. Two days prior, Enix would release the last game under that name, Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart for the GameBoy Advance.
After the merger, Square Enix would continue production of some of Enix's most notable series, including Dragon Quest, Star Ocean, and Valkyrie Profile. Square Enix would also bring many of these games to Europe for the first time by way of a series of remakes on the PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS, as well as full localization of games such as Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria and Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King.
So, why this thread?
Well, the short answer is that I feel Enix is underappreciated. They were key players in shaping the Japanese game industry at the tail end of the 1980s and published a catalogue of rather intriguing games throughout the 1990s, but their praise seems to go largely unsung. Part of this may be on language barriers, as well as many of their games seeing releases in the West rather irregularly compared to Squaresoft's, part of it may be the rather nasty toxicity spewed about them in the late 2000s, as Square Enix was slowly struggling and games like Final Fantasy XII and XIII received mixed-to-negative receptions with the common wisdom (falsely!) proclaiming that without The Spirits Within, the merger wouldn't have happened (this is wrong, talks of the merger began in 2000, TSW became a box-office flop in 2001) and that "Enix [had] ruined Squaresoft" (despite the majority of those working on both titles being mainly staff who had been with Square since the mid-1990s, including directors Hiroyuki Ito (XII) and Motomu Toriyama (XIII) and Enix, as a result, seemingly being written off as an also-ran who tried to capitalize on Squaresoft's popularity, a narrative so bone-headedly wrong and misinformed that it borders on conspiratorial thought.
It's also worth noting that Enix was one of the Japanese publishers still willing to work with Nintendo during the 5th gen. While their output was more focussed on the PlayStation, which was far more popular in Japan, they took over publishing duty for Wonder Project J2 by Givro (which was the then-new name of Almanic) as well as Treasure's Mischief Makers. They also poured support into the GameBoy, mainly by way of ports of the first three Dragon Quest games as well as a new spin-off series created specifically for the GameBoy called Dragon Quest Monsters, whereas Squaresoft cut ties with Nintendo so hard, they had decided to support Bandai's WonderSwan portable console instead.
How do you feel about Enix in general? Should Square Enix make more of an effort to bring back some of the company's 90s catalogue? And, if you've played any of Enix's games, which is your favourite?
Mine is Terranigma, but it's SUUUUPER closely tied with Valkyrie Profile.
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