Square had a legendary decade in the 90s. From late NES titles to the Super Nintendo and finally to the PS1. If one asked fans, most would say that this was the golden era of the company for hardcore RPGs. It’s not just because the Final Fantasy series was killing it either.
Square thought outside the box and created numerous series all with differing amounts of success like Chrono Trigger, Parasite Eve, Vagrant Story, and so on. What about the games that never released on the PS1 specifically outside of Japan? These ten entries are the best of the rest as it were.
10 Front Mission 2
This is one of many games in this series that never came to the West. The first one to do it was Front Mission 3, also on PS1. Anyway, for those that missed this game and any other core titles in this franchise, Front Mission is all about mech based tactics. It’s like Final Fantasy Tactics but with a lot of mech customization. It might be the best non-Gundam, Gundam game out there. There is a fan patch out there although not complete.
9 Front Mission Alternative
Another Front Mission game on PS1 is this spinoff. Instead of grid based tactics, players instead control a platoon of mechs as if it were an RTS.
Players won’t be building bases like in StarCraft though. The similarity comes in with the real time movement. Click on soldiers, command their movements, walk across vast maps, and so forth. It seemed like a promising idea for this typical RPG series.
8 Chocobo No Fushigi Na Dungeon
This is the first Chocobo dungeon game in the wider Mystery Dungeon franchise that started on the Super Nintendo. This, and the others, are roguelike dungeon crawlers. This is a bit more kid friendly as the difficulty isn’t as high as other entries. Plus it has an adorable Chocobo as the mascot with equally cute brightly colored sprites. The West did receive its sequel.
7 Racing Lagoon
This was a Square published and developed racing game. Racing games may not be as synonymous with Square as RPGs are but one may be surprise to find out they have actually made and or published a lot. Racing games used to be more prevalent so much so that almost every company had one if not several. This is not the best racer on PS1, but it is still serviceable. A better racing game they made was Chocobo Racing, just as a secondary recommendation.
6 Digical League
Another sports focused genre that used to be bigger was baseball. That’s what Digical League is, but a super deformed, cute version of the sport. It was actually developed under another branch of Square called Aques. It’s just a rearrangement of Square with the “r” missing and was seemingly used primarily for sports titles like this. Anyway, for a more family friendly baseball game, this should appeal to the kids.
5 Power Stakes 2
This is another Aques title and the name is a bit hard to guess as to what it is without any pictures. It’s a horse racing game. This genre was never popular in the West.
A few games from other developers made it out of Japan but to fairly poor results like Game Freak’s Pocket Card Jockey on 3DS. It reviewed well, but just didn’t have the staying capacity unlike Japan where this genre was and still is beyond huge.
4 Soukaigi
Soukaigi was published by Square while Yuke’s developed it. The game is set in a feudal era fantasy version of Japan and is an action RPG. This was early in the developer’s career, but some may recognize Yuke’s as the team behind many of the WWE and WWF titles up until 2018. Why this never came over is a mystery although Japanese centric games were viewed as harder to sell at this point across all types of media so that’s a good a guess as any.
3 Cyber Org
Cyber Org was developed by FuzzBox, a hard to find developer online, and just published by Square for the PS1 in 1999. It is essentially a brawler with very easy to learn controls. That is to say mashing one button will make victories easy. The curious thing about this game is the fact that most of the Cyber Org’s text and dialogue is in English. Even if there is no official release, it is fairly easily to pick up and play if one were to import it.
2 Tobal 2
Tobal No. 1, the actual name, was big on the PS1 for one essential reason. The game contained a demo of Final Fantasy VII. That said the game itself was received fairly positively at the time. Even so the sequel, released a year later in 1997 in Japan, did not come over. However, fans have mostly translated the game into a playable state for English players curious to get their hands on this fighter.
1 iS: internal section
While not a genre Square delved into that much, iS: internal section is a shooter. Specifically it is a tube shooter with a big emphasis on the music. The best modern game to liken it to might be Thumper although that isn’t exactly the same. Either way for shooter fans or music enthusiasts, this is actually pretty easy to navigate as there isn’t much text to get in the way. It was developed by positron and released in 1999.
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