#Squaresoft
2 article(s)
Bushido Blade at 29: The One-Hit Duel No One Ever Copied
Released in the United States in fall 1997 and in France in February 1998, Squaresoft and Light Weight's Bushido Blade remains the gold standard for samurai dueling on PlayStation. Without health bars or flashy combos, its one-hit-kill system was never adopted wholesale by the industry. Twenty-nine years later, this design void says volumes about what versus fighting chose to forget.
Tobal No. 1 at 30: Far More Than a Final Fantasy VII Demo Bundler
On August 2, 1996, Squaresoft launched Tobal No. 1 in Japan. Thirty years later, DreamFactory's fighting game remains trapped by a reputation that overshadows it: being the vehicle for a Final Fantasy VII demo. This misses the mark on a title that embodies the brutality of the 1990s 3D fighting game market, the commercial power of Akira Toriyama at his peak, and an ambition in game design that few fighting games have matched since.