Chaos Rings 3 Announced

Enter the Wayback Machine with me to a time when Square Enix actually developed new mobile games instead of just publishing Eidos jams and various ports/remakes. One game from that era was Chaos Rings, a fully voiced, 3D RPG for iOS …

Enter the Wayback Machine with me to a time when Square Enix actually developed new mobile games instead of just publishing Eidos jams and various ports/remakes.

One game from that era was Chaos Rings, a fully voiced, 3D RPG for iOS at a premium price. Its characters were designed by the art director of Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and X, giving it one hell of a pedigree (depending on which era of Final Fantasy you enjoy). The game got a prequel and a sequel, but for a time there hasn’t been any news on the series progressing further.

Well, it seems there will be a Chaos Rings 3 – in Japan, at least.

Japanese gaming mag Famitsu reports that Chaos Ring 3 is headed to iOS and Android, as well as PlayStation Vita – a first for the series. They don’t mention a North American release, but given that the past three games crossed the water it wouldn’t be a surprise. The Vita version – which is actually a collection of each game – is a little less certain to arrive. Who can tell these days?

We can expect the games to solicit a sizable price compared to most mobile games, however. This is a Square Enix joint, after all, and the Chaos Rings games were always high production affairs. This also seems to be a separate entity from Chaos Rings Sigma, the free-to-play online game announced last year.

It makes a lot of sense for the company to revive the old series for that very reason. Japanese gamers have all but abandoned dedicated hardware in favor of phones, and moving the traditional kind of Square game to the platform is more obvious than ever. We’ll see if that translates to Western success if the Chaos Rings 3 ever makes it here.

[NeoGAF via TouchArcade]

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Steven Strom

Steven "The Future of Games Journalism" Strom plays entirely too much Dota 2. He sometimes plays games when he's not too busy writing about them and their place in our culture, and thinks maybe they're not just a fad after all.