‘Final Fantasy Origin’ is a Souls-like ‘Final Fantasy’ game coming from Team Ninja. Well then!

Ain’t this a wild fucking pivot, no? Team Ninja is making themselves a Final Fantasy game with gameplay similar to that of their Nioh titles. The motherfucker is called Final Fantasy Origin, and it’s going to be a PS5 exclusive. All in all, I ain’t never fucked with Souls games, or Nioh. But I gotta support getting weird with an established franchise.

Fan Byte:

Over the weekend, a number of rumors have swirled about possible E3 announcements, as traditionally happens in the weeks leading up to the industry tradeshow. In particular, a rumor seemed to swirl around two websites, Reddit and gaming forum Resetera, about a new Final Fantasy spinoff that Square Enix is announcing this year.

The rumor states that Square Enix is working with Team Ninja, Koei Tecmo’s in-house development team behind games like Ninja Gaiden, Nioh, and perhaps most relevantly the latest entry in the Final Fantasy fighting game series Dissidia NT. The posted rumors go on further by assigning the game a genre, something akin to Nioh or the Souls games, and suggesting it takes place somewhere in or adjacent to the world of the first Final Fantasy game on the NES.

Our sources have corroborated this rumor and suggest the name of the game is Final Fantasy Origin.

The game, which appears to be exclusive to PlayStation 5 with a PC release further down the road, will be one of Square Enix’s tentpoles at their upcoming E3 show. For whatever reason, several large chunks of the undated June show have leaked out, including the Final Fantasy Origin’s logo and demo plans. Square Enix hopes to release an alpha demo this summer, not unlike Nioh’s public alphas, to solicit feedback from the audience while the game is still in a fairly early state. This demo, like several other major demos, has its own title of “Stranger in Paradise.”

Expect the title to play similar to Nioh or other games in the genre, but to be more accessible for a wider audience. Fanbyte’s sources indicated that the game is largely developed by the same team behind Dissidia NT, but that Team Ninja’s nearly-200 person studio involves a lot of shifting around and that there aren’t hard borders on the different teams these days. The Nioh DNA in the game is likely the result of people core to the first two games’ development being involved in Final Fantasy Origin.

It’s worth mentioning that anything could change before the final show, especially as more things leak out in the weeks ahead of E3, so this should not be misconstrued as a guarantee that the game will appear there. Still, production and marketing appear to be gearing up for a full swing on the title soon, so it should not be too long until we hear about it.