Square Enix Is Shutting Down Tokyo RPG Factory

Oninaki young girl screenshot

Tokyo RPG Factory, a small team within Square Enix that’s developed interesting and experimental RPGs on a limited budget, is unfortunately no more, as it’s been announced that the team will be absorbed into its parent company.

Square Enix revealed it would be absorbing Tokyo RPG Factory today, almost five years after the studio released its last game, Oninaki, on Nintendo Switch, PS4, and PC. As reported by Gematsu, Square Enix will inherit all the assets and liabilities of Tokyo RPG Factory, with the latter no longer existing as a legal entity.

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Tokyo RPG Factory was founded in 2014 after Yosuke Matsuda was made president of Square Enix the year prior. The company went on to develop smaller titles with a big focus on nostalgia and experimentation, resulting in games like I Am Setsuna, Lost Sphear, and Oninaki. It was said to be developing a fourth game, but after Matsuda stepped down as Square Enix president last year, it seems like the future was not bright for the small studio.

Its games were praised for their anime-style visuals and inventive game mechanics, but often criticized for lacking in gameplay execution. Oninaki in particular, while certainly inventive, was panned by critics, receiving an aggregate score of 69/100 on review score aggregator website Metacritic.

It’s not currently known if Tokyo RPG Factory’s staff will be staying on within other departments of Square Enix, but most of the staff who worked on its games were volunteers from within the company, so it’s expected most, if not all, will stay.

Square Enix has been focusing much more on its bigger franchises and IPs lately, with multiple releases in series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy — the latter of which having three major games in development concurrently in Final Fantasy 14, Final Fantasy 16, and Final Fantasy 7 Remake. That’s not to say it’s stayed entirely away from smaller games, as we’ve seen with Paranormasight, Star Ocean, and SaGa, but there’s definitely the sense that triple-A games are the focus at Square.

The company recently announced that it was bringing Dragon Quest Builders to PC after 8 years, with the game having previously launched on PS4 all the way back in 2016.

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