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A new Wizardry Variants Daphne collaboration event has been announced for this summer, in which the dungeon RPG will team up with the long-running MMORPG Final Fantasy XI.
If you are a fan of classic JRPGs, you'll likely already know that the Wizardry and Final Fantasy series have long been linked, thanks to the influence the former had on the developers of the latter. Speaking in the past about the influence of Wizardry, Akitoshi Kawazu, a member of the original Final Fantasy team, for instance, told the video game website 1UP in 2012, "We were all big fans of Wizardry and Ultima back then," stating that "Even though Dragon Quest had come out, in our minds, there still wasn’t anything quite comparable to Ultima or Wizardry" and "That's the kind of game that Sakaguchi and Hiromichi Tanaka and I were interested in."
Meanwhile, Hironobu Sakaguchi, the series creator, has corroborated this in other interviews, calling the Apple II his "gateway to the games industry" and consistently acknowledging the impact Wizardry had on him, noting that it had an undeniable influence on Final Fantasy's turn-based battles.
As a result, it seems only natural for the two classic RPG series to cross paths in this way, and that now appears to be happening, judging by the press release published this morning by Drecom, the current owners of the domestic and global trademarks for Wizardry.
Just in case you haven't been keeping up with the modern entries in the Wizardry series, Wizardry Variants Daphne is a 3D Dungeon crawler, with artwork and designs from the Japanese manga artist Yusuke Kozaki, the former Nintendo Power illustrator and video game cover artist Katsuya Terada, and music from Hitoshi Sakimoto (known for his work on Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII). It is available on iOS, Android, and PC (via Steam) and includes in-game purchases and loot boxes (which we imagine will put off many of our readers, which is why we're trying to be forthcoming by mentioning them here, to let you make your own mind up about whether or not you want to check it out).
Final Fantasy XI, on the other hand, is an RPG released in Japan in May 2002, originally for the PS2, which came to North America in 2003 and Europe in 2004, and is still available to play on PC today.
Sadly, the press release doesn't give much information about what form this collaboration will take, only that more news is set to be "announced in subsequent updates." We'll try to keep you posted if we hear more.