Square

Square at a Glance

You are likely looking at Square if you have spent time with classic Japanese RPGs from the 1990s. This publisher and developer operated from Japan between 1984 and 2016. They released a total of 73 games across their history, though they were more active as a publisher with 57 titles than as a developer with 41. The company saw its highest output during the 1990s when it published 41 games. Activity dropped significantly in later years, with only nine releases in the 2000s and two in the 2010s. Square focused heavily on Role-playing games and Adventure titles. They created 44 RPGs and 33 Adventure games out of their total catalog. Shooter and Arcade games made up smaller portions of their work with seven and five entries respectively. Their platform strategy covered a wide range of hardware. They released the most titles for the Wii and Super Famicom with 18 games each, followed by the PlayStation with 17 releases. Older systems like the Family Computer and its Disk System also saw substantial support with nine and eight games respectively. The quality of their work shows a strong trend toward high ratings. The average IGDB score for their 39 rated titles sits at 77.5 out of 100. Thirteen of these games received great scores above 80, while 24 fell into the good range between 60 and 79. They had only two mixed titles and no poor entries in the dataset. Top-rated releases include Chrono Trigger from 1999 which holds a score of 98.9, and Final Fantasy III from 1994 with a 94.7 rating. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars also achieved an 88.5 score in 1996. Recent activity shows they continued releasing ports or remasters well into the 2000s and 2010s. Final Fantasy IX appeared in February 2016 with a strong 88.1 rating, while Final Fantasy V came out in September 2013. The company merged with Enix in 2003 to form Square Enix. Their American arm was known as Squaresoft before the merger took place. Many of their most successful works came from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s era.

Release Timeline

Rating Distribution