Picture this: a moody, broody action RPG set in an alt-history version of 19th-century Paris, where the City of Light is controlled by vampires. You step into the shoes of an intrepid vampire hunter, armed with a deadly blade and supernatural powers, tasked with annihilating a gaggle of guys in gold-buttoned jackets and Napoleon hats — and a fair share of lingerie-clad mademoiselles.
Nope, this isn’t a trailer you missed from Gamescom last month. It’s actually a Square Enix game called Bloodmasque, which was released for Apple devices with touch controls back in 2013. I’d quite literally never heard of this game until I was doing research for a recent conversation with Kazutoyo Maehiro, game director of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. Naturally, I had to ask about it.
“When it comes to my moment with Bloodmasque, I was involved in designing the scenario. It was a really out there story, where you’re basically trying to defeat a vampire that’s taking over the world. It was originally released for smartphones, and now it’s no longer in service. But as for the gameplay itself, I do feel it was a very fun game. You basically swipe at the enemies [with your finger] in order to defeat them,” Maehiro explained.
The touch control stuff may not have aged well, but there’s some undeniably cool elements happening in this trailer. And there’s something about the action combat here that really gives off a proto-Final Fantasy 16 vibe — another game Maehiro worked on. Turns out, a whole lot of Bloodmasque’s intriguing worldbuilding is directly attributable to him.
“At the time, I actually wrote really extensively for this. I wrote about 3,000 years worth of Iore for that game. So yeah, this is the first time I heard that name in such a long time — I basically just remembered it myself. But now that I’m remembering it, I do feel it’s a game that would maybe be interesting to launch, even in this day and age,” he adds. “The intention for that game, we really wanted to be able to make it so you can have the story take place at any point in time, from a chronological perspective. So yeah, I had depicted or written out the story of the history of these vampires throughout a very long course of time, ultimately into outer space.”
A Square Enix game about vampires in outer space? And no one played it? We truly do live in a cursed timeline.
