One for sorrow, two for joy

Great artists steal, they say – but game developers are magpies, pinching ideas from a variety of sources and using them as the seeds of something bigger. It’s a rare month indeed that yields a Play section whose formative influences aren’t immediately obvious.

Even in that context, Lost Sphear (p114) is something of an outlier. The second game from Tokyo RPG Factory, a small Square Enix team tasked with revisiting the publisher’s 16bit glory days, the game’s inspirations are essentially its maker’s mission statement. But it takes the idea to new extremes, since the idea of forgotten memories being reborn also forms the basis of Lost Sphear’s narrative.

Elsewhere, OK KO! Let’s Play Heroes (p110) is a work of brain-melting circularity, a tie-in game based on a TV show that has itself been clearly inspired by videogames, a non-interactive animated RPG which has in turn sparked a, well, interactive animated RPG. Yet the game, like the show, handles its obvious inspirations with grace and restraint. The same can’t be said of the likes of Brawlout (p122), a Super Smash Bros clone we’re amazed Nintendo greenlit instead of calling in the lawyers, or Arena Of Valor (p116), a mobile League Of Legends, er, ‘homage’ that’s amassed 200 million users in Asia by simple virtue of being a LOLalike on your smartphone. Those are numbers that not even Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (p106) can match. Brendan Greene’s game, like the rest of this month’s Play crop, would not exist without its inspirations – the novels, films, games and mods that set in motion an astonishing success story. But it is remarkable not for what it borrows from the industry, but what it gives it; a new template from which many games will draw in the months and years to come.