Final Fantasy Tactics Director's Next Game Put on Backburner

Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians was successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2014, with a release scheduled for summer 2015. That never happened, and now it sounds like the game, from Final Fantasy Tactics director Yasumi Matsuno and developer Playdek, is facing another serious-sounding setback.

In an update to the game's Kickstarter page, Playdek started off by apologizing for the multi-month gap between its latest updates to fans about the status of the game. Before now, Playdek hadn't provided an update on Kickstarter since October 2015.

"Our continued intention is to make a great game, and get Unsung Story to development completion and released to you and the gaming public," the developer said. "During the last few months we have had some development setbacks that are affecting our timeline and progress on the game, while also affecting what we need to do in the immediate future as a company."

Since October, a few "key staff" from the Unsung Story team left the studio, which "had an impact" on the progress Playdek could make on the game, as well as the studio's overall focus. Now, though Playdek does intend to eventually release Unsung Story, it has been put on the back burner as the studio works on other projects.

"We now have one internal team capable of working on a single project, and for the financial strength of the company, we need to focus on a few products in the near term that have the ability to get to a retail release before Unsung Story is able to," Playdek said. "While this is a difficult choice to make, it is one we need to do for the ongoing financial health of the company."

Playdek added that it will explore the possibility of working with an outside developer to help with Unsung Story, though the studio added that "we aren't assured this will come to fruition."

The overall development goals for Unsung Story remain in place, but the game's release date is being pushed out. There is no word yet on a new release window, or even a projection of a release window.

Unsung Story's release date "will be affected by the ability and timing of any outside support, as well as when the single internal team is able to get back onto Unsung development, and when we do know, we will update you all," Playdek said.

"With the loss of that staff, and without having any new progress to share since the last update, we felt we needed to sort through what options and directions we had available before we updated you on the current status, but again do apologize for the lack of recent updates. We will get back to you as soon as we can with any progress and status update. Thanks."

Unsung Story successfully raised more than $660,000 from close to 16,000 backers. It is billed as a spiritual successor to Matsuno's line of tactical RPGs, reimagining the genre with "complex and rich game worlds" as well as "inspiring class-based tactics gameplay."

We'll have more details on Unsung Story as they're made available.