The DioField Chronicle was inspired by League of Legends, not Final Fantasy Tactics

digitaltrends.com:

The DioField Chronicle, a new IP developed by Lancarse and published by Square Enix, is the latest in a growing trend of tactical RPG games. While plenty of those kinds of games have come out this year already (including Triangle Strategy, Relayer, and Digimon Survive). The DioField Chronicle intends to put its own spin on the genre and stand out in a crowded field.

To get a sense of how The DioField Chronicle is setting itself apart, I spoke to Lancarse development director and battle designer Fukui Hirofumi, Square Enix producer Shigeyuki Hirata, and art director Kumagai Takahiro. The team members discussed The DioField Chronicle’s gameplay influences, art direction, and how they created a newcomer-friendly strategy game in a daunting genre.

The DioField Chronicle was first revealed during PlayStation’s State of Play presentation in March. When the game’s reveal trailer premiered, viewers thought it could be a new Final Fantasy Tactics game. Then, at the end of the trailer, the game’s title card appeared, showing that it was instead a new IP entirely.

Hirata says it was a surprise that the audience perceived the game as a potential new Final Fantasy Tactics game. The team is aware that the game is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, and that The DioField Chronicle would inevitably be compared to some of its predecessors in the strategy RPG genre. However, Final Fantasy Tactics wasn’t actually as big of an influence on The DioField Chronicle.

“We weren’t directly conscious of the title when developing the game,” Hirata tells Digital Trends. The DioField Chronicle has shades of real-time strategy (RTS) game influences, but its gameplay was actually more inspired by MOBA titles such as League of Legends. MOBA games (like