Recently a Kickstarter to fund two JRPGs from veterans of the JRPG industry was launched with the intention to provide spiritual successors to both the Wild Arms series as well as the Shadow Hearts series. When I told this to someone the other day, their question was “What does being a spiritual successor mean?”. This made me wonder how many other people are unaware of the meaning when a video game is called a spiritual successor. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what a spiritual successor is when it comes to video games.
The first thing we should discuss is what the term “spiritual successor” actually means. A spiritual successor is a work that employs the style, themes or, in the case of video games, gameplay of a prior piece of media while being separate and legally distinct with none of the characters, creatures, world etc. that made up the previous work. There are many reasons why this may be the case and we’ll go through these reasons while also providing examples.
The first reason that I want to discuss is where a creator wants to produce more content of a franchise but does not have the legal right to produce more in the series. One of my favourite video game series of all time, Dark Souls, is a spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls since FromSoftware, the developers behind these games, didn’t own the rights to the Demon’s Souls brand. Since Sony was the IP holder, Bandai Namco and FromSoftware developed the Dark Souls franchise which is a sequel to Demon’s Souls in almost everything but name.
Another interesting reason is where a fan believes that a series isn’t as good as it once was or is making wrong choices and takes it upon themselves to develop something closer in line with earlier entries. An excellent example of this comes from Eric Barone, the developer of Stardew Valley, who was dissatisfied with the direction and quality of the Harvest Moon games and set out to develop a game that was more in line with what made earlier Harvest Moon games so enjoyable.
While these previous reasons are quite fascinating, the next reason a game may be a spiritual successor is surprisingly simple, the creator may just want to make a new IP with similar gameplay. A great recent example of this is Elden Ring which, in many ways, is a Dark Souls game but both Hidetaka Miyazaki and Bandai Namco decided to create a new intellectual property with the help of George R. R. Martin rather than continue the story of Dark Souls. This makes sense as developers may want to stick to gameplay mechanics that they’re familiar with and can improve while also telling a new story with a different world and characters.
There are many reasons that a video game can be developed as a spiritual successor to an earlier game and I’m always interested to see how these pan out. Let me know your thoughts on the meaning of when a video game is a spiritual successor, what other video game examples you can think of, whether you’re aware of any other reasons to produce a spiritual successor, what some of your favourites have been and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.