I’ve been playing the new Final Fantasy Tactics A2 on the DS quite a bit lately. I’ve logged over 24 hours in the last week, that’s a lot for me on a video game. @hikikomori posted a heads up tonight that Square Enix has released their first iPod game, Song Summoner: The Unsung Heroes [press release].
The premise is pretty cool, you use songs in your iPod’s music library to create stats for your units in the game. Then you play through it with the Tactics mechanics, each unit having unique range and attacks. My favorite dynamic to the game is that you can level up your units outside of the gameplay by listening to your music. Each playcount added for the songs used to create the units will contribute to leveling up their stats. It really adds a new element to playing your music on shuffle, knowing that when certain songs come up, you’re progressing in a game. Check out a video of game play below.
The idea of using your media library to generate the stats of units is not new, from what I know, Monster Rancher was doing it back in 1997. It IS a mechanic that I haven’t seen used in a while, and it lends itself perfectly to the iPod (or any digital media device) environment.
@hikikomori reports that it runs rather slow on the iPod 5G, but I hope that we’ll see a more robust port hit the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch soon. This game is BEGGING for WiFi battling against friends. I’m also extremely excited to see Square Enix publishing games on Apple devices, I think it bodes well for the future of MobileOSX in the casual gaming market.
iTunes Link: Song Summoner
