Is it surprising that Squre Enix would be headlining a game like Gyromancer?”
As someone who has spent far too much time with games like “Peggle,” “Bejewled” and “Puzzle Quest,” the prospect of “Gyromancer” shatters my very foundation. Developed as a joint between PopCap Games and Square Enix, it’s basically “Bejewled Twist” with RPG elements. Just as in “Twist,” players rotate groups of four icons to create matches, earn experience and defeat dastardly monsters. The similarities to “Puzzle Quest” are hard to ignore, but given that “Puzzle Quest” had a lot of similarities with “Bejewled,” it’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg kind of situation…and one that really doesn’t affect the fun quotient of either product. The ability to collect and summon monsters to do your bidding is an expansion of what “PQ” was doing, and there’s more of a per-level challenge, as certain objectives must be met for each battle (rather than simply to defeat the enemy). Those fiending for this sort of game probably have a while to wait (looking more and more like a 2010 release), but th
Jason Kapalka, PopCap’s co-founder and chief creative officer, says he was half-joking when he pitched a game concept that combined Final Fantasy’s role-playing action and Bejeweled’s addictive casual gameplay to Square Enix. The folks at PopCap were fans of another RPG-Bejeweled hybrid, Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords. In the early stages of brainstorming the concept that would eventually become Gyromancer, they figured it would be “karmically neutral” for PopCap to try making a similar title. PopCap and Square Enix last week announced their collaboration on Gyromancer, a puzzle/RPG hybrid for Xbox 360 and PC the two companies are developing. Kapalka told Wired.com that he brought up the hybrid idea as a goof while meeting with Square Enix, which publishes some of PopCap game’s in Japan. But once he mentioned “Final Fantasy Bejeweled,” the idea began to gather momentum: Yuichi Murasawa, designer of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and
