This is the best summary I could come up with:

Decades later, after the industry chased higher fidelity graphics and approached the look of big-budget movies and TV, Boulanger and other international studios are spinning up new titles inspired by the golden era of 90s Japanese role-playing games — and audiences are responding to them.

“One thing that we found recently is that as graphics get better and better, and as characters become more realistic and more photo-real, is that the combination of that realism with the very unreal sense of turn-based commands doesn’t really fit together,” said Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida in a past interview.

SacriFire, developed by Pixelated Milk and inspired by the HD-2D style popularized by Square Enix’s Octopath Traveler series, combines retro character sprites and textures with polygonal environments and HD effects.

While it seems like Final Fantasy will continue to prioritize real-time action for the foreseeable future, publisher Square Enix also returned to older turn-based styles with recent franchises like the aforementioned Octopath Traveler.

But even when such established games cast a long shadow, SacriFire developer Łojewski sees an opportunity for indie studios to stand out in a RPG tradition pioneered by Japanese titans.

“With the bigger companies pivoting towards the creation of huge, open-ended worlds, it creates a vacuum for games with a more ‘standard’ progression, smaller but tightly designed maps, and traditional approaches to combat,” Łojewski explains.

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