Six years ago, a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics called Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians managed to raise $660,126 on Kickstarter. It achieved that mainly on the promised involvement of Yasumi Matsuno, director and writer of Final Fantasy Tactics, as well as its composer Hitoshi Sakimoto. Two years later developer Playdek put Unsung Story on hold, and in 2017 sold it to Little Orbit.
Little Orbit scrapped the work Playdek had done, went back to the setting and story Matsuno had laid out—which details a 77-year War in a world where songs are magical spells, and heroes must travel back in time from the victory of evil to re-sing history—and started from scratch. We’ll see the results soon, as the first episode of what’s now just called Unsung Story will be out via Steam Early Access this month, and keys are being sent to backers “over the coming days” according to the latest Kickstarter update.
In the Steam description, Little Orbit says Unsung Story will be in Early Access for “About 1.5 years as we work through releasing all the chapters.” The first chapter will showcase the ‘Harmony Songbook’ magic system and be made up of seven missions, giving players access to six jobs: Mercenary, Physician, Guardian, Elementalist, Archer, and Sage. Five more chapters will follow, eventually containing 20 jobs.
Unsung Story goes into Early Access on December 17.