Project Phoenix, the Kickstarter JRPG

Who is making it

The studio is Creative Intelligence Arts. Hiroaki Yura is the director and producer. The scenario credit on the campaign is Yoko Enoki. Art credits include Kiyoshi Arai and GONTARO. The music names on the 2013 campaign are Nobuo Uematsu, Tomoki Miyoshi, and Kevin Penkin.

VGC’s 2026 interview describes a team of more than 30 people at Area 35, with Uematsu still involved and new names including Erasmus Brosdau, Michael Chu, Takuya Suzuki, Hisao Takano, and Ray Hsu. I treat that roster as the interview’s account of the 2026 team.

Azuregard and the story

The world is called Azuregard. The protagonist is an amnesiac angel. The 2013 campaign calls that character Ruffles. Later wiki pages call the same character Rafel. He arrives in a conflict among orc migration, a human empire, and elves watching an omen star, and travels with Marcus, Sylrianah, and Zarum. Gorek Greyhelm is also a named character, but he is not in the 2013 “four heroes” set.

The character table, including which claims rest on a single wiki page, is on the JRPG characters page. This page stays on the game as a whole.

How it was described to play

The campaign and the Fandom combat pages describe three modes: exploration, combat, and character advancement. Combat is point-and-click squad strategy with terrain, fog of war, and threat management. The pitch talks about roughly ten controllable characters on the field. Stances named as still under consideration in 2013 were Aggressive, Defensive, and Stealth. The four announced classes were Templar, Paladin, Pathfinder, and Battle Mage.

Those details come from the 2013 pitch and the wiki’s combat write-up. The 2026 prototype video is about a minute and a half. I do not treat it as a full rules document.

Platforms

Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, iOS, and Android appear on the Kickstarter and Wikipedia lists. PlayStation 5 and Xbox do not. There is no public statement that says “we cancelled consoles.” The accurate line is that the published list does not include them, and nothing is for sale on any of those platforms yet.

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