Chaos Rings (video game)

Chaos Rings (ケイオスリングス, Keiosu Ringusu) is a role-playing video game developed by Media.Vision and published by Square Enix.

It was released worldwide in 2010 as an exclusive title for iOS,[1][2] but it was later ported to the Android, Windows Phone 7, and PlayStation Vita.

Produced by Takehiro Ando, characters were designed by Yusuke Naora, the art director of Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and X among other successful titles.

Chaos Rings begins as a dungeon crawl where navigation and battles are done as a two-person party that is chosen prior to gameplay.

Chaos Rings takes place in a mysterious fictional location known as the Ark Arena that holds many dungeons.

Dungeons of the Ark Arena consist of mixed indoor and outdoor environments with mid-dungeon and ending boss battles.

It is a place to train chosen couples from different parallel time spaces, eventually joining forces in order to defeat the Qualia.

The Ark is designed to return to 10,000 years in the past when a couple is chosen as worthy, to germinate a new, genetically superior race.

The characters consist of five couples: Garrick and Alto, Escher and Musiea, Olgar and Vahti, Eluca and Zhamo, and Ayuta and Mana.

In Chaos Rings four couples compete in the ominously named Ark Arena (one extra pair, Garrick and Alto, voiced by Shin-ichiro Miki and Asami Seto respectively, are eliminated early on in all four storylines and cannot be selected for play).

The Agent states that those who do not follow the rules shall be killed, and a grim reaper-like monster comes and his body dissipates in a cloud of purple mist.

They have been chosen because of their superior DNA to start a new human race strong enough to defeat a monstrous being called the Qualia.

If the player saves after the credits and reloads the game, the dungeon door will have a new option named 'Bereshith Road' where a whole new story unwinds.

With their limited strength, the four couples once again lose hope, until Theia tells them to see the miracle they created for their resistance to destruction.

With a burst of light, hundreds of starships, supposedly crewed by the parallel timespace's denizens, appears and completely annihilate the Qualia.

According to one of the game's assistant producers, Hiroaki Iwano, the soundtrack was released primarily due to popular demand.

[citation needed] The iPhone and iPad versions received "universal acclaim" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.