I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying that Final Fantasy just isn’t what it used to be. That stretch on the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 from 7 through X-2 was full of great games that people still love and still want to play. Given the desire for an old school JRPG, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the growing indie segment of the market is coming to the rescue.

Last week, the crowd funding campaign for TBT: The Black Tower started. If you’re a fan of the old-school J-RPGs like the PS1-era Final Fantasy games and Xenogears, a group of French developers need your money to make this homage to the great JRPGs happen.

To go through the whole plan that Simon Mesnard and team are working on for TBT would take a very long while since their plan is pretty in-depth. If you want the whole story, you should check out their IndieGoGo page. However, I will go through the Coles’ Notes version of things.

The story of the game is based on Mesnard’s self-published novel “La Tour de l’Espace” (The Tower in Space). It follows the story of the son of an astronaut who 21 years earlier found a black cube floating in space and disappeared. The Cube is sent to dying planets to save the history and knowledge of the planet. Whether the Cube makes an appearance hasn’t been explicitly said but I get the feeling that it might. If I recall correctly, dying planets show up in RPGs fairly regularly.

TBT’s gameplay is very much based on the JRPGs of the PS1 era, including the “exploration, long story, quests, mini-games and turn-based battles.” There will also be random encounters because you can’t have a JRPG-inspired games without random encounters regardless of how much you may hate them since they only seem to occur in such a way as they soften you up for a tough fight.

The combat will be turn-based but has a twist on the typical three or four-person party you take into battle. You have three attackers and three supporters in each battle. The attackers handle the offense while the supporters can heal the attackers and may be able to otherwise run interference for the attackers on the enemies. You also have your standard attack, defend, skills, summon and items commands to use in battle.

TBT: The Black Tower requires €328,440 for the fundraising campaign to be successful. In US dollars, that comes out to about $430,000. Stretch goals are largely focused around adding more content and more polish to the game. If you want to play TBT on a console, the campaign will need to hit the €400k threshold. At €500k, the team will add translations into Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Russian and Japanese. And voices will be added if the €600,000 level is reached.

Check out TBT: The Black Tower on IndieGoGo. Get TBT: The Black Tower on Steam with Greenlight.