Hello, Organization Anti-Social Geniuses! I’m Geoffrey Barnes, and I hail from a video game blog (that occasionally dabbles in other forms of entertainment) called Damage Control. Both Angela Moseley (who’s the head of the blog) and I will be contributing an ongoing feature called “The Directional Pad,” a monthly column about interesting video game-related topics skewed towards stories and titles OASG’s readership is interested in. By extension, our tastes match that, so this works out.
New entries of the feature will be posted on the third Saturday of the month, starting today. Since we’re busy adults, Angela and I reserve the right to slightly alter the schedule whenever we see fit. We should be able to stick to it, though, disaster permitting.
The biggest theme in gaming recently has involved dreams coming true. A staggering amount of projects once thought to be nigh-fantasy properties have been revealed in the last month, to the point that you could consider it a harbinger of the apocalypse. It’s an unprecedented moment in gaming, and though they’re all titles I’ve personally blogged about in recent memory, they’re well worth discussing again.
A Guardian Rises
It turns out news and rumors signifying The Last Guardian’s demise were greatly exaggerated, and thank goodness for that. Sony was so excited to announce that Team Ico’s development hell-laden title was still being worked on that they headlined their E3 conference with a lengthy gameplay demo. Its premise hasn’t changed since it was a PlayStation 3 title, originally revealed way back at E3 2009. It involves a boy who was kidnapped under mysterious circumstances, trying to escape from a mysterious island with the help of a mysterious guardian, who is perhaps the last of his mysterious kind. As you could guess, residing within this game are many mysteries. The game’s scenario is also mysteriously reminiscent of Ico’s, if Yorda was a super-useful beast instead of a somewhat-distressed damsel.
Despite its development being halted at one point, The Last Guardian was secretly moved to PlayStation 4 back in 2012. The team, including expatriate director Fumito Ueda, has remained involved with the project since. While the visuals show its PS3 origins, it remains a sight to behold thanks to a unique aesthetic approach endemic to Team Ico’s titles. With the information about its development and the gameplay demo, there’s a good chance it will make the end of 2016 after all. I’ll go ahead and assume they’re planning on showcasing it at upcoming shows and conventions to further solidify that release time frame, including Tokyo Game Show in September.
Return to Sector 7
The second surprise also came from the Sony Conference, whose overall theme was announcing dream projects, though other games not fitting that mantra were present. The Final Fantasy fanbase has desired a Final Fantasy VII remake since seeing the now-primitive Final Fantasy VII PS3 tech demo ten years ago, but now it’s officially happening, first on PlayStation 4. Not many details are known, but Tetsuya Nomura will take the position as director from Yoshinori Kitase, the latter of whom will fulfill the producer role. We also know the creative team, additionally involving scenario writer Kazushige Nojima fulfilling the same role from the original, won’t be changing much. Expect Cloud to cross-dress, but they’re not claiming they won’t change anything.
Square Enix’s staff also admitted this started development before the PC port of Final Fantasy VII of PS4, which they trolled the fanbase with last year, was announced. They just wanted to play with people’s emotions. A…job well done? More info on the remake will come sometime this fall, perhaps alongside the PS4 port’s release. I’m sure they’re targeting 2017 (FFVII’s 20th Anniversary), but whether they’ll make that is another question.
Continuing the Search for Sailors
Shenmue III was another massive surprise from the Sony Conference. Also surprising was how a crowdfunding campaign was introduced on the stage of a hardware manufacturer’s conference. It’s a phenomenon you thought you’d never see (along with games announced in this post), but here we are. Despite that, it’s good to see how a once-thought-impossible sequel due to the amount of money that would be required to fund it is happening at all, and the bonus advertising helped the project hit its initial goal of $2 million in record time. The campaign could have used better planning and management, and had poor stretch goals, but that didn’t stop it from being the most funded game in Kickstarter’s history. Poor Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night only held that record for a little over a month.
Some of its hurdles were unfortunate, like the Kickstarter team not being upfront about the funding initially and the underwhelming stretch goals. Now that it’s over, the concern has switched to how the final game will turn out — beyond the visuals in the test footage. Director Yu Suzuki claimed they actually needed $10 million to make the truly open world title he wants, but they raised nowhere near that through crowdfunding — but could have if its management was better. Maybe he can “wink wink/nudge nudge” Sony into funding the remainder of that, but cross your fingers and pray it will be a worthwhile chapter in the story regardless of what happens.
The Shadowlord Beckons Again (Maybe)
Who in their right mind would have ever thought NieR, of all games, would get a sequel? Despite good word of mouth after people realized its greatness after its unfortunate critical reception, NieR wasn’t the hottest seller. But director Yoko Taro has friends in high places at Square Enix, as recently proven through getting Drakengard 3 green lit for a 2013 release. Now he’s worked that magic again for a successor for PlayStation 4, despite this making no business sense whatsoever. And that’s OK.
This is another early bird announcement from Square Enix, meaning not much is known about it just yet. Heck, it doesn’t even have an actual name, as it’s officially referred to as “New NieR Project” at the moment. Joining Taro’s return to the director’s chair is Keiichi Okabe for the music, who I’m sure was a prerequisite after the last game’s soundtrack was one of the best in a last-gen console game. Also, Akihiko Yoshida is contributing character designs this time, and Platinum Games (!!) is developing. The final game will have three playable characters, including the mysterious woman in the trailer, and the boy quickly shown in an illustration. We haven’t seen the third one yet.
More information will come this fall, where they’ll hopefully show early gameplay. The game was only 10% complete as of one month ago, so don’t expect it to release until 2017.
Enemy Zero
Feel free to criticize Aksys Games for running a (now inactive) teaser site for over three months, but you have to hand it to them for actually delivering. Their site was indeed teasing the third game in the Zero Escape series for 3DS and Vita. The franchise’s future looked hazy since Spike Chunsoft wasn’t impressed with the second game’s Japanese sales, despite OK sales outside the country, and despite the second game ending on a cliffhanger. But support from the fanbase (rallied by Punch Line director Kotaro Uchikoshi) and Aksys helped get the third one green lit, as announced at their Anime Expo panel.
That it was announced in America first should help skew its tone towards the western fanbase, meaning will have more in common with the first game, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, rather than Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward. It will still feature nine characters who need to escape from an unknown captor, but the setting will be moved to a testing site on Mars. Also, character designer Kinu Nishimura is out, with a currently unnamed artist being the replacement, whose work can be seen above (courtesy of Justin Mikos). The game is due for release in summer 2016, so we should see more in the near future.
Re:Dashing
The final game in this long list is Red Ash: The Indelible Legend, another title whose game and anime adaptation launched on Kickstarter. Though it’s not a long-desired sequel, it counts because it’s a spiritual successor to the Mega Man Legends series, one whose third game was infamously announced and cancelled by Capcom after fans begged the company for it a decade after the second game released. We’ll never have resolution to Legends 2’s cliffhanger, but this is the next best thing, especially when it’s in a genre (anime-style/adventure) that’s been sadly neglected in the past decade outside of Solatorobo: The Red Hunter.
Let me clarify: this could have been the next best thing if the crowdfunding campaign was run more efficiently. Instead, it has such a laundry list of issues that I can’t cover them all here. Sorry, but I’m forced to pimp the post full of criticisms I wrote for Damage Control here, and they’ve made further gaffes since then. I hope they get it together, and that the final project turns out well, but this debacle isn’t instilling much confidence.
Meanwhile, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, the spiritual successor to the “Metroidvania” Castlevania titles, partially counts for this feature. We’ve receive plenty of Metroidvania games from indie developers in the last few years, but none have been on par with those aforementioned Castlevania titles from producer Koji Igarashi. Now he, along with developer Inti Creates, is working on a true spiritual successor thanks to receiving exponentially more money than they needed through Kickstarter. The early footage shown looked good, and it would be great if the visual quality meets their target concept artwork. Perhaps they can use an intense cel-shading style a la Arc System Works’ Guilty Gear Xrd.
There, that’s six (and damn near seven) dream projects announced in nearly the last month. That’s so much good news that you’d think someone made a worthy sacrifice to a Greek god. We’ll never see another event like this again, so take it all in.
I also hope you enjoyed the first entry of “The Directional Pad.” Angela will be handling the next one, and she’ll undoubtedly have a different take on this. Look forward to future entries!
