Over this past week, I’ve been working full time for the… well, I’ve worked full time before in my life, but this is the first time I spent my spring break doing it, and I have been far more strapped for time because of it. How people can manage to get home at 18:00, do some housework and eating until 19:00 and get everything they want done before 23:00 while simultaneously unwinding from work is kind of beyond me. But I guess I’ll just get used to it as, while some people can fight against the 40 hour work week, I’ll likely be in a profession where it approaches 50 during busier points of the year. So yay for that.
In a move that surprised basically everyone, Atlus announced that their 2011 DS title, Radiant Historia, will be remastered in the form of Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology. The game will be a 3Ds title coming out this summer year in Japan, and will feature additional story content, some visual tweaks and improvements, along with voice acting for the main characters. As somebody who enjoyed the original release and has been tempted to replay it over the past few years, Ill likely check this out when Atlus inevitably localizes this game. I guess I won’t be putting my 3DS away just yet, like I thought I would after Dragon Quest VIII.
It would certainly be a nice swansong to my 3DS, as I honestly expect the system to be rapidly abandoned afterwards in favor of the Switch. Speaking of which, GameFreak has begun recruiting for their next Pokemon game for the Switch, basically confirming that the next generation is entering full-scale development, and it will probably be out in holiday 2019. Which is just enough time for me to get over my gripes about the past games and become unreasonably excited for the new ones, as I like to do with Pokemon, and only ever Pokemon.
As part of the developing narrative of China becoming a rising superpower in the video game industry, Sony Interactive Entertainment Shanghai has announced the Playstation “China Hero Project”. An endeavor to harness the talent possessed by many Chinese game developers and use it to create a series of interesting titles that would otherwise never be made, and will likely be associated with the Playstation brand at least to some degree. As always, it is good to see larger game companies supporting smaller teams like this, and the ten titles that are composing this project all look pretty good, with a lot of them having AAA production values.
Oh, and I’m serious about the first sentence there. I seriously expect a lot of AAA game development to shift to China over the next decade or two. I seriously expect to hear about layoffs in America or Canada based game studios as resources shift, former AAA developers starting their own companies, and culture clashes between the American and chinese branches. But hey, my predictions are rarely right unless they are obvious or reiterations of things people smarter than me have said.
Those are the big three stories I had uncovered, but there are a few more things I should bring up. The recently announced Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth Hacker’s Memory was confirmed for a western release in early 2018, as I assumed it would be.
Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, the upcoming remake of the classic Sega game of the same name, will feature a newly added female protagonist, affectionately named Wonder Girl. An unnecessary yet appreciated move from the developers, as I jump at the chance to play as a female character whenever possible for reasons that should be pretty obvious.
Recore: Definitive Edition was found on a German ratings board website, basically confirming its existence. The game did poorly due to a less than stellar reception that was shaded negatively due to launch based technical difficulties, but hopefully this will give the appealing looking game another chance to shine. That, and a chance for the game to come to other PC gaming storefronts, rather than being relegated to the universally disliked Windows 10 Store.