I have probably listened to the soundtracks for each of the Parappa games about eight times now, and find myself constantly humming and thinking of the lyrics whilst I do other things. Also, I ended up making a recording of me trying to sing one of the songs despite the fact that I cannot sing worth a toss and know next to nothing about audio editing. I hope my voice does not sound too atrocious.
Seeing as how E3 is only a few weeks away, it is customary that information begins leaking, and what better to start the process than Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, the crossover RPG that nobody asked for and was first leaked last year. Key art of the game, featuring Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Yoshi all welding laser guns along with four cosplaying Rabbids showed up. Not too long after that, slides from a presentation about the game appeared, explaining that the Mario + Rabbids is built around wacky humor, is roughly 65% turn based combat and 35% exploration, and that the game was indeed intended to be revealed at E3 2017 as a surprise title that would come out as the big Switch exclusive for August. I likely will not be interested in the title, as I find the Rabbids irritating, but at least Nintendo is becoming more open to the idea of other developers using and crossing over with their intellectual properties.
In other Nintendo news, Capcom has announced that they are bringing Monster Hunter XX, an updated version of Monster Hunter Generations that released for the 3DS earlier this year in Japan, to the Nintendo Switch. A move that effectively cements the Switch as the primary Monster Hunter platform for another generation. In response to this, Nintendo’s stock rose by 5.48%, which is a testament to how massively popular the series was and still is in Japan. The game will debut on the system in Japan on August 25th, 2017, while a North American release will likely be announced at E3. Also, it has cross connectivity with the 3DS version, which is nice for those who invested days into the original game.
Keeping with the E3 talk for a second, I was actually quite curious about whether or not Square Enix would announce any release information for their two looming overly ambitious projects in the works, Final Fantasy VII Remake, the only remake to literally have the word Remake in its name, and Kingdom Hearts III. Well, in their 2017 financial report, which also mentioned how the company would be outsourcing more mid-tier games like Nier: Automata (yay for that), they said the two projects would be released sometime in the next three years. Meaning we might see either of the games by 2020 assuming they are not delayed. If this does not cement the fact that Square Enix is still the worst at announcing and then releasing games, I don’t know what will.
That’s all the mainstream news, so now onto the niche stuff I doubt anybody but me cares about. The director of the 2011 game El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, Takeyasu Sawaki, has recently announced the project that has presumably been keeping him busy since that game’s release, an RPG set in the same universe as El Shaddai by the name of The Lost Child. The game is about a magazine writer who opens a suitcase that is actually pandora’s box and finds a demon enslaving gun and later befriends a woman who may or may not be an angel. It sounds bizarre, but I understood that far more than El Shaddai, which I simply remember as a vaguely beautiful and vastly unfulfilling escapade that was also immensely incomprehensible. Maybe this will be a marked improvement, or maybe not. The game is coming out in Japan for PS4 and Vita sometime this year, with no confirmed western release.
Red Entertainment, who I suppose is best known for being a support developer for games like Record of Agarest War and Fire Emblem Awakening, announced that they are working on a Vita adventure game entitled Our World is Ended, because poor grammar is not uncommon in Japanese English names. The game follows the novel premise of a world that is being transformed by an augmented reality game gone wrong and it is up to the developers to save the real world from undergoing a bad end by switching between the digital and real world. It is a neat idea, but considering it is coming out for the Vita, the odds of it being localized do not seem particularly high.
However, a game that was confirmed for a western release is Chaos;Child. Yes, rising all-star localization company PQube recently announced that they are bringing this visual novel to the west in Q3 2017 for PS4 and Vita. For those unaware, this game is part of the Science Adventure series by developer 5pb., a series that also contains the acclaimed Steins;Gate, which I really need to get around to at some point. Chaos;Child specifically serves as a successor to the first entry in this series, Chaos;Head, another game I want to get around to playing, and focuses on similar themes of murder, and reality alteration. Also, a PC release is basically inevitable seeing as how 5pb. already made a PC version.
Speaking of PC ports of niche Japanese games, the ESRB listing for Disgaea 5 Complete was recently updated and it lists that the game is releasing on both the Nintendo Switch and on PC. This is par for the course considering how Nippon Ichi Software has been supporting the platform over the past two years, and seeing as how they were porting Disgaea 5 to a new platform, it would probably be easier for them to do two platforms at once.