Operation Backlog Completion 2025

Suikoden Remasters Delayed Out of 2023

 Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Aug 302023
 

With TGS approaching in less than a month, it might have occurred to you that it’s been a long time since we heard anything about the Suikoden I & II HD Remaster announced at TGS 2022.

Indeed, despite it being announced with a 2023 release window, we’ve heard next to nothing since then.

We finally have an update now, although it’s unfortunately a delay. Konami announced that additional time is needed to work on the Suikoden remasters, so they won’t be out this year after all.

I was surprised when I read that, because a year since the announcement already felt like a long time for a remaster.

However, since they were not only remastering the graphics but also making improvements to the gameplay and translation, I can see how it might take longer than a more straightforward remaster. Hopefully this delay means the eventual release of Suikoden I & II HD Remaster will be a high-quality product.

It’s a bit ironic, though, that this follows the news from a month ago that Eiyuden Chronicle was also delayed to 2024. Suikoden and its spiritual successor just can’t be separated, it seems.

Like I said in my reaction to the Eiyuden Chronicles news, this is fine with me. I have a lot of games in my backlog to play while I wait, after all.

Speaking of which, the Suikoden announcements were a welcome surprise at TGS last year. Here’s hoping we have many new exciting announcements on the way this year!

Why is Ace Attorney 7 Taking So Long?

 Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Aug 282023
 

If you’ve seen my recent Ace Attorney posts, you know I’m very optimistic about Ace Attorney’s future.

To me, Ace Attorney 7 is a matter of when, not if.

For that matter, I even think we have a chance of seeing an Investigations Duology collection, especially given the recent attention it’s received.

But optimism still leaves us with one big question: where is Ace Attorney 7?

The seventh mainline game has been rumored since 2017, and here we are six years later still waiting for a shred of actual news. As I mentioned in my post about Ace Attorney’s future, the data breach leaks that revealed The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and tentative plans for the Apollo Justice Trilogy also said Ace Attorney 7 was in development.

According to that roadmap, Great Ace Attorney staff would be shifted to the in-development Ace Attorney 7 after finishing work on Chronicles, with Chronicles planned for Q1 2021 release followed by a projected Ace Attorney 7 release in Q3 2021. Chronicles released later than its projected window, but Ace Attorney 7 has come nowhere close. This has led to a lot of speculation about what exactly happened to it, and I think there are three main possibilities.

Possibility #1: The delay is strategic

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles game out at the end of July 2021 and blew past sales expectations. With Chronicles selling so well, the last thing they’d want to do is release another Ace Attorney game too soon and risk cannibalizing sales – and it might have spurred them to release a collection of games 4-6 before Ace Attorney 7 after all.

Chronicles came out in mid 2021, and then they used Ace Attorney’s success to boost marketing of the Ghost Trick remaster in mid 2023, while preparing the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy for early 2024.

If this possibility is correct, it would mean that Ace Attorney 7 is going well or even finished, but the announcement was withheld to space out releases and bridge the gap for new fans by releasing the Apollo Justice Trilogy first. We’d probably get an announcement later in 2024 or the next year in that case.

Possibility #2: It was cancelled

The worst possibility, of course, is that Ace Attorney 7 was cancelled. Many fans seem to subscribe to this theory, believing the pandemic, Yamazaki’s departure from Capcom in 2020, or general development troubles led to Ace Attorney 7 being scrapped completely.

Obviously, since I’m an Ace Attorney optimist, I don’t believe this – or at the very least, I believe Capcom would un-cancel it after seeing the success of Chronicles. It is a possibility worth keeping in mind, though, because that would account for such a big delay. In this scenario, the Apollo Justice Trilogy could be seen as either a way to fill the gap while restarting development or an alternative release.

Let’s hope it wasn’t cancelled, though.

Possibility #3: It was rebooted or revamped

While this might sound very close to the previous possibility, this is actually the one I think is the most optimistic: the possibility that the in-development Ace Attorney 7 was playing it safe, but the success of Chronicles convinced them to overhaul the project to make it a more ambitious game.

For example, they could have seen how the two Great Ace Attorney games telling a single story allowed for its story and world to be built up so well and decided to give Ace Attorney 7 more than the usual 5 cases. Or they could have realized Ace Attorney doesn’t need Phoenix as the lead character to be a success (the recent poll focusing on the Ace Attorney characters with their own games fits in with that) and retooled Ace Attorney 7 to have a different lead.

This possibility would mean Ace Attorney 7 is potentially still a ways off, with the Apollo Justice Trilogy filling the gap in the meantime, but it could be the best-case scenario. I’d like to see what they could do if they were willing to take some risks.

Conclusion

Right now, there’s no way of knowing what the current status of Ace Attorney 7 is, but I think these are the most likely possibilities. What do you think happened to Ace Attorney 7?

Ace Attorney Investigations is Featured in the Capcom Museum

 Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , , ,
Aug 252023
 

A few days ago, after learning Edgeworth won the poll about which Ace Attorney lawyer you’d most want to defend you if you were sued, I decided to visit the Capcom Museum page in Capcom Town to see if there was anything new.

To my surprise, the Special Exhibits spot notified me that a new exhibit was available… for Ace Attorney Investigations.

Yes, the two Investigations game have their own Special Exhibit in the Capcom Museum. It features art, design documents, and more from both games.

(On Monday, the design documents included a major spoiler for Investigations 2, but I don’t see it there anymore. Just tread cautiously.)

It’s pretty likely this exhibit was added in response to Edgeworth winning the poll, as enough time passed between the poll closing and the results being announced for them to prepare it.

However, I still think it’s a good sign that Investigations is getting this much attention. Unlike the other DS games, Investigations never even got a port to the 3DS. I didn’t expect Capcom to acknowledge it at all, especially not with a whole page devoted to it. They could have highlighted Edgeworth’s role in the main series, but instead they chose to bring the Investigations duology into the spotlight.

(I’d place more importance on Investigations 2 being featured on an English Capcom site if not for the memory of Bandai Namco celebrating the anniversary of the Tales series with English tweets about untranslated games.)

The biggest thing to take away from this is that Edgeworth is popular, and Capcom knows it. A couple months ago, while discussing my optimistic beliefs about Ace Attorney’s future, I said I thought the success of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and the announcement of the Apollo Justice Trilogy showed that Capcom no longer felt Phoenix’s name had to be in the title for an Ace Attorney game to succeed. Between that and the clear evidence of Edgeworth’s popularity, our chances of getting an Investigations duology collection now look better than ever!

Are you surprised to see Investigations featured on Capcom site? Would you play a duology bundle if it was released?

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