Sep 252026
I’ve had both good and bad experiences with games backed on Kickstarter (as well as a backlog of backed games I still need to play), but this one might be the most painful.
Back in 2022, we discussed the double Kickstarter for Armed Fantasia and Penny Blood, spiritual successors to Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts respectively.
Although I found the dual Kickstarter format to be somewhat confusing, I backed the campaign in eager anticipation of both games.
I was a little worried because of how ambitious the projects were, but I still had optimism. Well, the years since then brought a sequence of disappointments on the Penny Blood side. After a while, the Penny Blood updates didn’t say anything about game development at all and only expressed their inability to pick up a publisher, and then the developer filed a lawsuit against Dangen Entertainment over unpaid costs. At this point, I’ve resigned myself to the possibility that the roguelike spin-off Penny Blood: Hellbound and novels set in the Penny Blood universe might be all we ever see.
But I still held out hope for Armed Fantasia, because even though updates were short and infrequent, at least they were still about the game.
Well… maybe that was too optimistic after all. Digital Bros, the parent company of 505 Games, announced the discontinuation of development on two games, one of which is Armed Fantasia.
(Did we know 505 Games had picked up Armed Fantasia? I feel like I’m going crazy, because I can’t find anything about the publisher being announced, yet I could have sworn we knew something. Maybe it’s just that we knew the game had a publisher, unlike Penny Blood.)
No update has been sent to Kickstarter backers yet, which is a little disappointing. After news like this, I’d like to hear what’s going on from the team. Maybe there’s still hope that they could find a different publisher; I haven’t completely given up on it yet.
But right now, it looks like Armed Fantasia might remain just a dream.