I know that like me, you've been losing sleep with excitement about the Samurai Maiden reveal and here we are!
A school girl that studies sword fighting as a hobby falls asleep in history class and wakes up in the Sengoku period and a whole army of undead samurai need dying. Very much an Onechanbara style game. You also have a team of ninja ladies backing you up that you can summon in for attacks. You improve those attacks by strengthening your bonds with which involves kissing them.
So some of the game conforms to old Simple Series; girl with sword hacks up the undead but we're also getting into sleazier stuff. Obviously some old Simple games had some sleaze with a lot of bikini women but this feels like it is veering more into Idea Factory territory. Out this winter.
This has reminded me that I haven‘t mentioned a game I’m really looking forward to that looks a bit Simple Series and a lot Devil's Third; Wanted: Dead.
It is developed by ex-Devil's Third devs but it looks better (I loved Devil's Third) and the voice acting/tone is extremely off key and PS2.
The dev on Samurai Maiden is Shade, makers of Bullet Girls, so that level of skeeviness certainly checks out.
The publisher on Wanted is the vanity project of some rich Russian guy who hired Stefanie Joosten (MGSV's Quiet) as creative director, and there's evidence to suggest he originally tried to get Remedy to make this game before going with Soleil. He's also got Soleil working on some mecha game, IIRC.
Yeah, they had Simple lines for every handheld from GBA onwards, but by the 3DS/Vita era they were mostly if not entirely download-only. The GBA versions weren't actually much cheaper than a standard game, which was a little odd.
They even did a "SIMPLE 100" line for feature phones—I've not played any of 'em but the impressions I saw on my last galakei dive were that most of them felt like a ripoff even at 100yen.
The original Puzzle Quest was a Simple PSP/DS game in Japan, incidentally.
@“gsk”#p81557 thanks, I found the wiki page. gotta check this out, GBA is definitely what I'm interested in, kind of like the BIT GENERATIONS series, eh?
Not exactly… the Bit Generations sold themselves as chic, whereas the Simple games basically tried to justify the relatively standard price by promising that every game would have single-cartridge multiplayer, so they were mostly just card game collections or whatever.
The bit Generations series (2006) was tied to the strategic repositioning of Game Boy Micro next to Nintendo DS, with other “trendy” GBA projects such as Mother 3 and Rhythm Tengoku aiming for a young & hip adult audience.
The Simple 2960 Tomodachi Series began during a very different period of the console, during its 2003 heyday.
@gsk you know an awful lot of stuff about an awful lot of stuff, do you know what's up with no western release announced for EDF6 (asking here since it started as a Simple game)?
The two Switch ports didn't get brought over and I'd have thought they would have been since so much sells decently on the Switch. I'm getting the Japanese EDF6 but it seems weird there's been nothing on this for the west.
@“Chopemon”#p81866 Honestly, no clue—the EDF fanatics have convinced themselves that somebody‘s scooped all those games up and is sitting on them for the purposes of pushing them all out at once as some sort of symbiotic marketing drive, but I get the impression they’re as clueless as I am.
@“Chopemon”#p81866 for what it‘s worth, most have been released here a while after the initial Japanese releases, often not announced until a few months before actual release. EDF5 was a full year after the Japanese release! I’d expect to hear something by the end of the year, but prior to it releasing in Japan, I wouldn't hold my breath.
I‘d forgotten that. I think I’m assuming that since there is a smaller gap between territory releases in general now that something would have been said.
Actually, World Brothers and Iron Rain were near simultaneous weren't they?
@“Chopemon”#p81888 Right, but both games also just so happen to have not been developed by Sandlot themselves. They were developed by Yuke’s with the explicit commitment to be able to deliver the games worldwide.
@“Chopemon”#p81961 I would not hold my breath waiting for Sandlot to adopt this kind of modern approach to game production anytime soon; from what I understand, they still have a very old-school “we’ll figure out how to handle <this port> / <this Western version> once we have shipped the domestic version” approach to the business (as evidenced by their output).
