Ni-Oh was originally announced by Koei Tecmo back in 2004, as a planned launch title for the PlayStation 3. Obviously, that never happened, and like a lot of PS3 games that were announced but slowly forgotten as vaporware, Ni-Oh was expected to be a game that simply would never be.
Until yesterday, when it was re-revealed at Sony’s TGS conference yesterday (Sony is sort of making it a habit of reviving and re-revealing these long awaited but ultimately forgotten game projects this year, aren’t they?). The game looked seriously awesome, like a mix between Capcom’s classic Onimusha, as well as From Software’s more recent Souls games.
So, how did the game survive a development cycle over a decade long? As Siliconera reports, the reason is fan anticipation- in spite of being more or less vaporware, the game routinely used to feature on ‘Most Anticipated Games’ lists in Japan, which gave Tecmo the incentive to continue working on the title. Basically, Koei Tecmo continued working on the game behind the scenes, even while hearing people say “you guys just announced it haven’t even made anything, right?”
That’s a hell of a story- let’s just hope that Ni-Oh does not suffer from the same issues that most games with such protracted development cycles do.