MAGES has announced Steins;Gate Re:Boot, which is yet another remake of the original Steins;Gate, which launched back in 2009. The new version of the visual novel will retain the original’s art style, but will freshen things up by enhancing the visuals and adding in new story content. Exactly how comprehensive those additons and enhancements will be remains to be seen. 

Steins;Gate Re:Boot is scheduled to come out sometime in 2025 in Japan. There’s no word yet on when exactly it will release, or what platforms it is supposed to release for, nor has a Western release been officially confirmed yet, but presumably, additional details will be shared in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned for further updates as more information becomes available. 

Today saw Nintendo drop a lot of material for the Switch that’s planned for 2021. Some of which was expected, but some that you probably never even heard of. The latter example is that the company announced that two titles would be coming this year, Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind.

If you haven’t heard of the franchise, that won’t be too surprising. These games are actually remakes of two older titles that was released on the Famicom (the Japanese name for the NES) in Japan, and despite being re-released in several forms via GBA ports and Virtual Console releases, were never localized outside Japan.

The titles will be full remakes of those games. They are visual novel styled and narrative direction titles. The Missing Heir is a murder mystery while The Girl Who Stands Behind is a more supernatural thriller. Both involve a pair of young detectives who find themselves in unusual cases with lots of twists and turns.

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind will both release on the Nintendo Switch on May 14th. They will release as separate titles.

You may not know who Mages is, but they are an extremely prominent and important developer of visual novels, one of the most engaged niche audiences in Japan; indeed, in recent years, visual novels and shoot em ups have found a home on the Xbox 360, and it appears like Mages was looking to continue that trend by releasing three visual novels exclusively to the Xbox One. Except it also seems like the Japanese are having none of that, if DualShockers is to be believed.

The announcement, which was on Nico Nico (Japan’s premier video streaming service, was met with a staggeringly negative reaction- 66.5% of the viewers responded negatively to the news of the games, presumably because of their exclusivity status.

Of course, this does beg the question- unless Japanese companies are being moneyhatted by Microsoft (and there is no way Mages was moneyhatted, since visual novels may be an engaged niche, but a small niche nonetheless), why do they bother making Xbox One exclusive games at all, especially given the country’s historic antipathy to the brand?

Deathsmiles developer and former Cave head Makoto Asada is apparently working on a new Xbox One title which is dubbed as “SHINASUTIMIKIRA Project”.  Asada has his own development studio titled  Div8 but at the moment we are clueless what this project is all about. The image above is the only thing we have so our guess is only good as yours.

However, when Asada left Cave, he explained that his ex-studio were no longer interested in developing console games. “Cave had announced that they were going to take a break from consoles and stuff that goes directly to the consumer, and that’s really what I enjoy about what I do,” Asada explained. “When I was going to quit Cave, about 10 companies contacted me to see if I was interested in joining them. Out of [those companies], MAGES had the best deal. Our president offered me the opportunity to explore and really do something interesting,” he told to Siliconera back in September 2013.

Ever since the original Xbox,  Microsoft have struggled in Japan, so hopefully this is one of the signs that Redmond based company is making improvements on that front.

Do you have any thoughts on what this title could be? Let us know in the comments section below.

Thanks OXM.