Shadow Hearts: From the New World

Imagine an alternate reality Prohibition era America with ninjas, talking cats, vampires and of course, demons. That’s Shadow Hearts: From the New World in a nutshell as players assume the role of teenage PI Johnny Garland. The game starts in a fixed path but quickly expands after a job that Johnny takes quickly goes off the rails. With a combat system dependent on timed button presses and combos, strange plot twists and an endearing cast of oddities, From the New World is perhaps the strangest and yet most endearing PS2 RPG of its time.

Hironobu Sakaguchi may no longer work at Square Enix, but the man who created Final Fantasy, and then saw its evolution until its explosion in worldwide popularity, still has a lot of talent behind him. This can be easily deduced by seeing the games he has worked on since his departure from Square- Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, and The Last Story, among others, are all great games that are beloved cult classics- all titles that he helmed.

In the last few years, however, Sakaguchi’s attention has been focused on Terra Battle, a mobile game that is rather popular in Japan- that said, he might be gearing up to announce a brand new project soon. In a year-end talk session with 4Gamer (via Siliconera), Sakaguchi teased, “I plan to announce a new title in 2017. Stay tuned!”

As noted above, Sakaguchi has a whole lot of talent and pedigree, so we are excited about whatever it is that he chooses to work on next- my only hope, personally, is that he will return to making console games again, and that this next game won’t be another smartphone title.

Although Nintendo has gotten a whole lot better about this lately, localizing all of their own games, and even helping third parties with localizations, so that their games can release in the west, they were pretty bad about bringing over games from Japan to the west last generation. It got to be pretty bad- major Nintendo games such as Fire Emblem 12, Fatal Frame 4, and Disaster: Day of Crisis never saw a release in the west, while games like Xenoblade Chronicles, Pandora’s Tower, and The Last Story only came over after a year plus of intense campaigning.

Discussing what motivates their decisions about what games to bring over to the west, Nintendo’s Chris Pranger said, “The hardest thing for everyone to understand and to accept — and I’ve seen this first hand in the company, that this is typified — people think that obviously they’re right, and what they like or dislike has to be the norm. Why would it be otherwise? And they just say the classic “Why do you hate money? Why do you hate money, Nintendo?”

“And it’s like “What are you talking about? We’re trying to make…obviously it has to make calculated risks, but at the same time, one of those risks…and I mean they’ll bring up games that are very Japanese games, like Captain Rainbow for instance. They’ll bring that up like “Look how many people want this. Don’t you want money?” And we’ll be like “Yeah, we do want money, which is why we know it’s a colossal waste if we ever try to localize that in this current market, because look at you people. You don’t make up a big enough group.

“The hardest part for people to realize is how much money it takes sometimes to make a game like…if it’s a Japense game, to bring it over the States. Not just translating and then localizing and marketing, but if it’s a game that has substantial voice text, oh my goodness! That is a collosal cost to bring that over. And some games you look at and you’re like “Well how are they going to bring that over?” and it’s like “Well, they can’t.”

“You look at something like even Xenoblade Chronicles. People love that game, you know, within a certain group. That game is not the type of game that just pulls in enough to justify the costs on that. So that’s like, we got it in the States by luck, that NoE decided “Oh, we’ll take the fall. We’ll localize that.” Okay, cause someone is going to have to eat the costs somewhere, because that game is guaranteed to not sell enough to justify how big that game is. You know, hundreds of hours, all voiced. That’s a lot of money that goes into that.

“And people are like “Why do you guys hate money?” We don’t. That’s why you literally can’t make everything. And people don’t like finding out that their fanbase is actually too small to justify the costs of the thing they want.”

I understand the reasoning here, but there are two intangibles that must be considered here too- diversity in a system’s library, as well as keeping your fanbase happy, both of which are achieved by sometimes undertaking projects that may not be profitable in the end. Sure, a localized Xenoblade probably won’t make money (although Nintendo insists that it did), but it keeps your fans happy, and it adds depth to your system’s library, so why not do it anyway?

Happily, it seems Nintendo has gotten better about it in recent years, so there is that, at least.

Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy who later left Square to start MIstwalker, and work on acclaimed JRPG projects such as Lost Odyssey and The Last Battle, released Terra Battle for smartphones in Japan. When he did, he also promised that once the game hit 2 million downloads, Mistwalker would work on bringing the world of Terra Battle to consoles.

Terra Battle hit 2 million downloads. Unfortunately, it seems the console game hasn’t actually been given any thought yet.

“When we first began planning the Download Starter and setting our goals, I never thought we’d reach two million downloads,” Sakaguchi said to Famitsu (as translated by Gematsu). “Or rather, it was a far away goal. But meeting this feeling, it is expected we keep our promise of ‘starting development on a consumer version,’ but I didn’t think that day would really come. We didn’t actually have anything planned for it, so I’m starting to feel the heat now that it’s happening.”

“We really don’t have any plans right now. I’m in so much trouble now,” he laughed. “Still, however we end up doing it, I want the characters and atmosphere of the game world to be in line with what we’ve done for the smartphone game. I plan on doing a lot of experimenting to see whether we otherwise actually take the game in any new directions. Virtual reality could be an interesting direction to take, as could having some sort of connectivity with next-gen if we could pull that off.”

So, while it seems that he has committed to doing a high end console JRPG, it might be a while before we do end up seeing it. So sure, there is something from him to look forward to. It’s just that no one, not even Sakaguchi himself, quite knows what that is yet.

XSEED got the western publishing rights for The Last Story–Mistwalker RPG from Hironobu Sakaguchi–and it has announced that it is the most popular game they have ever published. XSEED is a small publisher so who knows what numbers it did, but such a news is great because of the attention the game is getting.

The game was released for the Wii and hit the US and EU regions late, due to some issues, but it seems according to this latest news, everything worked out well. Sakaguchi may have enough money now to start an iOS studio or do more surfing in Hawaii.

“The Last Story has been an amazing title for XSEED Games and it has become our most successful title to date,” said Ken Berry, Executive Vice President at XSEED Games.

“This is a must have title for RPG fans, and we’re looking forward to more players discovering the magic that lies in Lazulis Island.”

It’s quite impressive they have managed to create a game like that on the Wii, and when you take into account Xenoblade which was funded by Nintendo, we learn that brilliance is not limited to hardware, it depends on the developers.

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

You heard that right, if you’re a core gamer, you will dust of your Wii this instance and get ready to play The Last Story, dseveloped by Mistwalker and containing the soul of the Final Fantasy creator, Hirnonobu Sakaguchi.

Guess what, I’m going to do exactly that. The game is too good to be missed, especially considering how Final Fantasy games have been so disappointing. XSEED is publishing the game in the US; it was released last year in Japan.

“We definitely feel that the core gamers that play RPGs are the most likely to follow the best games regardless of the system, so hopefully that will hold true for The Last Story’s release on Wii,” Ken Berry of XSEED told GamesIndustry.

“I know some people have started counting out the Wii already, but hopefully this release will show that there is still a lot of impressive things that hardware can do when the right game is running on it.”

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Nintendo does not usually translate and publish games in the US, we saw Xenoblade taking a lot of time to come to the US and hence the sales suffered. What prompted XSEED to take over the responsibility of publishing the game in the US?

The answer is pretty simple actually. “It was actually much easier than you would expect,” XSEED director of publishing Ken Berry told Kotaku. “They were receptive to our inquiry from the very start.”

“We approached them once it looked pretty certain that it wasn’t coming over. I was in Japan for Tokyo Game Show and I picked up a copy of The Last Story, cause a lot of us in the office would want to play it anyways. Once we started playing it, we just figured, ‘Wow, this would be nice if this came over—let’s talk to Nintendo!”

“Nintendo, they have their own set of rules that they go by. And as for us, it didn’t really affect us either—cause we have our own requirements that we look for on potential titles. And, you know, it just met all [our] prerequisites,” he added.

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The father of Final Fantasy and creator of The Last Story for the Wii has revealed that the game was affected negatively by the limited graphical capabilities of the Wii.

It seems a little weird to complain about it now, and it’s also something that’s pretty obvious, however Sakaguchi said that they created a good looking game despite these bottlenecks they had to face.

“It’s unfortunate, but the final issue that always seemed to deny certain ideas was the SD resolution limitation” he revealed to IGN.

“Within those parameters we aimed to create a title with beautiful graphics that can compete with modern day specs. And though the resolution may be SD, I think players will really enjoy the sophisticated world.

“I would be pleased if people would view our efforts to their best by switching their cables to advanced connection cables or by playing it in the best environment possible,” he added.

I’m not really sure what cable he means? If it’s component ones instead of the default composite ones the Wii comes with, then I agree.

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The Last Story features a high level of customisation for both items and characters appearance. There are two main ways of customising your party’s equipment including visiting blacksmiths to increase their abilities and using dyes to change their colour. By visiting the various blacksmiths who are situated within Lazulis City and within some dungeons you can upgrade your weapons and armour. 

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Mistwalker’s masterpiece for the Wii, The Last Story will be heading to North America courtesy of XSEED. The information was revealed on this week’s Nintendo Direct video.

The game comes out in Europe on February 24th. There is no specific date for the NA release, but we will keep you updated once we hear more about it. So stay tuned to GB.

Check out the video below: