This Week in Games

Suikoden Returns

Welcome back, folks! We normally talk about video games in this column, but this week was overshadowed by the news of George Lowe's passing. Anyone who grew up watching Cartoon Network would've been familiar with his dry wit and zany humor as Tad "Space Ghost" Ghostal—a role which was seminal in helping the Cartoon Network establish its identity and voice while also setting the stage for not only counter-cultural adult animation (Sealab 2021, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, 12 oz. Mouse) but also helped set the stage for Toonami. Space Ghost: Coast-to-Coast alumni C. Martin Croker (also no longer with us) famously hosted Toonami as Moltar long before T.O.M. took over, and with it helped establish a whole new generation of anime fans. It's a crying shame that Lowe wasn't able to break out into the mainstream as a comedian. And believe it or not, he did a few games—not just [Adult Swim]-related fare like Aqua Teen Hunger Force Zombie Ninja Pro-Am, but also stuff like narration for the PS1 The Grinch game. Appreciate your favorite creators, folks; they're taken from us all too soon...

Konami has been putting the work in with the Suikoden franchise. And it only took 'em the better part of twenty years to do it! Earlier this week, Konami released the final trailer for their much-anticipated remasters for the first two Suikoden titles. These remakes have been a long time coming and are hotly-anticipated by fans, so it's great to see that they're finally coming out. But Konami also unveiled that they have a few other Suikoden-related projects in the works...

The first bit was the reveal of Suikoden: The Anime, an animated adaptation of Suikoden II currently being helmed in-house by Konami's new animation branch. Choosing Suikoden II is a safe decision; it's widely considered the best game in the series, it has some of the most recognizable characters, and you'll never find a more satisfying villain you love to hate more than Luca Blight. However, it is still early in production.

The other bit of news is definitely of the "Thanks, I hate it!"-variety; Konami also announced a new Suikoden game... for mobile devices. It's a gacha game, titled Suikoden: STAR LEAP. Bold of Konami to bank on a mobile Suikoden game when the Tales of... series has four failed mobile games to their name. Even in 2025, we have some executives thinking that a mobile game with gacha elements is a license to print money without remembering successful mobile games with gacha elements are successful only for now. (I don't like to think of it either, but Fate/Grand Order and Fire Emblem Heroes are guaranteed to go dark someday.)

Konami is shooting for the moon with STAR LEAP, given that the game is effectively a canon Suikoden game taking place between Suikoden V and Suikoden I. But there's a lot of consternation over this title since nobody has much faith in Konami keeping it afloat. Konami has already burnt a lot of bridges with fans given their past decision to rely on pachinko machines for years and years (the Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater pachinko machines have ruptured cities' worth of blood vessels in their time). Even if Suikoden: STAR LEAP somehow manages to be a success and even leads to a proper Suikoden VI, would people even want it? Yoshitaka Murayama, creator of the Suikoden series, passed away not too long ago, leaving Eiyuuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes as his legacy—and honestly, Eiyuuden Chronicle is a perfectly respectable send-off to Suikoden, from its range of incredibly-diverse 108 heroes to its complicated political storyline. How could a mobile game follow up on a series with such a legacy?

For now, there's nothing to do but hope for the best—but prepare for the worst. News on the Suikoden anime will be forthcoming. In the meantime, the Suikoden I & II remaster should be available by the time this column goes live, on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Steam.

Last week, I covered the news that Chinese company NetEase is cutting back on their support of Japanese developers they've bought out, putting Suda 51 and Like A Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi in limbo. I also covered how NetEase's decision-making led to Ouka Studios, the developers of Visions of Mana, getting closed the day the game was released. The decision to do so was made a good way into its development. Kenji Ozawa, director of Visions of Mana, left Ouka Studios last October 31st, but his time gave him lots to think about. And his thoughts have led him to develop his new studio, Studio Sasanqua.

In an interview with Automaton, Ozawa-san mentions how his time at Ouka impressed upon him how much the poor decision making on behalf of management only ever seems to result in consequences for the creatives of the industry. He concluded that “management needs to protect creators,” which will be the philosophical core of Sasanqua's decision-making. Having fully funded Sasanqua entirely on his own, Ozawa-san has vowed to take personal responsibility in any case of a project failing due to poor management—up to and including financially.

For now, Sasanqua will build up a portfolio of smaller Unreal Engine-based projects, hoping to eventually build up to larger-scale releases for PC and console. A new Mana title might be out of the question—at least, for the near future—but we can wish Ozawa-san and his team the best as they chart their course.

I've seen a lot of people claim that the solution to the industry's maladies is a "return to indie;" this isn't practical on an industry-wide scale, since not everyone has the capital needed to establish a new company (let alone risk their house in doing so). It doesn't help that so many games are being produced. With so many games being made every year, there's no telling how many fly-by-night studios have made an unknown classic drowned in the ocean of other indie titles. It's that risky of a position; I don't blame any developer for deciding to stay at the razor's edge with an AAA studio rather than risking it all on a wing and a prayer. So Ozawa's decision deserves credit for putting things on the line. It's a bold and noble risk he's taking. What a rotten state the industry is in when a studio head committing to taking managerial responsibility for a failed project is such a rarity.

Let's talk about Level-5! When we last discussed Level-5, it was during their To The World's Children broadcast late last September. There, Level-5 announced a number of their projects; some new (like the partially-AI-designed Yokai Watch follow-up, Holy Horror Mansion), some very, very delayed (like Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, which was announced back in 2016). If you're worried about Victory Road coming out too soon, don't worry: it's been delayed again!

Level-5 CEO Ahihiro Hino cleared up the air in a blog post, promising more explanations this upcoming April 11th. Why April 11th? Because in Japanese, they're calling it "Yo-i Eleven Day" ("Good Eleven Day"). For what it's worth, Level-5 is committed to adding more to the game; while they know that it already seemed like Victory Road was packed to the gills in its last demo, Hino-san promises there's plenty more to come. He also added a bit of an explanation for Victory Road's delay: it's because of Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. Several things happened with Fantasy Life i; for one thing, internal focus testing revealed that the game wasn't very satisfactory among players. So the game was restructured to add new elements like an open world and parkour action. They've also added not only cross-play to Fantasy Life i but also cross-saves, allowing you to maintain your progress across a variety of platforms. I don't know how they plan to pull that off, but I'm glad they're attempting it. Cross-saves as a feature ought to be more common in the gaming industry.

The other major shake-up that rocked Fantasy Life i? The departure of its former producer... Keiji Inafune. We went over Inafune's recent checkered history not too long ago; Inafune hasn't quite dug himself out of the hole he was trapped in courtesy of Mighty No. 9's reception, even after all these years. And it seems that he won't be able to for a while: all this time, it turned out he was serving as producer for Fantasy Life i, then just quietly left the project sometime last year. The good news is that it led to the restructuring that has, for all intents and purposes, improved Fantasy Life i. The bad news is that this still left Level-5 reeling and needing to reorganize itself (for one thing, CEO Hino-san took over as producer).

It does seem like Inafune has lost the plot; outside of his executive producer roles for the Azure Striker Gunvolt series or 2016's ReCore (anyone remember ReCore? I didn't!), the past decade has been rather empty for Inafune. It'll be interesting to see where he turns up next, but I have to wonder if folks will be happy to see him. In the meantime, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is currently slated for release this May 21st—for now, anyway...

I have a lot of respect for artists and character designers. Maybe it's because I envy how they're able to do the "imagining something then put it to paper"-thing that I do with writing, only instead of doing it with letters they do it with lines that end up illustrating a whole idea of a person that takes up brain space in people's mind-palaces as their new favorite thing ("Treachery of Images," and all that). And this stuff can be super-important to a body of work—not just with games, but pretty much anything else. We don't have Final Fantasy without those beautiful, ethereal logos created by Yoshitaka Amano.

There's a cottage industry for art books for all kinds of video games because people had to work long and hard to design our favorite heroes, villains and settings. Artists have grown old over their time designing characters for a series, their art styles changing over the years (compare Tatsuya Yoshikawa's early art for Breath of Fire with the radical stylizations he's now known for circa Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter). Sometimes, like in the cases of the games I've mentioned here, the artists become synonymous with their series; hell, it's hard to think of what'll happen to Dragon Quest with Akira Toriyama's passing. But some other artists get passed over, sometimes for years. We had a pair of stories about two artists that I felt merited covering this week, so I figured I'd toss them in together.

First up is a name you might not recognize, but whose work you'll likely know. Takaya Imamura is a former Nintendo artist, best known for working on a slew of Nintendo's titles during the 1990s. He was the character designer for Star Fox and F-Zero and also handled art direction for The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Imamura left Nintendo in 2021, but he's been working on his project since then: Omega 6. Hearkening back to the science fiction settings of Star Fox and F-Zero, Omega 6 takes place on a futuristic Earth where aliens have settled and mingled with people. The story centers around two bounty hunters—and yes, we mean "bounty hunters" this time and not "space adventurers!" Hunters Thunder and Kayla team up to track down the assassin Petroglaze, a dreaded assassin with a 300 million credit bounty. Along the way, they meet countless bizarre and memorable aliens. Imamura's manga is set to release this October 21st from Dark Horse Manga. But the story was too big to keep to a manga; Imamura was later able to studios Happymeal and Pleocene to adapt the story into a video game! Hence Omega 6: The Triangle Stars.

Imamura dug deep for his inspirations with Omega 6; the game is an old-fashioned point-and-click adventure game, wherein Thunder and Kayla roam between three planets searching for a new home for humanity. Along the way, you can meet and log hundreds of bizarre aliens; think Space Quest with a little bit of Space Dandy thrown in. Imamura has done a few interviews about Omega 6, but I'm quite stricken that there isn't more buzz about this; it's not often that we hear about a former Nintendo artist working on a passion project like this! Imamura has done a few interviews regarding his work on the Omega 6 video game, citing its inspirations in old science fiction like Star Wars. He claims the inspiration came from his time in Kyoto seeing more and more tourists in the area, wishing to capture that feeling of an influx of new people. Omega 6 released earlier this week on Steam and the Nintendo eShop.

The next one comes from artist D.K; you likely know D.K best from their work on NieR: Gestalt and NieR: Replicant, as they designed everyone's favorite ill-tempered intersex character Kainé. D.K has also been freelance since 2021 and occasionally posts art from their time working on games. This past week, though, D.K shared art in celebration of the 20th anniversary of a rather forgotten action game they worked on: Red Ninja: End of Honor. I can't share the art here because, uh, it's quite NSFW in its artistic nudity, but I can link you to D.K's Twitter account with a fair warning.

Red Ninja tells the story of Kurenai, a young woman left for dead after her father is killed by a warlord pursuing the secrets behind manufacturing gatling guns. Using the very wire that was used to hang her from a tree (how very Lady Snowblood), Kurenai seeks revenge. It's very Tenchu in its approach; Kurenai would sneak around and toss kunai to distract guards, seduce them around corners, or otherwise dispatch people from the shadows, all while using her deadly wire to swing across pitfalls or interact with the environment. You might be thinking, "Sweet, a game with a hot, deadly ninja babe! No wonder Jean-Karlo likes it, why haven't I heard of it?" And there's a reason for that: Red Ninja: End of Honor sadly wasn't very good! In an era of effortless platforming, as inspired by Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Red Ninja sadly was a lot more clunky in its gameplay, with a camera that absolutely would not work with you. The Snake Lady boss—whose design sheet D.K. unveiled for the first time in 20 years this past week—is particularly infamous in how frustrating she is to fight.

On the upside, D.K's design for Kurenai was nevertheless enough to make her stand out for people, to say nothing of keeping her in people's heads for 20 years. D.K was profoundly flattered by the outpouring from fans sharing their love for Kurenai after all these years, so much so that he even drew another illustration of Kurenai in gratitude. I know I just spelled out Red Ninja's failings concerning its controls, but also: I don't think it matters. It's okay to like a bad game. It's okay to love a terrible game. Nobody sets out to make a bad game on purpose; it's pretty obvious from D.K's reminiscing that regardless of the final product, a lot of love went into Red Ninja. If a game can be remembered 20 years down the line because of its striking protagonist, that's something. (Also, hell, you guys have seen me with Izuna, I'm not throwing any kunai at any glass houses.)

It's heartwarming to see an artist receive an outpouring of love from fans for a work they did ages ago, especially if it's from an audience abroad—for further reference, look up that time last year when artist Daiki Sato earned a good fifteen minutes of fame as people rediscovered his work on The Wizard of Oz: Beyond The Yellow Brick Road/RIZ-ZOAWD. You never know what people will treasure and for how long. A game's success can't be remembered solely by sales figures or review scores. The anime ZENSHU. is good at illustrating how a "bad" work can still capture someone's imagination and inspire them to create—not out of spite, but genuine appreciation.

The game industry is all kinds of messed up, and the sheer number of titles being released doesn't help—but even the bad games that people love tarring and feathering can still be loved and cherished years after the fact. Even the audience is impermanent; only the text remains. We'd all do well to have a bad game that we love deeply. If you don't have one yet, I hope you find one soon. Life's not the same without a weird, obscure Nintendo DS game you're hopelessly obsessed with. Look forward to next month—D.K is excited to celebrate NieR's 15th anniversary!

Hideki Kamiya and his team at Clovers, Inc are reportedly still proud of the work they put into the canceled Xbox exclusive, Scalebound. Kamiya also stated that he'd still love to make it some day, going so far as to tweet "Let's do it, Phil!". Hey man, if Kamiya can get a new Okami game off the ground while making a new successor to Clover, there's nothing this guy can't do.

Sega has released their plans for the next fiscal year: invest in fewer new games, while circling the wagons around Persona, Sonic and Like A Dragon. Not sure I like the sound of that. Remember when Sega made Ristar?

Success' ABYSS SEEKER: What Do You See Deep in The Abyss released on Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch earlier this week, after releasing on Steam this past December 5th! Because of processing issues on the Switch, the Switch version has replaced two weapons (the Plasma Beam and the Zantetsu Protocol) with weapons that won't strain things as much (Rapid Laser and Magic Missile). I want that authentic Bangai-O experience! It's not a real shooter unless the console is smoldering!

That'll do it for this week, I think. Due to certain circumstances, This Week in Games will be taking a miss next week. Hopefully, the industry doesn't set itself on fire in the meantime. I deeply enjoy writing this column, so I look forward to seeing you guys the week after next. In the meantime, I'd like to see folks mention some of their favorite bad games! I always find it fascinating to see the stuff that people are emotionally attached to. Be good to each other, I'll see you in fourteen.

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This Week In Games! is written from idyllic Portland by Jean-Karlo Lemus. When not collaborating with Anime News Network, Jean-Karlo can be found playing JRPGs, eating popcorn, watching v-tubers, and tokusatsu. You can keep up with him at @ventcard.bsky.social.

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