Tag Archives: Keiji inafune

Shantae and Mighty No. 9: A Tale of Two Crowdfunding Projects

Shantae and Mighty No. 9

Two companies, two games, one common meeting ground. Crowdfunding has been something of a livesaver for projects that probably would never see the light of day through regular means, or save a project from near death. Since the boom of Tim Schafer’s Kickstarter campaign, many indie game companies have looked toward sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to get their projects off the ground. Skullgirls‘ DLC characters, Shovel Knight, Shadow of the Eternals (on hold as of this writing), and Yatagarasu has made a name for themselves on such crowdfunding sites. This month saw the addition of two more shining stars in the roster of crowdfunded games: Comcept’s Mighty No. 9 and Wayforward’s Shantae: 1/2 Genie Hero. So how did they come about, and how did they do?

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[NYCC 2012] Hands-On With Soul Sacrifice

Mega Man creator Keiji inafune is back, and this time he’s on his own without Capcom. But that’s not stopping him from making videogames as he’s still at it with Soul Sacrifice. Inspired by the likes of Monster Hunter and Demon’s/Dark Souls, Soul Sacrifice sees you making a choice as to what to do with certain enemies. Do you heal the corrupted souls that haunt the lands as beasts, or do you sacrifice them to boost yourself? The choice is yours.

Prota: Soul Sacrifice is a game I’ve been looking forward to for some time. The premise seems deliciously dark, but sadly some of that was lost in translation since the demo was only in Japanese. The gameplay felt similar to Gods Eater Burst, but instead of devouring monsters, you can sacrifice the souls of enemies you defeat to raise your evil alignment and power up or save their souls in order to recover life and align yourself with the righteous. The representative at the booth compared the alignment meter to Infamous’ moral system. If so, I’m really curiously how that will will affect the strength and availability of certain powers. I think that’s where the charm of the game comes from, all of the quirky powers you can use. I need to see how the co-op feels though before I totally get behind the game though, as I think that’s going to be an important aspect of it. Overall, it was definitely interesting, but I want to see more of what differentiates this title from others that fall under the same category.

Suikoinfinity: I still feel terrible for holding up the line for like 3 minutes just so we could try getting our games synced up. I hope the terrible connectivity is an issue with the demo games/vitas and not something that will stick with the final product. Having us play on the Japanese demo felt just a little lazy. Aren’t they already working on localization? With the relatively small amount of text encountered in one short mission, a build with English text should have been given. You get to pick from a pool of spells to use before combat begins, but the little picture given to each spell does little to describe what each one actually does, so the majority of the demo was spent trying to figure out how each power functions… I don’t think I was supposed to summon a giant plant monster at the start when there’s no enemies to kill. Aside from the big guessing game, once I found something that functioned like a regular weapon, the demo became much better. What wasn’t better was trying to talk over that loud ass Niconico booth they decided to put right next to Soul Sacrifice. I wasn’t able to hear shit, but it looked and played nice!