This week, Masaya Games have announced the latest title in the Langrisser series, the first in 15 years, for the Nintendo 3DS. As mentioned in an earlier report, the rights to the Langrisser series are currently owned by a company named Extreme, and CEO Soshi Saito and the chief designer and director Shohei Sato discussed the game in a recent interview with Famitsu magazine. [Thanks, Hokanko-Alt]
After acquiring the rights to the entire Masaya catalog, Extreme have been looking into making their games available in the form of PlayStation archives and Nintendo’s Virtual Console. At the same time, they’re also looking to work with developers that share the same enthusiasm.
Extreme have been leaning more towards making games for consoles. While they do understand the merits of making games for the more widespread smartphone format, they feel that smartphones can’t match the expressive powers of a dedicated game console. These feelings are what led to the development of the new Langrisser for the 3DS.
Additionally, Extreme also hope to find a way to bring the excitement of Masaya’s brands—which were pretty popular during the ‘90s—back. They say that their philosophy is to make games for videogame fans. According to Saito, Extreme also considered Cho Aniki and Kaizou Choujin Shubibinman [the prequel to Shockman] but ultimately, they felt that Langrisser would be the best choice for a revival.
Saito mentions that the upcoming Langrisser title will be a little different from previous games in the series, and one of the reasons for this is that Extreme felt it would be no good if they kept things the way they used to be. The company considered asking Satoshi Urushihara, who did the artwork for the previous Langrisser games, to contribute to the new title, but the reason they ended up going with Hiroshi Kaieda instead is that they felt the need to do something new.
Additionally, Saito says that he is personally a fan of Kaieda’s, which contributed to bringing him in. Finally, it is revealed that Extreme also initially thought about keeping the system exactly the same as the earlier Langrisser games, but that has changed as well.
