Today in Things I Never Thought Were Actually Possible, Bandai Namco producer Katsuhiro Harada proposed to fans that maybe, just maybe, a Xenosaga HD Collection could happen. That would mean a whole new generation of gamers could play through the Xenosaga trilogy, which was released for PS2 earlier this decade as a spiritual successor to the classic RPG Xenogears.
Although director Tetsuya Takahashi hoped to develop six Xenosaga games, financial realities forced him to stick to three, which saw mixed reviews when they were first released but have become cherished by a chunk of JRPG fans over time.
Takahashi is off working on Xenoblade Chronicles X for Wii U, so don’t count on his involvement, but Harada — who produces the Tekken games — seems to want an HD collection to happen. And all you have to do is tweet at him.
Here’s the full message Harada published today:
To Xenosaga fan community.
I do understand that you all are desiring “Xenosaga HD collection”.
Also, I do appreciate all your passionate comments.
I do understand your feeling to “tweet every day until the day Xenosaga HD collection comes real”.
However, what I need in order to achieve your dream, is not to have tweets from the “same person” sent to me every day.
It has been a long time since Xenosaga has been released.
It really brings back memories of those days they were developing the first Xenosaga staying up all night, when the TEKKEN Project was also staying up all night on the same floor at office.
A while back, triggered by the overseas version of Project X zone, I have conducted a research and calculated if there is a business chance for Xenosaga HD remaster.
It was a very simple research at that time. Yet, research does cost money.
And at that time, I was not able to seek business chance.
In other words, I was not able to find the necessary market size that will pay for the development fee needed to create the HD remaster.
Back then, the reactions on SNS and unique users were rather few in number.
It may be that I didn’t work hard enough.
Measures such as kickstarters are as of last resort, and at any rate we will not have a chance of winning as it stands now. It will not gather people by crowdfunding without creating some kind of big movement to support it.
To be honest, I was about to give up and I’m troubled.
What I need, are the voices from many fans.
This is a little different from having “messages sent every day from the same person”.
Although I do understand the deep love for the game, more than that, the cheers from as many “unique users” as possible is what is needed.
Digging further, I will not be able to believe comments like “I’ll buy 100 copies!”. Most companies will not believe in it.
It is not realistic for one person to tweet 100 times every day, or buy 100 copies alone.
It’s more realistic if you bring 10 fans to the game (not to mention, it wouldn’t mean anything by having the same person suddenly creating alternate accounts. I will be able to tell those).
What’s important in these kinds of cases is the number of unique users.
It means more to have 100 people mentioning they want the game one time, rather than having one person repeating it 100 times.
A miracle would happen if several tens of thousands are gathered at the end.
Of course, involvement from the company is needed for this but…
So go forth, RPG fans. Tweet at Harada in hopes of getting more JRPGs on new-gen consoles. Can’t hurt, right?
Picture: billysan291/deviantArt
Comments
11 responses to “‘Xenosaga HD Collection’ Is Actually A Thing That Could Happen”
Would be nice. Starting at part 2 was a bit…shit.
Yeah, Part 2 was quite weak for a number of reasons. Too short a campaign and a terrible battle system riddled with cheap hits. Fantastic music though!
Part 3 was quite awesome in my opinion! DAT ending!
I didnt play because I had no idea what went on in part 1.
Ridiculous idea.
Huh? They were released in 2003, 2005 and 2006. How was that “earlier this decade”, assuming the current decade started in 2010?
hehe, you’ve never referred to the 90s being ten years ago when its actually 20?
Time just keeps going by!!
Great! All I need now is a twitter account! Or a 100.
Maybe this time Namco will publish I & III (which were both reasonably good) in PAL-land instead of only giving us part 2 (which was shit).
I’d be down for this provided we got the original cuts, IIRC the western releases were censored to avoid a mature rating.
Don’t know about the others, but the US release of the first one was very partially censored. Mainly a bit where
Albedo cuts his own head offwas removed and they modified another quick scene whereAlbedo extracts an object out of MOMO, an android that looks like an 8-year-old girl, by sticking his hand into her chest in a very suggestive mannerwhich they changed so he just touches her face.Definitely it was to avoid running afoul of the ESRB, but I think that second more major change was to avoid “think of the children”-style controversy. Remember this was right around the point that various groups were going nuts about GTA3’s sexual and violent content, retail chains started carding purchasers buying Mature-rated games in the US and so on. The game came out in the US right when Jack Thompson was making big waves trying to connect violent games like GTA with school shootings and stuff.
I’d rather have a re-release of Xenogears.
HD remake would be good, would also be nice if they touched up the systems a bit. It gets a bit old playing a nice looking game with broken game systems.