Sorry for not updating over the last week. There was a little confusion over who was going to fill in the rant spot, and I also came down with a sudden case of employment.
Yeah, I seem to have picked up temporary employment at Konami, either as a game tester or a localization tester--I applied as a localization tester, but we'll see if that's how they actually use me in the upcoming projects. Which means I'm going to be quite busy in the next few weeks, though hopefully I will still be able to write for MT pretty often. If not, well, it's a tester job and it will pass fairly quickly.
Anyway, on with the news--I want to point out the new Nippon Ichi game, and some "peach girl" thing getting animated.
November 15th, 2004
A couple days ago, Nippon Ichi pulled the lid off of its next strategy RPG, Phantom Kingdom. As you can see from the characters page, the designs are extremely similar to Disgaea, with notable changes to the male mage, who no longer looks like a half-naked idiot, and the female warrior, who's now wearing some real clothes--damn hippies! (said the Cal graduate).
The schtick of this game (like Disgaea's geo panels and Phantom Brave's Confine system) is that you can store items and characters inside buildings, then "Invite" (IE reconstruct) those buildings onto combat maps. Enemy forces can also have buildings, which you can take over and steal from. So basically, they've added something vaguely like base assaults to the game, as opposed to "see enemy, hit enemy over head". Which might be welcome, we'll see how it goes.
Phantom Kingdom is scheduled to come out "some time in 2005", and naturally, is for the PS2.
Peaches 'n' Cream
Ueda Miwa's Peach Girl is going to be turned into an anime, according to Bessatsu Friend. So you fans of the TokyoPop release can be sure that within the next two years or so, it'll be in the US--probably less, honestly. I don't subscribe to Bessatsu Friend, so I don't have any more details yet, but I'll see if there's anything interesting that comes after this announcement.