On January 14th, the world-wide release of a new game known as X-Blades will occur. It is developed by Zuxxez Entertainment, Topware Interactive, and Gaijin Entertainment (Americans probably won't know these development teams), and the gameplay is pretty much hack and slash. It stars a girl named Ayumi, who is running around searching for valuable stones. But apparantly she has some curse in which very powerful and evil creatures are awakening in her body, and she needs to find out how to stop it. The back story is that there are creatures known as the Enlightened and the Dark Ones who are warring, and I'm guessing (because the Gamestop synopsis says that there are two different endings) that you can "choose" who you're going to help and that would affect the outcome of the game. The game is to be released on PC, XBox 360, and the Playstation 3.
Now, there hasn't been a good hack and slash game in several years (the last one I actually spent money on was Dynasty Warriors 3... which was about 6-7 years ago). But what this game is promising to be is Dynasty Warriors, with magical powers and abilities, and instead of a wide selection of Chinese warriors, you get an anime-style girl who is running around in a thong. Sounds like the making of a best-selling game in my opinion. To give you an idea of the level of "suggestive themes" (as the ESRB puts it) in the game, you have to enter your birthday to access the website. So with this train of thought, I thought to myself, maybe I'll buy this game for the PS3 and run around decapitating thousands of monsters (or run in circles and observe the great character design.)
However, it was brought to my attention that there is going to be a limited/collector's edition known as the Royal Bundle. This bundle includes the game, the soundtrack, a 2-way poster (one side seems to be a world map), a mousepad with a picture of Ayumi from behind for the PC version, an artbook, and a 22cm figurine of a topless Ayumi. You can imagine what the company is advertising the most in their Royale Bundle (I'll give you a hint, it isn't the world map). All for the hefty price of around $120 US dollars (it's being sold in Euros on the website because the development team is from Europe/Russia. Don't know exactly where, but apparantly the original language of the game is spoken in Russian by the voice actors). So now this is when "maybe I'll buy this hack and slash because there hasn't been a good one released in a while" becomes "holy crap I want that". At least in my mind.
Here is where you find out why I'm posting about this game: after a couple of days of trolling various forums, including Zuxxez's english board, apparantly the Royal Bundle will NOT be released in the United States, and the development team isn't even planning a huge sale of that edition anyways, estimating about 6-8 thousand copies being made world-wide because the figurine costs as much as the bundle is being sold for. According to a member of the Zuxxez team who posts on their english board, the entire bundle weighs about 3kg, so shipping it to other countries alone would drastically increase the prices, not to mention dealing with all the importation fees. And to give you an idea of how uncoordinated this development team is, the Royal Bundle isn't even going to be released until January 28th, 2 weeks after the game is supposedly released world-wide. I say supposedly because on SouthPeak Games's website (the American affiliate of Zuxxez) and on Gamestop, the pre-release is being shipped early February. Members of the Zuxxez team say that they are talking with SouthPeak Games of a possible US release of the Royal Bundle (although they have no plans as to how they are going to get it to the US), but according to a poster on gamefaqs's forums, the product manager of X-Blades at SouthPeak, Aubrey Norris, said that the Royal Bundle is only going to be released in mainland Europe and not in America (although later in the letter stated that they are going to display X-Blades at New York Comicon in February, and are giving away Ayumi figurines. Which is the only reason people would buy the bundle anyways right?) This is where this game goes from "holy crap I want that" to "I might buy it in a couple of years for $20 bucks used when I'm really really bored".
No comments:
Post a Comment