At last week’s Tokyo Game Show, Level 5 announced their newest DS RPG, The Another World. The title’s obviously a bit of Engrish, but it’s forgivable: in a surprising move, Level 5 has teamed up with Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, the animation house behind Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and My Neighbor Totoro.
There’s scant gameplay in the trailer, but the markings of a Studio Ghibli film are all there: the sweeping Joe Hisaishi orchestral score, the faded maps of strange fantasy lands, the strange dream-like tranquility of another world explored by a brave, wandering child. And the gameplay looks exciting: it appears to be based around drawing glyphs to cast spells, with each copy of the game sold having its own unique library of spells transcribed in a lovely custom spell book.
It’s probably worth while having modest expectations of this one: there’s only so much animation that can be crammed on a DS Cart. But an evolution of the Japanese RPG from the tired cliche of the Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest formula to something more approaching Miyazaki’s folklore-inspired dreamscapes would be very welcome right about now.
First Footage of The Another World [DS Fanboy]
I picked up an old PS1 game called Jade Cocoon a while back that had designs by Miyazaki. I still have not bothered to start it up. Maybe tonight…
First, it’s a good thing that the DS will limit cut scenes. Nothing like buying a game (esp. for a portable unit) where it takes you 15 minutes to get to the game.
Then again, if you have tried “Tao’s Adventure” (a halfway-decent Rogue-like RPG) you would know that the DS’s limitations does not guarantee spending that 15 minutes mostly plowing through dialog.
Anyways, hopefully Gibli will have some creative control and ensure that it’s not a derivative game (sure looks like it in the preview, tho’. Gee, draw diagrams to cast spells, run around, lots of dialogs. Sounds like all the other RPG’s for the DS.)
That’s neat. I love their movies.
Too bad this is for the DS.
I’ll stick to PC titles.
To CleveTheRipper
I bought Jade Cacoon when it first came out before i knew who Miyazaki was so thats news to me that he was involved in that. The game was above average and very different from typical rpg. It is like pokemon sort of but i’m pretty sure it preceeded pokemon games. also there are some point of no return stuff in the game that bummed me out because i didn’t make aan extra save.
For me the only remotely interesting part of Ghibli movies was the aesthetics, and now that I think about it, actually exploring the world in “spirited away” might have made it good. I’ll bet this’ll be a classically linear jRPG though. I’m not concerned by the size of the cart for the sake of FMVs – I just hope they can get some interesting environments in there.
A simple M3DS or similary cart for NDS will provide you with much more love for the handheld. Personally I’ve played both PSP and NDS and while NDS doesn’t have the media functions PSP boasts, the NDS at least has the whole ‘games that don’t suck’ thing going for it.
Also, the above mentioned cart or similar carts have a built in micro-sd slot in the nds cart, meaning you can expand upon your gaming, homebrew games/apps, emulators, ebooks, mp3′s, movies, and more.
This game is great! I saw it during last week Tokyo Game Show and LEVEL 5 had a huge booth to promote it! The magic book that accompany the game card is simply beautiful and it will make every M3/Flash card owner buy their own copy of the game since without the book you loose much of the game atmosphere…
Actually the book + videogame idea has been originated by an erotic/hentai videogame called “Kimiga nozomu einen” produced few years ago by the Japanese company âge Soft.
http://www.age-soft.jp/products.htm
Even tough the game was erotic the book was a children book drawed by the main eroine and it has topped the sales of children book in Japan for several weeks…
Anyway LEVEL 5 is going to be the next SQUARE SOFT!