Operation Darkness for 360

Caught a link to these screens on blues. Check out the bottom left shot on page 2:

http://www.gameinfowire.com/ss.asp?pg=2&gid=2100&pid=16

I don’t know about you, but that reminds me an awful lot of JA, with a dash of FFT and JRPG flair. Looks awesome, I just hope it comes stateside.

looks like an uglier silent storm. If it has multi, I’ll bite if it hits the US.

won’t bite

Poorness… Gears of War and Samurai Warriors 2 will be my last purchases for a while, until Assassin’s Creed comes out. That, and Halo 3… Then, i’ve gotta focus on College… cries

There’s not much information to go on at this point, as its just been properly unveiled recently. Not sure how much of the story you’re interested, but it seems to revolve around a special tactics group who is involved with an alternate reality, somewhat anachronistic World War II assassination of Hitler. (Maybe his head explodes at the end!)

It would appear it progresses similarly to most console SRPGs, but that the game at large is divided into three blocks. When in the middle block, once you complete enough missions, you can go on to the final block of missions. While this suggests that the game allows for choice of missions at some point, or perhaps a branching narrative, it’s pretty vague. Later on, the developers say the storyline will develop a dark horror angle to it, hence, I believe the choice of the name Operation Darkness. (OH please let Hitler be an alien vampire!)

The game is developed by Success, who isn’t well known in the US, I don’t think. Back in the day, they made the Cotton shmups (you know the witch on the broom ones?) and they are also responsibly for the well-received Psyvariar games, which are also shmups, commonly noted as the ones responsible for starting the system in which you get more points for shaving near bullets. They’re also known for the livestock-rearing sim Welcome to Sheep Town and various transportation sims, like Tokyo Bus Guide. (Sequel to Tokyo Dishwasher Guide!)

They also publish various games from PC and smaller developers, some of which they have a stake in, like Enix does. The most famous of these is Crea-Tech, who makes the Metal Max/Metal Saga games. So the most recent Success game to come to the US is Metal Saga, but before that it was the DS’s animal puzzler, Zookeeper. (They’re working on something new with Crea-Tech for the expanded female market, called Silk Saga.)

Lately, Success has kind of risen from the dead, as in response to perhaps a market unfriendly to their games, they had started the Simple Series on the PlayStation to publish small underdog games and budget software, much like D3’s similar line. This and the billion and one girl games and adventure games that appeared under the label has been their bread, butter, spaghetti and donuts for the last some-odd years. Recently, though, they seem to have cooled down that line and reinvigorated their original development studios something fierce, perhaps due to the success of Metal Saga and Zookeeper for them. (Thank goodness, if I see one more Super Lite 1500 ~Violet~ A Memory of Crimson: You’re My Honeybunch game I think I might explode.)

They’ve become one of the most creative DS developers, releasing games such as Kanji the Wanderer, which is kind of like Typing of the Dead and a Western-themed lightgun game all at once, using the stylus to complete various tricky word puzzly kanji exercises. They also made the quite nice roguelike Izuna and published a pretty cool Metal Saga game as well. Their cute and small adventure game, which will be known in the US as Touch Detective when it gets translated by Atlus later this year, was also a highlight. (We won’t say anything about their line of Exquisite Bowel Movement Training software.)

Other than Operation Darkness, they have the supremely bizarre and cool-looking “The Fiery Delivery Man!” coming for the PS2, wherein a cyborg created by a devil king who wants to rule the world takes a job as a kind of macho ninja delivery man to get revenge and deliver people’s stuff. Well, I’M looking forward to it! (And it’s looking forward to me, I’m sure!)

So yeah, they might be a really small developer, but lately they’ve really become quite notable in the same Irem (R-Type Final, Disaster Report, Bumpy Trot) and Atlus (if you don’t know, shame on you) are. So I think its safe to say that there’s a higher chance than normal that it will come to the US and be something solid, especially since there’s a gap in the library of the 360 where these types of games are concerned. (Hitler! Brains! Broccoli!)

-Kitsune

Preview with video here.

Nazis + supernatural + strategy RPG? Awesome.

WANT!!!

Yeah, supernatural stuff combined with nazis is great!