Crystar (Furyu) Coming to Nintendo Switch in 2022; Western Release by NISA

xghost777

King B00 Fan
I’ve been playing Crystar this past week with the PS4 version. Weird timing. I think I’m halfway through? Don’t think I’d really recommend it to people, but it’s interesting I guess, always just shy of being good. The story/atmosphere is probably the best part as it’s just sad all the time and every character and enemy has a tragic backstory. The revenge plot has a weird flimsy start, but I’m invested in it and the mysteries still. The 3D Ys action gameplay runs well, but again feels just shy of being good. Wonder why Spike isn’t publishing this version, they did a great job with the translation and English dub. That LE looks nice.
 

Stu Benedict

[Screaming Internally]
Pronouns
He/him/they/them
I’ve been playing Crystar this past week with the PS4 version. Weird timing. I think I’m halfway through? Don’t think I’d really recommend it to people, but it’s interesting I guess, always just shy of being good. The story/atmosphere is probably the best part as it’s just sad all the time and every character and enemy has a tragic backstory. The revenge plot has a weird flimsy start, but I’m invested in it and the mysteries still. The 3D Ys action gameplay runs well, but again feels just shy of being good. Wonder why Spike isn’t publishing this version, they did a great job with the translation and English dub. That LE looks nice.

my guess is that spike was given first rights to refusal and then refused. and then furyu offered it to nisa afterwards.

looking at their output over the last couple years, it's been drastically reduced from 2019. they'll only have two releases in 2021: rezero at the start of the year, and danganronpa decadance at the end of it. the sequel to ai the somnimium files and made in abyss are the only games with a set date of 2022 so far, so i think they just scaled back to focus on their own internal work, much like idea factory wound up doing and xseed is kinda doing now.
 

xghost777

King B00 Fan
my guess is that spike was given first rights to refusal and then refused. and then furyu offered it to nisa afterwards.

looking at their output over the last couple years, it's been drastically reduced from 2019. they'll only have two releases in 2021: rezero at the start of the year, and danganronpa decadance at the end of it. the sequel to ai the somnimium files and made in abyss are the only games with a set date of 2022 so far, so i think they just scaled back to focus on their own internal work, much like idea factory wound up doing and xseed is kinda doing now.
Yeah that makes sense. Sad to see though since NISA is seemingly way overextended. Atlus doesn’t exist the same way anymore (though they sorted Sega out which is very welcome), XSeed basically just became Marvelous only, and Aksys is mostly a lot of odd stuff lately.

Spike’s localization of Ai was excellent and Re:Zero was also very well done. The latter felt just like the show in a good way. I played in Japanese, but I heard they got the English cast back too which doesn’t always happen. So if they do just go down to two releases a year, but make sure they kill it each time, I guess that’s not the worst.
 

Stu Benedict

[Screaming Internally]
Pronouns
He/him/they/them
Yeah that makes sense. Sad to see though since NISA is seemingly way overextended. Atlus doesn’t exist the same way anymore (though they sorted Sega out which is very welcome), XSeed basically just became Marvelous only, and Aksys is mostly a lot of odd stuff lately.

Spike’s localization of Ai was excellent and Re:Zero was also very well done. The latter felt just like the show in a good way. I played in Japanese, but I heard they got the English cast back too which doesn’t always happen. So if they do just go down to two releases a year, but make sure they kill it each time, I guess that’s not the worst.

for a release like crystar which will use spike's existing work, nisa doesn't have to do a lot. it's mostly on the marketing/testing/package design side of things. nisa's also been on a schedule of about 12-15 releases in a given year since 2017 or 2018, so this slots in as part of the norm.

it wouldn't be surprising if spike was way overextended in 2019 and argued back against bringing in a lot of localizations. yu-no is an enormous game - something like double the size of trails of cold steel iii (though with a lot of duplicate text), and yet it released as just one of many titles for them that year. 2020 was basically robotics;notes and shiren.

spike-chunsoft is also largely made up of ex-nisa staff. not sure if they're the general manager or what, but one of the key people on the us side used to be the localization manager at nisa.
 
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