The world is still ending with you, apparently
Square Enix revives the brilliant DS RPG for Switch. Oh, and Gals Fighters is getting a sequel, kind of.
After teasing — really, more like tormenting — fans over the past few days with weird hints of an upcoming Direct announcement stream, Nintendo finally just dropped a giant chunk of Switch-related news on the world without ceremony. Today's reveals basically take Switch through E3, where no doubt the company will be smacking fans in face with another juicy slab of news to fuel them through the end of 2018.
While today's Switch announcements cover the gamut from a Dark Souls remaster for Switch, a demo for Dragon Quest Builders hitting eShop today, and new Super Mario Odyssey DLC, one piece of news in particular seems specifically germane to Retronauts: A remaster of revolutionary DS role-playing game The World Ends With You. Called The World Ends With You: Final Remix (in that inimitable Tetsuya Nomura way), this remake obviously will bring over some format changes to reflect the shift from a dual-screen device to the single-screen Switch… though since Square Enix has already published TWEWY on mobile platforms, there shouldn't be any real surprises in store.
Although this still isn't the sequel that Square Enix has been teasing for years, I'd like to take this TWEWY remaster as a sign that the company is laying the groundwork for a follow-up. In any case, the original remains one of the most innovative and heartfelt takes on the RPG ever created, and it should remain every bit as brilliant today as it was when it debuted a decade ago. And yeah, the fact that it's a decade old now means we'll definitely be tackling it on the podcast this year.
Also of note: SNK announced a sort of spiritual sequel to Gals Fighters (the quirky all-girls Neo Geo Pocket Color fighting game). Called SNK Heroines ~Tag Team Frenzy~, it ditches the chunky sprite art of the NGPC game in favor of a more, shall we say, blushy-crushy look. Still, fanservice aside, I feel like SNK has definitely laid the groundwork for this Switch release with their steady publication of Neo Geo fighting games over the past year. It'll be interesting to see how this one turns out… and how it fares with fans.
You can see the entirety of Nintendo's latest Direct, which includes something like a dozen different game announcements, at the company's site.
