Bandai Namco Entertainment’s Project X Zone 2, the strategy game featuring a mashup of characters from SEGA, Capcom and Bandai Namco franchises, was launched yesterday in Europe, and will soon be available in the US on February 16th. You can view the European launch trailer at the bottom of this article.
In an interview with NintendoLife, the game’s director Soichiro Morizumi talked about how they chose the characters to be included in the game. In particular, they focused on including characters from games that were localized. Segata Sanshiro is noted as an exception, but the fact that the iconic character is known even outside of Japan was apparently enough to include him in the game. This may explain the absence of Valkyria Chronicles 3‘s characters, which were included in the first Project X Zone. Personally, I’m glad that at least the characters from Sakura Wars were still included, despite only Sakura Wars 5 being localized. This does however show just how important the worldwide market is to Bandai-Namco.
In the same interview, producer Kensuke Tsukanaka also mentions that, despite the fact that these kinds of games aren’t easy to produce, he would like to continue the series if there’s demand from the fans for another cross-over game. You can read the full interview over at NintendoLife.
BandaiNamco have really put an effort on this, I’m still impressed they have translated the game into 5 languages (yep, spanish and italian included, which is very unusual outside of blockbuster games).
As a fan of this series I would actually appreciate if they relaunched the first game for 3DS, or make some kind of remake, I played the fan translated version but both PxZ games have references to Namco x Capcom events most western players don’t know. A remake with parallel/extra events including new characters (maybe from Sega) would be great.