An Undead Soldier, and a Witch Named Metallica

Remember the
mention of those three mystery Nippon Ichi titles that were missing from TGS
from my feature? It turns out they were saving one of them (the game whose
picture is in the article) for a reveal in Dengeki Magazine. Thinking about it,
there’s nothing beneficial for a small publisher revealing a game at a large
convention. Places like that are best reserved for larger companies revealing
games that can attract a large mass audience. A pity there was a serious dearth
of those at this year’s show, making it awfully blasé.

 

NIS’ new
game is The Witch and the Hundred
Calvarymen, an action/RPG for Playstation 3. As stated before, this game is
coming from the team that made the Prinny:
Can I Really Be the Hero? titles for PSP. It’s the first game coming
internally from the developer to use polygon graphics, which explains what they
meant when they said they weren’t using their experience from their previous
titles for this game. Looking at the game itself, this is certainly true. Here
we have a 3D polygonal title that utilizes an isometric perspective, which is
unlike anything they’ve developed in-house before. The 2D portraits for the
story scenes look pretty similar to their older titles, though.

 

But you’ll really see how this differs from their
previous games upon seeing the details. NIS’ is promising that this game will
have a high degree of freedom, with an open world sandbox-style setting that
allows for seamless transitions between towns and the field. It will also let
you choose a moral alignment, depending on whether your actions have had good
or villainous intentions. The inhabitants of each town will treat you differently
depending on your choice.

 

The story is
set in a forest, and details a war between two witches: the marsh witch and the
forest witch. The title character is the former, who is seriously named Metallica. You don’t need me to tell you what she’s
named after, nor that there’s no way they can keep that name if (or “when,” to
be realistic) it’s localized. Metallica stumbles upon one of the Calvarymen,
and decides to summon it in battle.  As
the title implies, there are 100 Calvarymen throughout the game’s world, which
is definitely a call back to the team’s previous title having 100 Prinnies at
your disposal. You could also interpret Metallica as being a callback to Etna,
as like her, she’s the master of these minions. But the Calvarymen aren’t
accepting of her initially.

 

Like the
Prinny games, this one also plays around with the concept of death. There is no
“Game Over” in this game, and your Calvaryman can’t die considering he’s
undead. However, you’ll lose your items if you fall in battle, similar to a
roguelike. You’ll only be controlling the Calvaryman shown in the screen shots,
but the other 99 can be summoned for temporary periods by Metallica, which will
consume her magic power. The team is aiming to balance the difficulty so it
isn’t too high, so it probably won’t
be as relentlessly (or needlessly as far as the second game is concerned)
difficult as the Prinny titles. They’re planning for the main game to give
players around 30 hours of playtime, but that doesn’t include the sidequests
you can accept from townspeople.

 

The Witch
and the Hundred Calvarymen hits Japan in spring 2012, and will hopefully make
its way to America soon after that from NIS America. This game is right up
their usual alley in terms of aesthetics, so it’s tough to imagine them not localizing it. This is one of the
most interesting projects NIS has undertaken in a good while, so hopefully it
does well for them. The official
website is due to open sometime tomorrow (today in Japan time), so here’s
hoping it launches with something significant — like a trailer.

Information gathered courtesy of AndriaSang.