The Armed Fantasia and Penny Blood Kickstarter Ends

Crowdfunding has been a boon for developers looking to get spiritual successors off the ground, for projects publishers wouldn’t provide support for until it was determined that a significant audience existed for them. The newest high-tier examples are the dual Kickstarter of Armed Fantasia: To the End of the Wilderness and Penny Blood, themselves successors to the Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts Japanese RPG franchises. Both series have been dead for nearly two decades, since the days of the all-powerful PlayStation 2’s prominence. It’s forgivable that publishers would need convincing that an audience remained for both, the clearly stated purpose of the campaign given the sheer amount of money both Wild Bunch Productions and Yukikaze, the head development teams behind both projects, needed.

It was clear from the day the campaign started, and when I first posted about it, that this would be one of the biggest examples of a wildly successful video game Kickstarter in recent memory, and it is. It concluded today, raising over $2.5 million in the process. It was enough to meet every stretch goal they provided, including those for console versions and New Game Plus modes. All the stretch goals were also met for the individual games, for which there are too many to list in this post. Both titles will be packed with content, which ideally won’t prolong the development times.

It’s noteworthy that more pledgers went for Armed Fantasia over Penny Blood, but that’s not surprising. The Wild Arms franchise reached a larger audience than Shadow Hearts thanks to Sony handling the first bunch of them, with Agetec and especially XSeed, which localized the later titles, benefitting from the baked-in audience. Midway never gave Shadow Hearts the same level of promotion outside Japan, which led to them reaching a small audience. It also helped that scriptwriter and supervisor Akifumi Kaneko and composer Noriyasu Agematsu attracted the Symphogear fanbase, which both have worked on since Wild Arms’ death. But it’s still remarkable how well its campaign did, even if it was below the sibling project.

The sheer number of updates the team provided for the games helped to maintain interest and funding. Several main characters for Armed Fantasia were revealed, with Mercedes Rosenberg, Sigurd Geiermeier, and Soleil Ainsley joining main character Ingram Goodweather, Alicia Fairhead, Euclid Sturges. The character designs from Tomomi Sasaki (of Wild Arms 5 and XF) and the, well, wild names maintain the Wild Arms series’ tradition, alongside the setting of an anime-influenced Wild West world. Armed Fantasia stands out because no JRPG franchise has even tried to fill the gap in Wild Arms’ absence.

The reveal trailer showed how the game will inherit a battle system similar to the WA franchise, but the field test videos show how the sense of exploration will be larger. The game is clearly very early in development, but the tests showed how ambitious the developers plan to be with town and environmental exploration, which will include platforming. JRPG exploration has evolved since the PS2 days, and it’s clear the team realizes this.

I’m still surprised that Media.Vision, the development studio behind the original series which still exists, isn’t involved in this game. They haven’t released a game since Valkyria Chronicles 4 in 2018. There are ex-employees working on this game, but most of its developers are presumably still there. Hopefully they’re only busy at the moment, and can join the project when it gets going.

Plenty more music tracks from the lead composers were provided over time too, all of which exude influence from Wild West soundtracks. This, like the setting, was sorely missed in JRPGs.

More characters designed by Miyako Kato were revealed for Penny Blood too, the largely-final designs for some which were chosen by fans between Twitter and Discord. In addition to Matthew Farrell and Emilia Dawson, characters like the Japanese Suseri Otsuki, Arkansas-born American Candy Nation (huh), Ukranian Luca, and French Roxane Archambeau were revealed. It’s also nice when the team can reuse characters who were based off historical figures from Shadow Hearts, like Roger Bacon. Given the time period it will take place in (the late 1920s), it’s a shame this game is unlikely to feature Grigori Rasputin and Anastasia Romanov. (Or will it? It’s an alternate history tale, after all.) The team also spotlighted several locations that will be visited around North America, Europe, and Japan. I mentioned above how there haven’t been any JRPGs to fill the Wild Arms void, but nothing has stepped up to fill one left by Shadow Hearts’ disappearance either. Until now, that is.

Yukikaze also lined up interesting names for assistance with the soundtrack. Yoshitaka Hirota is the main composer, well known for his contributions to the Shadow Hearts games, with Akari Kaida (Breath of Fire) providing additional tracks. Assisting with crafting the soundtrack will be the legendary Nobuo Uematsu, who Hirota plays for as part of the Black Mages band. Kenji Ito is also assisting with research, along with former Atlus composer Shoji Meguro, the latter of whom has his own Kickstarter for Guns Undarkness going on at the moment. It’s still a shame that Yasunori Mitsuda, who provided additional tracks for the first two SH games, is absent, but that won’t prevent the soundtrack from being worthwhile.

It’s notable that the campaign had a few communicational stumbles early on. The organizational team was slow to react to how quickly it was being funded and update the project on the stretch goals it reached, and add new ones to keep pledges going at a good pace. The team fortunately listened and responded to criticism, but I have to wonder if the early issues led to the campaign not receiving as steady a level of support as it could have near the end of its first week. This led to fear that the projects would run into organizational issues later on, perhaps on par with Shenmue III’s, but those have since subsided thanks to the steady stream of updates both projects have provided, and the quality of them. Hopefully these will continue following the campaign’s end.

Armed Fantasia is further along than Penny Blood in development, but both are years away from release. The former is planned to arrive sometime in 2025, while the latter is due in 2026. Remember that crowdfunded games always, always get delayed, unless the developers are merely asking for distribution money. Don’t be surprised if Armed Fantasia slips to 2026 while Penny Blood doesn’t arrive until 2027. Regardless of the arrival timeframe, my hope is that the team does a good job keeping backers and potential players updated on every development before it arrives, and, of course, that the games themselves are worthy successors to the old franchises.