duckroll said:
Devil Survivor was directed by the Growlanser series director. Considering how it outsold his subsequent Growlanser PSP release by over 3x, I would say it's highly possible that they might release another Megaten SRPG next year on the DS.
Yeah... I was a little curious about that. It looks like the key staff for Devil Survivor is about half Career Soft Growlanser/Langrisser vets and half Atlus R&D1, which certainly makes for kind of an interesting mix. The director had been directing and producing Career Soft games, and three of Devil Survivor's six design planners worked on Career Soft games while the other three were R&D1 (EO2, specifically). The programming team also seems like an even split between Career Soft and R&D1 (the R&D programmers had worked on a variety of games ranging from P4 to Raidou to the Trauma Center series).
Devil Survivor had four scenario writers and two scenario advisors. Two of the writers were Career Soft, and the other two were R&D1. One of those two worked on EO2, and the other was the scenario writer for P3 and one of the two writers for P4 -- I can definitely see that influence in a lot of Devil Survivor's character stuff. Both of the scenario advisors were R&D1 (one of the advisors, Shogo Isogai, is the SMT2/if/Nocturne writer who's also doing Strange Journey).
So... yeah, kind of interesting. The Growlanser series was never a super strong seller, but it hit a high-water mark with 4 and then just kind of tanked afterward -- 5 and 6 sold much worse than 2 and 3 had, and the PSP port's numbers weren't all that good either. So if Atlus is cannibalizing that team and putting key members of Career Soft on projects with a half & half mix of R&D personnel, and having them make Megaten-branded games, that really is probably a better use of their resources given how the series was struggling. And like I said, while Devil Survivor's sales weren't great relative to Atlus's overall lineup of games, they're
much better than the company's other SRPGs, and a sequel that improved on the quality of the first could do even better. If the choice is "should we have these guys make Growlanser 7 or Devil Survivor 2?" that's probably an easy call.
duckroll said:
Hopefully they'll use the animated sprites now available from SJ.
Hopefully.
And hopefully it'll have a compendium, too, and maybe even terrain effects.
Gorgon said:
Hum..I don't think that a Persona game on the DS would necessarily need voice over. It could be adapted for the DS as an offshoot from the PS2 games, and they could even use the Megami Ibunroku as a label for that.
Well, the Persona PSP port sold rather well, and I don't think there'd be a reason to switch over to the DS after that. But mainly, I just think that, like Tales and Nippon Ichi games, more of the potential fanbase for the modern Persona games in Japan would be on a system like the PSP or the HD systems rather than the DS, and I think Atlus probably recognizes that.
jj984jj said:
No doubt, no point in look for resources or outside help from mediocre developers like Y'sk to make a new Growlanser when Team Career can do another DS game on their own.
Well, they're not really on their own with Devil Survivor... but really, I wonder to what extent the distinct Career Soft team even exists anymore. I'm curious if this integration of Career Soft and R&D1 continues on future projects. This may have been a one-off project, but if we see a trend of all the main people at Career Soft working on R&D1 projects (the director/producer, writers, artists, game designers, programmers), then it effectively marks the end of the team as a unique entity.
That's probably preferable for the overall quality of their projects anyway, given how poorly Growlanser V (and presumably VI as well) turned out. I see Shinjiro Takata didn't direct either of them, just produced; having him directing again and having the team supplemented by R&D1 should do a lot for the quality of the games.
