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Compile Heart announces seven new titles – Madou Monogatari 4, Touhou Spell Carnival, and more [Update 2]
Compile Heart has announced its transition to a new management structure as of October 1, with Naoto Tominaga serving as president and Hikaru Yasui as director, as well as announced seven new title…
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Japanese publisher/developer Compile Heart announced 7 new projects a few nights ago, including its own new core RPG comedy/fan-service franchise called Todokero! Tatakae! Calamity Angels, a new Neptunia, a new Touhou Project game, two new Death end re;Quest titles, and two games from Sting (including a fourth dungeon crawler Madou Monogatari game, which was the root that spun off Puyo Pop.) Read up on what's in the line-up for 2024 and beyond if you enjoy Compile Heart's brand of entertainment. They have tended in years past to do a lot of pinky, fan-service-filled titles like Fairy Fencer F and Monster Monopiece and Mugen Souls or the goth Mary Skelter games as well as of course Neptunia (not my fave stuff, especially given the distantly-forgotten legacy of the previous version of the company,) but this new line-up seems to be covering a wider swath of genres and audiences than Compile Heart has done in a while, with their cute-gal games still of course in the mix.
The title I'm taking note of is buried a bit and under-described in the details, but it speaks the loudest to my interests since I keep hoping to see more of the the "Compile" portion of Compile Heart some day. Only listed as "UNTITLED SHOOT ‘EM UP GAME", this is a new shooter being made for Compile Heart by the shooter masters at M2. It is said to "be a brand-new title with some never before seen challenge elements." Platforms are unknown. Release is planned for Summer 2024.
Not only is M2 a great design studio for shoot-em-up games, but the release of a SHMUP by Compile Heart hearkens back to the heritage of the original Compile Corporation, makers of all-time SHMUPS such as Gunhed, Blazing Lazers, The Guardian Legend, MUSHA, and Aleste. When the OG Compile went bankrupt in 2003, the talent at the company split to form two companies, the aforementioned Compile Heart and MileStone. MileStone was where most of the SHMUP designers went, and they did stuff like Chaos Field and Radirgy. (IMO, MilesStone never quite delivered on its rep and the company closed in 2013.) Compile Heart meanwhile took on a lot of types of RPGs, visual novels, and puzzle games that Compile was also into (although they did not directly keep the Puyo Pop brand, which SEGA went on to continue.) Eventually Compile Heart became defined by their Neptunia and somewhat ecchi games. Across that time, Compile Heart never really tried much in the long-suffering SHMUP genre... I'd like to believe this M2 creation is meant to tap into the "heart" of Compile with a flagship shooter brand or resurrection of a classic Compile SHMUP franchise, but it could just as well be a random genre stab partnership. Compile Heart released artwork of their untitled M2 SHMUP, one showing the snazzy shooter ship and the other showing a very Compile Heart-style anime pilot gal.
Extra detail: in 2018, M2 announced that it was making a new Aleste for release in 2022, and in 2021 it released a trailer for the game in part of its promotion of the M2ShotTriggers line. It is unknown what happened to this project, named Aleste Branch. Maybe these projects are related? M2 has outright acquired the Aleste franchise and has already done the Aleste Collection, but I assume there's a reason why the two are coming together, and maybe Aleste Branch is part it?
(*Whoever here who used to post half-of-everything run on Gematsu is gone now, sadly, so keep an eye on that channel if you like the type of stuff GAF doesn't talk about too often anymore...)
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