Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts Spiritual Successors in Duo Kickstarter – News

The creators of the JRPG series Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts are raising money on Kickstarter to fund the development of spiritual sequels to these two titles. The special thing about it: It is not about two separate crowdfundings, but a cooperative campaign. Both featured titles (or just one of them) can be supported via the Duo Kickstarter campaign. In addition to the overview of how much the campaign has collected in total, there is a financing overview of the individual projects with stretch goals as well as a joint stretch goal bar. The additional goals are currently not visible for all three bars, but the divided bar shows “we have the technology” as an indication.

Akifumi Kaneko (Wild Arms) and his team want to go Armed Fantasy present an old-school “Westernpunk” JRPG in which you harness the abilities of your party of six to solve puzzles and navigate your way through a vast game world on land, sea and air (the latter describing the campaign as something “that’s getting harder and harder to find in games,” which seems odd given the abundance of open-world games). The battles are based on round combat mechanics, in which you try to use the “Cross Order Tactics System” to earn additional moves and to interrupt your opponent’s moves with force breaks.

Matsuzo Machida (Shadow Hearts) and his team, on the other hand, want the JRPG Pennyblood set in an alternate year 1920. Your squad of heroes, traumatized by the First World War, will travel to America, Europe and Asia and deal with cosmic horrors á la HP Lovecraft invest. The style will also incorporate elements of gothic horror. The “Psycho Sigil” combat system is designed to combine classic turn-based combat with timed inputs that boost your attacks. However, the fight can cost your party sanity – but this also increases your attack power. As such, it is implied that you may need a little madness to survive.

For the minimum contribution of 8300 yen (around 42 euros), backers will receive either a digital version of Armed Fantasia or Pennyblood. The release date is March 2025, which is known to be slightly different given the complexity of game development. The campaign runs through September 30, 2022 at 6:50 p.m. local time and is approximately $70,000 off the $721,606 minimum at the time of writing.