[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

GET NEWS:

While everyone was busy watching/cringing at/feeling superior for completely ignoring the Oscars tonight, Akira Ueda's indie firm audio, inc. announced that their long-dormant Space*Agency project is still in development and will be getting revamped.

If you're not familiar with Akira Ueda, I can say pretty confidently that if you are here on SB reading this, you'll probably want to be. He is a highly cool dude who started out at Square in the early 90s, doing background art for Secret of Mana and Super Mario RPG before moving to Kenichi Nishi's short-lived Love-de-Lic studio where he performed similar roles for import cult classics Moon: Remix RPG Adventure and UFO: A Day in the Life, before moving onto Grasshopper Manufacture, where he did more environment art for Flower, Sun & Rain and directed the GBA Shining Soul games, bizarro horror title Michigan: Report from Hell, and the underrated DS RPG Contact before going independent to form his own little studio, audio inc. He and his frequent collaborators from his Square and Love-de-Lic days - Nishi (Moon, Giftpia, Chibi-Robo), Taro Kudo (Moon, Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, Paper Mario: Sticker Star), Yoshiro Kimura (Moon, Chulip, Little King's Story, Rule of Rose), etc. - are all some really smart, creative, classy folks who have repeatedly proven their bona fides in terms of delivering the kind of quirky, imaginative, sensitive and inevitably overlooked games that we here on SB, I think, love to love. He's a name to watch out for. And he uploads his own musical performances and VGM remixes to the company Youtube account.

Now, as for SPACE*AGENCY, it's an ambitious original RPG project, seemingly a spiritual successor to Contact, that was pitched as a project for the DS nearly 5 years ago before apparently never taking off. Here's a trailer explaining the game's features in gloriously broken English, including but not limited to:

- very pretty sprite/background art
- Masafumi Takada music
- isometric melee and 3D space combat
- stat-managing mechanics for skills such as table manners and "pheromone"
- soundless space travel

audio/Ueda have expressed interest in developing the game for the 3DS and/or smartphones, and are very open to interacting with fans on Twitter and Youtube. So I'd encourage everyone to whom this sounds like your kind of quirky to get involved and give some encouragement/interest to Ueda and audio, because this seems to me like exactly the kind of hidden gem that SB could one day love loving.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Incidentally I've been talking about this game in the other thread but Moon pretty much looks like a spiritual Mother 2.5
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I don't recall Contact getting any appreciation at all really

Shining Soul II was a game I considered buying several times way back in the day but never did, possibly because it was too hard to find. I wish I'd made the effort to track it down.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Here's an interview with Ueda from 2011. Most of it is about his last game Sakura Note, but at the end he talks a bit about Space Agency.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.