Yukikaze and Wild Bunch Production provided a new update on their upcoming JRPGs Penny Blood and Armed Fantasia
Starting with Penny Blood, developed by a team led by Shadow Hearts creator Matsuzo Machida, we get a brand new video showing a conversation between protagonists Matthew and Emilia. You can watch it on Kickstarter since the video isn't set up for embedding. It's worth mentioning that voices haven't been added yet.
We also get new concept art showing the characters Candy and Goliath by Shadow Hearts character designer Miyako Kato, which you can enjoy below.
The developers are showing the game to publishers, but still haven't received concrete results, while Kato-san is starting to design the villains. Nobutaka Hanya also started to work on the Earth Fusion monster. He has been asked to design several monsters based on the Cthulhu mythos with "a unique Penny Blood-esque flair." In the gallery, you can see a Dark Young that he designed.
Masato Watanabe has been working on designing a "very important location" with a sad atmosphere, but we don't get to see it yet.
Composer Yoshitaka Hirota has worked on several tracks centered around the cello and is researching music from the 1920s, especially Irish and Celtic music.
Moving on to Armed Fantasia, led by Wild Arms creator Akifumi Kaneko, we get to see new character artwork, which you can enjoy below.
The developers are working on the whitebox models of the world map, which features a "vast, complicated structure", while the outline of the story is complete. The map will hide information that players aren't supposed to see until the right moment behind mountain ranges, while it'll also give glimpses of structures that can be visited in the future. There are also locations that are very high in terms of elevation.
New concept art is being created to create new maps for towns and dungeons, alongside whitebox models of new dungeons, while others created previously are being upgraded to get closer to the final version. If you're unfamiliar with the term "whitebox" it means that the structure of an area is being modeled with less detailed "white" untextured models in order to gauge the placement and playability of the overall structure.
Work is being done on the HUD, alongside the scenario and the storyboards for event scenes. According to the storyboard artist, Kaneko-san's scenes "have become more anime-esque than before."
If you're unfamiliar with Penny Blood and Armed Fantasia, they're spiritual successors of popular JRPGs Shadow Hearts and Wild Arms, driven by their respective creators. They were funded via a joint Kickstarter campaign in the summer of 2022, with fans pledging a total of 379,328,385 yen to the two games, which translates into approximately $2.7 million.
In other JRPG news about games that found their funding on Kickstarter, yesterday we heard that Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes by the creator of Suikoden has been delayed into 2024.
