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Having recently concluded a summary revisiting of past predictions which I've put forth (in the editorial entitled "The Value of Being Right"), it seems now prudent to carry this whole endeavor out even further. That's right -- having been rewarded for my speculations in the past, I'll now step right out on the wobbliest of limbs and put myself on record with more guesses and surmises across a wide range of companies and games.
Here's what I expect 2006, 2007, and beyond to offer us, the RPGaming community:
1. Square Enix will throw established demographic trends to the winds in a devil-may-care fashion when they announce a new portable Kingdom Hearts game -- but not for the NDS, which has the audience most heavily skewing towards the younger age bracket that has consistently driven the series' sales, as well as being the successor to the system which saw the last portable Kingdom Hearts. Instead, the next game in the series will be on the PSP and will feature advanced graphics (probably utilizing the Crisis Core engine) and the same style of gameplay seen in KHI and II. While this doesn't rule out the possibility of a future Chain of Memories title (though Jupiter Corporation has been preoccupied with BVG's Spectrobes game), but expect the heaviest emphasis to be on Kingdom Hearts Portable, and look for that game first.
2. Square Enix will soon be announcing a high profile strategy RPG for the NDS. This game will most likely take the form of a new Ogre Battle or Tactics Ogre title. However, with producer and director Yasumi Matsuno's future with the company imperiled after his disastrous turn at the helm of Final Fantasy XII, Square Enix may decide to cut its losses on the Ogre series; in this case, they'll take the already developed game and retool it into a new IP by making slight modifications to the story and, perhaps, minor cosmetic changes to the gameplay. However, the game will be coming out one way or the other.
3. Goichi Suda, the head of Grasshopper Manufacture, let quite the cat out of the bag when he confirmed that the quirky, Earthbound-reminiscent NDS RPG Contact would be getting a sequel, created by the same team that did the original (which has now spun off into its own independent studio). However, this game will not be for the NDS, as might be the natural expectation -- look for it to instead appear on the Wii home console.
4. In order to capitalize on the Wii's budding popularity post-E3, and to help prepare the system for the right userbase to establish the Friends of Mana online game, there's a strong likelihood that Square Enix will be putting an upgraded port of Dawn of Mana (or Seiken Densetsu IV) on the Wii in addition to the PS2. As mentioned before, this will be followed up with Friends of Mana, Square's next effort to hit success with online gaming, likely a late 2007 release.
5. As Japanese developers continue to face an enormous amount of hesitant uncertainty about the next generation console race (the Xbox 360 dead, the PS3 too costly, the Wii being different), you can count on seeing a LOT more PS2 games continue to be announced throughout the remainder of 2006 and into much of 2007. This will include quite a few new RPGs, many of which will reuse the graphical assets of older games and will, unfortunately, most likely not be making the leap across the Pacific. At least one of these new PS2 games will be a very high profile RPG -- like, say, Suikoden VI.
6. Mistwalker's big budget, eagerly anticipated Xbox 360 RPGs, seen by many as the potential saviors for the system in Japan (and the only things that can take it off of its laughable life support), are simply not going to move the numbers hoped for. The first new Hironobu Sakaguchi games in years will be solid sellers, but they're not going to change the console's status in Japan. The first game, Blue Dragon, will probably cap out at around 400,000 at the maximum (for comparison, this is about the same number Unlimited SaGa). The 360 will remain (just like its biggest series), DOA in Japan, and after the failure of Gooch's heavily-hyped games to make a dent, Japanese support will begin drying up aside from a few stalwarts, like Capcom or Itagaki's Team Ninja at Tecmo, who see an opportunity to fill a niche without much competition.
7. Towards the end of the year (perhaps at TGS, perhaps a bit later), expect a flood of announcements for new NDS games. These announcements will be fruits of projects that received the green light shortly after November and December of 2006 -- the two holiday months where the NDS started bringing in astonishing, record-breaking sales (the kind of sales that absolutely made every single publisher in Japan sit up and take notice). As these projects start reaching the ends of their ~13 month development cycle, then we'll start seeing announcements about them made.
And there you have it. In six months, perhaps a year, we can come back and see how I've done here. We'll have tea together, just you and I. It'll be fun, and we can reminisce over old times.
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