While the game was received with average to low scores, NEC announced a sequel in early 2000 titled “Ninth Will”. Unfortunately it seems they never shown any image from the project (or maybe there are some forgotten in old Japanese gaming magazines?) and soon it was canned, probably for the low sales of the original title.
In the end Atypical Alchemists Associate and NEC keep working on other games for the Dreamcast, many visual novels and dating sims such as Sentimental Graffiti 2, Kanon, Kimi ga Nozomu Eien and Pandora no Yume. We can assume this kind of low-budget projects was more profitable for the Dreamcast market after the discontinuation of the console in 2001.
If you ever find something more about this lost game in Japanese magazines, please let us know!
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing was a fighting game developed by Midway San Diego and published in 1999 initially for the Dreamcast. In 1998 the same team conceived another similar 3D fighting game, set in old-school sci-fi / fantasy settings.
This cancelled project was titled “X-Fighters” and would have featured such characters as a mad scientist, space-cop girls and warriors from alien planets. Only a few renders of these characters are saved in this page, to preserve the existence of this lost game.
By looking at these models and by reading its title, we can speculate X-Fighters would have been an arcade fighting game, with over-the-top battles between weird characters. Imagine a mix between Power Stone and Star Gladiator. Unfortunately the game was never announced by Midway and there are basically no more details about it.
Midway was one of the most prolific developers on the Dreamcast, with such arcade classics as NBA Showtime, Hydro Thunder, Gauntlet Legends and San Francisco Rush 2049. We can assume X-Fighters would have been another fun title to play with friends on our beloved Dreamcast. In the end the project was never fully developed after their initial pitch. Midway decided to make the team work on a different kind of fighting game, and the result was Ready to Rumble.
If you know someone who worked on this lost project, please let us know!
Shojo R (少女R) is a cancelled Dreamcast game that was in development by Compile in 1999. Unfortunately at the moment we don’t have any detail about the project and its gameplay, only some concept art were found by Videogamesdensetsu on Twitter.
By translating those Twitter messages it seems that Famitsu DreamCast magazine at the time published a short preview of the game (if you know someone who may own this issue, please let us know!). In the west Compile is mostly known for such games as Puyo Puyo (puzzle game) and Aleste (shoot ‘em up), during their lifespan they worked on many different games and it’s hard to say what kind of gameplay this Shojo R could have had.
By the look of the concept art available we can speculate it could have been a third person action / shooter game set in a sci-fi / military setting. In one of the scans we can also read “network game“, but we are not sure if it’s related to Shojo R or it was for something else.
As we can read on Wikipedia in 2003 Compile suffered from bankruptcy and as a result key staff moved to Compile Heart, the company’s spiritual successor, whereas shoot-’em-up staff moved to MileStone Inc.
Shojo R may remain forever as one of the many obscure, unseen cancelled Dreamcast games we’ll never know more about.
Farnation (sometime spelled Far Nation) is a cancelled online RPG that was going to be published by Sega, initially for their Dreamcast and later for Xbox. The game was somehow announced in mid 2000, when its title was found in a document released by Sega Enterprises discussing the company’s overall business strategy.
“With its upcoming massively multiplayer network RPG, Farnation, Sega plans to take the first step in introducing the concept of persistent online worlds to the console market. Farnation gives a nod to such successful PC games as Ultima Online and – more recently – Everquest by letting players interact with other human players across a large universe.
Farnation contains five different terrains, and in these areas, you will have the ability to cooperate with other human players in building towns – complete with casinos, libraries, restaurants, hospitals, banks, and residences. Of course, you aren’t limited to these towns. You can build stations that house airships, boats, and stagecoaches so that you can travel around the entire Farnation world to advance the game’s story arcs and events. In fact, there are several special events that occur throughout the game for plot advancement and, according to Sega, to make the game easily navigable for beginning players.
However, Farnation’s emphasis is on human interaction. Communicating through the use of the game’s chat function, you can buy, sell, and trade items with others. You can also form parties and head out in search of battles and adventure. In total, the game’s play modes include party battles, simultaneous online battles, weapon and item creator, town development, and story elements.
Aside from its gameplay features, Farnation looks to be one of the most visually impressive massively multiplayer online RPGs on the market. After briefly seeing the game in action, we came away thoroughly impressed with the amount of detail in the characters and environments, particularly in the towns. In one scene, there were at least a dozen generously modeled polygonal characters onscreen at once, and the environments were cluttered with several building structures and residences. Graphically, Farnation is favorably comparable to the currently available online RPGs for the PC platform.”
While the Gamespot Staff was able to take a look at the game, unfortunately Sega never officially released any image or footage to the public. From what we can read in this preview, it sounds the game would have been an original mix between Sim City and a traditional MMORPG.
In February 2001 on Dreamcast Magazine Issue 19 Farnation was named again in a list of future Dreamcast games. On March 2001Sega discontinued the Dreamcast, restructuring itself as a third-party publisher. Many Sega games in development were then moved to Xbox, GameCube and Playstation 2. In May 2001, Gamespot kinda confirmed that Farnation was then in development for Microsoft’s Xbox.
Still Sega did not shown anything from the game, not even officially announce its release. After a while Farnation vanished forever and the only proof we have of its existence is a prototype seen at the Sega of America office, in a photo they published on Flicker in July 2008.
Between many other Dreamcast games, released and unreleased, we can see a jewel case labeled “Farnation, PT-ROM 1/12/01”. This could have been an updated version of demo that Gamespot seen in December 2000.
We can only hope someone at Sega of America saved this Farnation prototype, to release it online in the future. If you know someone who worked at Sega in 2000 / 2001 and may have more details about Farnation, please let us know!
The 16-bit era brought many new possibilities into design and artistic fields on gaming. Colorful sprites, rich and fluid animation, stereo sound and many new features graced a period that for a long time was considered the most important for the video game industry.
One of the biggest hook for consumers in the 80’s and 90’s was the extensive licensed material. These decades would change video games forever as companies were beginning to understand it as a communication channel, more than just an electronic toy. Soon, adaptations from cartoons, anime, movies, comic books, novels and pretty much everything began to pop through. It was the “make a game of that” philosophy.
This means that game designers worked day and night to figure out how to work with whichever hardware came around, in every way possible to make something popular, playable. Sometimes this meant that something great was coming, sometimes it was just excuse to make more profit with a famous brand.
The only source available about this unseen game is a scan from a japanese magazine called Beep Mega Drive, dated 1991, which show us two screenshots, revealing the use of top-down perspective. Also, a map drawn for the game and anime was shared on Twitter by a former artist. We can also deduce by the menu displacement that it had classic j-rpg gameplay, including text-based actions, dialogues and multiple characters to use.
The game was also being co-produced by Sega.
Unfortunately we don’t know much more about this cancelled Mega Drive RPG: it quietly vanished forever with no official explanation. It remains one of the many lost 16bit games which will forever be forgotten by the majority of gamers all around the world.
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