Hudson

Oriental Blue [Nintendo 64DD – Cancelled]

oriental blue nintendo 64dd cancelled

Oriental Blue is a cancelled RPG in the Far East of Eden (Tengai Makyō) series that was in development by Hudson and Red Entertainment for Nintendo 64DD in late ‘90. The Tengai Makyo series was started in 1989 with the help of Oji Hiroi, the same author behind the Sakura Wars series, and even if it was one of the most popular RPG series in Japan in the ’90, only one chapter of Far East of Eden was officially translated in english. Oriental Blue 64DD was announced by Hudson in japanese gaming magazines (?) as one of the few RPGs planned for Nintendo’s ill-fated Disk Drive, but as the add-on was postponed many times and then discontinued soon after its release in Japan, the game was quietly canned and Hudson never shown any official images from the game. A few years later, in an interview published on the japanese Nintendo website, Kaori Shirozu (director and designer at Hudson at the time) explained that the project was resurrected and re-developed as a GBA game and finally released in 2003 as Oriental Blue: Ao no Tengai. The Nintendo 64DD version of Oriental Blue would have probably looked like the GameCube remake of Tengai Makyō II: Manjimaru (also released in 2003), with 3D low-poly environments and sprite based characters.

Oriental Blue: Ao no Tengai on GBA:

oriental blue gba

Tengai Makyo II: Manjimaru on GameCube:

Tengai Makyo 2 Manjimaru GameCube

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Tengai Makyou III: NAMIDA 3 [PC Engine / PC-FX – Cancelled]

Tengai Makyou III: NAMIDA was a new game in the highly popular Tengai Makyou series (known as Far East of Eden outside Japan) planned for PC-FX. The game actually was first announced for PCEngine Super CD and later moved to Arcade Card Duo format but never completed. Below you can see a japanese teaser article when the game was first revealed for SCD thanks to The Turbo List.

The game was announced in 1995 and development ceased at a very late stage. In July 1997 Hudson Soft officially announced that the project has been halted due to the fact that a release on the shrinking PC-FX userbase would be unprofitable for the company. Several years later Hudson Soft revived the project on PS2 ( and Gamecube but , once again, a version was terminated), heavily re-tooling it, and finally released it in 2005.

Very few media exist about the PC-FX project like for example an image found in GameFan volume 3 issue 10. Defrost in the pcenginefx.com forum posted some nice arts and gifs about Namida for the NEC console.

Article by Celine, thanks to dfrost for the contribution!

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The Calling [Wii – Beta]

The Calling is a survival horror developed by Hudson Entertainment that was released for Wii in 2009. In the screens and the videos below, we can see how different were the HUDs, the cellphone and the first two locations of the game in the beta. Interestingly, the early builds depicted in these videos were probably created for internal testing and never meant to be shown to the public: they were leaked before the official presentation.

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Kuma Soldier [PC-FX – Cancelled]

Kuma Soldier is a cancelled shooter in the famous Star Soldier series, planned for PC-FX (to not be confused with Super Star Soldier 3D also planned for PC-FX). As you can see from the short video below (taken from a promotional video made by NEC to promote the then brand-new system) the game provided a time attack mode, but it is unclear if it offered other gaming modes. CD Consoles magazine issue 5 cited how the game in early 1995 was only 20% complete. We can speculate that Hudson Soft cancelled Kuma Soldier when the PC-FX proved to be a failure in the japanese market.

As noticed by users of the Rising Stuff Forum, it seems that Hudson used some of the Kuma Soldier concepts to create Star Soldier R for WiiWare.

Article by Celine!

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