Robert Boyd

Just to let everyone know, we are looking into bringing the game to other platforms besides PC, Mac, Xbox Live Indie Games, iOS and Android, but those are the only definite platforms at this time. Hopefully we'll be able to announce additional platforms at a later date.

@Iamdude

By standalone adventure, we mean that you don't NEED to have played the first two games to play this one. There will still be references to events, characters, and locations in the third game which we hope longtime fans will enjoy.

As for the whole importing save idea, we thought about that, but ended up scrapping it for a number of reasons.

@FinalFantasyXIIIsucks

It's mostly a price thing. XBLA games are generally $10-$20 and the price is determined by Microsoft. We wanted to have control over the price and sell it for much cheaper so we decided to go with XBLIG (meaning the price can be in the $1-$5 range).

Thanks for the kind comments guys!

Our games are now on sale on Steam for a mere $1 for the combo pack of Cthulhu Saves the World + Breath of Death VII, so if you haven't played them yet, now's a good time. :)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/107310

I hate all these US websites posting ignorant articles about Japanese game prices. 6090 yen is not an unusually high price for a portable RPG in Japan. That's the exact same price that Ao no Kiseki (the most recent sequel to Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky) for the PSP released at, just a couple months ago.

The fact of the matter is that Japan charges a lot more for video games than the US does to the extent that it's not unusual for DS, PSP, and 3DS games in Japan to cost more than 360 and PS3 games in the US. It's no wonder they have a major used game problem.

@lsrs Yes, the Suikoden games have even bigger casts of characters, but each game also has a small core of characters that are very well developed. In contrast, Chrono Cross didn't really develop any of the characters very well.

I've replayed 3 of the games mentioned here in the past year or two and my job is to make games in the JRPG style so I have a tendency to look at JRPGs analytically even when playing them for fun. And I must say, I drastically disagree with just about this entire article.

Suikoden & Chrono Cross both hold up very well today. Unfortunately, they were never very good games to begin with. Suikoden 1 was above average at best when it came out (although the sequel is excellent) and Chrono Cross is a love it or hate it game (with myself falling in the latter camp).

Xenogears does not hold up very well at all. The graphics are really bad (they're trying to do a 2D+3D hybrid like Grandia but they did a much worse job of it), the gameplay is extremely unbalanced, the story which felt really edgy and cool back in the day pales in comparison to stuff like Persona 4 & TWEWY, and the text speed & general pacing of the game is so very slow. You really need a lot of patience and/or nostalgia to enjoy it these days.

Grandia, on the other hand, holds up quite well. The graphics have more style than most 3D games of that era and so still look artistically good (if not technically) and even in its first installment, Grandia has one of the funnest battle systems ever created in a JRPG. It's one of the few JRPGs out there where you might actually find yourself intentionally starting random battles, not because you need the XP or gold but because it's just plain fun. And did you seriously badmouth Grandia's music? Admittedly, it's not as good as the composer's earlier work on Lunar: Eternal Blue, but it's still really good. And the voice acting isn't very good but I've heard much worse.

I think the big problem here is that the writer based this on the first bit of each game. Xenogears has an amazing opening and slowly but steadily goes downhill from there. Grandia, on the other hand, has a slow start but after the first couple of hours gets really good.

The way the games were choosen is pretty simple - we had a thread on the official XNA forums and asked for submissions. After we got several submissions, the other promotion organizers and I decided which ones looked the most promising and included them.

Astroman, Curse of the Crescent Isle, Decay 3, Revolver 360 - these are all great games that I would have been happy to have included in the promotion, but their respective developers never asked to be included.