Studio Saizensen president Toshinobu Kondo appeared on 4Gamer’s TGS livestream today, explaining the concepts and showing off gameplay from their latest game, Umihara Kawase Fresh!. Among the news was that Cotton from the shmup Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams will be playable in the game.
According to Kondo, they first went back to the drawing board to re-examine what was so enjoyable about the game series, and how to refresh the gameplay. The latest game takes place in a metroidvania-type open world rather than a stage-by-stage basis. Instead of being confined to the walls of each stage, now you can keep walking on and seeing more and more of the world.
Without stages, what sort of objectives should you have? Umihara Kawase Fresh! will have a quest system, where you need to platform from point A to point B under various conditions in order to complete the quests. Completed quests will appear in the Time Attack option on the menu, so you can complete them again while being timed, and compete for the best time.
Along the way, you can enjoy the story in Umihara Kawase Fresh!, which is completely new to the series as well. While the mysterious elements in the Umihara Kawase series is part of its charm, this is the rebirth of the series after all, so Studio Saizensen thought it would be nice to have a story as well. They have worked hard on creating the world and the characters that inhabit the world.
You can collect various fruits and ingredients this time in the overworld with your lure, and cook them. In this game, enemies usually won’t kill you in one hit, so if you are low on health, it’s best to eat something to heal up. Umihara Kawase’s health is represented via the green Hunger meter and blue Thirst meter.
Kondo also hints that the ingredients hanging about can also be hooked and used to get around.
Cotton from Success’ Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams will be playable after a certain point in the story, although Umihara Kawase will still be the main protagonist. When asked if Cotton will also be using a lure, Kondo joked that she’s probably going to be throwing fairies around instead.
Finally, Kondo reiterated that the game is coming out in 2019, though when in 2019 is undecided. He hopes they make Spring 2019.
Kondo also had gameplay to show off, using the demo build made for TGS 2018. Check it out below (starts at around 11:00):
Success also showed off Umihara Kawase’s new design on Twitter:
Umihara Kawase Fresh! will release for Nintendo Switch in 2019. Recently, Success also talked about the gameplay and whether the game will come out for other systems as well, which you can find here.
Published: Sep 20, 2018 02:00 pm