How do you go from Senran Kagura to this abomination?
Well, there’s countless reasons actually as to how the likes of Marvelous Games and XSEED could fall so damn far in such a short amount of time, because of course this is the fate that they themselves have chosen so long ago from sticking with their abusive relationship with Sony Interactive Entertainment which lead to endless censorship galore for a more woke and inclusive Senran Kagura, dubbed 7EVEN that was censored so goddamn hard it has essentially been scrapped.
This also resulted in the creator / producer of Senran Kagura, Kenichiro Takaki to leave Marvelous and ever since then Marvelous has been falling out of relevance with their fanbase with “globalized” standards and practices and now it seems they’ve been hogging the bottle of soy sauce for themselves.
Silent Hope is an isometric 3D action RPG that looks about as creative as it was slapdashedly put together.
It’s actually baffling to see that Marvelous and XSEED Games have both put their seal on this abomination, from its low poxy exterior and bland art style you would imagine that someone had developed a mobile dungeon crawler game and handed it off to Marvelous for publishing but no, this is a completely all new in-house IP from Marvelous and XSEED directly.
Players will have the choice between seven different heroes, each with their own unique abilities, such as half the playable characters being ethnically inclusive, with at least one playable character of color having a gender identity crisis.
Thanks to the low effort chibi design, the character known as the Archer has the appearance of a woman, despite having a male voice in-game, the other characters are not that all expressive or all that different in design with the only variation between all seven characters being the darkness of their skin color.
Though of course there’s not much to expect from the company that managed to destroy the Rune Factory franchise with the release of just a single game, with Rune Factory 5 being completely broken.
Performance issues, load times, crashes and corruption. All of this was prevalent throughout ones playthrough of Rune Factory 5, for over an entire year and instead of updating the game and fixing its horribleness, Marvelous and Co. instead decided to force an update that added the ability for gay marriage rather than actual bug fixes.
Needless to say, consumers were not fucking happy, especially after Marvelous and XSEED went back on their word regarding the promise of additional DLC romances of some female characters, despite their voice overs and general code already being in the game, never to be released.
Rune Factory 5 was an abolishment of what made the franchise so reputable, completely destroying any actual trust in both companies consumers may have had, the game was a massive financial loss and rightly so.
So much so that Marvelous have fallen back on old properties such as the Story of Seasons / Harvest Moon farming sim, but of course with each new release from Marvelous the product seemingly gets worse and worse not only in terms of quality but equality as well.
Marvelous are getting lazier with each new game they put out, their finances are also taking a noticeable hit especially after looking at the soulless design elements seen in Silent Hope, where even the UI / HUD elements are just all around generic and lazy.
You can look forward to Marvelous and XSEED’s upcoming financial hit when it releases for regions outside of Japan on October 3rd 2023 for Nintendo Switch and PC platforms.
