Is the Sakaguchi/Silicon Studio game a Terra Battle MMO?

[Freya]

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Dualshockers did some heavy digging after last week's announcement of a new game being worked on with Hironobu Sakaguchi's Mistwalker and Bravely Default's Silicon Studio. They noticed that the image that was being used and promoted looked awfully familiar to something they had seen before.

Kimihiko Fujisaka, an artist employed at Mistwalker, had his artwork appear in a Mistwalker gallery almost seven years ago. It is no longer available online but as mentioned in this article on Siliconera from back then, it was clearly released before in 2009. Originally thought to have been for The Last Story, on Fujisaka's author page on the Mistwalker site, he explained it was just 2721445-drakengard3_002.jpga stand alone project he had been working on.

Even more intriguing, the same sword is held by a Character, Two, in Drakenguard 3. While Fujisaka is still employed with Mistwalker, he did work on the character designs for Taro Yoko for the game.

It goes deeper than that though. On Terra Battle's Download Starter page, the same artwork is used on the console version of Terra Battle, labelled Terra Battle World. This has already been achieved as a goal several months ago. So the production on it should already be in full swing. Sakaguchi has mentioned before that it would be quite different than it's Mobile counterpart. In fact, it's been said that it will be an MMORPG set in the same world with a focus on the tactical formation gameplay that is a focus on the mobile game.

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If this is the MMORPG Terra Battle World, it is understandable to use Silicon Studios. The press release mentioned the use of Silicon Studios techonolgy. That would be their Orochi game engine and Mizuchi rendering engine. You can check out the tech demo that was released well over two years ago for the Mizuchi rendering engine. It could only have improved since then.

Kimihiko Fujisaka is the lead Character Designer on Mistwalker's Terra Battle, so using an older piece of work of his is understandable but could this mean we're getting a MMORPG Terra Battle in conjecture with Silicon Studios? Dualshockers has reached out to Mistwalker to inquire on why such an old piece of artwork is being used on a new announcement but no updates as of yet.

What are your thoughts about a console based MMORPG set in the the world of Terra Battle? Do you believe this is what their partnership and new game that they have announced is all about? Share your thoughts!

[Wolf Kanno]

While I know Sakaguchi said he was toying with the idea of making the console version of Terra Battle into an MMO, I'm still hoping he'll make it into a single player RPG with a battle system still in alignment with Terra Battles system (Tactical RPG would work) but with all that said and done, I'm glad to see Mistwalker actually making some stuff for console. Regardless, I'm pretty interested to see what they'll do with the Terra Battle IP as it's one of the better projects from the studio.

[Freya]

I hope they make it into an MMO. The art work is amazing. The world is amazing. The tactical take on an MMO may just be what we need outside of the normal class tactics.