Heck, we've held back multiple recent Pokemon reviews because of Nintendo's strict information controls, such as not allowing us to talk about the literal opening cutscene of Pokemon Legends: Arceus. This weird secrecy fits into a longer, ongoing pattern that Nintendo has been embracing lately of being weirdly cagey about simple, inoffensive information, such as who the voice of Mario is, and being increasingly harsh about what kinds of information it will and won't let early reviewers share with their audiences. It's just so bizarre that a piece of information that's normally a staple of press releases, fact sheets, official websites, trailers, and copyright pages was so well and deliberately hidden. I don't think there's any secret scandal here revolving around ArtePiazza. Had we learned this months ago, we all just would have gone, "Oh cool, ArtePiazza!" and moved on with our lives. The most interesting bit of it is the involvement of ArtePiazza, a long-standing Japanese studio with a reputation for making pretty good Dragon Quest remakes and ports. Yoko Shimomura returned to reimagine the soundtrack. I won't read you the entire credits, but overall project leadership appeared to be a joint effort between Nintendo and ArtePiazza, collaborating with Digital Media Lab for cutscenes, Basiscape for sound design, and Nintendo Pictures for character art. Nintendo's Taro Kudo was the event director after holding the same role on Paper Mario: The Origami King. Art direction came from Shintaro Majima over at ArtePiazza, who was also art director for the Romancing SaGa 3 remaster and Dragon Quest Builders, among many other things. So, I don't know, here's the information Nintendo was so secretive about, I guess! Super Mario RPG Remake was directed by Ayako Moriwaki, who was also an assistant director on Pikmin 4 and worked on level design for Yoshi's Crafted World. Barring that, an embargo on discussing the game's credits would have prevented anyone reviewing the game from listing the literal co-creator of this game anywhere in their reviews. The general public only found out because someone managed to find it written in very tiny letters in a copyright notice at the bottom of a Japanese pre-order download page. Notably, while IGN had the game for review, all this information was locked behind those credits - there was no ArtePiazza logo on a splash screen when you booted the game up, nothing. Instead, Square Enix told me to ask Nintendo, and Nintendo said to wait until the game is out and check the credits. Clears it right up.īut that didn't happen. It would have been extremely simple for either of them to just respond to my email and say, "Hey yeah thanks for asking, it was a joint effort between Nintendo internal studios and ArtePiazza." Simple. So I did the fairly obvious thing a journalist does in this situation and reached out to Nintendo and Square Enix to find out the answer. A few weeks ago, I saw several threads of online speculation of who the studio was - could it be Grezzo? Camelot? A group of rehired AlphaDream developers? No one seemed to know. What's weird though is the goofy, cagey way Nintendo chose to handle this information as we inched closer and closer to launch. The official Nintendo store page for the game pointed to Nintendo as the publisher, but again, those pages don't list developers. This in itself wasn't unusual, as plenty of trailers like it, especially in Nintendo Directs, don't include this information. In the initial announcement trailer, there was no indication of who the development studio was - just a copyright notice indicating the property was owned by Nintendo and Square Enix. Super Mario RPG's remake was announced at a Nintendo Direct earlier this year. Wrong! Nintendo has been being very weird about disclosing seemingly basic information about who developed the Super Mario RPG Remake for months now, and there's no clear reason why. So given that it's a great remake of a classic game with seemingly no whiff of controversy or problems around it, there's absolutely no reason for its publisher, Nintendo, to be weird or cagey about who actually made it, right? The remake of Super Mario RPG is out today, and good news! It's a great game! We reviewed it, saying that the game is "considered a classic for a reason, and this wonderfully faithful remake makes it easy for anyone who missed it in the SNES era to see why." While some outlets disagreed with us, the vast majority of critics seem to like it a lot.
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