10 Unreleased Vita Ports I'd Still Like to See - Article
by Adam Cartwright , posted on 26 January 2019 / 4,779 Views
Two years ago, the Vita was in an undeniably better state. It had never sold particularly well worldwide, but it wasn’t on the verge of discontinuation, with western cart production stopping and stiff competition from the new kid on the block. At the very least, its prospects were more promising and there was still plenty on the horizon to look forward to.
Fast forward to today and the Vita is in a very different position and, thanks to the above factors, cancellations of previously announced games are now commonplace – it’s easier to work on the assumption that a title isn’t coming until you see it on the PlayStation Store. That’s left the status of some ports, many of which were previously offering very positive signs that they were still targeting the platform, in limbo (best illustrated by the recent news that Bloodstained would no longer be hitting the console).
It’s these games that I’m going to look at in this article – 10 titles that I’m still very keen to see on Vita that we’ve not heard about for a long time, and that I’m beginning to doubt will ever hit the handheld, but that I’d love to hear an update about.
Deathbase 900,000,000
In 2017 we got the enjoyable and sadly overlooked Son of Scoregasm from Charlie’s Games, a twin-stick shooter that offered some fast-paced and incredibly enjoyable gameplay. On the developer’s blog that same year he mentioned that Deathbase 900,000,000, a “noisy, neon homage to Solar Fox” would be hitting Vita “shortly after” Scoregasm, but here we are in 2019 and it’s nowhere to be seen. To be fair, Charlie is a solo dev who is also working on a PS4 port of his previous title (also AWOL), but it would be nice to have some kind of word to know if it’s still coming.
Drifter
Back at the end of 2017, I included the sandbox space trading sim Drifter in my list of 10 games I was excited to play in the coming year, based on the assumption that, from its first announcement for Vita in 2014 to the date of the article, it would surely be hitting the handheld soon. That obviously turned out to be too optimistic. The devs do occasionally Tweet reminders and videos that Drifter has been up and running on Sony’s handheld, but I’d appreciate a proper update on the status of this port.
Drift Stage
Another game that made my list of upcoming 2018 games, Drift Stage is a gorgeous cell-shaded, neon-drenched arcade racer that takes heavy inspiration from 90s games like Outrun and Ridge Racer. Recent rumblings on Twitter suggest the title is in development hell and the code has been passed off to another company to work on. Who really knows what’s happening with this one, but I’d be all over it if it did manage to make it out on Vita (or anywhere, for that matter!).
Is it Wrong to Try to Pick up Girls in a Dungeon? Infinite Combate
Diligent readers of my website will note that I have a full section dedicated to import reviews and that I love importing titles from Japan (especially where they contain easy-to-understand gameplay). So when a tie-in to the popular DanMachi series was announced, promising action-based dungeon crawling, my interest was piqued. Sadly, the game missed its original 2017 release date and then also missed its delayed 2018 release. It’s currently aiming for spring 2019, which should match the launch of the second season of the anime, but if it gets quietly canned then it wouldn’t be the first time a 5pb game for Vita got delayed repeatedly then cancelled.
Legend of Raven
Indie publisher Nicalis has gained a bit of a reputation for causing developers difficulties in actually shipping their products. For example, The 90's Arcade Racer was renamed '90's Super GP after being picked up by Nicalis, but seems no closer to release. A similar thing happened to Legend of Raven, a fighting game from three of the former members of the King of Fighters development team. Despite targeting a 2013 release on Vita, before shifting to PS4/PSV/XB1 in 2015, the title seems nowhere on the horizon and Nicalis has offered no real reason for its absence. The indie fighting game market is a lot more crowded now than it was in 2013 - so just where is Legend of Raven?
Monster Slayers
Digerati Distribution has had a fairly positive relationship with Vita, bringing a variety of hidden gem indie games to Sony’s handheld. That support continued into 2018, with things like Slayaway Camp, but one game that was announced but never materialised is the turn-based deck-building RPG Monster Slayers, developed by Nerdook, of Vertical Drop Heroes fame. Monster Slayers was pegged for a spring 2018 release on all platforms, but while the PS4 and XB1 versions came and went the Vita port never happened, so just where is it?
Narcissu
When visual novel localisation expert Sekai Project revealed it would support Vita, I was ecstatic. Then the years rolled by and nothing happened. Just as my faith was being tested, the company announced a partnership with Limited Run Games to bring numerous titles, including Narcissu (which I’m told is an emotional rollercoaster), to the console. That was two years ago and there’s still nothing to show for it. The last word I heard was that LRG was pushing to make a couple of these releases happen before the physical window closes (by asking for current builds), but I’m willing to bet that’s Fault Milestone and World End Economica, and that Narcissu gets left in the dust. I really hope that I’m wrong, but it's beginning to look like none of them will happen.
Ray’s the Dead
Another promising Kickstarter project that seems to have run into development problems along the way, Ray’s the Dead from Ragtag Studios has you controlling a human named Ray who becomes able to lead the undead around as an army in order to fight and solve puzzles (it sounds a bit like Overlord crossed with Pikmin crossed with Zombie Tycoon 2). The developer hasn't been coy about the fact that Vita isn't a priority, but has continued to hint it’s coming. Time is definitely running out though, so it would be nice to see an announcement either way.
Starlight Tactics
Starlight Inception was one of the earliest Vita Kickstarter ‘success’ stories out there, but while it arrived on the platform in a timely manner it was also a bit of a technical mess, although to its credit the developer did take the time to improve things with patches. The team then went on to announce two more titles in the same universe for Vita – Starlight Tactics and Starlight Titanium, both of which are space-based tactical games that looked fairly promising. However, despite teases of footage, neither game is out yet and it’s looking increasingly unlikely that they’ll ever happen.
Strength of the Sword Ultimate
On PS3, Strength of the Sword 3 was a neat little boss rush fighting game with a punishing difficulty level that seemed to fly completely under the radar. So when the developers decided to fund an expanded remake for new platforms (including Vita) on Kickstarter they received a solid amount of support, but years down the line we seem no closer to the game releasing on any platform. Ivent Games did provide regular updates for a while and recently conducted an interview with VitaIslandViews, but that seemed to shed little light on when we’d actually be playing it, beyond hopefully 2019.
Conclusion
Announcing a game for a platform doesn’t automatically mean it’ll happen – even successful machines like PS4 and Nintendo Switch see things like Deep Down and Steep facing cancellation years after being revealed. This is often exacerbated on less successful consoles like Vita and Wii-U though, where early enthusiasm turns to cold market reality over the years and projects inevitably get shelved for commercial or technical reasons.
Despite this, Vita has always been the little machine that could – whether it be things like Papers, Please appearing out of the blue more than three years after it was initially announced (similar things happened to Roundabout after four years, as well as the recently resurfaced NightCry), or 2064: Read Only Memories being un-cancelled after the developer found the energy to finish it off.
The realist in me accepts that the majority of the titles in this article will never happen, as Vita finally reaches worldwide discontinuation and cart production finishes, but there’s a part of me that is hopeful that some more miracles will happen and I’ll be playing some of these games on my handheld at some point in 2019. Whether that happens is still up in the air, but it’d be nice for these developers to keep to their word.
