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Back in 2013, a Kickstarter campaign was launched for the ambitious Project Phoenix, a JRPG helmed by Hiroaki Yura. It would smash its funding goal and earn $1,014,600, yet, over a decade later, it remains unreleased.
Amazingly, Yura has confirmed that the game is back in production – although it won't be launching any time soon.
Speaking in an interview with VGC, Yura goes some way to explaining exactly what went wrong with the campaign:
“It was my mistake. I overestimated my ability to deliver. Project Phoenix was the first game that I planned. I had never led a game project prior to then, and I overestimated my abilities to deliver. There were other key underlying factors for why we failed, but that was the main one.”
Another factor is the loss of a key team member, which VGC identifies as David Clark, who was working on Ori And The Blind Forest at the time the campaign was live.
When that proved to be a hit and a sequel was needed, Clark couldn't commit to Project Phoenix – and this understandably put the brakes on the project, as Yura tells VGC:
“He is a genius programmer. We were waiting for his next title to ship so he could join us and that delayed production. Art we could do, but programming was a lot harder.
When he was working on his other game as a freelancer, he committed to working on Project Phoenix after. All of a sudden, his game was very successful and the publisher was very happy, and they offered him more money to stay for the sequel.
As a friend, I was like, ‘You should do what’s good for your career. Don’t worry, I’ll find another programmer’. But that was the biggest mistake I made during that time, because he was a fucking genius. He was so good at what he did, and that was impossible to replace.”
More problems arose when it transpired that Yura was involved with the Advance Wars-style RTS Tiny Metal, and was accused of using Project Phoenix funds to produce that game – a claim that was later withdrawn, but not before serious damage had been done.
You'd assume, then, that the last thing Yura would want to do now is return to Project Phoenix, but that's precisely what he's done.
“Why now? I’ll be truthful, we want to show that we have the team now," he says. "We have the people, and we haven’t forgotten about this. That’s why we need to talk about it.”
The team includes ex-Crytek artist Erasmus Brosdau and former Blizzard designer Michael Chu, and Yura is keen to stress that "much of the core team" remains in place, including Nobuo Uematsu, Go Takahashi, and Koji Moriga. "Since then, we have added a lot of talent," he says.
"Takuya Suzuki on environments, Hisao Takano on sound editing, Ray Hsu... we are in far better shape to take Project Phoenix into production than we were the first time around.” He also adds that "everything going into the game now is paid for by the studio I’ve built since, not by what remained of the Kickstarter."
Yura has also shared some rough footage of the game as it stands right now, and insists that his team is "better suited to actually finish and to build a bigger and better game than the original plan ever could have. I’d rather be judged on that than on what went wrong getting here.”
The catch? Yura doesn't think we'll see this game until 2031. "Internally, I was forced to make a promise: I will finish development by the end of 2031. And I am serious. I don’t think I can pursue any more later than 2031 because, you know, I’ve made everybody wait too long, and at the same time, I have to be realistic with my dev team."