Nintendo Wii Fanboy

In late 2006, out of nowhere, Taito announced a PlayStation 2 sequel to their relatively obscure arcade game of twenty years earlier, Kiki KaiKai. The Western gamers who noticed, and who knew the game's SNES sequel as Pocky & Rocky, cheered, especially when the screenshots showed up, revealing a vivid 2D game that kept the same multidirectional shooting gameplay and top-down perspective as the original. And then Taito cancelled it.

Kiki KaiKai 2 resurfaced in September of last year, from publisher UFO Interactive, with altered character sprites and a new name to reflect the severed Taito relationship: Kiki Kai World. At this point a Wii version was revealed along with the PS2 version. We then had to worry about whether the Wii version would actually show up, since not even UFO's own website mentioned it.

In November, UFO changed the name again, to Heavenly Guardian, probably to remove any link to a property that Taito (or, rather, their parent company Square Enix) could aggressively protect.

The possibility of this game actually coming out seemed so remote that I never dared get my hopes up. It had already been cancelled once, and it had gone through two name changes and a publisher change. It seemed a lot more likely that Kiki KaiKai 2/Kiki Kai World/Heavenly Guardian would quietly disappear. I am happy to confirm that, after repeated near-death experiences, Heavenly Guardian is real and available. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't played it myself.

When UFO Interactive told us that Heavenly Guardian would be out in "Q2," we had no idea it would be so soon in this particular Q. Gamestop now lists the shooter, which was once a sequel to Kiki Kaikai/Pocky & Rocky, with an April 22nd release date, at an excellent price of $19.99. UFO confirmed both the release date an the price to us.

Apparently, the PS2 version slipped out to a few retail outlets a while ago, and we didn't even notice -- and neither did other review outlets, it seems. The Wii release should be a bit more high-profile, if only because we're talking about it right now! It's an original, fully 2D action/shooter game; how could we not talk about it?

No, The Monkey King: The Legend Begins didn't come out this week. But, according to the UFO Interactive rep we contacted about the game, it'll be out in Q2, which is ... pretty soon! Even more exciting, we got confirmation that not only is Heavenly Guardian (once Kiki Kai World) indeed coming out for Wii, it's also coming out in Q2! That's two brightly-colored 2D shooters in one vaguely-defined period.

Along with this news, we got a bunch of awesome screenshots and art of both games, which we've put into screenshots for you. We've heard from players of the Japanese version that The Monkey King isn't so great, but we're still excited.

The most recent screens of Starfish's Kiki Kai World are looking ... well, a little bit sparse. We're somewhat disappointed by the basically blank environments. It's quite a contrast from the lush graphics seen in earlier screenshots. The sprites look quite nice, but some of the screenshots seem a little low on detail, like the one above. Spamming the screen with a pile of identical enemies-- it's bizarre, but doesn't make for a super-impressive screenshot.

Of course, our impression could be a result of the snow level, which, for a game with this perspective, means pretty much solid white. We're just glad Famitsu is calling this a Wii game, because we had some doubts recently.

The first real screens of Kiki Kai World-- as in, not screens of the cancelled Kiki KaiKai 2-- have been released, with the new character sprites. Since we're not heavily invested in the Kiki KaiKai universe, we couldn't care less that the characters look a little different. The gorgeous high-resolution 2D art and brilliant colors make us very happy that this game exists. The NeoGAF audience seems to be less impressed with these shots than the previous Kiki KaiKai 2 stuff (mostly for technical reasons: the images are resized and there's a bit of JPG artifacting), but we still like them.

What doesn't make us happy, however, is that Gamespot labels Kiki Kai World as a PS2 game only. And, to make things worse, publisher UFO Interactive only shows the PS2 version as "Coming Soon" on their website, with no mention of the Wii version at all. We may have just posted screens that have nothing to do with the Wii! We posted them out of faith.

[Via NeoGAF]

Cubed3 talked to Starfish's Chong Ahn, a producer on Kiki Kai World, and nailed down the question that all (three or so) of us wondered: Is Kiki Kai World based on the cancelled PS2 Kiki KaiKai 2, or did they start over? It is, as suspected, the cancelled game with new art, which means that Taito's cruel cancellation of Kiki KaiKai 2 will not deprive the world of that game. Ahn promises that Kiki KaiKai/Pocky and Rocky fans will be right at home playing World.

When asked about possible online features, Ahn responds in the negative, stating: "As for the WiiConnect24 service, we do not feel it is something that needs to be utilised for this title." We're pretty sure we didn't need online integration in Kiki Kai World, anyway. Starfish plans to release the game in the first quarter of 2008-- we're optimistic about the chances of this actually coming out.