Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Daiseiou, which means "Great Sage King" or "Great Wise King" is a manga based on the Chinese Monkey King story that has been adapted and remade countless times, most recently in the game world as Starfish's The Monkey King: The Legend Begins.

It appears that the legend is continuing: Starfish is working on a game based on Daiseiou, which is also a 2D side-scrolling shooter with the player as the Monkey King flying on his cloud (though this one also features Space Harrier-style segments). For two games in the exact same genre about the same subject matter from the same developer, the styles couldn't be more different -- Daiseiou's detailed, painted-looking style is a sharp contrast from the colorful chibiness of The Monkey King. There's nothing but a single (but pretty excellent) piece of artwork on the official website right now, but you can see plenty of screens at Famitsu.

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.

Siliconera interviewed UFO Interactive's Michael Yum about their two Wii shooters, Heavenly Guardian and The Monkey King: The Legend Begins. We recently nailed down the release date for Heavenly Guardian (April 22nd!) and Spencer Yip tried to do the same for the horizontal shooter The Monkey King. Unfortunately, the release date is still somewhat in the air (and maybe being fired at by patterns of glowing bullets), with Yum able to specify only Q2, with a probable $19.99 price. The awesome news is that the U.S. version will get a "reverse mode" and a new exclusive stage!

Yum discussed the recent change in boxart for The Monkey King, from the colorful anime-style piece seen above to a cover with a less cartoony interpretation of the title character. He explained that "The American audience was just not aware of the Monkey King character so we felt that releasing the game after a new movie which I cannot say, would help people recognize the character." Presumably, then, the art was changed to resemble a live-action movie (probably The Forbidden Kingdom) a bit more.

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 fate of UFO Interactive's North American release of Kiki Kai World (now known as Heavenly Guardian) is up in the air. We aren't sure if it's coming out on Wii, or PS2, or anything. But UFO's other Starfish-developed 2D game, Monkey King: The Legend Begins, is still on the way -- this trailer says this month, but Amazon says April 15th.

We're continuing to be optimistic about this game, both in terms of its quality and the likelihood of its release, because we so desperately want to believe that it's possible to release an original 2D sidescrolling shooter in 2008, and that it's possible to subsequently enjoy that shooter. It's easy to be optimistic when the game is as pretty as this one is.

[Via NeoGAF]

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.

UFO Entertainment announced today their plans to release Kiki Kai World for the PS2 and Wii. Kiki Kai World is a "spiritual successor" to Taito's classic shooter Kiki Kaikai, known in the US as Pocky & Rocky.

Developer Starfish announced a sequel to Kiki Kaikai last year with crisp, bright 2D art. It was cancelled. According to the UFO rep Game|Life's Chris Kohler spoke to, this isn't the same game, but it's "very similar" (which probably means just similar enough to avoid problems with Taito.)

We were sad when Kiki Kaikai 2 died. Little did we know that it would come back on a system that is so dear to us. Everybody, cross your fingers and hope this actually makes it to the shelves in early 2008.