This is what frustrates me about Capcom these days.
They spend all this time homogenizing Resident Evil and Lost Planet, when those franchises were special because of what made them DIFFERENT from everything else. Now, because production costs on these games are rising, their focus on market dollars and trying to appeal to mass audiences is forcing unnecessary change on franchises that are transforming from something quirky into something generic.
The idea of trying to make more money is perfectly fine. That's business, and that's what they do. But EX Troopers looks wierd and fun and sort of different. And the industry needs this kind of variety. It needs niches and wierd offshoots and stuff like this. They really should have made this one for domestic release. It's got a strong anime bent, and if Capcom had the balls to take a chance on it, they might be surprised by the revenue it could generate.
Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story are both niche titles and they did pretty decent numbers for the Wii. Of course, that may partially be because of the OpRa hype, but still...it just proves that with the right marketing, people will buy what you are selling. And one thing Capcom does very well is market.
I really hope they reconsider releasing this domestically. What will it hurt? It's not like Lost Planet is some bastion of purity as a franchise. They already took the wonderful premise of the first game -white out survival horror combined with mecha action- and homogenized it by making the second game a run of the mill sci fi squad based shooter. And the third one looks like 'The Thing' in space, which isn't completely bad but it's obvious that it's lost its unique identity. I am fully expecting Lost Planet 3 to be nothing but QTEs and set pieces in robots.
