Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts creators are back with two new JRPGs

rockpapershotgun.com:

It's been a hot minute since I last crossed paths with JRPG series Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts, but today the key creators behind both of these late 90s and early 00s RPGs have announced they're making two brand-new JRPGs that are inspired by their previous works - and they're launching a 'double Kickstarter' campaign to help fund them. The games are called Penny Blood and Armed Fantasia (no points for guessing who's making what), and based on what I've seen so far, I'm intrigued.

Armed Fantasia is, as you might have surmised, being made by former Wild Arms devs under the banner of their new studio Wild Bunch Productions. The creator of the series, Akifumi Kaneko, is on board handling lead game design and scenario writing, and composer Michiko Naruke is back along with fellow musicians Noriyasa Agematsu and his group Elements Garden. Like Wild Arms, Armed Fantasia has a 'westernpunk' theme, and follows a group of adventurers known as Pathfinders on their journey through the wilderness. They each have their own ARM (or aether reaction maximiser) weapon to hand, and they'll be dispatching strange 'anomalies' that are ravaging the land.

Wild Bunch promise a "gigantic" world map stuffed with things to do (although here's hoping it's not one that follows the Ubisoft school of open world design), but it sounds like there will still be good old-fashioned dungeons to explore as well. It certainly looks lovely based on the screenshots, and its turn-based battle system looks particularly flashy. It's not yet clear how each character's ARM weapons will differ from one another, but fights will utilise what the devs are referring to as a 'cross order tactics' system, allowing characters to disrupt enemy turn orders to their