14 DAY TRIAL // Sin & Punishment did pretty well when it was launched on the Nintendo 64 and even if it let enough loose ends, it wasn't followed by the sequel everyone expected. The game had to wait nine years before it could spawn an offspring. Sin & Punishment 2 was first announced by Nintendo at a press conference last year but has operated under the radar ever since. Whatever progress the game made during this time wasn't really shared with the gaming community. But now, with just over three weeks until the big release, news about it is finally starting to emerge.
Coming to Japan on October 29, developer Treasure and the folks over at Nintendo promise that the game will be everything the first one was but on a higher level. Famistu magazine had a chance to talk to Masato Maegawa, the man in charge of Treasure, and here is what he had to say: "It's not that we particularly had a sequel in mind from the beginning. The idea behind that project was basically to make a game that used the left-hand position on the Nintendo 64 controller, since not too many other games did that. When the Wii came out, we felt like we just had to tackle it again – it's not like we've been sitting on this idea for nine years, but the simplest reason for this sequel is 'because the Wii came out'.”
Gameplay wise, it resembles the original title. It's an on-rails shooter where the player uses long ranged and melee attacks to dispatch his enemies. Sin & Punishment 2 will follow the story of Isa Jo, the son of Saki and Airan from the first game. He travels to a parallel version of Earth with a mission to find and dispatch Kachi, a girl that has lost her memory but the two end up working together to defeat a greater evil. The game itself will still be an arcade but won't need to follow the limitations imposed by one.
"We concepted out this game as an arcade-like title, but if you made a game this long for the arcades, the operators would kill us," Maegawa said. "It's arcade-style, yes, but in terms of volume, it's a different story." The project director at Nintendo, Hitoshi Yamagami, shares this opinion: "You can't really compare the number of stages as they're all different sizes, but in terms of playtime it's easily twice the size [of the original]." Innovations will include two playable characters with their own special moves and aerial combat possibilities, but also several difficulty settings. The US version of the game is expected to arrive somewhere in the first quarter of 2010.