It's been a while since a Kemco release, hasn't it? I saw that a bunch of PS5 versions of the older games popped up on PSN. I wonder if LRG is brazen enough to print those.
I've been wondering about this myself. I fear that LRG may have abandoned all further Kemco releases.
For a while, the LRG Kemco releases basically followed the order of the releases of the Asian "4-games-in-1" physical versions. (except LRG released them all individually.) Around 2022, Kemco finally caught up with porting their back catalog of mobile games, so they were slowing down on the console releases. Vol. 10 came out Dec. 15 2022.
And as of the end of 2023, LRG released three games from that volume, and one standalone game from one of Kemco's less common developers. All about one month apart. Business as usual at this point.
But since then, it's been nothing at all. No games announced since, including the last one in that collection, or other standalone ones like Cross Tails. And Kemco is still releasing their 4-in-1 packs, just a bit slower now, so games still exist. Vol 11 came out in 2023, and I see Vol 12 released literally yesterday.
I hope I'm wrong that they ditched these contracts though, because this is what I LIKED about LRG. Physical US releases of smaller digital-only games, that never would've had a release otherwise. LRG seems to leaning hard into re-releases of existing games now. And I get it, recognizable name means more sales, but personally I don't care at all. I have both money and working retro systems. If I really wanted to buy, let's say Tomba, I would've done so already. So as history is showing me, I actually DON'T want the game. Nor do I feel any pressure that I won't be able to find a copy in the future.
And while the Kemco games' quality is all over the place (as you might expect from dozens of individual games. Like are we seriously pretending that Square Enix doesn't have a lot of turds in their library?), some of the games are genuinely really fun. But more importantly, they're only like 10-20 hours and move along quickly. And those games have some insanely good QoL features, truly the best I've ever seen in any RPG. (Amusingly, have so many games under their belt now means they've had the ability to learn and fix all the little player annoyances.) So it's not a big deal at all if you start one at random and it ends up being mediocre. Way better than trying to slog through some 100-hour open-world game where you spend all your time either in transit or braindead hack n slash combat, and no one told the writers the meaning of "brevity".
