How I didn't hear about Dragon's Crown for the upcoming PS Vita and PS3 (thanks, Diabolus!) this entire week is blasphemy. I would have been much more excited about the new Sony handheld if I knew this was coming, since I have seen more than my fair share of fantasy action RPGs at E3 2011 – EA's Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Capcom's Dragon's Dogma, WB Games' Dungeons & Dragons: The Lord of the Rings, Atari's Neverwinter Knights 2 Dungeons & Dragons: Neverwinter Nights, Namco's Dark Souls, and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (I'm sure I'm forgetting a few). Though many of them are already shaping up to be blissful, time-sucking interpretations of Western folklore, they were all… predictable.
Vanillaware, known for Muramasa: The Demon's Blade (which still belongs in the Top 10 games for the Wii), looks to change that, by giving the Western RPG a Japanese makeover, similar to how Microsoft gave the Japanese RPG an American makeover with Lost Odyssey. From the trailer below, it gives the genre the art style from Muramasa and what looks to be six-player cooperative play. Let's hope this means actual online play (and not just ad-hoc for the PS Vita), or all my excitement will be for naught.
