It has been announced that lucky Japanese PSP owners are getting Summon Night 5 sometime in spring 2013. No doubt, some of you are thinking, “Summon Night 5? When was there a Summon Night 1?”
Initially released on the Sony PlayStation in 2000, Summon Night is a highly popular series of tactical games in Japan. Most of the installments have been released on Sony platforms in Japan only, but the first game in the series to hit the Americas, Summon Night: Swordcraft Story, was also the first for a Nintendo console. It was published by Atlus for the Game Boy Advance back in 2006, and is considered to be, by far, one of the most unknown gems of an aging system. Swordcraft Story actually spawned two other games that got American releases from Atlus: another sequel for the GBA, which functioned much in the same vein as the first spinoff but had a more interesting plot; and a DS sequel, Twin Age, which shook things up by completely revamping the series’ basic mechanics to focus more on group based combat.
Summon Night 5 was briefly cancelled following the demise of the games’ developer Flight-Plan, but it appears that Bandai Namco has revived the series for the PSP after remakes of 3 and 4 sold quite well. In this new installment, characters now utilize supernatural partners, known as Cross, which are bound to their souls. In combat, the Cross characters transform into various tools, such as Meteora, a machine Cross that transforms into a giant axe to protect this partner, Karis. Now if this will only get brought to the Americas and possibly make its way to the 3DS, this writer will be even more excited.
