The other day Gust Co. launched a teaser website for their next gaming project. Once visiting the website, visitors are treated to some nice music (courtesy of the awesome Gust sound team) and a soothing blue background, along with the above text that steadily appears. The text reads: “shoujo”, cross, and Gust, with a reveal date pretty clearly intended to be May 14th of this year.
Besides that, it may mean Gust is working on a project that features girls that look cute. There are plenty of Japanese games of all sorts of genres that feature cute girls, so I’m at a loss. Shoujo could also be referring to a targeted demographic; in which case it means media ostensibly designed to target Japanese females who are in the late teens or younger (but really, I think that anything sufficiently popular has fans outside of its intended demographic anyway.)
It’s actually a bit of an ambiguous teaser. Nowadays, Gust is known most prominently for making the Atelier series of RPGs, alongside the less-active Ar Tonelico series. Modern Atelier games are well known for featuring moe characters, but typically when Atelier games are about to be announced, the project is codenamed as a combination of the letter A and a number indicating how many titles will then exist in the Atelier franchise with the announcement of the new game (for example, Atelier Shallie: Alchemists of the Dusk Sea was originally codenamed as A16.) There’s no such known codename for the game. It’s possible that Gust is branching out into something new, but…we’ll just have to wait and see!
Gust is a Japanese development studio and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koei-Tecmo, known for the Musou/Warriors games and Fatal Frame franchise among others. Time zones being what they are and Japan being where it is, odds are our more Western-based readers can expect to see what this project’s about very soon.
