Famitsu just shared an interview with Compile Heart on their recent internal restructure and broader shift in focus when it comes to software output (in a nutshell, they're prioritising global, multi-platform releases for every game and, without going mass-market, attempting to take on new genres) and the new leads chose to reveal several upcoming games, all of which are due by summer of next year, with one being particularly noteworthy: a new Madou Monogatari title, with the working title of "Madou Monogatari 4".
For the unaware, Madou Monogatari was a first-person dungeon-crawler RPG series, originally developed and published by Compile, from which the world and characters of Puyo Puyo were derived, and while it's fared a lot better than some of the game in Compile's catalogue post-bankruptcy, the rights to the series have been complicated enough that doing anything with the IP has never been easy: put simply, D4 Enterprise owns the IP and the original software but none of the characters, so they can't actually do anything with those original games without Sega's sign-off (and they don't always get it when they ask for it, either), nor can Sega do anything explicitly RPG-like with the Puyo Puyo characters for fear of infringing too closely on Madou Monogatari.
(Compile Heart's connections to OG Compile are fairly tenuous: they were indeed formed by select former Compile staff and were granted extremely generous permission from D4E to go forward with new games based on old Compile IP, but you wouldn't know it from most of their output.)
D4E and Compile Heart did roll the dice on a brand-new Madou Monogatari back in 2013: titled Sei Madou Monogatari, it completely bombed due to a) being a Shiren the Wanderer clone rather than a first-person dungeon crawler, b) being full of characters that were not only wink-nudge references to classic Compile characters but whose conversations were often just meta references to older games and/or copyright issues, at the expense of originality of a halfway-serious plot, and c) Compile Heart farmed it out to the notoriously shoddy Zerodiv, so yeah, it sucked ass. This game got a global release, even, as Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Curry God, and I can't check right now but I presume it's still available on Steam (it's geolocked, IIRC).
In recent years, there have been signs of cooperation between D4E and Sega—Sega letting some of the Game Gear Madou games show up on a Dwango vintage game app, Madou Monogatari 1 appearing on the Mega Drive Mini, etc—culminating in D4E's recent limited-edition physical Madou Monogatari compilation for PC, which included emulated versions of over 40 Madou-related games across both Japanese computers and consoles and even includes certain versions of Puyo Puyo games. (They recently opened orders for a second and final run, if anyone wants in; it'll ship in December.)
Now, they've taken things even further: Sega's given permission to D4E and Compile Heart to use classic Compile-era characters in this new Madou game, and they're very clear about it being a direct sequel to the classic games, too. They haven't outlined precisely how much of the old lore/stable they have access to—their teaser art is images of the Puyo, Carbuncle, Suketoudara and Skeleton T—but even if they're being limited to tertiary/zako characters, they'll at least have the foundation to produce something halfway-credible, provided they resist their urge to make it one big in-joke. The actual dev on the game is Sting, and they're emphasising the fact that a lot of former Compile folk went to Sting back in the day and will be working on this game, but I do wonder precisely how true that is.
I don't think I've ever played a Compile Heart game I liked, but between this and some of the other announcements made in this interview—a new hardcore STG by M2, a Touhou tactics-RPG with real-time elements by Sting (Knights in the Nightmare-ish, maybe?)—have piqued my interest, so I hope they're able to achieve their goal of diversifying, and that they specifically diversify away from low-hanging trash. As for Madou in particular, I'm more curious about what this new game might do for official global reissues of the classic games than a new one, but who knows, maybe the new game will be interesting in its own right... Sting used to make great games, after all.
further evidence of D4E & Sega's renewed chumminess: Madou Monogatari 1-2-3 (MSX2) and Puyo Puyo (PC-9801) are coming to Project EGG (the JP subscription service for, not the recent console line) next week! D4E's previous Madou reissues have all been boutique box sets with tiny print runs, so this is the first time they've been able to just put 'em out for general digital purchase:
these are out today, so please enjoy this commemorative screenshot of PC98 Puyo Puyo's Drunk Arle
Madou Sugoroku (PC-9801, originally released in 1996 via Compile Disk Station Vol.9): a fairly straightforward board game starring the Madou/Puyo cast: blue squares give money, red squares take money, green squares trigger events, whoever has the most money at the end of the final quest is the winner. You can play as one of six pre-set two-character teams, with the ability to designate one character as main and one as sub; the main character traverses the board, while the sub can use magic to attack other players. Draco and Witch are paired up, as they should be.
Carbuncle-pi (MSX2, originally released in 1991 via Compile Disk Station #24): a Carbuncle-skinned take on Nyanpi, a puzzle-platformer originally released on Disk Station DX#3 in 1990 and level-packed to death via subsequent issues; it doesn't quite have the same charm as navigating a cat to a trash can, gotta say.
A little refresher, should you require it: the Madou Monogatari series made its debut with Madou Monogatari Episode II, a MSX2 game included on the xmas '89 issue of Compile Disc Station, with the full official debut, Madou Monogatari 1-2-3, released as a standalone commercial game in mid-'90 and converted (with a more realistic and violent aesthetic) for PC-9801.
From there, the three constituent episodes were individually remade for various other platforms, with Episode I being remade no less than four times: there's the Game Gear version that you're looking at now, which is an expanded but relatively straightforward take on the original; the Mega Drive version, which borrows from and heavily iterates on the Game Gear version's content but replaces the battle system with side-view, real-time combat with command inputs for magic; the Super Famicom version, which has top-down dungeons and side-view menu-based combat and is practically an original game, and the PC Engine CD version which was completely outsourced but broadly in line with the content and format of the original, save for all the fancy CD elements like voice acting and whatnot. (The PCE Puyo games were unique inasmuch as NEC shelled out for high-profile voice actors, and they retained Arle's VA for this Madou game as well; I don't remember the name of Arle's actor offhand, but it's the same person who voiced Usagi in Sailor Moon.)
I say all that to say that the numerals on these games don't necessarily mean a whole lot: many of these games might share one name but don't offer the same experience, and the diehards are ultimately going to want to play 'em all.
Released exclusively for PC-9801 in late '93, this was the first new, wholly original Madou game released since the original trilogy, the first original Madou game released post-Puyo Puyo boom and the first new Madou released after the departure of series writer/creator Kazunari Yonemitsu; as such, the tone of the story has been lightened up and they've gone all-in on standardising the Puyo Puyo art style, but it plays like a tried-and-true Madou game and, at two discs per episode plus an extra disk for intro/outro movies, it offered an absolute ton of content. Lore-wise, it's a prequel to Madou 1-2-3 that establishes the origins of Arle, Schezo and Rulue, and it's basically the last substantial, all-new Madou game they made in this style, as the long-in-production Saturn Madou was more of a conventional JRPG, and the other Madou games released for Japanese computers were gaidens and spinoffs released exclusively via Disk System, and mostly pieced together from existing games.
(The Arle scenario from this game was ostensibly remade as the final Game Gear Madou game, titled Madou Monogatari A: Dokidoki Vacation, but the two games have almost nothing in common beyond the initial premise.)
Spun off from a side-mode present in certain early Puyo Puyo games, Nazo Puyo is constructed entirely of authored challenges using pre-assigned pieces/fields ("create an x-chain", "clear x puyo simultaneously", "clear all puyo of x colour", etc), with this particular version of Nazo Puyo offering a basic story mode with 100 not-too-tough puzzles, a raw puzzle mode with 100 harder puzzles and a puzzle editor. Compile released hundreds more puzzles for this version of Nazo Puyo across various Disk Station releases but they are, for the most part, separate programs, and probably not amenable to offering as standalones or as a bundle.
I've not played this game but I've seen enough fan art of the main character to at least recognise it as something with more than zero cache among Compile fanatics: LADY BONO, a four-episode command ADV distributed across Disk Station 98 issues #13~17. After an epic space battle that causes an evil space vampire to crash-land on earth, the heroine arrives in pursuit and discovers the vampire is hiding undercover at a girls' high school, forcing her to infiltrate the school in the guise of a student in order to apprehend the vampire. This series has zero connection to Madou and I don't know that there's much to it, individually or collectively, but all the excited mentions I'm seeing right now lump it together with the likes of Galaxy Fraulein Luna, so that's gotta count for something.
Game Gear Madou the second is here and, much like the Game Gear version of the first episode, it's an expanded but not dramatically transformative take on the original: they've fleshed out some of the original beats to be longer or recurring rather than one-offs, lengthened the dungeons, etc but the system mechanics are more or less the same (carrying forward the changed made for GG Madou I) and it doesn't deviate in the ways their home console adaptations typically did.
bonus free game: B.G.V. Christmas, a reissue of a Christmas-themed animatic from Disk Station #2—"B.G.V." stands for Back Ground Video, and was Compile's designation for little visual demo programs with no game content.
