Veteran STG programmer and former Gulti president Osamu Chadani is mulling over the idea of publicly talking about their involvement with Thunder Force VI🇯🇵, the Sega-produced revival of Technosoft's cult STG series Thunder Force, released for PlayStation 2 exclusively in Japan in 2008, for the first time—this is a game that they/Gulti have never publicly claimed and even explicitly denied being involved with but whose involvement was implied by certain strings found in the game's internal data, and one people have been particularly curious about since its release some fifteen years ago.
Thunder Force VI is remembered globally for being "that one kinda-late PS2 TF game that we didn't get", if it's remembered at all, but is has a much larger and more salacious legacy in Japan—it was and remains synonymous with kusoge... and, to be sure, it's not a great game on its own merits, nor is it a particularly faithful or congruent revival of Thunder Force: the visuals are distinctly unimpressive; it has a lot of easily-triggered terminal bugs that include multiple hard freezes and the player-ship turning invisible; the music, composed by an all-star cast of STG composers, bears little to no resemblance to the series trademark hard rock style and is extremely poorly mixed, and virtually every mechanical and design element of the game is an homage, if not a direct lift, of something from the classic games. It looks and feels like a Simple 1500 ripoff of the genuine article, basically, and it might as well have released direct to bargain bins; it was readily available at sub-¥500 and even sub-¥100 prices soon after release.
TFVI's infamy extends beyond the game itself, however: what cemented this game as a punching bag was the response among irate Gamer types to the game's producer, Tetsu Okano, whose previous works include Segagaga, Gunstar Heroes and Astro Boy: Omega Factor—in the lead-up to the game's release, Okano made a lot of contradictory statements about the series' lore and tone that implied a lack of understanding or respect for the previous games, which were capped off by a strange (and allegedly satirical) launch-window interview, viewable for mere hours on Famitsu's site before being pulled, in which Okano disparaged the previous games, critics on 2ch, the developers on his game, other developers' games and whoever else, so combined with the game's overall lack of quality and the very conspicuous shoehorning of incongruous thematic elements that may or may not be allusions to the producer's own manga, the more cantankerous corners of the internet dogpiled dude for years afterward, to the point where he's still the poster-child for individuals tanking an existing game franchise. I'd compare it to the way certain people obsessed over that one Silent Hill producer, with the obvious difference being that Silent Hill was a massive franchise and Thunder Force was only ever modestly popular at best, so the mere notion of it ever attracting the furore that it did (and in some corners, still does) is a little puzzling.
What makes the whole situation especially frustrating as an external observer is that it's extremely difficult to ascertain fact from fiction—there are all sorts of stories about TFVI being a literal Simple Series, three-stage game that Okano browbeat the contractor into extending into a full game for the same budget; that Treasure considered him persona non grata; that the Famitsu interview was the public result of some weird in-house spat between Sega PR and Okano; that ensuring the interview didn't make the print mag may have cost Sega a not-inconsiderable amount of money, which in turn forced them to window-seat Okano; that Okano actually got forced out for embezzlement, and on and on, but because the discourse around this game escalated to bitch-eating-crackers mode from the jump and never really calmed down, there's virtually no way to verify any of it, especially when those involved have had the good sense to keep their mouth shut about it.
Anyway, we might finally be getting some inside info on the game in the near future, and I do wonder if anything that Chadani may or may not comment on might lead to some sort of reckoning on the part of the insane folk who've been hate-tracking this one dude online for the last fifmbklbfnhbklnhkndklgngdklhnkfdldnbkdlhnkfdlhl;shnrdhnkdl
