Dragami Games has announced a delay for the upcoming re-release of Suda51 and James Gunn action game Lollipop Chainsaw.
Dragami has also revealed that the rerelease will go by the title of Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP. While it was originally intended for release this year, it will now be rescheduled to summer 2024.
As reported by Gematsu, Dragami shared this press release:
“Although development of RePOP was carried out with the intention of a 2023 release, our commitment to providing the best possible quality experience to our players led us to making the hard decision to extend the development period in order to ensure this.
We sincerely apologize to all who had been waiting for the latest installment in the Lollipop Chainsaw series, and kindly ask for your understanding in this matter.”
Lollipop Chainsaw was originally released in 2012 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This was a noteworthy but late seventh generation release. It holds the distinction of being developer Grasshopper Manufacture’s most successful game to date, selling one million units. It also came in between two other notable Suda51 games, Shadows of the Damned and Killer is Dead.
While Suda51’s works are more of an acquired taste, compared to Hidetaka Miyazaki’s breakout hits, he is in somewhat the same boat as Ken Levine, popular and bankable in the industry, but idiosyncratic in their visions, and not as interested in matching the grandiose scale of AAAs nowadays.
Lollipop Chainsaw has a somewhat convoluted rights history as well. It is one of the last games made by Grasshopper Manufacture under their original publisher, Kadokawa Games. The year after its release, Grasshopper Manufacture was acquired by Gungho Entertainment. It would move ownership again to NetEase Games in 2021.
Grasshopper and Suda51 left Lollipop Chainsaw behind with Kadokawa Games, while they seemingly retained the rights to Shadows of the Damned. Kadokawa Games, itself a subsidiary of Japanese multimedia conglomerate Kadokawa Corporation, would divest in 2021. Its assets would then move to a new company called Dragami Games, and that included IPs like Lollipop Chainsaw.
It isn’t completely clear why Suda51 was OK with leaving Lollipop Chainsaw behind, but it is one of many games where Suda famously got into conflicts with publishers. In the 2015 art book The Art of Grasshopper Manufacture, Suda surprisingly revealed he didn’t want the game to be as sexual as it was, and that that direction came from Kadokawa themselves.
Today, Kadokawa has full control of the Lollipop Chainsaw franchise, and it seems they have seen fit to revive it. While we still wait for its release, we will find out soon enough about the new team at Dragami Games working on Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, and if Dragami have plans for Juliet Starling’s future.
