Midori has shared new rumors of a few of Sega’s upcoming remakes of their classic games.
This information was collected and shared on reddit by user kuro_snow. We’ll run them down one by one below:
The next Streets of Rage game is apparently being made by Komi Games. A mobile port is coming, alongside PC and console versions. Komi Games is best known for making 3D arena fighting game Mighty Fight Federation. So there’s a real chance this brawler franchise is itself going 3D for the first time soon.
The next Virtua Fighter game will be officially announced later this year. Midori also previously revealed that Sega was working on this title, and that it will be the first full sequel after Virtua Fighter 5.
Both Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi are being built on Unreal Engine 5. If this rumor is true, Sega may want to reconsider. Unreal may be a popular game engine, but it is not particularly well suited to racing, either with cars or humans.
Assetto Corsa Competizione is likely the most prominent racing game to use Unreal, most other developers make their own game engines from scratch. The other big racer, Rocket League, is owned by Epic, the developers of Unreal itself.
In any case, Midori shared a screenshot of Jet Set Radio on Unreal, to prove that Sega was using the engine. And here’s where we get to something interesting.
Our source was able to confirm that Midori said the game is still in development, but that’s not all she said. Quoting Midori herself in reply to another comment:
“Both JSR games are in Unreal Engine.
And both started development in 2021 but development plan changed in 2022.”
So we now know that Sega worked on two Jet Set Radio games. It sounds like one was supposed to be the remake, and the other could have been an entirely new sequel. As of right now, we aren’t sure which one Sega is working on now.
This is complicated by how the ambiguity on whether Jet Set Radio Future, released on Xbox in 2004, is itself a full sequel, or should be considered a remake of the first game. Perhaps this upcoming title will once again be open to interpretation on if it reimagines the original game the first time, or should be considered a different time in the same continuity.
Lastly, Midori says she is unsure if the rumored Fortnite collab with Persona is happening. The sentiment within Sega is Fortnite competes too closely with their own live service offerings.
Fortnite is definitely huge competition for nearly every other video game out there. But it’s precisely because it has a stranglehold on a certain generation of gamers that other game companies should work with them, and get their own characters and IPs exposed to those gamers.
That’s a lot to think about when it comes to Sega’s games, but whatever the case, older fans are definitely looking forward to see their childhood favorites get reinvented for a new generation.