The long awaited China Hero Project title Lost Soul Aside may finally be close to release.
Niko Partners Director of Research and Insights Daniel Ahmad, popularly known as Zhuge_Ex on Twitter, shared some interesting information about the title. He quoted a tweet from the official Lost Soul Aside Twitter account which said:
“Lost Soul Aside got an ISBN license approval to release in China.”
Ahmad quoted this tweet with his own commentary, saying:
“This means the game has been reviewed and can officially launch in mainland China.
In other words, there will be news for the launch of the game fairly soon (At least within the next 3 months or so, typically.)”
Lost Soul Aside, as we had mentioned, is part of the PlayStation China Hero Project, but actually exists from even before that. Our first report on the game dates back to 2016, the same year that Pokemon Go debuted.
The developer, Bing Yang, mentions in a tweet that he had been working on it for two years already. That dates development back to 2014, the year Nvidia revealed the Tegra K1, the first mobile chip that could run Unreal.
While there was a lot of hype around the China Hero Project, even when it launched, it had become clear that this program would not bear fruit for Sony for a couple of years. But even then, the idea that a single title could take a decade before we could finally see it released is unheard of.
When Bing Yang started the project, he was a single developer. Since then, he founded the studio UltiZero in 2017 to finish the game. So Sony definitely paid to get this game through the finish line but it somehow still took quite a while to get there. It’s likely the pandemic staggered its trek to the finish line.
The last GameRanx reported on this game was December 2022, and while no one will claim those trailers have been unimpressive, there must have definitely been questions if this would turn out to be vaporware. Fortunately, this time, it looks like we’re getting something.
Just to add one more explanation, video games don’t get ISBNs, as that serial numbering system is only for publication of books. This is actually a sort of Chinese slang, as they call the registration to get a video game published an ISBN simply because of the association. As explained in this LinkedIn post, the actual Chinese name for it could be roughly translated as Publication Approval Number.
That article also explains it usually takes 3 to 6 months for this registration process to finish, so Bing Yang may have finished this game late last year or early this year. And it’s just in time for Sony to prepare an announcement trailer for it by this June.
