As it turns out, the fans remembered Juliet Starling fondly after all.
As reported by Automaton, Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP sold at significantly higher numbers than even they projected. As a result, Dragami Games’ parent company Extreme Co. Ltd. has revised their earnings forecast for this fiscal year.
Extreme Co. Ltd. Is yet another modern incarnation of an older Japanese video game publisher. In this case, they are the holding company that owns the franchises that were once made by Masaya. In this capacity, they have been rereleasing the Langrisser games, the Assault Suit games, and the Cyber Citizen Shockman games.
Those are all deep cuts that do have an audience with retro gamers, but as we know, they have more going than that. In 2022, they acquired some of Kadokawa’s video game franchises, and hired some of their employees to start a new game company. That company is Dragami Games, and of course, one of those new hires is Yoshimi Yasuda.
And as it turns out, Dragami has other games under their library, most notably God Wars, which got rereleased on the Switch. And Japanese developers are fortunate in that even their most obscure action RPG will have a captive audience in the West. But Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is simply built differently.
While a lot of talk about the game surrounds its mature content, its poor critical reception, and its connection to Suda51 and James Gunn, even fans who remember when it first came out seem to have forgotten that it was the best-selling game in Grasshopper Manufacture’s history.
When it came out in 2012, Lollipop Chainsaw absolutely did capture a notable amount of the prevailing video game zeitgeist. This was the same year which saw the release of groundbreaking titles like Mass Effect 3, Fire Emblem Awakening, Dishonored, and Borderlands 2.
And this is why, even though the original Lollipop Chainsaw received mixed to poor reviews, and was technically flawed on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, it was still a significant sales hit for Grasshopper Manufacture and its publisher at the time, Kadokawa Games. And that clearly explains why Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, which also received poor reviews for its poor technical performance, even as a rerelease on multiple platforms, also sold significant numbers.
It definitely helped that Dragami Games invested in making this a multiplatform release. Even as some avowed fans complained about those technical issues, and some bogus accusations of censorship, the fans still showed up to support the developer. That’s probably because they rightly recognized that this re-release seems impossible, and that this may be their last chance to ensure that the franchise comes back for real.
Hopefully, Dragami and Extreme see enough of a return on their investment, that not only will they complete their fixes for the game across the platforms it is on, but that they make a new Lollipop Chainsaw game. A real Lollipop Chainsaw remaster, and also a Lollipop Chainsaw 2, why not? The world needs a proper return of the Starling clan.
