First Images of New Ryukishi07 Game [祝姫] (Iwaihime)

Thanks to a tweet from the illustrator, us foreigners unable to attend the Toranoana’s “Tora Festival” can learn about Ryukishi07’s upcoming game, which he teased at ACen earlier this year.

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Nope, it looks like we’re not getting any JRPG from Ryukishi (though that would’ve been totally awesome). There’s still no announcement about this game on 07th Expansion’s official site or twitter, but what I gather so far is:

  • The game’s name is “Iwaihime.”
  • The game’s genre is “horror.”
  • The plot involves a (cursed?) doll.
  • The character designs are by Kazuharu kina.
  • The backgrounds are by the artist mocha.
  • It will be released this Fall.
  • It’ll be ADV style, not NVL like Higurashi and Umineko.
  • It will be released by DMM, perhaps best known in the West as “the company that does Kancolle,” which had a booth at the event. It will be a commercial release, not a doujin one like his works from Comiket.
  • The cast includes lots of high school girls, as we can see from all the character designs shown off so far.

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  • DMM had a booth at the event to promote the game, along with a character cosplayer.

DMM's booth at the event

One more thing to look forward to! From the cast and release, I feel it’ll be a more typical story than his When They Cry works, but it’ll definitely be visually stunning. You can get high res images of all this stuff, along with more pictures from the booth, on Kazuhara Kina’s twitter. Thanks to anonymous Goat-kun for pointing this out to me!

UPDATE: The game’s teaser blurb has been translated by the Reddit users temporalreality and Garlstadt:

Hajakenshou…Crush evil, spread the truth.

For generations, the men of the Susuharai family have left home at a fixed age to become independent. By tempering themselves without aid, they would have their adulthood recognized. In preparation for that day, I learned an array of things.

Susuda Prefectural High School—my new halls of leaning. To tell the truth, I had planned to transfer my first year, not second. But my everyday life here wasn’t just carefree; it was pleasant. I passed the days happily with any of my peers from Second Year Class A.

But there was a girl—Kurokami Toe. To call her strange would be a lacking description. Never for a moment would she let go of the traditional Japanese doll she held in her arms. There were those who whispered it was a cursed doll, whose hair would grow when you weren’t looking. Indeed, it was an eerie doll.

However, meeting Kurokami might have been fate. No, it must have been.

UPDATE 2: Sorry, I read a kanji in the title wrong! It’s actually pronounced “Iwaihime,” not “Shukuhime.”

20 thoughts on “First Images of New Ryukishi07 Game [祝姫] (Iwaihime)

    • I’m glad to know I’m not the only person who prefers NVL. It feels more like reading a novel that way, instead of a really long video game cut scene.

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  1. You put the girls in the horror game and you stir it all up, I said R07…
    You know what schoolgirls in r07 horror work mean right? That’s right. BULLYING. Popular girl vs nerdy girl, classroom politics and in the end the classroom bitch will survive while the likAble girls will go through hell and back. NO OnE CAn eScAPE tHE FUN oF BULLYING.
    By the way, its unfortunate that they chose DMM due to all the gaijin hate the site harbors.
    when the highschool girls cry

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    • If this turns out like Higanbana mk. II, I’d totally be down for that.

      Yeah, I’d never heard of DMM before, and it was hard for me just to check out there site. Who knows how long this’ll take to get officially released in English, if ever. At least there’s a whole community of translators, patchers, and modders out there!

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  2. There’s a small bit of me that screamed “Oh no, Ryukishi, don’t sell out!” when I read certain parts of this post. I really prefer NVL format, but I’ll take whatever we get from Ryukishi. As far as selling out, I just don’t want him to ever feel pressured into making a more typical VN to boost sales (though, I couldn’t blame him. You can dumb down the complexity by a billion and just add in four waifus and already the game will be more popular than Umineko, lol.) That being said, it’s a horror game with a bunch of interesting looking females (like Higurashi) and takes place around a school with a haunted doll (Higanbana). I guess I really needn’t worry about something with the 07thExpansion mark on it. Now, if only we could find a way to make visual novels more widely accepted as a storytelling medium, rather than known as a popular way of producing eroge.

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    • Patience child. The VNs are already starting to infiltrate the western market through legal means, it’s only a matter of time until people realize that the hardcore otaku market isn’t the majority custumer in the west

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      • It’s crazy how far VNs have come in the past 1-2 years. I remember when just a single VN making it to Steam was a huge deal. Now, there’s tons of them on it.

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    • The anime/manga/VN community is very image-focused. I always see people online acting like, “I’ve seen a few promotional images, so now I know everything worth knowing about the series.” And some series are so shallow that people are justified thinking that way! But one of the things I love about Ryukishi07’s work is how much goes on below the surface. So even if it looks like the typical harem set-up, I look forward to seeing what lurks under that.

      It’s the elements similar to Higurashi and Higanbana that make me worry the most. It reminds me of Onikakushi, which felt way too much like a retread. I think the stuff to really look forward to is whenever he’s challenging himself to something new and unexpected. Like alternate history noir, or space opera.

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      • I agree, that is why I am much more interested in how TRi turns out. I can tell this will be an enjoyable title since I’m a big fan of j-horror movies, but it doesn’t feel quite like one of his personal projects. It seems he has confirmed in twitter the game is property of DMM and not 07th Expansion, too, so he is only in charge of the script.

        I guess Ryukishi will be working more with different people now, but my hopes for a WTC5 in the future aren’t dead yet.

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      • Yeah, I’m psyched for TRi. I just heard, “It’ll be a complex work with many layers…” and thought, “I’M IN.”

        He’s said he deeply enjoyed collaborating with people on Rewrite. Maybe that collaborative feeling is something he’s been missing since BT passed, who influenced Higurashi and Umineko so much as a reader.

        I hope your hope remains alive :)

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      • The space opera sounded interesting, but whatever happened to that? Is that part of Trian or something?

        I have no doubt in Ryukishi as a writer. Hopefully some group still surfaces to patch Iwaihime as I’m sure I’ll be dying to read it as soon as it drops.

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      • Yup, that’s gonna be one of the 3 worlds in TRianThology. I think Ryukishi will be writing that world.

        I thought Higurashi Hou would never get translated. And then, all of a sudden…it was.

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      • Well, Ryukishi07 seems pretty confident about Iwaihime on his twitter account, at any rate. As for me, I’m just excited to see various new 07th Expansion works coming out.

        Also, what exactly did Onikakushi feel like a retread of? Or did you maybe mean Okamikakushi?

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      • On your third image with the cosplayer and the logo on the right, it clearly says on the left of the logo, written in hiragana, that the lecture of the title is “Iwaihime”, so there’s that!

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