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.
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.
- DMM had a booth at the event to promote the game, along with a character cosplayer.
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.”
Sea of Fragments 
