In case you haven’t seen it yet, GENBA no Kizuna finally has a release date: August 26, 2024, at 10:00 AM PST!
You can find the official release announcement here! And as was mentioned in it, today, we’ll be talking a bit more about the release and what’s still left on our to-do list for the next two weeks. So, without further ado, let’s jump right into it!
- PC-Only Release (for now)
We know there are a lot of people who have played any of the console ports for SHINRAI – Broken Beyond Despair and who would love to continue solving mysteries on their platform of choice. If you’re one of those people, we’re terribly sorry, but just like SHINRAI, GENBA will release only on PC for now. That said, we do have plans to release it on Nintendo‘s, Sony‘s and Microsoft‘s consoles as well, but that will unfortunately take quite a bit more time. We sadly don’t have the tech or know-how to do console ports ourselves, which is why we needed to rely on the help of a publisher in order to make it happen for SHINRAI.
We’ll delve into the specifics of this topic in the future, but for now, we hope you can forgive us and hold out a bit longer.
Again, it’s not gonna happen any time soon, but we want console ports ourselves and will do what’s necessary to make it happen!
- Soundtrack
The complete soundtrack for GENBA will release alongside the game. It will contain 36 tracks in total, adding up to an overall play time of 1:20:30 hours! It will be available as a downloadable zip file through both Steam and itch, but our composer Solo Acapello might also make it available through other, more music-focused platforms. We’ll let you know more about that when the time comes!
Here’s a look at the full track list:
- Pricing
Since it’s got the exact same play time as the SHINRAI OST, the one for GENBA will also sell for 7.99$. As for the game itself, after lots of consideration, we’ve decided to go with 24.99$. In a previous blog post, we’ve talked about the thoughts and considerations that go into determining the price for a VN like ours, so if you’re curious to know more about how we ended up with the above number, you can check out said post right here. We will also talk a bit more about this decision in the coming weeks.
- Game Content
With 300,000+ words, GENBA features essentially twice the amount of content that SHINRAI did. It also features a ton more interactivity and even some new interactive gameplay elements. If you want to know more about those, we’d recommend checking out the GBA-style instruction booklet we’ve already released. You can download it here.
In terms of play time, that’s always difficult to gauge. With a VN, it heavily depends on your personal reading speed and how thorough you are. Are you gonna browse through, focusing on the mandatory stuff only? Or are you going to consume every last bit of optional content as well? Our beta-testers all took around 16 hours to complete the game, but since they’ve all been testing it, they’ve been very thorough, of course. Still, even if you skip out on all the optional content, GENBA should provide you with a good 10 to 12 hours of mystery-solving. So yeah, it really is about twice the size of our previous project!
- What’s left to do?
More testing and polish, of course! We still have a couple people testing the game some more and they’ve stumbled across a few more typos or missing words, so we’ll continue to try and catch as many of them (ideally all) before it’s time to release! We also need to finish setting up the soundtrack store pages and create some more asset content. Steam literally just updated their store asset dimensions, meaning that we can essentially redo all the store assets now… yay!
We also have to update a whole bunch of other places, such as our website and do some much dreaded promo work, so yeah… There still is a good amount of stuff left to keep us busy for the next two weeks! We’ll talk about that, too, in a bit more detail in the next couple of posts. But for now, it’s time to wrap things up! Hopefully, you’re just as excited about the release as we are!
As always, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care :3
