The video game developer, Compile Heart Inc., has recently announced its bankruptcy, according to Noirina International Reports. The developer who’s had the hands on War of Agarest series, the franchise of Neptunia, has finally meet its fate because of its overspending and decision mistakes.
Compile Heart was a video game developer, set up as the complete subsidiary of Idea Factory by Shingo Kuwana, who was the CEO of Idea Factory. It was more like a brand than a child company of IF, just like how FAVORITE and Omega-Star were to CROSSNET. When Compile Heart focused on moe games, another brand of IF, Otomate, majored in Otome games, as its name suggests.
Year 2015 witnessed a major success of Compile Heart, when the Megadimension Neptunia was launched. The game, features three stories in three dimensions, was said to be well crafted and organized. Though not perfectly, the game is still a complete embodiment of the spirits of Neptunia series.
However, after 2015, Compile Heart has ceased the development of any canon Neptunia games, instead, there were only three spin-offs launched in the following years: Megatagmension Blanc+Neptune VS Zombies, Superdimension Neptune VS Sega Hard Girls, and Cyberdimension Neptunia. Even those are not full-fledged Neptunia games as the previous four, they are still completed, having their own good plots(except the first one and the last one). Also, the first and the last of them are good explorations into a brand new genre that Compile Heart has never set its foot in, rather than staying within its RPG confort zones(and still never now, because these action games were developed by Tamsoft, the maker of Senran Kagura). But they received positive reviews from customers over the world, although seen not as good as the canon ones.
And Compile Heart just took a step further. It decided to entrust a Carribean game studio, AmateurGameStudios the next game of Neptunia series. The studio gave it a tentative title: Villain Neptune. According to its settings, the evil Neptune, the protagonist in the game, crushed one of the three dimensions, making the whole game a 2D one. It was purported that they were making a Megaman Maverick Hunter X at first, but ended up with another Odin Sphere. And its quality was severely compromised probably because of this sudden change during the game making.
So it came as no surprise that the Evil Neptune(the name when it was launched) did not receive much acclaim. However, Compile Heart erroneously attributed its failure to the assumption that Neptunia was losing its momentum. And it decided to make new IPs. In this period, they made the Fairy Fencer F, Genkai Toki, Mugen Souls Z, and so on. They had attempts with not only role playing games, but card games and adventure games as well. However, none of them made enough profits to reverse the situation. . The economical crisis in Spring 2018 added to the difficulty for the company to operate. On 4/1/2018, Sunday, Compile Heart issued an application for bankruptcy to Tokyo District Court. Its property rights of Neptunia and other series go to Idea Factory Co., Ltd. And one of the company’s previous member, Masamitsu Niitani, is going to start a new game maker called Compile(the brand name and the heart symbol still belong to IF, so he cannot use it). And Takashi Takeuchi, the founder of Type-Moon, is showing his willingness to join the new company’s graphics team.
