Anthropomorphic animal adventure Solarobo is being localised for the European market, with a playable demo on the show floor of Paris' recent Japan Expo. Currently the translation is going under a working title of Project CODA.
Solarobo takes place in a world populated by dogs and cats living together in harmony - crazy! The player takes on the role of a bounty hunter named Red Savarin, who's equipped with a mecha battle suit to help take down targets. It doesn't have any weapons you'd typically expect from such a luxury device, however. Red can merely grab enemies to throw them around, catch incoming projectiles and hurl them back, or clobber goons with any stray items within the environment.
Solarobo is essentially a 3D action RPG. Developed by CyberConnect2, it's the spiritual successor to their own Tail Concerto, a PlayStation game which never saw the light of day in PAL regions.
The game has been in the works for quite some time. "I'm not joking when I say that this game's been in conception for 10 years and in development for three," head of CyberConnect2 Hiroshi Matsuyama told Famitsu in an interview earlier this year. "Crazy, isn't it? Three years for a Nintendo DS game! I'm impressed Namco Bandai waited that long for us".
Solarobo also boats high production values, with lovingly animated cutscenes by studio Madhouse (Death Note, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time). It's due to launch in Japan later this year, with the European version (Project CODA for the time being) likely for an early 2011 release. Hopefully it doesn't get completely lost and crushed in the 3DS hype, which will no doubt be in full force by then.
Interestingly, Project CODA was on display at Nintendo of Europe's (NoE) own booth, perhaps hinting at a joint effort by Nintendo and Namco Bandai to get the game out there. It wouldn't be the first time NoE has distributed a Namco-published DS game.
See here for a short, kind-of-useless video from the Japan Expo show floor.
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Actually looks quite nice from the screens shown here, I'd totally take a look at it if it came out down here.