JRPG legend Yuji Horii is teaming up with the Blue Lock manga writer for a new Nintendo Switch game literally designed to ruin your friendships
Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii is teaming up with Blue Lock manga author Muneyuki Kaneshiro for a new Nintendo Switch game destined to ruin your friendships. And that sounds like a blast.
Japanese game developer Any Inc. is working with ArtePiazza to develop the new dark fantasy multiplayer game, tentatively called Reincarnation Game, which is based on the popular Japanese board game Sugoroku. No gameplay or even images of the game have surfaced so far, but in a machine-translated press release, it’s billed as “a game that will definitely cause conflict between friends.”
It’s not exactly crystal clear how gameplay will work, but Any Inc. says it takes place in the afterlife, and the goal of all players is to reincarnate, but the only way to do that is “by knocking each other down.” Killing each other, essentially, which you can do by using Karma to “sabotage or betray other players… The closer you get to victory, the more your friendships will be destroyed.”
Horii is working on the game as an advisor, while Kaneshiro is concept planner. Any Inc’s Ayaka Sato is game director.
“I still can’t believe I was able to create a game with such dream people as Horii-san and Kaneshiro-san,” Sato said in a statement that was machine-translated from the original Japanese. “We will continue to develop ‘Rebirth Game’ with the aim of making it a ‘messy and awesome game’ that everyone can laugh at, sometimes fight with, and still think ‘I want to play it again.'”
Horii said he decided to join the project simply because he found it “very interesting” and original. “I’m looking forward to making a game that everyone can laugh at and have fun with, and that they’ll want to play again and again,” he said.
Going off the fairly barebones marketing materials at this point, I’m going to say Reincarnation Game is still very early in development. That said, Any Inc. did peg it for release in 2026, which almost surely means it’s coming to Switch 2, although that isn’t made explicitly clear.
Yoko Taro hid Nier’s save-deleting twist from the game’s producer, who thought it was an homage to Dragon Quest: “Apparently it wasn’t an homage to Dragon Quest.”
