After Star Fox Zero flopped, I feared that Nintendo was going to leave the beloved space shooter series in the dust. So when I saw that Star Fox would have a major cameo in Ubisoft’s Starlink, I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a far cry from the sequel fans are asking for, but when I was expecting the worst for the series’s future, it gave me a breath of relief. Probably not as much as I first thought, given the kinks outlined in our review, but it at least shows Nintendo is willing to let other studios experiment with IPs they’ve become hesitant to work on themselves.
It’s led me to ponder about the fate of an even more niche but fervently beloved Nintendo IP –and one that I have more of a personal history with — Skip Ltd.’s Chibi-Robo. Similar to Star Fox Zero, it was stated if Chibi-Robo Zip Lash didn’t sell well, it might be his last game. Zip Lash also flopped even harder than Fox’s last outing, having little to no resemblance to anything his fans found appealing and charming in the first place. But just as the Star Fox team was given a new lease on life by Ubisoft (as well as the SNES Classic), I’m hoping Nintendo could also give another studio a shot at this oft-neglected IP.
But if Chibi-Robo is to return to its original gameplay style (or at least something new but fundamentally similar), most studios wouldn’t be willing to tackle its bizarre niche. He’s known for his wholesome charm (barring the occasional can-butt), exploring a “massive” house, doing mundane household tasks, scrambling his way across furniture with various simple tricks, and helping a cast of lovable weirdos through their relatable emotional side quests. And sometimes, extremely weird weirdos with weird but still endearing side quests. It’s a niche that most developers don’t even touch, let alone make successful. Naturally, the first candidate for this job to come to mind was the studio that developed Yakuza, a series well known for that move where Kiryu neuters his enemies with a gondola.
Source: Destructoid The Yakuza team could make a pretty rad Chibi-Robo game