Raiden V coming to North America & Europe ‘in the near future’

Success in Japan is seemingly not the only goal in Raiden V's sights as the game's development team confirms the title will soon hit North America and Europe.

The CEO of game developer MOSS, Toshinobu Komazawa, was recently involved in an interview with Inside Games (company based in Japan), where he was questioned on the next move for Raiden V.

"Raiden is always made for worldwide, is an important thing because this franchise is very popular in the west and Asia. Raiden IV was sold well digitally there. With this in mind, we needed characters who can do serious acting as well. That's why we asked Tsukasa Kotobuki to design them," he said.

For those that aren't aware, Raiden V is an Xbox-exclusive top-down shooter – experiencing some success in Asia, but many fans of the franchise have been waiting for the game to land in the West.

"We are releasing Raiden V in North America and Europe in the near future. There are many enthusiastic shooters overseas. We have more massages from them like "When's the western version?" or "Why Xbox One?!" via e-mail and SNS than Japanese gamers'. Very excited messages" Komazawa continued.

Quite often smaller game developers opt to open up their game to several platforms, whether it be PC, Xbox, PlayStation 4 or various other consoles. However, as mentioned earlier, this game will be hitting Europe and North America as an Xbox exclusive. If you're wondering why that is the case, Mr. Komazawa also touched on that during his interview.

He said: "Of course, we considered every platform but Xbox One's exceptionally good features like the cloud have high affinity for what we wanted to do with Raiden V. That's the reason. Also, there was a strong demand from Microsoft Japan for shmups. I felt the feeling that they want to keep appealing this genre on Xbox to shmups fans."

On a side note, no official release date has been confirmed for Raiden V's impending launch in North America and Europe.

[Inside-games]