OMG Nintendo

You've probably been sitting around wondering what Nintendo's going to publish next that's not a GameCube port with new controls. Well, Famitsu has announced the title of the next first-party game Nintendo intends to publish for Japan. Called Takt of Magic, it's... well, it's a Taito-developed Wii sequel to LostMagic. 

If you don't remember LostMagic (and I bet you don't!), it was a gimmicky and fairly early DS game about drawing symbols with the stylus to cast magic spells. To give you an idea of how early, it came out around the same time as the first US models of the DS Lite. The magic rune gimmick aside, it was basically generic JRPG plot married to really primitive RTS combat mechanics, kinda like Revenant Wings. Much less polished, though. 

LostMagic is one of the last games I'd ever expect to see getting a sequel, even a sequel-in-spirit like Takt of Magic. I really wouldn't have expected Nintendo to be publishing much of any Taito-developed games, what with Taito being owned by Square-Enix these days. If not for the Famitsu scans in hand, I'd just dismiss the whole thing story as probably made up.

But I do have the scans and, well, the game appears to be coming out 5/21 if I'm reading it correctly.  The gimmick now seems to be casting spells by using the Wii Remote to draw magic runes and the screens indicate a more pleasing-looking game than LostMagic. If Nintendo makes Taito polish it hard, I can see it being entirely decent. I can't imagine it being any better, though, which really makes me wonder why Nintendo is bothering.