Right now in Japan it's not ungodly late at night, so virtuoso developer Level-5 is holding its annual "Vision Conference" where they announce new games and where development on announced projects is standing. For DS fans, by far the most interesting tidbit dropped at the show relates to Ninokuni, Level-5's ground-breaking team-up with animator Studio Ghibli.
Due to the amounts of voice and video data (including original Ghibli animation) planned for the game, Level-5 is going to introduce a new 4 Gb DS cart for issuing Ninokuni. This will make Ninokuni the largest DS game ever created in terms of pure data size. The previous record holder, if I recall correctly, was Mistwalker's Archaic Sealed Heat (or A.S.H.) at 2 Gb.
A.S.H. never came out in the US and it's not yet clear if Ninokuni will, but if Level-5 is expanding cart size into the 4 Gb range then you can expect other developers to eventually follow. A 4 Gb cart works out to 512 MB, around the size of your average PlayStation game. This could herald the introduction of a lot more use of character voice acting and FMV footage in DS games. More voice is unquestionably a good thing; I'll let you guys argue it out about the FMVs.
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