E.X Troopers: 'Capcom wanted two very different Lost Planet games'
Lost Planet 3 and E.X. Troopers exist in the same universe but the while the former is a gritty and dark take on Capcom's franchise, the same can't be said for the latter. The canyon of different between both games is entirely intentional, Lost Planet executive producer Kenji Ohguro has revealed.
Speaking with Siliconera, Ohguro explained that he felt Lost Planet 2's multiplayer focus and 'festival' vibe caused Capcom to split the franchise in two, "They had kind of struggled with Lost Planet 2 a bit, because they were going in this direction of creating this multiplayer, almost festival atmosphere, including crazy amounts of content and ridiculous scenarios."
"Sort of Monster Hunter with guns," Ohguro added "coming in and defeating huge creatures together—and getting away from some of the narrative strengths that were originally part of the franchise."
"They were doing this almost kind of ‘party game,’" Ohguro continued, "but their art style was leaning more towards the cool end of the spectrum. So I already felt at the tail-end of Lost Planet 2, that they weren’t able to marry those as well as they should have."
"That was one of the reasons why maybe Lost Planet 2 didn’t perform as well as it could have. Coming out of Lost Planet 2 as the franchise owner on the creative side, Ohguro-san felt really strongly about the need to branch these out into two separate products," Ohguro concluded.
He's not wrong about them being separate. Here's an E.X. Troopers trailer. It's colourful, anime-tastic and definitely nothing like Lost Planet 3:
E.X. Troopers will launch on 3DS in Japan November 22.