Six years after the cancellation of the game announced as an Xbox One exclusive in 2014, we’re now hearing that the Japanese studio has brought out the dragon-filled “not-Devil May Cry” again.

PlatinumGames’ canceled game was perhaps the biggest project we’ve officially heard about and seen in action in the last decade (Ubisoft’s canceled projects, which we reported on yesterday, don’t even come close!). Except that it’s been nearly a whole console generation since then, PlatinumGames has a new CEO in Atsushi Inaba, and Microsoft is also admittedly looking to expand into Asia. By that, we mean that Redmond is reaching into its pockets to add Japanese studio(s) to the Xbox Game Studios family.

Inaba said in 2020, and again last year, that PlatinumGames would return to the game if given the opportunity by Redmond (Microsoft owns the IP). Only last year, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer shrugged it off with the typical “we have nothing to announce or information to share on Scalebound” response. Still, Microsoft might have seen the potential in the project, as even Hideki Kamiya (Resident Evil 2, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, Bayonetta, The Wonderful 101) is keen to get back to work on Scalebound.

On the latest episode of the XboxEra podcast, Speshal_Nick, who has previously had accurate information on several Xbox projects before the official announcement, said that PlatinumGames is working with Microsoft again, but that the collaboration is still in its early stages. It’s unclear whether the Japanese studio will completely restart development on Scalebound or pick up where it left off in January 2017. Spencer has likely finally reached out to the Japanese team over the last few weeks, though, as something may have happened behind the scenes at the time.

PlatinumGames didn’t throw out all the ideas from Scalebound, as they used a few concepts in their Nintendo Switch-exclusive games Astral Chain and Bayonetta 3 (and since both games turned out well, the studio did the right thing).

Source: WCCFTech