The History of Metal Wolf Chaos

The Xbox was successful in the West and had gained no foothold in Japan. Microsoft teamed up with FromSoftware, then known primarily for the Armored Core mecha series, to develop an exclusive mecha game for the system. The game was built not by the Armored Core team but by the team responsible for the Otogi games, with the Armored Core team advising on mecha gameplay, and the developers have stated they did not want simply to recreate Armored Core. Producer Masanori Takeuchi and director Keiichiro Ogawa led a team of about 30, and the game took eight to eleven months to develop. Kota Hoshino and Shohei Tsuchiya composed.

Because Microsoft was American, the team built the game around American themes, working closely with the nearby Microsoft Japan offices, who supplied American context and humor. Takeuchi's E3 2019 account of the result is the definitive one: it is America as perceived by the Japanese, a fictional ideology of American culture and comic book heroes, assembled into a president piloting a mech, and he compared the viewpoint to how Americans imagine a Japanese ninja. A Microsoft employee suggested the three word title, on the theory that a rhythmic name would appeal to Western focused audiences, like Metal Gear Solid. The game was nevertheless developed with a Japanese player base in mind, a contradiction the sales figures would soon annotate.

Wilson's mech carries up to eight weapons selected from more than a hundred, from handguns to surface to air missiles, unlocked with money collected across destructible stages running west to east across the United States, from the west coast to the White House, Las Vegas, and a final duel on a space station. Rescuing hostages unlocks music and special weapons; chaining kills builds score bonuses; dashing drains the shield that protects the mech. Contemporary reviewers who played the import, at 1UP and GameSpot among them, praised the premise, the frantic action, the simple controls, and the destructible environments, while noting the game wore thinner with repetition.

It is, by design, an arcade object rather than a simulation: the Otogi team's simplicity against the Armored Core team's complexity, wearing its influences, Saturday morning cartoons and action films, on its flag draped sleeve.

For years the game circulated in the West as reputation and import copies: Westerners kept asking for it, and Takeuchi has said he heard the rumors without understanding why anyone would want an old Xbox game that was never released in their region. In 2016 Devolver Digital publicly offered on Twitter to help localize it; the fan reaction started the conversations that became XD. The remaster's priority, per the team, was fidelity: the original game, absolutely faithful, on modern hardware.

On this shelf, Metal Wolf Chaos is the mirror of Shin Megami Tensei: Nine. Nine is a Japanese series the West never received; Metal Wolf Chaos is an American fantasia, voiced in English, that America never received. The two Japanese boxes in this gallery are the only boxes their games ever had in their era, and that is the exhibit.