Cry On: Sakaguchi’s abandoned game
You may remember that in the mid-2000’s Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man behind the greatest Final Fantasy titles the series ever had, was inexplicably stuck making games for XBox. Only one game of his came out for the system before his contract was cancelled, and he went on to make The Last Story for Wii. But if Blue Dragon hadn’t been the lone JRPG fish in the bro-dude shooter market and sold more copies, he might have made Cry On instead. The project was cancelled in 2008, but Sakaguchi uploaded the trailer to his own YouTube account this week.
No actual gameplay footage is shown, because development never really got that far. Half of the trailer is concept art and the other half is a cutscene created by the game engine. We can see it would have used the nifty seventh-gen cel-shading technique.
And for once, the title is not abstract: everything really cries. The drawing of the girl cries, the Japanese letters cry, the English letters cry, EVERYTHING cries. Compare this with false-advertising titles like “Devil May Cry” where not ONCE, in three games and a reboot, did we ever see the devil cry.
A girl in a blue dress runs through a cave, chased by hundreds of little black angry fuzzy balls. Unfortunately for her the cave ends as an opening in a large mountain, and a drop hundreds of feet long. With no other options, she lets go of the cliff just as the Balls of Death reach her…..but then her secret power is revealed…..she can make gigantic rock monoliths with her mind!
The giant golem-thing catches her in its big hand, glances at the cave and then SLAMS a fist at the evil fuzzies, smashing them all to bits. Then the giant crumbles back into the rocks it was composed of….and the girl cries again.
If you want to play Cry On, start looking for parallel dimensions.