Hey, let's talk about a game we don't know anything about! I'm putting this here for now because we don't even know the genre, but it could very well be an RPG. We don't know the system either (though a lot of people are speculating Vita). What we do know is that it has a pretty awesome
teaser trailer.
So what have we got? Let's analyze the heck out of limited information!
The name 'panopticon' refers to a prison design proposed by philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. It consists of cells arranged in a circle around a central guard tower, and the whole point was to make it so that guards could monitor the inmates without them knowing when they were being watched. Remember that this was before CCTV and all that stuff, so that was actually hard to do. In a normal prison design patrolling guards would be obvious and prisoners who were up to no good would have time to hide what they were doing.
Now obviously in this sci-fi setting there are no literal panopticons. However the
monitoring theme seems to be pretty big, so I seriously doubt that name was chosen at random. In the trailer there are several shots of cameras and of people clearly watching what other people are doing. Not to mention that the people in the trailer do appear to have been captured and are prisoners of some sort, but we don't really know why.
Then of course there are the numbers over everyone's heads, probably the trailer's most distinctive feature. But what do they mean? I've seen a lot of people speculate that it's something like the "shinigami eyes" in Death Note that shows how much time people have before they die, but I don't buy that. I rewatched the trailer and noticed that most of the time these numbers don't change. If they were just clocks counting down to somebody's death then they should be changing all the time. If they never changed at all I would be inclined to believe it was some sort of ID number attached to each person (which would fit the whole monitoring theme), however there is that one scene at like 2:20 where the guy's number is changing after rescuing the girl. That's the only point in the trailer I noticed a number changing, but it's changing
fast. What does that mean?
Then there's the color of these numbers. Normally they're blue, but we saw people's numbers change to red after being captured (0:50 in the trailer), which would make one inclined to believe that the color has something to do with criminal status.
But, then there's the baby born at the end. Number 1,000,000 and born with a red number. What the heck does that mean?
I have no idea, but it's a pretty cool trailer...
Now what about gameplay? A lot of people are speculating that this is yet another Monster Hunter clone based on the second half of the trailer that has a bunch of people fighting big monster things. Of course this is just cinematics, not gameplay. Final Fantasy games have cinematic moments of a bunch of people fighting big monster things, but that doesn't mean they play anything like Monster Hunter games (well, except maybe Type-0 a bit...). Certainly the setting and style are very different, though I suppose you could say the same about Soul Sacrifice.
What we do know is that it's being made by Son's Japan Studio, though Japan Studio is actually more of an umbrella label that has a lot of different teams within it. It's been speculated that it's the team behind Gravity Rush doing this, since they've been kind of quiet since Gravity Rush came out. That would be pretty cool.
There's obviously a lot of stuff we don't know. This was just a teaser. But it was a damn nice teaser. I'm definitely interested.
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