Xseed Are Trying To Release Rune Factory 4 In Europe Via The Nintendo eShop

Rune Factory 4 was planned for release in Europe until the game’s PAL release was infamously cancelled by Marvelous in early 2014, due to developer Neverland going out of business. At the time, Xseed, who publish Rune Factory games in the USA and are subsidiary of Marvelous, said that one the reasons behind the cancellation of Rune Factory 4 in Europe was due to technical hurdles.

More specifically, Marvelous had taken in some of Neverland’s staff after the studio closed down, and the team—which consisted of members of the Rune Factory group—continued work on Forbidden Magna, an RPG that had begun development after the completion of Rune Factory 4. Unfortunately, the main programmer for Rune Factory 4 was not part of this team, which is what prevented a European release from being worked on.

This week, however, Rune Factory 4 was rated by the USK, Germany’s videogame rating board, with Xseed and Marvelous listed as the game’s publishers. Following the rating, Siliconera got in touch with Xseed’s Executive VP, Ken Berry, to find out if the game was going to be released in Europe after all, and the reply we received should make our European readers happy: Xseed hope to release Rune Factory 4 as an eShop title in Europe.

“The situation is that we know the Rune Factory 4 fans in Europe have suffered enough with one cancellation already,” Berry said to Siliconera, “so we didn’t want to announce anything until the game passed [Nintendo of Europe] certification and we were sure its digital-only eShop release was imminent since we are using a different programming house to try to pick up where the original dev team left off.”

I asked Berry if he could say which team was taking over programming duties for Rune Factory 4’s release and if he could say how much work on the title had been done.

“Though I can’t disclose which development house is handling the PAL localization programming duties for us, I can say that it’s been in the works for months already and we hope to start the master submission process with NOE within the next couple weeks,” Berry replied.

So, there you go. Rune Factory 4 is coming to Europe after all.