Everything Level-5 Announced In Its Vision II Livestream

Professor Layton and the New World of Steam Layton

Level-5 just held its second big comeback stream, after announcing four new games earlier in the year. For a little while there it seemed like the company was on its last legs, but with a host of new games in development and a penchant for knowing what fans want the most, it stirred from its slumber and excited those fans.

The Level-5 Vision II stream started on a bit of a bummer note — that all of the games the company planned to release had been delayed into 2024 or beyond. One of those is a particularly large delay, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Five games featured in the presentation, all of which were given release windows and a few more details. We’ve outlined all of those details below, including the release dates for every game featured.

Megaton Musashi: Wired – April 25, 2024

The anime mech RPG Megaton Musashi, which first released back in 2021 in Japan, is getting an enhanced version — this time it’s a premium, paid experience rather than a free game with microtransactions. It’s also launching globally on April 25, 2024 on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, and PS5. The trailer in the presentation didn’t show off much in the way of new stuff, but it did look nice, as it did in the first Megaton Musashi Wired trailer back in September.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time – Summer 2024

We know that Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time got delayed into 2024 after it was leaked in an ad in a Japanese magazine earlier this month. Still, we got to see much more of it in action, with the livestream showing us the new character customization, a couple new jobs for the character, and a little bit of the gameplay loop. One of the biggest things that’s bound to excite fans is its overhauled decoration system, which essentially just lets you design houses and even the town itself in a very similar fashion to Animal Crossing (or Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, which has its own Animal Crossing minigame).

It’s looking pretty good, honestly, and is set to release in Summer 2024. Level-5 says it has a specific release date in mind, but it doesn’t want to announce it too early, which is fair given the company’s history with delays.

Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road – 2024

Ah Inazuma Eleven, you poor thing. Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, formerly subtitled Ares, was announced in 2016, with a release date of 2018, before it was renamed to Inazuma Eleven: Great Road Of Heroes and given a 2019 release date. You’ll never guess what happened next — it got delayed again, and had a few more name changes, but still didn’t release. It was slated for 2023, but it won’t be hitting that release window.

In the presentation, we saw an extensive look at the soccer gameplay, which looks bombastic and high-energy, as it should, as well as a brief glimpse at the story. It looks like there’ll be a pretty hefty story there, with heaps of interesting characters and lots of voiced cutscenes. It looks great, as you’d hope so after 7+ years of development.

The release schedule for Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is a little bit unusual, as Level-5 will be holding a global beta test from March 2024 on Nintendo Switch. The beta will include online matches, some single-player content, multiplayer matches, and a small chunk of the story, and players will be able to provide feedback. After that, the game will be released sometime in 2024 — an exact date is not yet certain.

Professor Layton and the New World of Steam - 2025

This is the most exciting game in the presentation, as fans have been waiting for a new Professor Layton game for years now. We got to see a brief slice of the gameplay, with Luke and the kind professor himself working together to solve a puzzle. Unlike past games that cut away from the area to do self-contained puzzles, the puzzle shown here was actually a part of the world itself — something we’d love to see a whole game based on, but we’re not holding our breath on that one. It was very impressive, though.

Unfortunately, we’ll be waiting a little bit longer for it. Level-5 says that the game is tentatively scheduled for a 2025 release, which is a long time to wait, but should hopefully be worth it. The company said during the stream that all of the puzzles are actually finished, it’s just a matter of creating the rest of the game around them. Just looking at this small slice, though, we feel confident saying that Professor Layton is definitely back.

Decapolice – Post-2024

Decapolice was supposed to be released this year. People played it at Tokyo Game Show in September. Just two months ago, Level-5 was still confident it would hit its release window. That’s why it’s so surprising that it’s been pushed back, not into 2024, but to sometime after — unlike Layton, the company isn’t even committing to a 2025 release.

We didn’t see anything particularly new for the investigative RPG during the presentation, but given it’s apparently well over a year away, that’s not surprising. We’re just left wondering how this happened to a game that was just months away from releasing.

Level-5 Vision 2024 – April 2024

Finally, Level-5 announced another livestream, called Level-5 Vision 2024. This one is subtitled “To The World’s Children,” and will take place in April 2024. Curiously, the teaser that played during this announcement looked a lot like Yokai Watch, featuring a ghostly cat-like creature, but it’s not like any Yokai we’ve seen from the series in the past. Could we be looking at a hint of a reboot for the embattled series? Only time will tell.