For those not familiar with Lollipop Chainsaw, here’s the launch trailer from 2012. It’s really something.
We learned in 2022 that Lollipop Chainsaw was back, although it wasn’t clear what “back” meant until a few weeks later, when original producer Yoshimi Yasuda said that a “remake” of the game was in the works. But now it seems that fans might want to dial their expectations back a bit: Yosuda now says that Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, as it was recently entitled, is not actually a remake, but a remaster.
“We have changed the game design of RePOP from Remake to Remaster based on your requests!” Yasuda tweeted.
There’s no further clarification about what that means, although generally speaking a remaster spit-shines a game’s graphics but otherwise leaves it alone, while a remake is a more in-depth updating of story, characters, mechanics, and other fundamental aspects of the game—closer to a complete do-over, in other words. (A complete do-over would be a “reboot,” but we don’t need to complicate this any further.)
Whatever the team at Dragami Games has cooking, it looks to be more of a struggle than was initially expected. When Yasuda announced the remake in July 2022, he said it would be out sometime in 2023. But in August of this year, it was delayed until summer 2024, basically a year-long pushback—a far bigger postponement than you typically see when developers want to spend a little more time bug-hunting and polishing.
There’s also still no confirmation of platforms: Lollipop Chainsaw was originally released in 2012 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 but never made its way to PC. We hope the remaster comes our way, but we just don’t know at this point.
(Image credit: Yoshimi Yasuda (Twitter))
The “requests” from fans that Yasuda alluded to may have been a factor in the delay too. When the remake was first announced, features producer Mollie Taylor said she was “not super-jazzed” about some of the planned changes, including an update to the licensed soundtracks (only a few of the songs from the original soundtrack were planned to carry over to the new game) and a “more realistic approach” to the game’s visuals. It’s fair to assume that Mollie wasn’t alone on that front, and reversing course on some of those planned changes could have contributed to the need to push it back so far.
I’m not really what you’d call a Lollipop Chainsaw guy but based on this comparison from January, I think the original looks better too (although honestly I’m not sure the word “realistic” applies to either):
(Image credit: JeamWSR (Twitter))
Anyway, that’s where it stands now: Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, originally intended as a remake and not a remaster, is now a remaster and not a remake. We will continue to hope for the best.
