Suda51 and Level-5's Liberation Maiden to become a traditional adventure game

Even the most hardcore fan of Grasshopper Manufacture's work may have overlooked Liberation Maiden when it first came out as part of Level-5's GUILD01 game omnibus. Available now on the 3DS and iOS, the shooter starred Shoko Ozora, the teenaged president of New Japan, as she fought to free her homeland. Somehow, that plot's now become the backdrop for a brand-new PS3 adventure game set in the same universe.

Called Liberation Maiden SIN, the adventure stars Kiyoto Kaido, Shoko's new chief assistant in the New Japan government and a war orphan that Shoko saved at the age of five. The fledgling nation is at war again, and it'll take all of the government's resources to deal with this menace. (And by that, we mean the sexy anime ladies that seem to take up most of the top cabinet posts.)

Development of SIN is mostly being handled by Chiyomaru Shikura and his adventure-game experts at 5pb, although Grasshopper head Goichi "Suda51" Suda is also doing some writing. "It's kind of fun to take some of the silly details behind the story and really try to go all the way with it," Shikura told Famitsu magazine. "I think that's some of the charm of this game world. When I played the original, I asked Suda some questions because I was wondering just how seriously he fleshed out all of the story details. He revealed that he had all of this text description laid out somewhere. That's what I mean when I say it has charm; there's real depth from the surface down to what's inside."

According to Suda himself, much of the drive to launch this project also came from Level-5 head Akihiro Hino, the man who also spearheaded the original GUILD01. "Hino had said to us that it'd be neat if there was a single cut of sorts released from the GUILD series at some point," Suda explained. "Personally, I thought that Liberation Maiden had enough force behind it to be able to spread out to other forms of media as a single product. Liberation Maiden was given life thanks to Level-5, and now we've having 5pb make it into a bigger thing. It's really a blessed project in that way, I think, and I'm very glad to have these two outfits backing us up."

There's no release date announced for SIN yet, and 5pb's PR department pegged the game at only 20 percent complete. "This is the first text I'm writing for an adventure game in a very long time, but you really need to have a certain quantity," Suda admitted. "With an action game, you can write out the entire setting in two or three days if you concentrate, but no way you can do that in this genre. I have about two weeks to finish my part of it, and it's already kind of two weeks late, but I sure hope I can make the new deadline!"