Why would Falcom reissue Brandish in so many forms over the years, and why would a tiny publisher like Xseed take what is presumably a significant risk on releasing an aging port of the game for an obsolete platform in 2015? To put it in Seinfeldean terms: 'What's the deal with Brandish?' On top of that, Brandish saw no less than three sequels through the years, too. Falcom's no stranger to remakes, but the only game they've ported and reworked more than Brandish is the original Ys I & II - and, to put it lightly, Brandish doesn't command anywhere near the amount of tenacious fan affection the early Ys games do. That's a lot of iterations for a game that would probably be pretty widely reviled if more people had ever actually played it.

but even 20 years ago, that Brandish was a remake of a PC game from 1991. If you know the game at all, you probably know it from its Super NES release back in 1995.

Of course, at heart it's far older than that, a remake of a much older RPG simply called Brandish. The idea of a new PSP release in 2015 alone seems sufficiently nutty, but it's an elderly PSP game at that - the original Japanese release happened way back in the dim and distant year of 2009, having languished in localization limbo for the past six years. As though publisher Xseed is defying you to like it.Ĭonsider: While most people will likely play Brandish on PlayStation Vita, it's actually a PSP game. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.īrandish: The Dark Revenant almost feels like a dare. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247.

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