Metal Gear Rising, the action-focused spin-off of Konami’s most popular franchise, was originally unveiled at a Xbox 360 focused press conference. It comes as some surprise then that the game is no longer being released for the 360 in Japan.
Today Konami announced the cancellation of the Japanese 360 version of Rising. The game is still multiplatform in all other territories, but it seems like Japanese 360 owners (a few of them exist, apparently,) will be S.O.L. when Rising debuts as a PS3 exclusive over there.
It’s not necessarily surprising news; while the 360 has dominated software and hardware sales in Western territories for a good chunk of this generation, the system (and the original Xbox) never caught on in Japan. Despite Microsoft making numerous campaigns to court Japanese developers and players alike, the 360 has never managed to achieve widespread popularity beyond a niche audience of Japan’s most hard core gamers.
Xbox owning Metal Gear fans in the West have nothing to worry about, however: Metal Gear Rising is still being developed for both the 360 and the PS3, and will be released as a multiplatform title in the US and Europe in February, 2013.
