Following a release on PC in February of 2023, Sunsoft has announced that Ikki Unite will launch on Switch in North America in early 2024. Japan will get it slightly earlier in 2023.
Ikki Unite is a bit of a weird one. It is based on a 1985 arcade game that was ported to Famicom in the same year. The Famicom version is considered one of Japan’s “kusoge no densetsu” or “legendary crappy game.” However, rather than try and duplicate the reviled gameplay of the 1985 “classic,” Ikki Unite has a lot more in common with Vampire Survivors. Specifically, it involves hordes of monsters and powering up your auto-firing attacks. The big wrinkle here is that it’s 16-players online.
I played some of Ikki Unite back when it first released on PC. It was fun, but at the time it was unbalanced and buggy. Sunsoft has patched it a few times since then, and I keep meaning to jump back in to see if they polished out the experience. Its roguelite multi-player gameplay just seemed kind of fascinating to me at the time, but I recall it being a very busy period for me, so I didn’t get a chance to put much time into it.
While details on the Switch release is somewhat sparse, Sunsoft is saying that it will have full crossplay with the current PC version. That’s pretty important. You wouldn’t want to divide the player base of such a niche game.
Ikki Unite is available on PC right now. It will be coming to Switch sometime in early 2024.
