In an update to his personal website from July 8, Ikaruga creator Hiroshi Iuchi officially confirmed his departure from M2, where he had been developing his new game Ubusuna. He gave a detailed account of the project’s current status and explained why its development dragged for so long only to get halted.
This follows M2’s recent announcement about Ubusuna’s development being cancelled. Iuchi apologized for causing fans disappointment with this announcement, saying he now believes he should have stopped the company from making it public when it did. He explains that his resignation had already been decided by the end of 2025, and by the time M2 announced it, he had already begun discussions with other companies about continuing Ubusuna, though nothing had been decided yet. Because of that, he believes there was no practical need to announce his departure at that timing (he speculates that M2 probably wanted to get the matter out of the way before upcoming events).
Needless to say, Iuchi has not abandoned Ubusuna. Although it will no longer be developed at M2, he says he’s actively working behind the scenes to continue the project without causing damage to any party involved. Thankfully, Iuchi personally owns the rights to Ubusuna’s concept and game system because the original proposal for the game is something he made back in 2006 and later brought to M2.
On the other hand, all assets created for the game during its development at M2 belong to the company, so even once development resumes elsewhere, he will not be able to simply use those assets, at least not for free. Iuchi says this is probably the third or fourth time Ubusuna has been stalled or cancelled since its conception in 2006, but this is the first time development had progressed this far before being halted.
The director also addressed speculation he had seen online about Ubusuna falling apart due to “design flaws” or “the pressure of creating a worthy successor to Ikaruga.” He denies these theories, instead explaining that his team at M2 didn’t get to work on Ubusuna exclusively because members were repeatedly assigned to help out with other projects. Whenever the team moved onto other work, Ubusuna’s development would stop for a year or more, and restarting afterward also consumed additional time.
Another major reason for the delays, according to Iuchi, was that management had instructed the dev team to keep improving the game until he was satisfied with it. As a result, the team continued pursuing higher and higher quality without a firm direction. While he says the planning side did attempt to streamline development, Iuchi admits he personally took those instructions too literally, making this partly his own mistake.
Over such a long development period, the team gradually lost momentum, and with unstable staffing, Iuchi says the project entered a vicious cycle, as if “a group of 2 of 3 people with no experience with 3D games suddenly tried to make an AAA title like Call of Duty.”
That said, Iuchi is confident in Ubusuna being a good game and seems to be taking steps to continue its development. Immediately after deciding to cancel the project at M2, Ubusuna’s external graphics artist, Kususaga Rin, proposed seeking funding from another company so development could continue, and other people also came forward saying they would help if the project continued. Talks with companies who expressed interest are already underway. Though Iuchi cautions that he does not yet know how things will ultimately turn out, he says the team is actively working toward delivering Ubusuna to everyone who has been supporting the project.
