Each year, April 1st has gamers keeping their guard up as devs bombard them with joke announcements, fake edits and even full-on parody trailers that make you wish they were actually real. Though of course, it all depends on how the jokes land (this year’s new NieR series game announcement was an emotional rollercoaster for fans).
On the other hand, visual novel studio Key, known for developing Clannad, Kanon and Air, made a rather unusual announcement, apologizing to their fans for not having anything prepared for April Fools Day. As per their official X account, the development team has decided to skip the holiday this year in order to pour all their effort into working on their upcoming visual novel anemoi.
Post translation:
[Announcement]
Due to our team pouring all their effort into developing anemoi, we don’t have anything prepared for April 1st (April Fool’s Day) this fiscal year. We really don’t.
We sincerely appreciate your understanding.
Key development Staff
Doubling down on the sentiment, Key’s studio director and scenario writer Kai jokingly commented that “if we’re going to make a funny image as an April Fool’s joke, we’d better [use that time] to make one more image asset for anemoi.”
That being said, with only a couple of weeks left until the game’s planned release on April 24, it’s not surprising that the team is focusing all of their energy on developing anemoi. Back in December last year, it was announced that the original January release date would be shifted to April precisely because they wanted to work on the game “without compromise” and help it reach a quality that meet both the fans’ expectations and the developers’ standards.
Consequently, it seems like the game is going to be pretty hefty, as Key recently announced that the physical version of the game will be released in a two-disc package to account for extra content, with the digital version being at least 18GB in size.
Anemoi is set to release on April 24, 2026 for PC (Windows) in Japan. A future Steam release with English and Simplified Chinese language support has also been confirmed.
