SOL Shogunate Preview – Fly Me To The Moon

Developer Chaos Manufacturing curiously describes its debut action RPG, SOL Shogunate, as a “samurai space opera.” When I ask CEO Guy Costantini and game director Leszek Szczepanski what inspired this theme, they cite a plethora of intriguing influences. The pair rattles off video games such as Metal Gear Rising and Final Fantasy XVI, films like Dune and Man in the High Castle, and even anime like Attack on Titan and Knights of Sidonia. But the biggest inspiration for this upcoming sci-fi adventure, surprisingly, is music.

SOL Shogunate takes place in a future where humanity colonized the solar system and has culturally adopted the Japanese feudal system and culture. Like the best samurai tales, the game is a revenge quest centering on Yuzuki, the once-heir to a powerful Tennoji samurai clan that was wiped out by the rival Karasuma Clan. Yuzuki will enact her vengeance as an outlaw ronin across a sprawling metropolis on Earth’s moon; players will battle within its glass-domed cities, each inspired by different eras of Japanese history, as well as on the lunar surface itself.

“It’s what we would call a Moon that has been essentially developed,” Costantini explains. “It’s the gateway to the solar system. It’s been developed for around 150 years. So we have these large, rotating cities called lunar glasses that are built inside of a lunar crater. And essentially, these cities allow people to have simulated gravity, allow them to have biomes that are fully explorable.” 

These domed cities feature architecture and other elements inspired by eras. For example, one city called Shin Edo is inspired by Feudal-era Japan, while another city, Tenkyo, draws inspiration from the late Showa-era of the 1980s. Of course, each city is heavily futuristic  

Szczepanski and Costantini are industry veterans; Szczepanski has worked for Konami on series like Metal Gear and Castlevania, as well as with Guerrilla Games on the Horizon franchise; Costantini has tenure at Riot Games, CD Projekt Red, and Skydance. Both are massive action game fans from opposite spectrums of the genre, with Szczepanski professing his love of Platinum Games, the studio behind Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising, while Costantini is an enthusiast of Elden Ring and Dark Souls masterminds From Software. 

Despite being the yin to the other’s yang, SOL Shogunate is a visceral yet rhythmic, stylish action experience. “‘Samurai Space Opera’ is both figurative, because this is an epic adventure in space, but also is very literal,” Szczepanski says. “This is a musical adventure in space.” While not actually a rhythm game, Szczepanski says music is intimately woven into the experience; the soundtrack is being carefully curated – so far, we know Japanese rock act AliA is involved with the project – to provide a soundscape that emphasizes the thrills of gameplay to the highest degree so that every major battle or setpiece feels like an adrenaline-pumping, sensory-overloading music video. 

“In many ways, my process of trying to figure out what this game is supposed to be, it was spending embarrassing amounts of time just browsing through YouTube and Spotify and other places, and just jumping from band to band and band and seeing what makes me feel the strongest, and finding a way to convey these like plethora of different feelings of these songs managed to make me feel to the players was the driving force behind all this,” Szczepanski tells me.

Combat is a slick and fast-paced affair, with players using a katana (one of several weapons the team will reveal later) to slice apart foes, while parrying incoming attacks. Strategy revolves around exploiting opponents’ elemental weaknesses players must discover during combat, a system dubbed the Vulnerability Matrix. Weapons can be equipped with various elemental properties, such as electricity, and other active abilities to create optimal loadouts against certain threats. Although you can’t be prepared for everything, SOL Shogunate will challenge players to study adversaries and learn how to adjust during the dynamic, ever-changing battles. Costantini also teases a gene-splicing mechanic for gaining and even combining powers, but is keeping details under wraps for now. 

Chaos Manufacturing is also considering the setting by always posing the question: how would a samurai fight on the Moon? For one, Yuzuki wears a bio-ceramic skin that acts as the sci-fi evolution of traditional samurai armor, allowing her to survive exposure to space and augmenting her natural talents to superhuman levels. This armor is not only practical, but it also represents another piece of world-building, as it’s a symbol of Yuzuki’s ascension to the top of her clan.

Yuzuki is also equipped with Gravity Assist Gear, which, among other tools such as back thrusters, includes grappling hooks used to navigate areas, like pulling herself up platforms. This tool is also crucial to combat. Hooking onto enemies can either yank them towards Yuzuki or vice versa, and you can also use this tool to send enemies into environmental hazards. You can even weave electricity into your grapple attacks. 

“[There are] a lot of combinations that will effectively be a rabbit hole for people to explore so they can decide, ‘hey, I’m this kind of space samurai,’” says Costantini. “‘I like this kind of weapon, I like this kind of augmentation, I like this way of moving around the battlefield.’” And the reason we did it that way is because we can’t wait to see what players will surprise us with as they mix these genes together and discover some of the stuff we hid there.”

SOL Shogunate is not an open-world game, but players can veer off the beaten path to complete optional tasks designed to add additional context to the world’s lore. But the adventure is very much centered on the primary story. Yuzuki can even mount a robotic horse, which draws from Szczepanski’s previous work on Sony’s Horizon series, but it’s unclear what else this mechanical steed can do. However, it helps reinforce this culture’s romanticization of its past and how it cherry-picks the most desirable aspects to bring into the future, regardless of practicality.

“If you were in power, and you were idolizing a specific time period, and you had access to all the technology possible, you would give yourself the fantasy that you and your peers want. And that is why we felt that the samurai would totally create a mechanical horse,” says Costantini. 

We won’t be playing SOL Shogunate until 2027 at the earliest, but it currently has no release window as the game is very early in development. Still, Chaos Manufacturing has created a fascinating world and a mouth-watering gameplay premise. Hopefully, it lives up to its astronomical potential, and by channeling the studios’ love of the action genre, Japanese culture, and music, it has a real shot of making a big splash. 

“SOL Shogunate is very much a product of all our individual passions,” says Szczepanski. “We are all in love with Japan and its culture, and we wanted to kind of share some of that love with the world. And we also wanted to embed this game with other things we are deeply passionate about.”