La-Mulana WiiWare cancelled in North America and Europe

The WiiWare version of La-Mulana was announced nearly three years ago, but it seems that gamers outside of Japan won't have the chance to play it.

Publisher Nicalis teamed up with developer NIGORO to publish the game in North America and Europe, but in the year since the game was released in Japan (published by NIGORO themselves), Nicalis has decided that a Western release simply isn't worth it any more, and announced that the game was cancelled last night via Twitter.

Things get a little sketchy from there, as NIGORO apparently found out about the cancellation the same way the rest of us did. Just last week they posted an update on their website claiming the game was finished and sent to Nicalis, but they hadn't heard anything since then and didn't know when to expect a release.

In a statement to GoNintendo, Nicalis explained the reasoning behind the cancellation, blaming NIGORO's long development cycle and the stagnation of WiiWare as a platform:

"The decision to cancel publishing of La-Mulana was a tough call, but waiting two years for NIGORO to finish development has made it near impossible to sell sufficient units on Wii. The WiiWare market has a fraction of the players from 2008. The window for release and success of software on the platform ended in 2009 and took a very steep decline. Players have moved onto other digital download platforms."

The PC version, published by NIGORO themselves, is still planned for a North American release.

Staff article by Rhody Tobin (May 01, 2012) Rhody likes to press the keys on his keyboard. Sometimes the resulting letters form strings of words that kind of make sense when you think about them for a moment. Most times they're just random gibberish that should be ignored. Ball-peen wobble glurk.