Macross: Shooting Insight brings musical space battles West this year

Red Arts Games has announced that Bushiroad’s Macross: Shooting Insight will be coming to PS4, PS5, and Switch in North America this year.

Ironically, we’ve thus far not been given much insight into the game, which was initially announced in Japan last year. If you’re not familiar, the original Macross series was adapted as Robotech here in North America and was one of the earliest anime that a lot of people saw. The company localizing it, Harmony Gold, then brought over two unrelated anime series and tied them all together in a redub since the OVAs that followed Macross were too short for American standards, and they wanted some sort of continuation immediately. It was something that made sense in the ‘80s before the internet.

Macross: Shooting Insight might be the first proper game of the series to make it to North America. In 2002, we got Robotech: Battlecry (which I actually enjoyed), but that was based on the English adaptation and was developed by American developer Vicious Cycle Software. Some in the West may have played the Famicom Macross, however, because it was a mainstay on multi-game pirate cartridges.

For Macross: Shooting Insight, it will be a scrolling shoot-’em-up. There has been some trailers of the gameplay, but they all just show variables fighting things against a generic starfield. I’m hoping that’s not completely indicative of the gameplay.

The story follows characters from a few of the series (7, Plus, Zero, Frontier, and Delta) after a fold in space-time brings them all together. One unique feature has you use the power of songs to gain an edge in battle!” You’re joined by songstresses from the various series. I guess that makes sense, but it makes them sound like bards from Dungeons and Dragons.

Macross: Shooting Insight will be coming to PS4, PS5, and Switch in North America sometime this year.