Dear subscribers,
It has been a while since our last detailed production status report, so we would like to give you an update about the latest state of our pre-order products.
Although COVID-19 has calmed down in most parts of the world and everyday life is almost back to normal, the effects from before are still causing global problems of production chains and logistic issues that haven’t fully recovered their productivity from before the pandemic just yet. The results can be seen not only in our schedules, but also in those of many other businesses of physical goods.
Despite the circumstances, we’ve been doing our best to make good progress with our releases and will go into detail with this report.
Be ensured that our number one mission is to deliver top quality releases - which is a very overused term, but if you have ever laid hands on one of our games, you know that we mean it.
With this newsletter, we would like to also announce our Summer Holiday Break, which will last from 14th of August 2023 to 18th of August 2023. Our team does its best to ship out all orders with available products and answer all open support inquiries until then, but please note that there will be only limited email support and shipping during the holiday break; support and shipping will resume after the holiday break is over.
1. Here is the update of what we currently have:
We now have the Game cartridge for Underhero (Switch version) and NekoNavy in our warehouse and currently waiting for other print parts to finish manufacturing.
As you can see in the picture below, we have been trying to solve a printing color issue with our manufacturing partner for a very long while as we had to change manufacturers; because of this we had to do the color matching from scratch. It is a process that takes many attempts and a lot of time, due to multiple complex steps to see the end result (especially in regards of the coating procedure). We want to ensure for you that our Nintendo Switch slip cases match the color of previous slip cases, when displayed next to each other as a collection.
The slip cases for all the announced PS4 titles have been printed and are currently being built. All of our slip cases as well as Collector's Editions boxes are built by the team in our warehouse by hand to ensure highest quality.
As we have announced in the previous Newsletter, we now also have the CD Soundtracks for following:
Psychotic Adventures Origins Premium Soundtrack CD
Project Blue Premium Soundtrack CD
Neko Navy Daydream Edition Deluxe Soundtrack CD
Ginga Force Deluxe Soundtrack 2CD
Natsuki Chronicles Deluxe Soundtrack 2CD
Honō no Rangerman / Blazing Rangers Deluxe Soundtrack CD
CrossCode Official Soundtrack 2CD
These may not seem relevant to the release progress, but please note that Soundtrack CDs are an important part of the Collector‘s Editions.
The Neko Navy plushes, which are part of the game's Collector‘s Edition (and also sold separately) have finished manufacturing and are on the way to us now. We are also excited to show new additional plushes of Eugene, Kyrie and Ginnosuke! We will annouce them separately upon arrival in our upcoming newsletter.
Here are some pictures of the final products:
Finishing these plushes was a tough process, that took a long time. Due to COVID shutdowns during the pandemic we had to completely change our manufacturer and start the prototyping from scratch, go through many adjustments to perfect all details, as well as needing to have them entirely re-manufactured, because the initial production arrived in an inacceptable condition. Here are some of the pictures from the prototyping process and damaged plushes:
The plush key-chains included in the Collector‘s Editions for Psychotic Adventures are also finished and are on the way to us:
We have also finished the production for the Mulaka Artbook which is another part of the Collector 's edition and it comes in a brand-new layout and 150+ new pages for this reprint resulting in over 250 pages.
2. Regarding Blazing Rangers:
We have halted shipping of the game for some time, since the initial production had a lot of faulty PCBs and we had to return them to our manufacturer. Finding the cause for the irregular defects in the PCBs, putting in the QA work and of course the eventual re-manufacturing took some time, but we have the improved revisions in our stock now!
The replacement PCB for Blazing Rangers (PAL and NTSC version) have arrived from the manufacturer and replacements as well as paused orders will start shipping shortly.
The reason why it has taken a while is because upon checking, we have discovered that all the PAL and NTSC batches we had were affected by this issue, therefore we could not just swap out the cartridges with the ones we had in stock and had to resolve the issue with the manufacturer. For those who have sent us their defective copy, a refund or a voucher for the shipping cost will follow shortly. And if you should have one, please do not hesitate to contact our support.
We once again apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
As for the Super Collector's Edition, we have prepared a few surprises. More details will be coming soon!
3. Progress update for rest of the products:
Collector's Editions of Rival Megagun, Mulaka, Project Blue (including Kickstarter version), Ginga Force, Natsuki Chronicles (including the SCE that contains both titles) and Blazing Rangers (every edition) - all parts for the titles above are fully produced, only waiting for the outer premium boxes that are currently in the making. The process has been delayed due to issues with the manufacturing, such as the quality of the print not being up to our standards as well as color match issues.
Psychotic Adventures and Crimzon Clover for Nintendo Switch are about to go into production, as they are in their final steps of submission.
The PS4 versions of Underhero and Psychotic Adventures are currently held up in the digital submission process, but our licensing partners are actively working on it. If we can resolve the issues soon, a timely release will be possible. We already have most product parts ready, just waiting for the discs.
All versions of Chained Echoes are currently waiting for one final patch that will be finished this month, submission for production can start after that. Overall preparations for the release are going well and it is still scheduled for end of this Summer.
MindSeize's final major patch (1.2.0) is almost ready and we will start the cartridge manufacturing shortly after the patch came out.
Unfortunately, we can‘t do much to speed up the submission process, but in the meantime we are working on assembling of already delivered parts, sometimes adding goods to the package (there will be even more additional content for some games that we will announce later) in order to have them ready for when the games themselves finally arrive.
4. A comment on the state of production:
We are aware that all of the listed games above should have already been completed by now and we are truly sorry about that. As explained earlier, the difficulties of the previous years are still having their aftermath and sometimes the submission of the production masters bring up some unexpected issues. But we are doing our best to move projects forward as swiftly as we can.
Please keep in mind that our releases are much more complex than most other physical titles for modern consoles these days. We intend to offer the most content and the best quality and we are very proud of our high standards. You may wait a few months longer but the product stays with you all your life unless you sell it. And our vision is to create products that people will treasure as small highlights in their personal gaming library.
We often have to consolidate the manufacturing process for parts of several games at once. The result is having 50, 70, 90 % of the content on hand for several games but not yet 100%, thus being unable to ship said games. Some of these parts come from and are manufactured in Asia therefore can take longer to get to our warehouse in Germany, even If just one component is held by complications, a delay for the whole product occurs.
We apologize for the lack of updates in the last few months and understand that this has been frustrating for our customers. We will have more updates to give on a frequent basis as production and manufacturing progresses, such as the Exclusive Collector‘s slipcase, so please keep an eye out for these updates via our newsletter and other social media accounts in the upcoming weeks.
Thank you for making it to the last part of this long newsletter. We felt it is necessary to give a detailed statement on the situation and overall progress of our releases.
We appreciate your continued support for our releases and of course the admiration the collector community always shows for each of our shipped games - we put everything into making sure that every single of our shipped products will be a feast for you to receive.
Sincerely,
First Press Games
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