A reason why Atlus is my most trusted developer and publisher

For those of you who didn't subscribe to the Atlus Newsletter, an interesting one appeared in my inbox today.
The email is quoted in italics.

CLASS OF HEROES TARDY, GETS DETENTION UNTIL JUNE
This is going on our permanent record


Here at Atlus, we like to shoehorn bad news into people ears with a joke... something to ease the tension, you know?

Two wolves were eating a clown. One wolf turns to the other and says, "Does this taste funny to you?"

No? How about...

Two strings walk into a bar and sit down. One asks for a beer and the bartender says, "We don't serve strings here." The other string ties himself up and messes up his ends. He asks the bartender for a beer and the bartender says, "Aren't you a string?" He replies, "No, I'm a frayed knot."





Ok, now that you are sufficiently shoehorned, here's the bad news: Class of Heroes™ for PSP® system is going to be a little late for graduation.

*waits for boos to subside*

Now now, we understand the disappointment. Dungeon-crawling fans need their fix of item-finding, monster-bashing action. Unfortunately, days before the game was to be manufactured, a rather serious bug was brought to our attention. In order to fix the problem and deliver a worthy final product, one that lives up to the high standards we aspire to and that you deserve, we are delaying the game until June 9th.

We will under no circumstance ship a product with foreknowledge of such an issue. We regret the situation and the timing in which we discovered it, but we will not compromise our quality standards... as a publisher, not as a humorist, because we clearly did that at the beginning of this email.



Atlus has a team of dedicated writers and a brutal honesty that you can't help but respect. In addition, I remember when Rondo of Swords came out. About a week later a newsletter came in talking about the difficulty of Rondo of Swords(I could actually pull up that newsletter now) as well as how one reviewer gave Baroque a 3/10 for its difficulty. What Atlus DIDN'T do was try to shut them up. Instead, they brought it to the fans' attentions and linked them to a part of the forums addressing that. No doubt a lot of the forum users are Atlus fans but there are those who gave arguments about the difficulty curve if I remember correctly.

One thing to note is Gabe and Tycho's, of Penny Arcade, occasional references to Atlus.

Atlus does a lot of things right and they listen to their fans via the forums.


Of course that doesn't mean they've always been pumping hits and masterpieces all the time. If you look at "My World, My Way" it got very little publicity, fully released in a single print, and it's site is in shambles with nearly everything being "coming soon" while the game's already out and out of print. Then there are games like Eternal Poison, where I just felt I couldn't complete due to sub-par quality of the developers and publishers (for I guess not recoding parts of the game for better load times).