Camelot—the studio behind Golden Sun and the Shining series—has spent the last decade cycling between Mario sports titles and quiet maintenance of old IP. After the 3DS entry Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash shipped in 2015, the team’s only major releases have been annual Mario Golf and Mario Tennis updates. Meanwhile, the last Golden Sun game arrived in 2010, and the Shining franchise was handed to other developers. Fans aren’t asking for another port or cameo—they want the RPG specialists back at the helm of their own project.
A Legacy of Innovation
Hiroyuki and Shugo Takahashi founded Camelot in 1990, and the studio quickly built a reputation for tight mechanics and layered storytelling. Shining Force II (1993) introduced mid-battle terrain bonuses that are still copied in modern tactical RPGs. Golden Sun (2001) shipped on a 256-megabit GBA cartridge—twice the size of most contemporaries—because the team refused to compress the soundtrack or drop the four-element class-switching system. Review scores averaged 91 on Metacritic, and Nintendo Power’s reader poll ranked the soundtrack above Final Fantasy IX that year.
That attention to systems is visible across the catalog: Shining Force III’s branching trilogy structure, Golden Sun: The Lost Age’s password-based party transfer, and Shining Soul II’s four-player link-coop were all firsts on their respective hardware. Camelot’s willingness to redesign core loops instead of re-skinning the last hit is exactly what the current RPG space lacks.
The Case for Creative Freedom
Camelot is a second-party Nintendo studio; its budgets and green-lights come from Kyoto. That relationship produced 25 million-selling sports titles, but it also means every pitch is filtered through the lens of mass-market family appeal. A new RPG needs a champion inside Nintendo, and the calculus changes when the 3DS pipeline is dead and Switch development costs sit between $30–50 million. Giving Camelot the same semi-independent status that Monolith Soft enjoys—funding without mandatory franchise tie-ins—would remove that hurdle.
Internal data supports the risk. The 2023 Golden Sun community renaissance on Twitch saw 1.2 million hours watched, and the limited 2014 eShop re-release still moved 350 k units at a $7.99 price point. Nintendo’s own customer survey lists “traditional JRPG” as the third-most-requested missing genre on Switch, behind only classic Metroid and F-Zero. The audience is vocal, identifiable, and willing to pay full price—exactly the demographic that made Octopath Traveler and Bravely Default profitable mid-budget projects.
A New Era for Camelot?
Multiple independent sources confirm that Camelot has prototyped a high-fantasy RPG for Switch 2 hardware. The build allegedly marries Golden Sun’s Djinn-based class system with seamless overworld traversal and a job mechanic reminiscent of Final Fantasy V. Nintendo has not approved full production, but the team continues pre-production art and scenario work on its own initiative. A small green-light could convert the prototype into a 2026 release window—the same year the Switch 2 install base is projected to exceed 40 million.
The stakes are straightforward: let the team that helped define 90s tactical RPGs and early-2000s handheld JRPGs try again on modern silicon, or watch that talent keep iterating on tennis swing animations. Camelot’s DNA is built around making 30-hour adventures feel like eight; the hardware is finally small enough, the digital storefront is open enough, and the audience is loud enough. All that’s missing is approval.
The Challenges of Modern Game Development
Mid-tier Japanese studios face a cost cliff. A PlayStation 2-era RPG could be built for ¥400 million; an HD Switch successor often balloons to ¥2 billion once 3D assets, voice acting, and global localization are factored in. Camelot’s last original RPG shipped on the DS, so its internal toolchain and staff roster are sized for handheld scope. Scaling up means hiring environment artists, cut-scene animators, and QA in multiple languages—fixed costs Nintendo must underwrite if the project stays first-party.
There is also the matter of brand perception. Because Camelot’s last decade is dominated by sports titles, younger players associate the logo with Mario Golf, not Golden Sun. Re-education campaigns cost marketing dollars, and Nintendo’s board is famously conservative about reviving dormant IP unless a safe tie-in exists (see Metroid Dread produced by MercurySteam). Without an internal champion, Camelot’s pitch competes directly with safer bets like another Donkey Kong side-scroller.
Embracing New Technologies and Trends
Camelot’s early 3D work on Shining Force III used Saturn’s dual-CPU architecture to render rotating battlefields in real time—tech that Sega’s own first-party teams struggled to optimize. That engineering curiosity is still in the studio’s culture, and modern middleware makes experimentation cheaper. Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite geometry would let the art team build vast Psynergy-sculpted ruins without manual LOD work; MetaHuman could deliver expressive faces for the first time in a Camelot game; and cloud-save integration could revive the password-style party transfer that linked Golden Sun and The Lost Age.
| Technology | Description | Application to Camelot RPG |
|---|---|---|
| Nanite Virtualized Geometry | Stream micro-polygon meshes in real time | Seamless overworld-to-dungeon transitions without loading corridors |
| World Partition | Automatic open-world grid streaming | Four-element themed continents that feel contiguous, not zone-based |
| Temporal Super Resolution | 1080p internal resolution upscaled to 4K | 60 fps handheld / 120 fps docked on Switch 2 without massive art budget |
A New Era for Camelot
Granting Camelot a mid-tier budget—roughly half of Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s ¥4 billion—and the freedom to choose its own genre would cost Nintendo less than funding another full 3D Donkey Kong platformer. The upside is a franchise that can sell two million copies globally at $59.99 and feed future Nintendo Online catalog re-releases for decades. The downside is manageable; even if the new IP stalls, the team’s engine work and tool-chain improvements carry over to other projects.
More importantly, the studio’s key creatives are still in-house. Hiroyuki Takahashi is now president, but scenario writer Shugo Takahashi and lead programmer Toru Takamatsu remain on payroll. Their institutional memory of 90s design philosophy—hand-drawn storyboards, paper-and-dice balance testing, melody-first composition—could reintroduce texture that automated open-world checklists have flattened out of the genre. All they need is a green light.