Back in June, The Last Story’s lead designer, Takuya Matsumoto, revealed that Mistwalker were interested in the idea of developing role-playing games for the Wii U. Matsumoto, who works at Marvelous AQL, collaborated with Hironobu Sakaguchi and Mistwalker on the game.

Recently, we asked Matsumoto what he’d like to do with the Wii U, to push JRPGs forward. He replied that he feels the Wii U’s new controller with a screen built into it is useful for organizing information, and that he was interested in taking advantage of this.

“I feel that the Wii U’s interface, as with other tablet devices, works best for browsing and arranging information,” Matsumoto told Siliconera.

“One merit is the ability to use a touch screen to directly manipulate information, such as looking up a monster’s weak point or, like with a car’s GPS, as a tool to understand battlefield conditions on a sub screen. This special feature will likely bring about opportunities for deep research into JRPG strategy.”

He added: “Also, I think that things like saving information gathered during gameplay, adding to your own character’s memories and experiences, and sharing with other players via Wi-Fi and the Miiverse will become an experience typical to the Wii U.”

The Last Story is being published by Xseed in North America.

http://www.siliconera.com/2012/08/03/wii-u-controller-will-push-jrpg-strategizing-says-the-last-story-lead-designer/

Sounds good hopefully they get on a wiiu game quick.

I hope so as well. I also want to know what Monolith Soft has been up to since Xenoblade.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the better the idea of the Wii U game pad sounds to me!

Really good news, hope to see some new JRPGs for the system

One of the things that I would like to see on a RPG (western or japanese) is the ability to change weapons/team members during combat. How many times have you found yourself using an elemental weapon with success only to find an enemy that instead of being hurt by it, uses it to heal itself? (think of a fire sword fighting a fire enemy). That's frustating.

But now that is almost impossible to do because you would have to go through several menus and sub-menus to do it, but with WiiU's screen controller it could be done in like 3 steps:

1-Assuming that the screen shows your team mates and basic info (like health and magic), just tap on the one you want.

2-The screen now displays the character you have chosen with several options, like changing it for another team member or changing the weapons/armor.

3-Tap the option that you want and change what you want. You only have to press the back button 1 or 2 times to go back to the battle screen

Easy, simple and useful.

Disaster: Day of Crisis 2 :P

Nah, but seriously, I hope they stick to JRPG's from now on.  I didn't like the Xenosaga games, but what I've played of Xenoblade has been masterful so far.

(And to answer your question, wikipedia (however unreliable) points to them helping with Skyward Sword development)

In terms of JRPG's on the Wii-U's gamepad, I'd like to see a return to more turn based combat.  The kind of thing where you decide your moves as you go along on the gamepad and then watch them take place on the big screen.  I reckon that could work pretty well.  Looking up a monster's weak point on it sounds fine and all, but it sounds more like a gimmick than a revolution in the genre.

We know they are working on at least two games at the moment, however I suspect there is a third.  One is Project X Zone (ie NamcoxCapcomxSEGA).  The other is unannounced, but I believe it to be Baten Kaitos 3.  We saw this image of the game on their website:

That image strongly reminds me of Baten Kaitos' pre-rendered world maps, such as:

For this reason I believe they are making a Baten Kaitos 3.  They have officially announced there are working on a WiiU game ( http://www.siliconera.com/2011/06/24/xenoblade-developer-monolith-soft-working-on-wii-u-title/ ), yet we don't know whether this is the same game that the top image is from.  If not, a third game is in the works and what I assume is Baten Kaitos 3 is probably for the 3DS.

Myself, I personally what to see a new open world, real time RPG from Monolith Soft, in many ways a spiritual successor to Xenoblade Chronicles.

I think Nintendo should bring back Mistwalker to work on something for the Wii U. The Last Story seemed decent enough, Mistwalker is too good to be working on iOS shovelware even if they're not mid/late 90s-era Squaresoft.

You could well be right, I don't follow Monolith all that closely (btw, that artwork is beautiful)

I just can't see them returning to the Baten Kaitos IP any time soon.  The first game sold moderately well but nothing too great and the second game didn't sell too well at all (and wasn't released in Europe, I might add).  And there was supposed to be a DS game which got cancelled a long time ago (maybe that was what the artwork was from? Can't see too much about it since it's quite small dimensions)

Advertising it as a continuation of that franchise would alienate a lot of people who thought "Oh, well I haven't played the others".  Xenoblade is their premier IP now and they'd do well to expand on that, but even starting a new one would probably be a better choice.