"It has been seven years since my last update. I'm not going to soften that or bury it further down the page."
That's how Hiroaki Yura, director and producer of Project Kyzen, opened the email that nearly 16,000 Kickstarter backers had stopped expecting to ever receive. After going completely silent in March 2019, the ambitious JRPG-meets-RTS project has resurfaced with a lengthy apology, a financial accounting, and a new production target of the end of 2031.
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How a $1 million dream went quiet
The original Kickstarter launched in August 2013, pitching a "JRPG with a squad based RTS game design, brought to you by veteran developers and creators from the East and West." The talent attached was genuinely impressive: Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy composer) signed on for the main theme, and the development credits spanned Diablo 3, L.A. Noire, Metal Gear Solid V, Halo 4, Skyrim, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and multiple mainline Final Fantasy entries. The campaign blew past its $100,000 goal and closed at $1,014,600.
Regular updates ran for six years. Then on March 26, 2019, CIA Inc. simply stopped communicating. No explanation, no status post, nothing. Backers were left in a silence that lasted over seven years, and the project became a cautionary tale about crowdfunding risk.
What Yura says actually happened
Here's the thing: the explanation Yura offers is more complicated than a simple rug-pull. The project lost its lead programmer, the developer who later went on to work on Ori and the Blind Forest at Moon Studios. Rebuilding around that loss took years and money that wasn't sitting in reserve.
Rather than drain the remaining Kickstarter funds and return to backers empty-handed, Yura says he stepped back to build a separate business from scratch, using its profits to fund Project Phoenix's continued development. "I built that business with my own means, not with what you had pledged, and its work is what funds Phoenix now," he writes.
He also addresses the silence directly, and doesn't try to spin it: "Years ago, I made myself a rule that I stuck to even when it cost me. I wouldn't post an update unless I had something worth showing. For a long stretch I didn't, and instead of filling the gap with mock-ups and promises, I went silent. That was the wrong call."
The game also went through at least one significant redesign that Yura killed himself. "We went down a stylized redesign that I eventually killed because it had started to look like a mobile game, which is not what this was ever meant to be."
Where the $1 million actually went
Yura breaks down the spending without much hedging. A large portion covered early production work: character and creature designs, base models, the scenario, world-building, and a significant amount of Uematsu's music. Some went into the vertical slice that didn't pan out. He admits not every dollar was spent optimally, but maintains all of it went into the game.
The scope has grown considerably since 2013. "What I will say plainly is that we are now putting far more into this game than the Kickstarter ever raised," Yura writes. No outside publisher or investor is currently involved. Every additional resource comes from the studio Yura built to self-fund the project.
A rough mix of Uematsu's main theme, performed by the Eminence Symphony Orchestra, has been shared with backers alongside the update.
A 2031 target and a promise of more updates
Yura is not offering a firm release date, and he's upfront about why: "I am not going to hand you a release date I can't keep. Dates I couldn't keep are a big part of how we ended up here."
The current target is to finish production by the end of 2031, with an actual release date still to be determined after that. All original backer rewards will be honored. Yura also commits to communicating more frequently going forward, even when there's nothing major to report.
For a project that began with a PS4 and PS Vita launch window of 2015, that timeline asks backers to wait nearly two decades from the original campaign. Whether the community has the patience for that after seven years of silence is the real question now.
If you want to keep tabs on other ambitious projects in the MMORPG games space and beyond, the Project Kyzen guides are a good place to start while the longer waits play out.
