• Posted May 31st, 2008 at 06:31 EDT by
• 16 Comments

Missing PS3 Titles – Eyedentify and City of Metronome
Missing PS3 Titles – Data-Fly and The Getaway
Missing PS3 Titles - Coded Arms: Assault and DarkWatch 2
Missing PS3 Titles - Time0

Welcome to part five of our Missing PS3 Titles series. In our latest instalment, we examine Sega's paranormal First Person Shooter (FPS), Fifth Phantom Saga.

 

First revealed during E3 2005, Fifth Phantom Saga was a new PlayStation 3 exclusive that not only had players utilize unique weaponry, but use the abilities of an armored phantom to destroy enemies and complete tasks. The game was considered an early concept, with simple textured environments and sketchy framerate, although despite its problems, it was in fact one of the first few titles actually up and running on the console. Nonetheless, the game received little reaction from E3 attendee's; however when you have CGI trailers for Killzone 2 and Motorstorm, and are told to believe they are in game, you'd probably lose interest too.

Watch the trailer below:



 

The game was last seen at the Tokyo Games Show 2005, when game producer Takashi Yuda gave a real-time demo showing the effects used in the title. IGN reported on the demonstration stating:

"Fifth Phantom Saga was one of the least impressive PS3 demonstration clips at E3 and it looks just as bad now. Aside from the high resolution, we had the feeling we were looking at an Xbox game with bad image quality. We presume SEGA will be replacing much of the artwork with final assets and will use better filtering effects to clean up the game for a future build... or at least, we hope so."

So nearly three years of silence has gone by since Fifth Phantom Saga's last showing. Is the game canceled? Still in production? PSU.com contacted Sega to find out.

Where is the title now?

It's been a few weeks, but we finally hunted someone down at Sega to receive a somewhat ambiguous update on the matter:

"We have nothing official to confirm on Fifth Phantom Saga at this time," a Sega representative commented.

However, continuing in our conversation it sounded as though many of the people at Sega – specifically, Sega of America - haven't even heard of the title, let alone know of its production status, so we'll let your decide for yourself on what this all means.

Our bet is that either Sega Japan is keeping a tight lid on the title, and hasn't given the rest of the Sega studios an update, or the title has been canceled, and once again, Sega Japan has yet to announce anything official.