There were lots of great things happening in the iOS scene in 2015, but one of the not-so-great things was the way several awesome, fairly new apps stopped working from iOS 8.4 onward. Even less great was the lack of any update from some of the publishers of those games. Despite assurances of a fix from 2K, we’re still waiting on Bioshock to get its update, for example. In the case of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, publisher Capcom outright said they had no plans to update the game, and pulled the game not long after iOS 9 arrived, breaking it completely. Well, at least they were upfront about it, right?
For me, there were a few things about that announcement that didn’t make sense. First, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite was more or less perpetually in the Japanese App Store Top 20 Paid games rankings. Admittedly, that amounts to peanuts when compared to the spoils of free-to-play games on the same store, but it’s not nothing, particularly for a port of a pretty old game. Second, the announcement’s wording in Japanese had a slightly different nuance to it, feeling more like they had no scheduled plans rather than no plans ever. The last piece of the puzzle was when Ghost Trick (Free) was finally updated. Why invest the resources into fixing an old title that probably didn’t sell terribly well to begin with, but pass on fixing something new that was performing better than expected?
For anyone who felt that story wasn’t adding up, it looks like your hunch was correct. Spotted by eagle-eyed members of the TouchArcade forums, it seems that Capcom Japan updated their webpage for Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G for iOS (the Japanese title of Freedom Unite) yesterday with a notice. Roughly translated, it says that the current plan is to update the game for iOS 9 sometime in Spring of 2016. In case you’re not familiar with how Japanese companies use the seasons as dates, ‘Spring 2016’ means anywhere from mid-February to early May. Assuming they’re going to carry that fix over to the international version, and I can’t see why they wouldn’t, the game should be operational again by the middle of next year.
That’s a long wait, but hey, it beats no update at all. Maybe while they’ve got their fingers in the PSP code, they can think about porting over Monster Hunter Portable 3rd? Honestly, I think I’ll just be happy if the game doesn’t break again when the next version of iOS hits.
