🛸 A game can stay in development so long that a child born the year it was announced finishes elementary school before it ever ships. That was the story of Ubusuna — and on May 24, 2026, the story ended without a release. M2, the Japanese studio worshipped by retro shoot 'em up fans, has cancelled the game after twelve years, because the one person who could finish it has left the building.

The shmup that never arrived

If you don't follow shoot 'em ups closely, the name Ubusuna may mean nothing. Inside the genre, it meant everything.

The project was led by Hiroshi Iuchi, and that name is the whole story. Iuchi directed Radiant Silvergun (1998) and Ikaruga (2001) at the studio Treasure — two games that shmup players talk about the way film buffs talk about Citizen Kane. He also directed Gradius V and worked as an artist on Alien Soldier. Ikaruga, in particular, turned a niche arcade genre into something close to high art: a game built around a polarity-switching mechanic so elegant that it still gets ported to new hardware a quarter-century later.

So when M2 announced in 2014 that Iuchi was building a brand-new, original shmup called Ubusuna for PlayStation 4, a small but intense corner of the gaming world held its breath. A new Iuchi game is a rare event. Fans were prepared to wait.

They were not prepared to wait this long.

Key visual for the shoot 'em up Ubusuna

Source: M2 / Automaton

Twelve years of almost

Here is the strange thing about Ubusuna: it was not vaporware in the usual sense. It genuinely existed, and it kept inching forward — just very, very slowly.

In 2018, M2 president Naoki Horii said the game was rough but nearly playable, with the team building assets as fast as they could. In 2019, Iuchi confirmed it could be played start to finish, though the graphics were far from done. He even joked that Ubusuna would launch "at the end of the current console generation" — a line that aged into prophecy, then past it. Then in 2022 came the biggest update of all: M2 revealed key art, the names of the player aircraft, a story setting about a peaceful nation that worships a divine bird, and a soundtrack EP video.

And then, mostly, silence again.

The reason was never a secret. Iuchi and a small team built Ubusuna in the gaps between M2's paying work — and M2's paying work is constant. The studio survives on commissioned ports and collections, the kind of contracts that fill a calendar. Ubusuna was the passion project that everyone loved and nobody could prioritize. A child born the day the game was announced would now be in their final year of elementary school.

Why M2 says it cannot finish the job

The cancellation notice, posted to M2's official X account, is unusually candid.

Iuchi submitted his resignation, and the two sides reached what M2 described as a mutual agreement. The studio says it genuinely explored continuing Ubusuna without him — but concluded that, given the nature of the work, the game simply could not be brought to completion in his absence. M2 apologized to fans in Japan and overseas, to the outside creators who had contributed, and to the games media. It also quietly set the Ubusuna soundtrack video on its YouTube channel to private.

That last detail stung. For many fans, that EP was the only piece of Ubusuna they could actually experience.

What makes this more than a routine cancellation is the admission underneath it: a game can become so completely an extension of one person's sensibility that no studio, however skilled, can carry it across the finish line alone. Ubusuna's entire concept, by Iuchi's own description, was about expressing the nature of its creator. M2 took that idea at face value. Without the creator, there is no game.

M2 — the studio shmup fans quietly trust

To understand why this hit a nerve, you need to know what M2 is.

M2 is not a household name, and that is almost the point. The studio, based in Abiko City just outside Tokyo, has spent decades as the most respected preservationist in Japanese gaming. Its M2 ShotTriggers line — meticulous console versions of arcade shooters like DoDonPachi, Battle Garegga and Ketsui — is treated by enthusiasts as the gold standard for how a port should be done, down to faithfully recreated slowdown. M2 has also handled Sega Ages, Sega's 3D Classics, and Konami's Castlevania and Contra collections.

In other words, M2 is the studio that keeps the lights on for a genre most of the industry walked away from. Shoot 'em ups were once the showcase of the arcade; today they are a devoted niche, sustained by re-releases and a shrinking pool of new titles. Ubusuna mattered because it was that increasingly rare thing — a brand-new, big-name shmup, made by the people who care most about the form.

Its loss is not just one cancelled game. It is one fewer original entry in a genre that cannot easily afford to lose them.

A door left open

There is one thread of hope, and M2 was careful to highlight it.

Iuchi himself has not given up on Ubusuna. M2's statement explicitly notes that the game might still be completed somewhere else, in some other form, someday. Nothing is promised — no new studio, no new platform, no timeline. But the project is canceled, not killed.

M2 also asked something pointed of the internet: please don't fill the comment sections with speculation about why Iuchi left, and please don't harass the people involved or M2's staff. It is a reasonable request, and a revealing one. A creator changing jobs is ordinary. The grief of fans who waited twelve years is real. Both things can be true without anyone needing a villain.

For now, Ubusuna joins a quiet list of games that were genuinely real, genuinely loved, and never quite finished. In Japan, the news landed as a mix of sadness and stubborn optimism — disappointment that M2 could not be the one to ship it, paired with hope that Iuchi's next chapter still has this game in it.

In your country, is there a long-delayed game you are still, against all reason, waiting for?

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