Sad news: it looks like production of Shanghai EXE: Genso Network, a notable Mega Man Battle Network + Touhou crossover fan game, has been cancelled. Koki, the game’s lead developer, posted a notice on his blog today stating that development can no longer continue for “unavoidable reasons”, and there are no plans to release the game in any form in the future.

For those not in the know, Shanghai EXE: Genso Network was a highly regarded Japanese indie game based on the Mega Man Battle Network gameplay and setting, but featuring an original story with mostly characters from the Touhou series. The game had been featured in a few TeamBN marathons and was expected to wrap up development sometime in 2019.





Koki has not shared the reason for the game’s cancellation at this point. It should be noted that Shanghai had a fundraiser running through Ci-en (a sort of Japanese Patreon), with supporters receiving early access to new demo versions, and there had been plans for a commercial release. As such, it’s always possible that disagreements over rights or funding led to the game’s untimely end. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like we’ll be able to confirm the reasons for the time being.

Though this is the end of the road for Shanghai, Koki plans to continue to release original games on Steam; currently in the works is a Unity-based action game. In addition, Koki intends to release the remainder of the game’s planned story in some other form in the future.

At the time of writing, download links for the latest publicly released version of Shanghai EXE are still up, so if you want to see what the game is all about, make sure to grab the download before it’s too late!