In 2017, Dischan Media, long known for visual novel-y bits like Juniper's Knot, hatched a game idea: what if paramilitary magical girls saved the world from alien invaders? Presumably after declining an anime offer from Studio Trigger, work on the game that would become Mahou Arms began, with lead dev Softmode saying, in a recent Reddit post, that the project dates back to "my parents' basement." Today, after about six years in early access, it's finally, properly out on Steam with version 1.0, and boy does it look cool.
Work on Mahou Arms began in the same year that Nier: Automata was released, and that's either a massive coincidence or a strong sign of the sort of character action DNA that was folded in over the years.
