Haha, no chance; I had to wait almost a month for Disgaea 5 last year for my birthday and I wanted that desperately. My mother delights in my suffering sometimes. xD
That's a definite possibility. They no doubt wanted to save the announcement for the 20th Anniversary, so it's not surprising it was kept under wraps for so long if that is the case and they spent most of last year working on the translations. I'd like to think that Game Freak are that efficient, but...well, we'll see I suppose. That they only showed bare bones concept art and design makes me wonder just how far they are with it, as it implies they're not very far along at all, but then they'd have to work very quickly to get it out by year's end if they were only that far along, and that would lead to the question of what on earth they were doing all last year.
Yeah, Australia frequently gets hit harder than EU territories when it comes to video game releases, and it's rather unjust when companies demonstrate that they're capable of worldwide releases. It sets a standard that they really should try to uphold. There are often extenuating circumstances surrounding delays between regions, which is fair enough, because sometimes they are unavoidable. But if they can be gotten around then they should be, and it's when they're not that annoys me, personally. There can be no valid excuse for delays between Pokemon release dates now, as Nintendo have proven they can pull off a simultaneous release with X and Y. The Super Mystery Dungeon delay was inexcusable.
I take refugee in the memories of OrAs only having had a small trailer shown a week or so after they only showed the logos. It had originally given me the impression they weren't far at all, but it came out six months and a few days later :).
Can we really put remakes in the same sort of time frame as we can an all-new game in the franchise, though? I suppose it's difficult to know without any trailers just yet, but early first impressions indicate that they may have made some upgrades to the graphics, on top of building a brand new region from scratch, adding in new Pokemon and everything associated with those...and adding two additional languages on top of that, giving them more than the standard workload for brand new games. There is simply more to do, and when we don't know how long they've been working on it...
Hmm, Masuda kind of hinted that he was working on something. In an interview after OrAs he said he had some "big ideas" for the future of the franchise. The "all comes together" at the end of the reveal trailer of SM makes me think that he meant this all along. So, he might've been working on this after XY were done, especially since another team worked on OrAs... Plus they had begun work on BW shortly after DP irc, and same for XY shortly after BW were out. So, they might've been working on this for three years now...
XY weren't that good (had 3 years too), but that might be attributed to the fact that it was on a new system. Wasn't it rumored that GF had a hard time making a 3DS game? I faintly recall such a rumor...
