There is something unexpectedly healing about Orbitals. I do not say that lightly, and I certainly do not say it as somebody arriving through a lifelong allegiance to anime, because I have never really been an anime person. I can almost count the works I genuinely love on one hand: Neon Genesis Evangelion. Pokémon. Dragon Ball. A very small number beyond those. Studio Ghibli does not count toward the five because Ghibli occupies another category entirely for me; I love Ghibli best, and I have always experienced those films almost as a medium unto themselves. So Orbitals entering this unusually small personal canon is significant. It does not feel like another attempt to reproduce “anime style” as that phrase has come to mean in games. It feels startlingly specific, unusually sincere and, above all, guileless. There is no embarrassment about wonder here. No defensive irony. No faint suggestion that the creators are standing outside the material, knowing more than it does, congratulating themselves on reproducing the visual furniture of another period. Orbitals believes in its own universe. That simple quality has become extraordinarily rare, and spending time inside this world has felt restorative.
As I write this on 3 September 2026, Orbitals has just launched exclusively for Nintendo Switch 2. It is developed by Tokyo-based Shapefarm and published by Kepler Interactive, and it is specifically a two-person cooperative game: there is no conventional single-player version. Its heroes are Maki and Omura, two young explorers whose station home has been trapped inside a supernatural cosmic storm. They leave that enclosure looking for help, travelling through abandoned stations, asteroid fields and increasingly strange spaces while solving asymmetrical puzzles with different tools. It can be played in local split-screen or online, and Nintendo’s GameShare system and the separate Global Friend’s Pass are designed so that two people do not necessarily need to own two full copies. That cooperative structure is not incidental decoration. Game director Jakob Lundgren previously worked at Hazelight during the development of A Way Out and It Takes Two, and he has explained that an early version of Orbitals could be played alone or cooperatively before Shapefarm realised the concept became much stronger when it committed completely to two players. Maki and Omura therefore are not hero and sidekick. Both are protagonists, and the design repeatedly hands each player different responsibilities rather than simply asking two identical avatars to perform the same actions side by side.
But the thing one notices before any of this is the image. I have been calling it “capsulepunk,” not because Shapefarm has formally named its style that, but because the word catches something that the broader label “cassette futurism” does not quite contain. Cassette futurism describes part of it: chunky apparatus, analogue logic, visible controls, deep CRT-like housings, physical switches, machines whose functions are announced by buttons and cables rather than hidden behind featureless glass. Yet Orbitals bends that lineage into something rounder, warmer and unmistakably informed by Japanese animation and industrial imagination. Nothing quite wants to be a perfect rectangle. Machines bulge. Consoles swell. Helmets resemble friendly capsules. Tanks and equipment hang from bodies like beautifully designed toys. Even threatening machinery often retains a strangely approachable silhouette. Johannes Varmedal has described one of Shapefarm’s rules as avoiding fully angular forms: objects should almost feel slightly inflated, while surface detail and colour are deliberately restricted so the world remains painterly rather than becoming another excessively textured 3D environment. Creative director Marcos Ramos says the project has an enormous internal art bible governing details as small as how wrinkles should be drawn. This apparent simplicity is therefore extremely disciplined.
The influences are equally specific. Ramos has identified the original Dragon Ball as a major source, particularly the early sense of irresponsible, exhilarating adventure in which Akira Toriyama could apparently invent something simply because it delighted him and then continue travelling. Character drawing looked toward works such as Sailor Moon and Ranma ½; Johannes Varmedal has cited Venus Wars, Wings of Honneamise, Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2, particularly their painted environments; Ramos has also spoken very directly about Evangelion, admiring the way it can function simultaneously as spectacular robot-and-creature imagery, human drama and something philosophically deeper. Mechanical references include the tactile machinery of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Venus Wars, while the spatial feeling of travelling through space owes something to Cowboy Bebop. It is an enormous reference field, but Orbitals rarely feels like a collage because those references are being filtered through a tightly controlled house style rather than reproduced one at a time as Easter eggs.
This is where the word “retro” begins to seem insufficient. A retro object can simply quote old shapes. Orbitals has gone much further and tried to reconstruct why those old images looked the way they did in the first place. Shapefarm’s developers have repeatedly explained that they studied the production methods of Japanese animation from the 1980s and early 1990s and then built their game-making process around the same separation of visual layers. Ramos describes the original principle very clearly: in traditional cel animation the character layer and the painted background were produced separately, so Shapefarm treats those things almost as different productions even though both ultimately exist inside a modern game. Character-like and moving elements emphasise line, silhouette, carefully controlled colour and cel shading; static environments aim for brushwork and the feeling of painted background art. Shapefarm then had to solve the difficult part: reproducing in Unreal Engine the visual relationship that naturally occurred when those physically separate pieces of artwork were eventually combined.
To understand how unusual this is, it helps to understand what the old process actually involved. Traditional Japanese cel animation did not begin with somebody sitting at a computer and producing a finished frame. The production moved through a chain of specialised stages. A storyboard, or e-konte, established shots, action and timing. Layout drawings resolved the composition. Key animators drew the crucial poses — the genga — and other artists produced the intermediate drawings, the douga, required to make one pose travel into another. Background artists separately painted the location behind those figures. Colour decisions were separately specified. In the analogue cel era, the character linework was transferred onto transparent sheets — historically called cels, made from transparent celluloid or acetate — and those character images were coloured. The transparent character sheets could then physically sit over the painted background. A camera photographed the composite onto film, frame after frame. Studio Ghibli’s own production documentation explains this distinction directly: characters and backgrounds were separate processes; before digital compositing, characters were transferred and coloured on transparent acetate and laid over painted backgrounds for photography. Toei Animation’s description of the production chain likewise separates storyboard, key animation, in-between animation, backgrounds, colour and final image-making into distinct crafts.
That physical arrangement produced qualities nobody necessarily designed as “effects.” The transparent cel was a real object sitting above another real object. Paint had density. Lines had human inconsistency. Background pigments behaved differently from character colours. Film introduced grain. Optical photography could introduce bloom and halation around light. Slight differences between layers could create tiny shadows or separation. A painted environment might contain extraordinary tonal variation while the moving figure in front of it necessarily used flatter colour regions. Even movement had an unmistakable cadence because animation did not require a completely new drawing for every frame of projected film. Drawings could be held across multiple frames, giving effective drawing rates such as twelve or even six images a second for particular elements. The result was not simply “low frame rate.” It was selective motion: stillness punctuated by bursts of expressive movement, an economy that forced artists to decide exactly where motion should exist. Ghibli’s documentation of the old photographic process even notes that modern digital compositing can appear too uniform, requiring deliberate analogue-like variation to regain some of what film naturally supplied.
Orbitals deliberately rebuilds many of those consequences. Ramos says the developers introduced the tiny shadow caused by the conceptual separation between “cel” and background layers because that difference helps convince the eye that two physical media have been combined. Johannes Varmedal has described the team adding film grain, halation and other post-processing to recover the imperfect optical character of photographed animation. Static and moving things are treated differently: moving and interactive objects can be cel-shaded so that they resemble foreground animation, while surrounding surfaces use a painted shader. Background motion is sometimes restricted to twelve or even six drawings per second in imitation of old animation cadence. Another interview describes moving elements and environmental treatment being intentionally assigned different frame behaviour rather than allowing everything in the scene to update with identical digital smoothness. This has the incidental advantage of making interaction readable — the things one can use naturally stand apart — but its deeper effect is aesthetic. The eye begins to accept the impossible proposition that it is looking at a hand-painted animation cell which somehow contains a controllable three-dimensional world.
And this is not all simulation. There is literal handwork inside Orbitals. Ramos describes his own practice as “tradigital”: writing and concept work begins with pencil, pen and paper because he wants the earliest stage to remain loose and low-tech, after which he moves into tools including Rebelle for backgrounds, Procreate for characters, Blender for 2D animation and effects, Resolve for video and FadeIn for scripts. Ramos told Game*Spark that when analogue drawing was genuinely the best solution, they drew by hand, and the studio even obtained art materials of the kinds historically used by Studio Ghibli. The interview does not identify the exact products, so I will not invent a romantic list of particular paint jars, but the larger point is extraordinary: they were interested enough in the material history of the image to acquire tools associated with the actual craft they were studying. Shapefarm’s offices, according to the same visit, contained numerous original animation cels as reference objects.
The collaboration with Studio Massket pushes this much further. Shapefarm wanted proper hand-drawn cinematic sequences rather than making every narrative moment out of the same real-time 3D assets, and Studio Massket became an unusually integrated animation partner. The game’s official site describes the finished cinematics as handcrafted, hand-drawn sequences produced with Massket. Hidetoshi Yoshida, an animator and storyboard artist whose career reaches back into the period Orbitals is invoking, directed the storyboard work. Yoshida did not storyboard the game on a tablet. He drew the entire thing by hand on paper. Crunchyroll’s studio visit describes seeing a thick physical stack of his drawings. AUTOMATON’s interview goes further: more than 200 printed sheets and pieces of concept material moved between the teams, with material physically printed and mailed rather than simply exchanged as files; phone conversations accompanied requests for particular viewing angles, which Shapefarm would answer by capturing reference screenshots from the game. It is such a beautifully improbable production anecdote for a game launching on Nintendo’s newest hardware: a sophisticated real-time 3D title whose cinematic language passed through hundreds of sheets of paper and the hands of an artist trained in the older production culture it is honouring.
Megumi Varmedal has described the aim as reaching back toward classic 1980s and early-1990s technique while valuing emotion and expression above perfect line consistency. Lead animator Taliesan Arnold approached the game from the other side of the problem: how do you translate the kinetic instincts of two-dimensional Japanese animation into characters that must respond instantly to a controller and remain visually convincing from changing camera angles? Arnold says he spent considerable time deconstructing the animation of the period and working out how its decisions could survive in contemporary 3D. Ramos and his team already had some experience solving these problems through earlier projects including Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker and Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time. Ramos gives one wonderfully revealing example: a 2D ponytail can look perfect from the intended drawing angle and absurd when the camera rotates around its literal 3D equivalent, so stylised games sometimes have to cheat — changing shapes or positions depending upon the camera — because fidelity to the drawing can require infidelity to physical geometry. That is one of the great secrets of animation: the image is more important than the object supposedly producing it.
That is also why I think the animation here sometimes goes beyond what even Ni no Kuni achieved for me. Ni no Kuni remains an enormously beautiful accomplishment, and its connection to Studio Ghibli gave it an immediate visual lineage, but Orbitals creates an unusually seamless relationship between animation history, game rendering and world design. I am not seeing a game intermittently presenting me with animation. I am looking at an interactive object constructed according to animation logic. There is a difference. Ramos has said he dislikes the rupture in some games where characters suddenly seem to move, speak or exist differently when a cinematic begins, and Shapefarm and Massket therefore shared assets and knowledge in both directions: Massket’s two-dimensional work informed the game, while Shapefarm’s environments and assets informed the cinematics. They were trying to make crossing the border between gameplay and animation feel almost imperceptible.
And then there is something even harder to engineer: imperfection. Contemporary rendering technology can create perfect circles, mathematically clean gradients, endlessly smooth motion, physically correct illumination and identical line widths. Shapefarm recognised that this perfection itself was destroying the illusion. Johannes Varmedal has specifically discussed how old cel lines could change thickness, become slightly irregular or even fail to connect perfectly, and how those deviations signal to the eye that a human being drew them. The team consequently had to learn how to collaborate with noise, filters, painterly shaders and deliberate inconsistency rather than treating every deviation as a technical defect. This is one reason the game looks handmade even when you know intellectually that much of what you are controlling is 3D geometry inside Unreal Engine. The imperfections have been placed where old production created them naturally.
The same historical intelligence appears in sound and music. Sound designer Isamu Ogawa says Shapefarm researched old interviews and production materials to understand how characteristic vintage anime effects had been produced and then tried to rebuild that sonic vocabulary inside the game. The opening and ending themes go even further by involving Mami Ayukawa, whose voice is inseparable from 1980s Japanese science-fiction animation through her work on Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. She sings Orbitals’ opening theme, “Accelerating Destiny,” and ending theme, “Heart To Heart.” The decision turns something that could have been cute pastiche into a kind of historical continuity. The same voice that belonged to the period being remembered has been carried forward four decades and placed inside this new fiction.
All of this technical information only deepens the reason I find Orbitals so healing. There is enormous sophistication behind the game, but that sophistication has been placed in service of innocence rather than cynicism. It has been used to make a machine look friendlier, a movement funnier, a painted cavern stranger, a friendship clearer. That is guilelessness. The developers are demonstrably serious students of their references, yet the result is not academic. Ramos has spoken about wanting the “right amount” of old-fashioned cheesiness — enough to preserve the sincerity of the era without turning it into parody, while resisting the equally destructive urge to modernise everything until it becomes coldly fashionable. The goal was not archaeological accuracy anyway. Lundgren has explained that memory changes old media; the thing you remember from childhood may feel richer, sharper or grander than a literal reproduction of the original object. So Orbitals aims at remembered truth. It wants to recreate the sensation of being young and seeing these worlds rather than merely reproducing the technical deficiencies of an old television image.
That distinction touches something extremely personal for me. I remember Australia and Cheez TV. I remember glimpses of Gundam. I remember Action Man. I remember satellite television in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, and the strange experience of encountering fragments of enormous imaginative worlds that seemed to originate somewhere unimaginably distant. Before the internet flattened cultural distance, there could be mystery in merely seeing an unfamiliar logo, a dubbed episode, a toy catalogue, a title sequence. Japan existed for me partly as a real place and partly as a transmitting civilisation of images. You would receive a fragment and construct the unseen whole around it. The incomplete access enlarged the imagination rather than diminishing it. Orbitals brings that sensation back because it presents itself with enough confidence that I immediately believe there are episodes I missed, ships I have not seen, supporting characters with old model sheets somewhere, obscure soundtrack releases, advertisements, pencil boards, toy prototypes. It generates cultural memory around itself almost instantly.
My love of Japan has long since moved beyond those childhood transmissions into actual places and lived memories, but the old and new experiences remain entangled. I think about Narita Airport at two in the morning: the peculiar liminality of arriving or departing, the quiet systems, the exhaustion, the light, the feeling that one is suspended in transit inside a place of intense order and enormous distance. Japan has often produced this sensation in me that design is capable of carrying emotional meaning without announcing itself. Orbitals connects itself to that part of my imagination. It is not “Japan” reduced to iconography. Shapefarm itself is a Tokyo-based studio whose international team has spoken openly about choosing Japan because of a lifelong engagement with its games and animation; Megumi Varmedal has noted that working there gives the team direct access to exhibitions, museums, books and the ordinary urban details that can unexpectedly echo something encountered in an old animation.
And then there is the ship. I keep returning to it because it already feels quietly iconic. Science-fiction vehicles are surprisingly difficult to remember now. So many are technically impressive and instantly forgettable, dense with surface noise but devoid of silhouette. The ship in Orbitals belongs to the opposite tradition. It has a shape one can remember. It is almost character design masquerading as industrial design. It looks like transport, shelter, toy, machine and friend simultaneously. It embodies the capsulepunk idea perfectly: advanced technology that remains tactile, rounded, repairable and emotionally legible. You can imagine opening it, touching it, finding compartments, arguing inside it, fixing something with a wrench. It belongs to that abandoned future in which technological progress did not require the disappearance of buttons, texture, repair, colour and mechanical personality. Even Nintendo’s description foregrounds piloting the vessel through asteroid fields and travelling between abandoned stations; the ship is therefore not merely menu architecture but one of the central objects through which this friendship and journey are experienced.
This is why cassette futurism remains useful but insufficient. Cassette futurism generally names a future extrapolated from late-twentieth-century electronics: CRTs, tape mechanisms, industrial controls, switches, keypads, dense instrumentation. Orbitals certainly belongs somewhere inside that family, but its sensibility is softer and more playful. Its machines look as though someone cared about their silhouette before caring about their specification sheet. They belong as much to the history of animation drawing as to the history of electronics. “Capsulepunk” is my shorthand for this particular combination: Japanese retro-futurist design in which sophisticated technology remains chunky, curved, colourful, visible and touchable. The world may contain impossible cosmic engineering, but you still turn something, plug something in, hold something, climb through something, shoot something with an absurdly charming tool. Physical interaction has not been abolished by technological advancement.
And perhaps that is one reason Orbitals feels so strangely contemporary despite looking backwards. We inhabit an age in which an increasing amount of technology has been visually flattened into interchangeable rectangles and invisible processes. Orbitals imagines the opposite future. Every mechanism announces itself as a designed object. Computers possess bodies. A console occupies space. A tool has a peculiar silhouette. A ship can become beloved because it looks like only itself. The future once promised an expansion of objects rather than their disappearance. Orbitals returns us briefly to that branch of imagination.
I love this world. I love the fact that understanding how it was made makes me love it more. The handmade feeling is not an illusion generated by one clever shader. It is the result of people studying old animation production, maintaining separate visual philosophies for foreground and background, drawing on paper, exchanging printed artwork, working with an animation studio, learning the optical peculiarities of photographed cels, slowing particular movements down, building unusual Unreal rendering systems, painting, deliberately damaging digital perfection, studying how mouths and noses were positioned in different periods of character design, researching old sound-effects practice and recruiting a singer whose voice actually belongs to the history being invoked. Shapefarm says plainly that it does not use generative AI in its production; Ramos’s explanation is equally plain: the studio likes making things with its hands. In Orbitals, you can see the hands.
And somehow, after all this research, expertise and technical labour, the game does not feel burdened by research, expertise or technical labour. It feels free. That may be its finest achievement. Orbitals feels genuinely as though it has always been there. Not an imitation of a lost 1987 series, but the thing itself somehow arriving decades late, newly playable, with its old opening sequence intact and its peculiar little ship waiting outside. Quietly iconic. I am happy to add it to that tiny personal handful alongside Evangelion, Pokémon and Dragon Ball, with Ghibli still sitting in its own unassailable place beyond the count. There are not many fictional worlds that immediately create the sensation of remembering something one has never actually encountered. Orbitals has done that to me.
And this article is beginning to suggest another project. What started as thoughts about Orbitals is turning into a series about cassette futurism, capsulepunk, analogue image-making, Japanese animation, lost technological futures and the artists who kept those futures alive. Which brings me inevitably back to a name I have been circling for some time: Dan McPharlin. Where is he? What happened to that extraordinary visual world? I have increasingly been thinking of a proper “Dan McPharlin: Where Is He?” documentary project, but perhaps the documentary begins here first, as writing — following the lineage backwards from Orbitals into the artists who imagined futures full of buttons, impossible architecture, painted planets, control panels and machinery that seemed simultaneously ancient and yet to come. The articles are beginning to connect. I think I know where this series goes next.
Sources
- Nintendo Australia, Orbitals official Switch 2 listing — release date, premise, two-player requirement, GameShare/Friend’s Pass, developer/publisher and gameplay description. Nintendo Australia — Orbitals
- Shapefarm / Orbitals, “Hello from the team behind Orbitals” — Marcos Ramos’s tradigital workflow, Megumi Varmedal on classic animation technique, Taliesan Arnold on translating 1980s animation into 3D, Isamu Ogawa on vintage sound research. Orbitals — Meet the development team
- AUTOMATON, Shapefarm developer interview — separate cel/background production philosophies, frame cadence, film grain and halation, Studio Massket collaboration, 200+ printed materials and hand-drawn storyboard process. AUTOMATON — Orbitals developer interview
- Game*Spark, Shapefarm studio interview — Ghibli-associated art materials, analogue imperfection, influences including Evangelion, Dragon Ball, Nausicaä, Venus Wars, Sailor Moon and Ranma ½. Game*Spark — Shapefarm studio interview
- GameSpot, “This Co-Op Anime Adventure Couldn’t Have Been Anything Else” — development history, art bible, rounded design philosophy, earlier Shapefarm work, Studio Massket integration and custom Unreal rendering pipeline. GameSpot — Orbitals development interview
- Crunchyroll, “Orbitals is a Video Game Love Letter to Retro ’80s and ’90s Anime” — Hidetoshi Yoshida’s hand-drawn storyboards, cel-shaded moving objects, gouache-like environments and reduced animation cadence. Crunchyroll — Orbitals interview and preview
- Studio Ghibli, Tales from Earthsea production diary — historical explanation of separate character/background production, transparent acetate cels, colouring and compositing. Studio Ghibli — Cel-animation production process
- Studio Ghibli, production diary on cinematography/compositing — historical photographing of cels over backgrounds and the later recreation of film-like irregularity in digital production. Studio Ghibli — Animation photography and compositing
- Toei Animation, official animation-production guide — storyboard, key animation, in-betweening, background, colour and compositing stages. Toei Animation — Production process
- Orbitals official site, soundtrack announcement — Mami Ayukawa, “Accelerating Destiny” and “Heart To Heart.” Orbitals — Mami Ayukawa theme-song announcement
