"The Last Hope" video game gets pulled from the Nintendo eShop amidst a copyright claim by Sony
The surplus amount of indie and/or shovelware titles appearing on official storefronts has been in the uprising for the last decade. As more and more resources are easily available for people interested in the video game industry, it's no surprise that this has been the case.
While many have realized their dream game into a reality with the current tools at their disposal, others take inspiration from already existing titles to bring forth a new story with original characters. However, you can only take so much "inspiration" from a game before it borders into plagiarism, and this has been the one case for a title found in the Nintendo eShop, "The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival".
The title found its way into the Nintendo eShop just like month, on June 30th, and many people took interested in the title due to some interesting resemblances to another published title by Sony. The promotional image for "The Last Hope" sees the main protagonist in company of a woman who highly resembles Ellie from "The Last of Us", down to the very same hair style, clothing and face, albeit with a lower quality than that seen in The Last of Us.
Outside of the resemblance with Ellie, the game has very little substance to even make it into the mediocrity level. The story boils down to a time travel concept of sending a soldier's conscience to the future to help with a zombie outbreak, but aside from the flat story, there's no voice acting; instead carrying over all plot/story points and dialogues through hefty text boxes and still images (which may or may not be AI generated), dull environments and awful models that make the game look like an early PS2 title in terms of visual quality due to the lack of proper lighting, almost no music at all, simplistic UIs and the gameplay itself leaves a lot to be desired.
After the game made its ways in social media, it quickly caught up and gathered attention, enough to make the rounds of Sony, to which the resemblance of Ellie with the character of "Eva/Eve" in "The Last Hope" was enough for them to take action and issue a copyright claim to it. The game's trailer has been taken down with the message "Video unavailable. This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC" (which has been reuploaded by other users given the original has been claimed).
Not only was the game's trailer pulled by Sony, but it seems like Nintendo has also removed the game from their own eShop, as well as all other instances or mentions of the game from their websites, with the original link for "The Last Hope" now redirecting to a 404 page. Most interestingly, prompting the link into the Wayback Machine gives out the message "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."
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