Lollipop Chainsaw 2 Back2Back slashes onto PS5 in 2027
Dragami Games and Nada Holdings have revived Juliet Starling for a proper sequel, with Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata at the helm and a PlayStation 5 release pencilled in for 2027.
Juliet Starling is coming back, and she is bringing the chainsaw. Nada Holdings and Dragami Games used Tokyo Game Show 2026 to announce Lollipop Chainsaw 2 Back2Back, a full sequel to the 2012 cult hack-and-slash, and it is down for a PlayStation 5 launch in 2027. The reveal arrived with gameplay footage rather than a logo and a promise, which is more than the franchise has managed in a decade.
Who is actually making the new game
The headline name is Hajime Tabata, who directed Final Fantasy XV and is now directing this sequel through his own studio, JP Universe. Original Lollipop Chainsaw writer Masahiro Yuki is back to write the story, and the original character designer, NekoshowguN, is also involved. That is an unusual degree of continuity for a series that spent most of the 2010s in licensing limbo, and it suggests Dragami wants this to read as a genuine continuation rather than a reboot with a familiar jacket.
How a 2012 cult hit got a second life
Lollipop Chainsaw launched worldwide on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in June 2012, a collaboration between Grasshopper Manufacture's Goichi Suda, better known as Suda51, and the filmmaker James Gunn, who wrote it. Kadokawa Games and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment published it. When the rights situation became murky, Yoshimi Yasuda, a former Kadokawa Games chief executive who had moved to the newly formed Dragami Games, bought the intellectual property from Kadokawa, and Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster of the original, followed in September 2024 on PS5, Xbox Series, Switch and PC. A Switch 2 version arrived on 28 May this year, which makes the timing of a sequel announcement look less like nostalgia and more like a sales chart.
The uncomfortable bit nobody at the booth mentioned
Taiwan's Nada Holdings announced in July 2025 that its Lollipop Chainsaw projects, a new game and an anime adaptation, would not impose what it called "excessive creative restrictions in the name of DEI". The company has never explained what that means in practice, and this week's reveal did not revisit it. It is a marketing line that aged badly the moment it was printed, and it now sits permanently next to the game's name.
Our opinion
A Lollipop Chainsaw sequel directed by the man who steered Final Fantasy XV through its own development hell is a strange, oddly promising pairing. Tabata knows how to ship a big action game and Yuki knows what made Juliet funny, and the PlayStation 5 exclusivity window suggests Dragami is pitching at a premium rather than a bargain bin. The risk is that the DEI line was never just noise. If the studio thinks the original's appeal was transgression for its own sake, it will build a sequel that feels like a forum argument, and the gore will land as empty as the trailer's zombies. Bring back the absurdity, leave the culture war at the door.