Japanese Niche Games Deals & Discussion Thread 4.0

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shivan128

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Welcome to the Japanese niche games deals and discussion thread!  Feel free to talk about local and import Japanese games here.  Our goal is to maintain a thread dedicated to active deals on niche games including RPGs, Visual Novels (VN), Shoot'em ups (Shmups), Musou, etc.  Also maintained are pre-orders for standard, limited and collector's edition games with key release dates provided.

I've wikified the thread to make it more friendly and open to others that can actively update with important information. You can find the wiki post directly below this one.

NOTE:  Please, leave the censorship discussion away from this thread.  It's common for japanese games to have questionable content outside of the country.  We want to keep discussions to the game itself and not about cultural/societal tolerance.

A message from Thorbahn:

Our CAG Japanese Niche Games Thread also has a community on PS4, where you can interact and game with other members of the thread.

Our moderators are: Draekon, Las_Hole, and Waffleswanton

You can basically friend any of our members, or any moderator, and you will be able to request to join the community under "Communities friends are in" tab, and a mod will approve your request.

You can also leave your PSN ID in the thread, saying you want to join, and we can invite you directly as well.

As always, have fun and enjoy your stay!

 
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Cleaned out my closet, and in the midst of digging through the boxes I found my Ani-Mayhem cards from back in the day.

Basically Magic the Gathering for anime fans. ;D

Anyone here remember Ani-Mayhem, or played it from back in the day?

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Squarehard said:
Cleaned out my closet, and in the midst of digging through the boxes I found my Ani-Mayhem cards from back in the day.

Basically Magic the Gathering for anime fans. ;D

Anyone here remember Ani-Mayhem, or played it from back in the day?
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Never heard of it but I saw some Project A-ko cards in there, that's cool.

 
Squarehard said:
Cleaned out my closet, and in the midst of digging through the boxes I found my Ani-Mayhem cards from back in the day.

Basically Magic the Gathering for anime fans. ;D

Anyone here remember Ani-Mayhem, or played it from back in the day?
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I have one starter deck somewhere, but I never played it. Ironically, it’s stored in a larger MtG two player starter box.
 
I briefly remember that CCG. I honestly don't like the card layout as much. I'm sure it provided some fun though if you played it. I actually was cleaning out my closet too to see if I had a Mario 3DS game (Dream Team for those curious) and yeah just so many games in the backlog. I have way too many especially for PS2/3/4/3DS/Vita. Think I'm going to get serious and try out many of the games and see if I really want to play them. I know we joke about our miles long backlogs, but it's pretty lame in a way too. I can understand lots of bundled games over the years, but the physical backlogs and games we picked up ourselves digitally are no joke. Just tired of having so many and not able to play them. So yeah will be playing a bunch and just getting rid of ones I don't see myself finishing. 

 
Not touching another Kickstarter for a game unless it's a VN I want to read. I'm still waiting on Cryamore, Delver's Drop (this one I believe is dead and Cryamore likely close to it) and my console version of Soul Saga. If any of these fully release I'll likely not care anymore by the time they're out. I'm also waiting patiently on the Libra of the Vampire Princess retranslation. It will fund without me like Shenmue 3. I'll just wait till it releases. 2022 feels like forever away. I am glad the Suikoden developers are making another game though.

 
I haven't had any failures in my KS experiences... only year(s) of delays.  But I've only ever done 2 KS.  First was Shenmue III (because it's one of my favorite series of all time and it had been nearly 2 decades waiting for part 3) and the other was Muv Luv for Vita because at the time I was pretty serious about the vita but not sure where I stood on VN's... and this was supposedly the only way to get the games physical (never imagined they'd do the retail versions).

I think the only KS I would even consider again would have to be for something else on the same level (to me) as Shenmue... which I doubt will happen.

 
nagpo said:
SE has always made open world JRPG's ever since the old days. It wasn't until, from my memory, FF10 that they became more linear.
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Having a world map is a very different thing than the "open world" trend of today. I personally don't care at all for open worlds if they're full of bad characters and poor storytelling.
 
gospelman said:
Having a world map is a very different thing than the "open world" trend of today. I personally don't care at all for open worlds if they're full of bad characters and poor storytelling.
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I agree. I remember Wild Arms, where a world map meant talking to a villager to learn where to head next and search for it, not follow the guide cursor to collectible X of several hundred identical ones.

On the flip side though, pointless world map travel (suikoden 4 wtf was the point of making me sail that giant ocean???) (also windwaker), just brings the game to a slow drag for no gains at all.
 
I prefer open world rpgs (both modern and classic open world).  I hated FFX and its linear path enough to stop playing it even though I thought the story and characters were interesting.  I want to feel like I'm role playing and living in the world... not guided through it like it's some museum tour and everything interesting is behind ropes.

 
Starcrest said:
On the flip side though, pointless world map travel (suikoden 4 wtf was the point of making me sail that giant ocean???) (also windwaker), just brings the game to a slow drag for no gains at all.
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I loved wind waker and it's exploration. It only lasts part of the way into the game and then you can fast travel everywhere. But exploration in games is something I just happen to love.

 
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I love exploration when it leads to stuff and i'm not just talking about collectibles. Ghosts, while I may not find it a 10/10 game provides interesting enough side quests and has a lot of alright stuff around. I generally dislike open world games otherwise especially when the world feels bland or the content in the world is bland. I got bored of for example Saints Row 3, where even though the action was fun enough, the story was tacked on and I got tired of the side content. I just said I got my I think 10 hours of entertainment...maybe a bit more and was done with it. It was the old version I got in some old bundle, so it wasn't a bad price initially. 

 
Starcrest said:
On the flip side though, pointless world map travel (suikoden 4 wtf was the point of making me sail that giant ocean???) (also windwaker), just brings the game to a slow drag for no gains at all.
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Yeah, the sailing in WW was fun for about 5 mins, and then as stated, it was much more of a chore than anything I would label fun for any length of time.

nitrosmob said:
I love exploration when it leads to stuff and i'm not just talking about collectibles. Ghosts, while I may not find it a 10/10 game provides interesting enough side quests and has a lot of alright stuff around. I generally dislike open world games otherwise especially when the world feels bland or the content in the world is bland. I got bored of for example Saints Row 3, where even though the action was fun enough, the story was tacked on and I got tired of the side content. I just said I got my I think 10 hours of entertainment...maybe a bit more and was done with it. It was the old version I got in some old bundle, so it wasn't a bad price initially.
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This was how I felt for BotW, for as big as the world was, I couldn't have been more bored in it, and the enemy variety(or lack thereof), did not help in the least.

 
I learned my lesson with the Project Phoenix kickstarter. Rooting for Eiyuden to succeed but yeah, from afar. 

JRPG releases for August:

- Brave Pinball (PC)
- Death end re;Quest 2 (PC)
- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered (Switch, PS4, Mobile)
- The Legend of Heroes: Hajimari no Kiseki (PS4, JP only)
 
nitrosmob said:
I generally dislike open world games otherwise especially when the world feels bland or the content in the world is bland.
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This, for me, is the issue. If a game is developed to be open world, a large chunk of the focus in development goes to creating the environment and sandbox gameplay. As a result, creating quality characters, plots, and artwork almost always get neglected. All of those things are more important to me than open world freedom.

 
gospelman said:
This, for me, is the issue. If a game is developed to be open world, a large chunk of the focus in development goes to creating the environment and sandbox gameplay. As a result, creating quality characters, plots, and artwork almost always get neglected. All of those things are more important to me than open world freedom.
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That's how I felt about ff15 sort of. I also feel like they had no excuse for why Iris, Aranea and Cor didn't travel with you for most of the game. It's pretty obvious they can handle themselves in battle. And it's not as if they couldn't have made the car bigger. I kinda enjoyed exploring and killing monsters in dungeons more than doing anything else in that disaster of a game. Especially that awful sewer dungeon with 3 bosses in it. a giant snake, dragon and a black slime iirc. the middle didn't even make sense as it was in a tiny area.

 
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shadowysea07 said:
That's how I felt about ff15 sort of. I also feel like they had no excuse for why Iris, Aranea and Cor didn't travel with you for most of the game. It's pretty obvious they can handle themselves in battle. And it's not as if they couldn't have made the car bigger. I kinda enjoyed exploring and killing monsters in dungeons more than doing anything else in that disaster of a game. Especially that awful sewer dungeon with 3 bosses in it. a giant snake, dragon and a black slime iirc. the middle didn't even make sense as it was in a tiny area.
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Maybe the dragon entered as a baby and fell asleep for a century. When he woke up, he was too big to get out.
 
There are so many open-world games that they have to be prettttty good in order to keep your attention after the 20 or 30 hour mark.  You can only do about 1-2 per year without genre/type fatigue.  There's also a fine line between an on-rails experience and a completely directionless open world.   I've found that games that use a hybrid of these experiences tend to be a little more focused and better.  God of War is a good example of a game that does both; it has an open world, but then it also inserts you into these other self-contained levels at times.  It was also the best video game of 2018 imo. 

Right now I'm in the middle of playing Farcry 4.  I'm having a lot of fun with it.  But the novelty wears off after awhile and you have to get back on track with the main scenario quests sooner or later, or else you lose the drive to continue playing.  Especially with all the Ubisoft map vomit of landmarks and 'points of interest' that they spew everywhere. 

Yeah, you can only do about 1-2 games like that per year for many of us.  Plus there's no point in wasting your time with the mediocre ones. 

A better strategy is probably to just skip all the sidequest stuff and power through the main parts of these games.  OTTH, then what's the point?  When the point is to take your time, stop and smell the roses, and explore off the beaten path.

 
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I will likely cause a lot of controversy in this thread especially, but I feel just like I can get burned out on open world games, I usually have to spread out RPGs as well. I can get a bit bored otherwise. I don't think I like the genre as much anymore, but there are special and fun ones that still do come out. I still am a sucker for them, but yeah I think I'm going to sell/drop most of the just decent ones, mainly for time constraints, but also if I'm not having too much fun it's likely not worth playing for me anyway.

 
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I'm a fan of games that break up their massive worlds into zones, like Xenoblade 1 and 2, although I felt that Xenoblade X had one of the best open worlds since the sidequests you'd find were so engaging. With zones, you have a large area to explore, but it's not so huge that you find yourself completely ignoring the story. Rather, you want to move on to see what's next, and get to the next zone. It's similar to the original world map style of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, etc.

That's the biggest problem with open world games: they sacrifice the narrative for the exploration. I'm playing Ghost of Tsushima and, while I love the exploration and combat, the sidequests and story are like watching paint dry. And, they all follow the same formula: meet Quest Giver, follow him/her to destination, investigate and/or follow footprints, fight bad guys, get reward. I really value the story and characters in a game, so if I'm playing a game and not enjoying either of those, no matter how fun the game is, I begin to lose interest because I don't feel like there's a point to what I'm doing.

Of course, because I'm such a Zelda fangirl (Wind Waker is one of my all-time favorite games and I never tire of sailing through its wordl), I'd say Breath of the Wild is my exception, since that game was VERY light on story, but the characters and sidequests were amazing, so that kept me going, easily. Like Xenoblade X, all of the sidequests didn't play out the same way, so you wanted to do as many as you could.

About FFXV: I honestly really enjoyed that game and loved the exploration in the first half, probably because I fell in love with The Bros and just wanted to hang out with them. I adored Cor (I always just called him the Marshal when playing lol) and was very happy he was in Gladio's DLC, but I didn't feel the game needed more than its four playable characters, since the story was so much about the relationship between men and all of the unsaid love and trust. Also, I'm heartbroken the Aranea DLC was never made. She deserved that sidestory. The Luna and Noct DLC sounded like absolute trash, so if they had JUST made that Aranea DLC, then canceled the rest, nothing of value would have been lost.

 
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nitrosmob said:
I will likely cause a lot of controversy in this thread especially, but I feel just like I can get burned out on open world games, I usually have to spread out RPGs as well. I can get a bit bored otherwise. I don't think I like the genre as much anymore, but there are special and fun ones that still do come out. I still am a sucker for them, but yeah I think I'm going to sell/drop most of the just decent ones, mainly for time constraints, but also if I'm not having too much fun it's likely not worth playing for me anyway.
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That's totally reasonable. I live for JRPGs, but when they're all 50-100 hours long, it's easy to lose interest unless it's an amazing game. I've finished tons of JRPGs, but I've dropped just as many, because you only live so long and you can't waste time on a game that isn't knocking your socks off. I've even forced myself to finish some games for various reasons (for example, and this might be a hot take, I HATED .hack//G.U. and thought the first 4 .hack games were way better, but I finished it because it's .hack and I'm a sucker). I say play what you like and who cares if you don't love what other people love (or hate what other people hate). Life is just too short.

 
Funny enough, the last JRPG I dropped was Ni no Kuni 2 because the gameplay/combat was neither engaging nor challenging.  It felt like I was playing on auto-pilot. 

 
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Nothing- said:
Funny enough, the last JRPG I dropped was Ni no Kuni 2 because the gameplay/combat was neither engaging nor challenging. It felt like I was playing on auto-pilot.
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Oh, I loved that game, but I understand where you're coming from. I preferred its action combat over the first game's combat, though. I wanted to love the first game, but the battle system just never clicked with me and I didn't finish it.

My favorite part of Ni no Kuni 2: the town building. I would completely abandon the story just to upgrade my town. That's my jam, man.

 
You know, the first truly open-world game (for me) was Dragon Warrior 2.   I remember sailing the ocean endlessly and combing over the mountains and through the caves looking where to go next, while fighting countless random encounters and hoping to not overextend yourself. 

I believe that was the game that REALLY turned me on to JRPGs in the very late 80s, and I played it a bunch before starting out with Final Fantasy 1 on the NES.  Game was hard as hell too.  Especially before any sort of hint guides.

 
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Honestly my biggest problem with a lot of open world games is that the core gameplay is just not good enough to sustain how much content the games have. I am playing Tsushima right now and it's a great example. It has Far Cry style outposts for you take over but good god the game has nearly 60 of them. The combat in this game is no where near good enough to make doing that activity 50+ times an engaging experience. And it's not the only activity in the game either, there are like 30 or 40 quests (side + main) that all involve combat as well. The only thing that keeps it from being a slog is the fact that once you unlock enough skills/tools you can just one shot any normal enemy in the game so all that stuff tends to only take a couple of minutes to complete.

It's not like I hate the genre either, some of my favorite games of all time are open world. But they tend to be ones that gives you lots of different options on how to navigate the world and do whatever it is you do in the game. I know it's divisive but I just played Death Stranding for the first time last month and I couldn't put it down. Played about 110 hours before I got the plat trophy and honestly I was sad that I ran out of things to do. I just had a lot of fun setting up my world exactly how I wanted it. Putting shelters in the right spot, building all the roads, and eventually setting up a massive zipline network that covered the entire world. It felt like a proper sandbox which is what an open world game should be imo.

 
gospelman said:
This was by far the best experience of the game for me. The problem is that the game starts with gameplay so dull that a lot of people drop it before getting to the truly fun stuff.
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Yeah the start of the game is pretty rough, I wasn't really sold until I finished the first map and made it to the main area. Glad I stuck it out though because I absolutely loved the game from that point on.

As amazing as the zipline stuff was I actually put about 60 hours into the game before even unlocking them. I was obsessed with building all the roads, even to places I hadn't unlocked yet. Since you can collect materials by doing almost anything it didn't really feel like a chore either, I had a lot of fun just doing random stuff and then taking my spoils to the next auto paver to work on my roads. Sadly though once you get to the roads at Mountain Knot City it becomes a bit too grindy and you can't really build them until you connect those areas to the chiral network for the multiplayer support.

 
super1upqueen said:
That's totally reasonable. I live for JRPGs, but when they're all 50-100 hours long, it's easy to lose interest unless it's an amazing game. I've finished tons of JRPGs, but I've dropped just as many, because you only live so long and you can't waste time on a game that isn't knocking your socks off. I've even forced myself to finish some games for various reasons (for example, and this might be a hot take, I HATED .hack//G.U. and thought the first 4 .hack games were way better, but I finished it because it's .hack and I'm a sucker). I say play what you like and who cares if you don't love what other people love (or hate what other people hate). Life is just too short.
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I can see hating the 2nd g.u. game but I loved rebirth. Perfectly paced and didn't feel like it wasted the players time. While 2 was insultingly bad with the story and felt mostly like filler. And fuck whoever came up with that phyllo stuff. That is just being an asshole. I'll never include a certain character in the party because of it.

That as it is a line that should not be crossed.

I still need to get around to playing the 3rd one. recoded came out and I played that for a little bit but I ran into bugs locking out content so i wasn't really up to playing further after I finished it as I would be missing stuff like the dopple ganger and hell sidequests lines.

Plus even with the improvements the aida battles are still god damn too long. and 2nd vol added in more of them D:

I also have a perfect file for 1 on ps2 with maxed out stats, levels, most of the equipment besides the reaper scissors and the needle rippers though I have the needles upgraded once since I got lucky and found another pair while dungeon spelunking. They only give you the one pair from winning the tournament and they are seriously the best weapon in the game. book of 1000 completed, all items collected and 99 of each, near max money. And I managed to do that all in under 24 hours.

 
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chrislaustin said:
Yeah, the sailing in WW was fun for about 5 mins, and then as stated, it was much more of a chore than anything I would label fun for any length of time.
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I feel this way about the sailing in the Assassin's Creed games. Ever since it's introduction in 3 or Black Flag and bc some ppl raved about it, they tacked it on to every game since. I hate being forced to always sail just to get somewhere, I wouldn't mind it as much if it was only once in a while.

Anytime you have to go to some random spot or island, you gotta jump off the ship or boat, swim over to land, go back to your vessel, and repeat or fast travel+repeat.

I want to play AC, not killer sailor.
/endrant
 
super1upqueen said:
this might be a hot take, I HATED .hack//G.U. and thought the first 4 .hack games were way better
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Nah, G.U. is hot garbage. IMOQ has a good story, though pretty trash gameplay and graphics. The only other .hack// media that comes close to IMOQ in quality is probably Quantum, though that might technically be better since there was no gameplay to screw up.
 
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 introduces Legend Mode

https://youtu.be/NwiXDTW8KxY

 
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Azur Lane PS4/Steam has upcoming DLC this fall.

Also Japan has a Switch version planned for later in the year. So far the only difference has been the Neptune bonus character being a swimsuit character (instead of her standard look) and your camera Y axis can go lower.

Best Buy also has Neptunia Virtual Stars up for preorder. I know my GCU goes away in November so I'm trying to reserve what I can.

E: Also if you want Senran Kagura Reflexions complete physical in English, LRG preorders end August 2nd.

It's the Senran Kagura Switch game where the dressing room groping mode was turned into a game with some waggle minigames as a "finisher" after having touched the girl enough.

 
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bappt said:
E: Also if you want Senran Kagura Reflexions complete physical in English, LRG preorders end August 2nd.

It's the Senran Kagura Switch game where the dressing room groping mode was turned into a game with some waggle minigames as a "finisher" after having touched the girl enough.
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Oh, how does that work with switch lite? I ordered it, but will I be locked out of some stuff?

 
denpanosekai said:
Oh, how does that work with switch lite? I ordered it, but will I be locked out of some stuff?
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The game has an alternative control scheme where the sticks can be used instead of motion controls. I used that almost exclusively during my playthrough until the skip options finally opened up.

 
For those wanting Fairy Tail on PC, GMG has it now. It's only 5% off but they have a coupon for the weekend, code: WEEKEND for an extra 10% off.

 
Dang, I only had one game arrival last month, though, was expecting more had their release not get pushed back in date.

Oh well, at least figures helped to fill that void.

How was everybody else July for pick-ups?

https://twitter.com/Squarehard/status/1289668008089067521

 
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