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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Not sure if anyone is interested, but Fate/Grand Order in English has been announced to launch on June 25th. Players will receive Saber Lily for a limited time.

DB-s1zgXcAAaN-n.jpg

 
dsman3717 said:
Not sure if anyone is interested, but Fate/Grand Order in English has been announced to launch on June 25th. Players will receive Saber Lily for a limited time.

DB-s1zgXcAAaN-n.jpg
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I want to graduate over to being able to play on an iPad eventually. Getting sick of the small phone. I hope they allow you to transfer your Fate Grand Order account to a different device.

 
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Supplice said:
Dragon Ball FighterZ Gets First GameplayZ Trailer with Goku, Frieza, Vegeta, Majin Buu and More

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAKSgWQ6AeU
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Wow, RIP MvC:I, I hope this game outsells MvC:I by a huge margin, showing Capcom they can't release unpolished games reusing assets anymore. Granted, DBFZ will probably get like 3 title updates like Blazblue and Guilty Gear, but at least the first launch product looks terrific. This looks like what I wanted MvC3 to be after MvC2. 2D sprites, over the top action, great animation, etc. They also seemed to cater to MvC fans too, with how after a character dies, the game goes back to neutral with the next character coming in, so its doesn't become a one player game like MvC3 is. Stage transitions, super animations, assists calls, everything looks so damn good!

 
Nothing371 said:
I want to graduate over to being able to play on an iPad eventually. Getting sick of the small phone. I hope they allow you to transfer your Fate Grand Order account to a different device.
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Fate/ Grand Order uses a bind code that is able to use used across platforms (iOS to Android, Android to iOS, etc) so you should be good to go!

 
SgtWiggles said:
At a theater for the Sony e3 event and a guy is using the Persona 5 CE bag, it looks like a giant shoddy purse and i felt immediate shame.
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It's not the bag's fault. It's those damn phantom thieving kids with their perfectly built slender figures and small face frames that make those bags look good.

 
BlackRockWaifu said:
Which one are you at? Me and Vic are waiting on line in the one in NYC right now.
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Indiana, luckily its not stupid crowded. I went to one in Atlanta 2 years ago and there was a good 300+ people in line.

Right now they are just showing a boring ass preshow so you arent missing anything lol. About to whip my Switch out
 
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Wait Sony E3 is tonight? lol I've been out of the loop this year in regards to E3. Main thing I really expect as a surprise would be a Sony Japan jrpg getting announced
 
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Draekon said:
Here's some short writeups on three recent games I went through. I didn't go into too much detail and probably rushed them a little, so they may not be as clear and concise as I'd like them to be. Plus two of them aren't very recent, so details are only from what I can remember.

Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception
Let me start by saying that I'm not a fan of Visual Novels for the most part. They hit on a lot of things that I don't particularly enjoy, frequently with the absence of any real gameplay. Utawarerumono on the other hand I found to be quite entertaining. I tend to really enjoy fantasy and sci-fi themes and this game presents them fairly well.

The games story is very slow to actually get anywhere in this game. However the story takes place over two games, but it picks up in the latter half. In the first half there is a lot of slice of life going on, which can seem overdone but is mostly used to setup all the characters you obtain as well as their reason for being there. If you've played either of the two Trails series, you should think of the game as the first game of the two where you don't have a whole lot going on, but the writing sets things up for what's to come later. Then towards the end, everything starts ramping up for its direct sequel.

The characters are pretty well written, but definitely follow tropes a bit much. Despite this, they meshed quite well together and had some decent cohesion. Granted some of the circumstances on why they group together to begin with can be a little shoddy. The biggest downside you'll have for this is that there is a lot of slice of life that can feel overdone due to the sheer amount of it.

Gameplay is decent, but ultimately pretty easy. What makes it fairly easy is that you can rewind to any turn in the battle you want and units lost return after battle and still gain full experience. You also only get experience with characters that participate in battle and until the latter half, everybody can join. You are able to replay missions, but they only give bonus points to spend on extra attributes. Missions will reward scrolls and "equipment" that give passive bonuses (+10 Speed) to characters, but no actual equipment (Armor/Weapons), money or usable items exist. That means everything is gained via leveling and completing missions. During the course of the game you have 16 battles, plus one tutorial for a total of 17 battles. There are post-game battles that number 16 in total as well.

The voice acting is only in Japanese and pretty much everything is voiced (including inner thoughts) except for the narrative description. Translation is fairly decent, but not super great. There are some really bad choices, with one example being they translated the English word "capsule" (for a cryostasis bed/pod) into "pill" when they could have kept the English word capsule that was used to begin with. Despite the occasional bad choice, I was fairly happy with it, but I'm sure there are plenty who are hung up on many choices such as character names. I played the entire game on auto-advance dialogue, which made the game quite long. It caused the dialogue in between battle sometimes last for 3 hours if not more before I hit another battle.

I actually liked the game a lot more than I thought I would. I'll definitely be grabbing the sequel when it hits in the fall. There are a lot of tie ins to the original Utawarerumono as well as returning characters and it looks like the next game will feature a metric ton more references too. If you are interested in playing this, I think I'm going to recommend that you watch the 2006 Utawarerumono anime to learn everything that went on. If you don't, then you will be lost on a lot of things mentioned. There's also a fan translation of the game the anime is based on from 2002 on the PC, but the gameplay is a lot more bland and there are quite a few 18+ scenes in it as well.

I recommend the game if you like Fantasy with some Sci-Fi themes and are willing to put some time investment into either the original fan translated game or anime season. Stay away from the most recent Utawarerumono anime as based on the synopsis I read a lot was omitted and changed as well. Including the entire ending segment which made absolutely no sense.

Dragon Quest Heroes II
This is a significantly different game than the first DQH game. The first one was extremely musou, but this one tosses a lot of that out and adds in a lot more RPG. It made it a lot more enjoyable for me without getting bored of the gameplay as quickly.

Both characters are story are pretty bare bones though, like the first one. They're nothing to write home about at all. Though if you're playing this, you aren't playing it for the story at all. Even so, the story is pretty straight forward and like the first game, the past DQ characters that appear just sort of 'appear' with no particular special reason for being there.

Gameplay has been improved quite a bit and the world design is fairly decent. There are quite a few side areas unlocked are you progress that you wouldn't normally visit if you're just following the story. The game also unlocks warping around fairly early on as well and there are a lot of special triggers and dodging enemy abilities that make the gameplay a bit more engaging too. Drop rates on items and accessories aren't too bad either, but with the rotating bonuses every day you can plan around getting certain things much more easily if you're the grinding type. However getting a platinum is a stupidly long and drawn out process which I don't recommend.

The downside to the game is the multiplayer co-op. There are two types of multiplayer in the game:

1) Story Battles - Players who have 'beaten' a level can make themselves available to players who haven't beaten the level yet. However if you are invited while fighting, you either have to accept right away or cancel and be unlisted from being available. To relist yourself, you need to go back to town and set yourself up for availability again. While playing this, my friend invited me to missions to help him and it would take him sometimes up to 10 minutes for my name to appear to be invitable at times. Also, story battles are not repeatable after you've done them unless someone who hasn't done it yet invites you or you do NG+. During this as well, you're replacing an NPC ally that would normally be available to the player.

2) Map Battles - This is similar to Dragon Quest IX maps. However these are unlocked by leveling your class as well as completing previous maps. Most aren't available until very late game or post-game due to their requirements. This one is more straight forward where one player created a lobby and you just search and join the said lobby. These did not take long to join like the story battles. However in this mode both players only have one Ygg leaf to revive one another or you can wait a certain amount of time to auto-revive. No AI players are available in this mode, so if you and one other player go in, then you only have two people instead of the usual 4 for everything else. This tends to gimp duo players because enemies don't downscale particularly well for less players. If you go in solo to these maps however, you have 3 AI allies with you that make it significantly easier.

There's also a significant bug with multiplayer as well. If you have anybody on your block list on PSN, you are unable to create a lobby for map battles or host story battles. To my knowledge this haven't been fixed and I don't recall seeing any patch for DQH2 yet on my PS4 notifications.

I recommend this game at a cheaper price if you're interested in playing it solo. For a co-op game though, it's pretty shitty. It's a lot better than the first game in my opinion, but they've still got a ways to go to be a really great game for this type of genre. Maybe the next one will be better and incorporate full co-op without the bullshit.

Fire Emblem Echoes
Echoes is a very different game than the other Fire Emblem games we've gotten in the west. To some it will be a great change of pace, but to others they might be disappointed in how different it is.

Story is still your standard fare and you'll have two separate parties to care for. However you'll switch between them as opposed to Fates for example where you pick one of the branching paths instead. Both parties are tied together in the story a lot more tightly than previous recent games with branching paths as well. Characters are also what you've come to know from Fire Emblem games. There's nothing particularly outstanding about them, however you have a lot less than Fates does which helps give the characters a little more life to them as you aren't bouncing around quite as much for dialogue. However most of the dialogue is reserved for characters that are automatically gained to progress. The optional ones don't get a whole lot of dialogue beyond their recruitment and battle relation dialogues they get with certain characters.

Gameplay is really where this game differs from previous games. The weapon wheel system does not exist in this game and environments act slightly differently than more recent Fire Emblem iterations. During the course of the game, some characters will be able to promote up to three times while others less. You can go further and obtain a Villagers Pitchfork to cycle back around to Villager class and do it over again as well from the free DLC. However this game doesn't benefit as much from waiting until level 20 to promote as previous games do. The first reason is because after level 10, leveling slows down significantly and you'd have to grind a mind numbing amount for everybody to hit 20, even with using the DLC.

The other is that promoting works differently. In past games you'd get a static set bonus of say +5 Speed that you'd get whether you promoted at 10 or 20. Promotions in this game don't give set attributes. Instead it works for example that Sniper starts with 15 Speed. If you have 8 Speed when promoting, you gain 7 speed upon promoting. However if you have 15 or higher Speed when promoting, you don't gain any speed. So going up to level 20 will give you a few extra stats, but for the amount of time you have to invest to get there it isn't as worth it to wait until then. Leveling gains are also RNG as per usual.

Map design is the exact same as the original game this is based off of. Since that's the case, the maps are pretty basic and don't offer much in the way of strategy with regards to the map design itself. So don't go in expecting to make use of the map in most cases outside of the usual choke points and other things.

You've also got some annoying units, such as the Cantor that will continually summon enemies that will seek out the nearest target and don't stop until they're killed. They are unfortunately used way too much and it makes fights much more tedious than they should be. You've also got Witches that can teleport anywhere on the map, followed by moving and attacking. Depending on your luck with the AI this can be painful or extremely easy. Finally there's a spell that a few units have that can drain your HP to 1. Since the lowest damage you can take is 1, if they hit your main character and then anything else hits that character in the same turn, it's an instant game over. It's not particularly pleasant if it happens to you.

Dungeons are pretty interesting, although I'm not a fan of the fatigue system. Fatigue is entirely dependent on how big the dungeon is, which is dumb. Shorter dungeons you'll tire out more quickly than longer ones. If they could fix that, they'd be more interesting. That and if the designs were better. Most of the dungeon areas are fairly bland unfortunately.

Despite these couple of flaws, it was a nice breath of fresh air. I'm not very big on the way the series has evolved, but I enjoyed this quite a bit. I do recommend the game and I'd like to see a future game incorporate some of this game into it.
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so underwater ray romano is just like tears to tiara 2? Basically spam fastforward then only even more since there isn't much plot in the anime series so the games probably have nothing worth reading.

 
I'm sad to say that the Monster Hunter Worlds trailer did nothing for me... 

They should have shown multiplayer, that's what I love about that series. 

 
shadowysea07 said:
not surprised considering how the reboot was received.
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becausenobodywantedtherebootandcapcomnowrealizesthateveryonewantsdmc5buttheystillhaventannounceditanditsbeenalmost10yearssincedm4andcapcomisbreakingeveryonesheartsbutespeciallyminebynotannouncingiteventhoughtheyhavetoknowthateveryonewantsit

 
Man I thought that Shadow of the Colossus was a sequel, not a remake. Why do we need a remake? I think Sony saved all the good stuff for Playstation Experience in December.

 
Kaiser499 said:
Man I thought that Shadow of the Colossus was a sequel, not a remake. Why do we need a remake? I think Sony saved all the good stuff for Playstation Experience in December.
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I was the same....I saw that and was like *yawn* old game remake which was remastered for the PS3...move on! That's just my humble opinion, but it's likely cheap money for them.

 
SgtWiggles said:
Indiana, luckily its not stupid crowded. I went to one in Atlanta 2 years ago and there was a good 300+ people in line.

Right now they are just showing a boring ass preshow so you arent missing anything lol. About to whip my Switch out
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Turns out they just did a terrible job admitting people in, theater wasn't even half full. Also, did the sound not work for like the first 15 minutes of the show? It was so low, almost silent, and people were just screaming funny shit and sounds are the screen.

Also, when they mentioned all the games that came out this year, Persona 5 got the biggest pop which was a huge surprise. SotC also got a huge, maybe biggest applause when it was shown. Not the best conference but watching it in a theater was pretty hype.

The Dead Texan said:
SotC looked really pretty.

MvCI looks like microwaved dog shit.
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Lol, shame on that game after seeing DBFZ. Looking at some people playing the demo, the graphics are actually decent. It's just the lightning, HUD, character/stage designs, animations, etc. that look like steam boiled horse diarrhea. Seriously, wtf is up with Chun Li's face? People in the theater was yelling how terrible it is. It's Chun Li, how can you even screw that up? Plus, doesn't help that like 90% of the cast is from MvC3.

 
Kaiser499 said:
Yeah, they definitely ruined Chun-Li's looks.
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Seriously wtf did they do to her. The art style of this MvC game is just terrible, I miss the 2D sprites where it was almost impossible to ruin how a character looked

Shes got a serious case of manface in this one, how the hell do you ruin one of your own companies mascot characters

 
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The picture Olengie posted seems to be a screenshot Capcom edited themselves, which doesn't even look the worst, looks good compared to other shots of her.

This is one I screen capped from the 2nd story trailer:

Jqd45Ej.png


Lol, I'm not joking, I didn't edit this picture, came straight from the trailer.

Capcom...

4oRmvc5.gif


 
Maybe that's how chun li looks after she loses to Balrog the next day?
remember those continue screens in sf2 ?

I hope the colossus remake is a way to spark interest for a sequel.
 
BlackRockWaifu said:
The picture Olengie posted seems to be a screenshot Capcom edited themselves, which doesn't even look the worst, looks good compared to other shots of her.

This is one I screen capped from the 2nd story trailer:

Jqd45Ej.png


Lol, I'm not joking, I didn't edit this picture, came straight from the trailer.

Capcom...

4oRmvc5.gif
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I Couldn't find that one so I opted for the other one.

 
 
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There are a few more interesting things to come out of E3 than just the .hack//G.U. Remaster in my opinion. I'll finally give Monster Hunter a whirl again now that it'll be on the PS4 & PC. Glad to see that one has a seamless world to eliminate all the room-to-room loading.

shadowysea07 said:
so underwater ray romano is just like tears to tiara 2? Basically spam fastforward then only even more since there isn't much plot in the anime series so the games probably have nothing worth reading.
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It builds the lore and the characters despite the large abundance of slice of life. If you're fast forwarding in a visual novel, why even bother playing it?

 
.hack//G.U. Remaster was pretty requested. I never played them, though I wish they would have done the other 4 previous games first, though I believe these have better gameplay.

For me E3 has been the Atlus announcements, Monster Hunter (don't care about Shadow of Collosus remake, even though I'm not a fan of MH gameplay) and hopefully something cool from Nintendo. I also think that prison break game looks neat and Skull & Bones looks cool too, since i'm a pirate games fan, and there just isn't too many of them. I hope NISA announces something too since their plate is looking a little light after September releases.

 
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A Way Out announced at EA conference:

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGZGSdgJVPM[/media]

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ApSmPvxz1o[/media]

 
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