Japanese Niche Games Deals & Discussion Thread 4.0

shivan128

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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shadowysea07 said:
Squarehard posting a picture of me at the buffet table xD
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Nekonyansoft is releasing The Future Radio and the Artificial Pigeons on Steam and other places February 17, 2023. I've been waiting to read this and glad the license was saved from that garbage company that had it before. I will post an 18+ Steam patch on release.

Steam

Crime Opera 2: The Floodgate Effect launched and the developer made the original game and the two fan discs free until tomorrow although you can pay for them. Be sure to pick it up if you're interested in mystery visual novels. This is on itch.io

Crime Opera Sequel Sale

Crime Opera 2

Kagura Games, known for many many eroge RPG Maker games is releasing an eroge VN this year Spiral Dystopia by LiLiM in 2023. This one has something about a calamity and two girls and some book and I'm sure will be alright. This will likely have an 18+ patch for the Steam version.

Steam

VNDB (NSFW)

Mangagamer has a New Year New Waifu sale going on and JAST USA has a Lunar New Year sale. Both excellent ways to get their titles and end at or near the end of the month. I've played many of the moeges so any questions on them I can probably answer.

JAST USA (NSFW)

Mangagamer (NSFW)

 
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Re-did my shelves a bit. Now my Switch games are all in one spot.

And yes, the Vita games in the cabinet are unfortunately maximized space-wise like that, but I'm planning to make custom labels to slap onto those sides of the case to make them look less uggo. XD

But at least now my Switch stuff is much nicer looking. :3

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d3LrzZ3.jpg


 
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The organization is pretty impressive.  At my age though I look at that many games and just think there's not enough time.  Switch alone, looking at the standard copies at 25 games per shelf section and if it took 20 hours on average to complete a game and you spent 6 hours a day (outside of work, sleep and eating) playing games (pretty hard core) it would take about 7 years and 1 month to complete them all.  That's not counting digital releases, Vita, or any other systems and taking no breaks from gaming... getting no more games and probably limiting any time spent on other hobbies.  14 years 2 months if you cut that to 3hours a day so you can still watch some tv shows / anime / movies and maybe go out on occasion.

Still, beautiful organization.

 
nightc1 said:
The organization is pretty impressive. At my age though I look at that many games and just think there's not enough time. Switch alone, looking at the standard copies at 25 games per shelf section and if it took 20 hours on average to complete a game and you spent 6 hours a day (outside of work, sleep and eating) playing games (pretty hard core) it would take about 7 years and 1 month to complete them all. That's not counting digital releases, Vita, or any other systems and taking no breaks from gaming... getting no more games and probably limiting any time spent on other hobbies. 14 years 2 months if you cut that to 3hours a day so you can still watch some tv shows / anime / movies and maybe go out on occasion.

Still, beautiful organization.
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Organizing definitely takes me much longer than I would like.

Much of my time yesterday basically went into figuring it all out after I started to take stuff off shelves, and then realized what I had planned originally wasn't going to work, so had to re-tool things a bit and create a new plan.

If I wasn't still on break, I probably wouldn't have even attempted to tackle this kind of a project, lol.

And agree, backlog seems to always grow much faster than I can get through the games nowadays. :x

 
keyblader1985 said:
Not gonna lie; this stuff is difficult for me to look at (in a good way), both as a gamer and someone who grew up poor.
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Always good to just keep in mind that the world is filled with people both with more money and stuff than you and much more needy and poor than you. There are countless hardships or positive things that can happen in anyone’s life at any moment that far outweigh any pile of games. And if you are experiencing gamer envy, the person that gets more enjoyment and growth out of what they have wins over the person that has more but gains or learns nothing from it and is just chasing trends. That’s what’s it’s about, otherwise it’s just a collection of plastic or an ill advised financial investment. I imagine with that big a collection the poster may be in game sales? If you are buying and selling and searching for deals to offset the cost, its not necessarily about money as much as it is time and effort put into a hobby. Just straight out buying that much at MSRP without offsetting the cost in anyway would be a lot, but it’s all relative.

 
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Squarehard said:
Re-did my shelves a bit. Now my Switch games are all in one spot.

And yes, the Vita games in the cabinet are unfortunately maximized space-wise like that, but I'm planning to make custom labels to slap onto those sides of the case to make them look less uggo. XD

But at least now my Switch stuff is much nicer looking. :3

wnZCc2a.jpg

DHszuoz.jpg

d3LrzZ3.jpg
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I gotta ask. What shelves do you use for these? Particularly the Switch and PS4 games! I've been looking into some for my games and media collection but it's so daunting.
 
gospelman said:
Well, not anymore. I'm wondering if there any content difference between this Hyper release and the pc version?
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It's pretty funny. I've had ebay emails setup for Moero Chronicle Hyper for quite a while now and typically one copy would show up every 2-4 weeks for $150-$200. Now, since the reprint went up, I've seen 7-8 copies each the past couple days priced $90-$150.

 
Noticed on the front page that Cruel King and Great Hero Storybook Edition is $20 at GameStop. Pre-order was $60, and Best Buy had it for $40 not long after release, so if you can find a decent condition unopened copy at GS (lul), that’s a great way to get a cute game.
 
Souffrir said:
Noticed on the front page that Cruel King and Great Hero Storybook Edition is $20 at GameStop. Pre-order was $60, and Best Buy had it for $40 not long after release, so if you can find a decent condition unopened copy at GS (lul), that’s a great way to get a cute game.
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It's on clearance. Picked it up for $16 a week or two ago. Found a loose case on the clearance shelf, at checkout the employee pulled out the storybook box to put the case in.

 
Having finished Pokémon scarlet wtf at that ending.

I looked at my completed games list for last year and I finished 2. Probably my worst year in recent memory since I started keeping track of it around 2013. Usually I completed at least 9 a year. I can blame some of that into working more since I started floating to other departments around February. I think there was also going down the ff theaterhythm curtain call rabbit hole again since I bought all the song dlc for that before the eshop closes and was sss perfect critical each song on every difficulty setting.

Pokémon arceus was one of the 2 games from last year and I nearly completed the pokedex for it minus shieldon or whatever it was since I never got it to spawn.

The other one was Steven Universe unleash the light which I was surprised got released outside of Apple. As it and phantom fable were both exclusive to their platform for whatever reason years ago.

It added in additional characters for the port that were removed from save the light the previous game on top of bismuth, hessonite sp?, and lapis lazuli who were new. Judging by the cover they may gave updated it since and added in another character as Greg Demayo wasn't in the port when I played it but is now on the cover page for the game when I last saw it.
 
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shadowysea07 said:
I looked at my completed games list for last year and I finished 2.
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Last year the only game I finished was Live A Live.. and that was just the base completion for each character's story... not finishing the final story with every character (just one or two). I did play a decent amount of Grand Mountain Adventure also but not enough to call it anywhere near complete (not that I feel I need to "complete" it). On the plus side, I only bought 7 games for switch last year... and between then and now have played at least some of 4 of them. The other two being DQ Treasures & Pocky & Rocky Reshrined. So I'm feeling pretty good about my ratio of purchases to at least what I've played.

This year so far I haven't bought any games but I will 100% buy Zelda Tears of Kingdom as well as anything else Zelda, DQ, and Xenoblade that releases physically (for Switch) even if I don't make the time for them immediately. I have my eyes on about 5 other releases none of which I'm sure on yet and might easily pass them all up.

 
I'm a physical copy-only gamer; if the game's only sold digitally, or its physical copy is fatally broken, I'm not interested.

Anyways, while I'm much more picky now with purchases, I also find I'm less and less interested in the games being made today.

As for completing my games, I've long since abandoned any belief that I'll have the time to beat even a fraction of my collection. I just don't have the time or even the energy/motivation.

I just play a game as long as I'm having fun. If it's not fun anymore, I stop. I've never felt obligated to finish a game and I definitely don't care enough to hate-play to see the end credits.

Obviously, different folks have different approaches or needs. Mine is just based on whether I'm having fun - that's the same barometer I use for buying a game. Don't care whether it'll be worth squat. If I want to play something, I'll keep an eye out and get it when it's on sale. Only games I used to ever pay full price for were Zelda and Mario, but today, won't do it for those, either (not a fan at all of botw and its open world direction). Still love the mainline Mario games, but that's about it for Nintendo, which explains why I still haven't gotten around to buying a Switch -- and at this point, will just wait to see what's next.
 
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To be honest I just can't get the "physical only" mentality. Don't get me wrong; I 100% understand and agree with most of the reasons for preferring physical over digital, but if a game I'm interested in is only available digitally or if the price is low enough, I'm not going to pass it up. Yeah, digital copies are never really yours and the servers will go down eventually, but physical copies are only yours as long as they're safe and in your possession (and anything can happen no matter how careful you are).

A couple years ago I was slightly more adamant about preferring physical copies. But as it is we're already headed very quickly toward an all-digital future, with whole consoles with no physical drive. I feel like if I skip out on something I want I'm only hurting myself.
 
I finish what I really like. Dead space I bought today and 100% will finish this weekend.

I will probably never even beat 70% of my collection and I'm ok with that.
 
keyblader1985 said:
To be honest I just can't get the "physical only" mentality. Don't get me wrong; I 100% understand and agree with most of the reasons for preferring physical over digital, but if a game I'm interested in is only available digitally or if the price is low enough, I'm not going to pass it up. Yeah, digital copies are never really yours and the servers will go down eventually, but physical copies are only yours as long as they're safe and in your possession (and anything can happen no matter how careful you are).

A couple years ago I was slightly more adamant about preferring physical copies. But as it is we're already headed very quickly toward an all-digital future, with whole consoles with no physical drive. I feel like if I skip out on something I want I'm only hurting myself.
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All things equal, I'll pick physical. When a Kecmo game is $2 digital or $40 physical, na.

 
All the Digital Deluxe editions for the niche games I play have pretty much guaranteed I'm mostly going digital. Koei Tecmo and the Atelier series has been pretty consistent with theirs and the first mainline Neptunia game in ages locks swimsuit costumes behind one. 

 
bappt said:
All the Digital Deluxe editions for the niche games I play have pretty much guaranteed I'm mostly going digital. Koei Tecmo and the Atelier series has been pretty consistent with theirs and the first mainline Neptunia game in ages locks swimsuit costumes behind one.
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Sisters VS Sisters isn't another spinoff? I haven't really checked into this one yet, been used to the last few games in the series not being of much interest.

 
I think Sisters vs. Sisters is a spin-off, though reviews indicate it's one of the better ones. Main series is just 1, 2, 3, and Megadimension unless I'm wrong (which is possible).

 
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I think about physical vs digital a lot, so I'll chime in too.

I used to be pure physical and I still understand the appeal. The most important aspect to me was losing access to my games if a store gets shut down or something. That and managing digital content on something like the Vita was asking for trouble. The download list was awful, the memory card were expensive, the backup application was time consuming.

Managing a physical collection is kind of a hassle for me, but in some cases digital was even more of a hassle.

There are the obvious arguments against physical that it rarely contains the best, or sometimes even a playable version of the game because of patches etc as well.

My biggest gripe with digital is just how the ability to buy something is lost when a store shuts down, I really like with physical things are still in circulation and can be bought second-hand.

My ultimate goal is to drop the hoarding mentality altogether, and buy games when I want to play them. I'll figure out how it can be accomplished when it's time to play it, and if it can't be I'll move on to something else.

I have an already too long list of 'last games to get physical' because there are already orders through LRG, using Best Buy certs, or through those Target sales so I'll still be riding those out but my hope is to stick more strictly to a "beat 6 games, can buy 1" rule-set for myself to get through my massive pile of games more. I'm finding that delaying the tracking down of a game when I'm ready for it instead of constantly trying to work through an everything list to have it all on hand isn't as scary as I thought.

Restrictions don't make sense if you don't want them though, if you like getting things on sale and having a lot of options or a collection then that's great too. It's a really personal, different for everyone type of question.

 
I do say to myself when I'm buying a game digital or physical, does it look like I'll play it in a few months to a year or so. If it's a super niche game, I may buy it on release and play it a little down the road. Sometimes I get tempted by new releases especially since I play many Steam demos during the fests (one is coming up in February I believe) and when those games come out I may take chances on them. This also helps with Steam's generous refund policy, so if I don't like the game in an hour I'll refund.

I like BoxPizzaBox like variety and tend to play multiple genres although some like Sports I'll rarely play. I will get some games if they're on my wish list somewhere if they're like a $1.50 or something. If something doesn't grip me around that range, I'll likely only get it from cheap bundles. I choose to play many things digitally otherwise I would miss out on my many visual novels, great digital only games like Picross, and extremely cheap prices at times.

I do prefer physical for niche games though especially since if I beat them quickly I can likely sell it for something still unless it's ancient and cheap or just fell a lot in price like Monark. Plenty of these games even after falling low around the $15-$25 range still do go up when they go out of print, or are just hard to find.

The bottom line is play games physically and digitally. You miss out on many especially niche releases that way. AAA is extremely stagnant for me nowadays other than a few heavy hitters. Just my opinions of course.

 
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Soma_Cruz said:
Sisters VS Sisters isn't another spinoff? I haven't really checked into this one yet, been used to the last few games in the series not being of much interest.
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It's a real Neptunia game that takes place after VII. The goddesses go to help out the PC continent, while they're gone Nepgear and friends find a hidden lab and get thrown into a stasis pod thing, awakening to a world where cell phones took over and monster attacks are keeping people inside. Also Neptune didn't return from the PC continent so Planeptune fell without a goddess. There's a different battle system but the story constantly refers back to earlier games.

Unfortunately the initial Japanese announcement called it a "Orthodox Spin-off" which was all the western audience needed to see to write it off. The Japanese term is used in media to refer to canon works in a larger franchise. The best anime example I can come up with is A Certain Scientific Railgun with it's plot running alongside A Certain Magical Index or all the Star Wars media created post-Disney acquisition.

 
I'm not shy about being a Sonic fan, and I'm not shy about my opinion that (other than, potentially, Sonic Mania, which is still in my backlog) there hasn't been a good Sonic game since Sonic & Knuckles, so you may have seen me espousing that opinion here before.

Still, I'd heard some people say that maybe most Sonic games past that point weren't very good, but I should check out the Sonic Advance series, or the Sonic Rush series. I bounced off Advance on an emulator probably about a decade ago, but went back to it last year and beat it. It was... okay. It was a significant step down from the Genesis games, but it wasn't a bad game, per se. I went on to Sonic Advance 2, which I found to be significantly less fun than Advance, but I played it for a while before bouncing off. I then moved on to Advance 3, and bounced off almost immediately due to the obtuse hub and probably being a little sick of the series by that point.

I recently modded my 3DS, and while loading some DS games onto it last week, figured I'd go back and give Rush a shot. Just got around to trying it, and the first couple levels were so mindless, and the first boss was so obnoxious, that I immediately powered my 3DS down, loaded my SD card onto my computer, and deleted the ROM. I literally had a better experience with Sonic 06. (Granted, that was mostly due to playing it with other people, but I feel like the point stands—at least 06 was entertainingly bad, this was just so mediocre I actively felt like I was wasting my time.)

 
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Pretty much everything DS Sonic (Rush, Rush Adventure, Colors, Generations) was just a slightly modified Rush until Lost World, when they actually made a 3D game. Sonic Generations even gave Classic Sonic a homing attack when it reached the Dreamcast Era after they didn't have a 2D level to base stages off of. That's a whole range of games to avoid if you didn't like the playstyle. 

 
I heavily curate my physical collection and still have north of 500 titles across 16 platforms.  I don't collect anything with a cartridge save handhelds and Switch because hooking them up to modern TVs while looking good takes extra special hardware investments and storing carts is crazy.  More so when I can get a nice retro device that can play them nearly accurately for a song.
 

The Steam Deck is going to push more games digitally into my hands, since stuff I would normally thing "that's a Switch game" is now "that's a Steam Deck game."  LRG has a tough time selling me stuff; $4 for a Steam game or $40 for a Switch version 3 years from now. 

My physical wishlist is less than 20, including some high dollars acquisitions (Fire Emblem Path of Radiance, Solatorobo...), but my Steam wishlist is nearing 700, mostly unreleased stuff I just watch.

So I think my days of seeking out physical stuff is nearly ending, but its still fun to hunt and see things I've never seen before.  Sometimes I just find a too good to be true deal and pass the savings on to someone looking for whatever I find.  That's fun.

 
TheKbob said:
I heavily curate my physical collection and still have north of 500 titles across 16 platforms. I don't collect anything with a cartridge save handhelds and Switch because hooking them up to modern TVs while looking good takes extra special hardware investments and storing carts is crazy. More so when I can get a nice retro device that can play them nearly accurately for a song.
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I tried doing that and ended up buying more games.... LOL

 
TheKbob said:
I heavily curate my physical collection and still have north of 500 titles across 16 platforms. I don't collect anything with a cartridge save handhelds and Switch because hooking them up to modern TVs while looking good takes extra special hardware investments and storing carts is crazy. More so when I can get a nice retro device that can play them nearly accurately for a song.

The Steam Deck is going to push more games digitally into my hands, since stuff I would normally thing "that's a Switch game" is now "that's a Steam Deck game." LRG has a tough time selling me stuff; $4 for a Steam game or $40 for a Switch version 3 years from now.

My physical wishlist is less than 20, including some high dollars acquisitions (Fire Emblem Path of Radiance, Solatorobo...), but my Steam wishlist is nearing 700, mostly unreleased stuff I just watch.

So I think my days of seeking out physical stuff is nearly ending, but its still fun to hunt and see things I've never seen before. Sometimes I just find a too good to be true deal and pass the savings on to someone looking for whatever I find. That's fun.
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I kept telling myself I'll get around to curating my collection, but at this point, I've just placed that on the perpetual backburner. In the interim, I'll usually pick up a game here/there if I want to play it and it reaches a reasonable sale price. Can't justify buying games at full price anymore ... unless it's a so-called limited print run (though I think I'm generally done with those, too) or an import (but even then, seldom at msrp).

Like you, I also sense my physical game buying days are numbered. I can see myself buying far fewer games this current gen given the way publishers are handling releases (i.e., critically unfinished games or material dlc content, or just the usual holding back content to sell as microtransactions). I don't think we'll see nearly as many publishers bothering with GOTY/complete editions, either. It's what the consumer trajectory has been for quite some time so none of this comes as a surprise. Selfishly, I can't say I mind it all that much in that it means I'll stop spending money on games, and maybe make an actual dent on the games gathering dust in my collection.
 
As a gamer who has been gaming since the earliest days of home videogames, I realize that while I still have a love of gaming, the fire I had to buy and play every high-profile game is gone for me. Unlike movies (and I collect those too) where I can enjoy one in an hour and a half or two hours, there just aren't enough hours in the day to really commit to playing a game through like in my younger days. When I realize how many games I have that I barely played through because it could not keep my interest or because I couldn't beat it because my reflexes and mind are dwindling due to age, I can compare it to watching a movie and never seeing it to the end. Glad to see my son can commit to playing a game through for 2 weeks to a month so we actually buy far fewer games than we used to from even a few year ago where I used to buy every game I even have the slightest interest in when it drops in price. I'm tired of adding to a backlog I will never get to. As an older gamer, I keep going back to my older games that I played when I was young that gave me so much enjoyment while my son's interest are only in the newest games.

Nowadays, I'm buying only games we're committed to playing through and I'm committed to buying games physically although it ticks me off to no end knowing the full content of so many physical games are not on the disk(s) and requires downloads. I'm tired of remasters being brought over to every new generation of consoles but is more partial to remakes although I find it sad that game publishers often don't make new games with stories and gameplay as riveting as their older counterparts.
 
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Rhapsody II & III got announced, western release.   Rad.

And you can buy Disgaea 7, too.  Maybe rad?

I won't be pre-ordering either since NIS pissed me off with breaking every single Prinny Presents release with a game ending bug on each cart.

I'll get them on PC on sale. To tie it with the previous conversation, no point in owning a physical product if its broken without patches!

 
Oh that's kind of cool Rhapsody II & III are coming west. I didn't even know they existed since I don't follow japanese only releases for the genre.

consoleman said:
Unlike movies (and I collect those too) where I can enjoy one in an hour and a half or two hours
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I stopped collecting most movies. I will on rare occasions buy something but for the most part I'm happy seeing something in streaming for one watch and be happy and move on. The main exceptions are the occasional marvel movies and star wars... though even Marvel I stopped buying them since it's easier to just have Disney+. In the end I don't re-watch movies that much outside of the certain classics and even those it's more like every 5 to 10 years.

 
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TheKbob said:
Rhapsody II & III got announced, western release. Rad.

And you can buy Disgaea 7, too. Maybe rad?

I won't be pre-ordering either since NIS pissed me off with breaking every single Prinny Presents release with a game ending bug on each cart.

I'll get them on PC on sale. To tie it with the previous conversation, no point in owning a physical product if its broken without patches!
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That sums it up. I'm hype for the games themselves, but I am beyond wary of NISA at this point.
 
I too had no idea these was a sequel to Rhapsody... much less two of them. 

I too am also over NISA, seems like most of their releases have some major bigs/issues and their CEs suck. 

 
TheKbob said:
Rhapsody II & III got announced, western release. Rad.

And you can buy Disgaea 7, too. Maybe rad?

I won't be pre-ordering either since NIS pissed me off with breaking every single Prinny Presents release with a game ending bug on each cart.

I'll get them on PC on sale. To tie it with the previous conversation, no point in owning a physical product if its broken without patches!
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PS5/Switch/PC only. Not rad.
 
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