The dating sim genre is one that hasn’t really made much of an impact in Western markets. For those unfamiliar with the concept, essentially they are story-driven games that have a branching narrative, where your main source of input is an occasional choice, in order to reach a goal of, well… dating one of the characters. More of a visual novel than a game with much gameplay, they tend to be popular amongst the otaku culture. But y’know, the formula has been getting stale for a while, it’s just a set of archetypal characters that fit into a subset of personality traits. And it all gets very samey.
So it seems that some companies have decided to break the mold and try something different. And that kind of radical outside-the-box thinking is how we’ve ended up with the feature of this article.
The game is Hatoful Boyfriend. It’s a dating sim, like any other. There are the typical array of male characters, from your best friend to your teacher, from the doctor to the shy one that sits in the library. But perhaps the most obvious and interesting difference is that everyone in the game, apart from the main character, are birds.
Oh man look at that one on the left.
Yes, I mean literally birds. As in feathered winged warm-blooded egg-laying vertebrates. Each bird has a male personification that you see when the character is first introduced, and they even have their own voice actors! (It should be noted that the game itself doesn’t have voice acting, but you are encouraged to imagine it as if it did.) But after the initial introductions, it’s all about the birds. I never cease to be amazed by some of the things that make it out of Japan.
The game itself was released in August of last year, but the official English translation has been brought out a few days ago. If the idea of trying to woo pigeons into dating you sounds like your idea of a fun time, the game can be picked up for just $5.35 from here!
Alternatively, if you want to have a closer look at the game before you make your purchasing decision, you can check out the first episode of my new Let’s Play of the game in the following video!
o·ta·ku
(noun)
1. an avid collector or enthusiast, esp. one who is obsessed anime, video games, or computer and rarely leaves home. 2. (In Japan) Young people who are highly skilled in or obsessed with computer technology to the detriment of their social skills.
As a writer on this blog, sometimes I have to make judgement calls and skew my interpretations of the above definition. This site was set up as a general place for us to post about anything anime-related or video-game-related, or about Japan in general. As far as I know there’s no clear ‘line’ as to what does and doesn’t belong on here. So as a gamer, I’m always wondering if something belongs on here. Pokémon? Definitely otaku. Layton? Yep. Steam sales? Well it’s certainly video-game related, but it’s nothing to do with Japan at all. So I’d guess probably not, right? But then someone makes a post about Minecraft and I’m all confused again.
So you know what? I’m a gamer, and as long as I’m still alive, Steam sales belong on this website dammit! This is my section, I can do what I want with it! Hmph.
December 19th marked the beginning of this year’s winter Steam sales! Almost every game on Steam has a massive chunk taken out of the price, and every day until January 1st, 12 games get their price reduced even more. A bunch of games have added achievements to go for, and there’s even a chance to win the prize of EVERY SINGLE STEAM GAME for participating. Now that’s a prize I want to win. (If only for that Railworks 3 DLC worth $1545.96).
To commemorate this occasion, throughout the sales I’ll be making a video on my youtube channel highlighting the deals, talking about the games and generally handing out my recommendations like candy. Steam sales are traditionally times that all gamers unite to give Valve all of their money. Because Steam deals are just *TOO GOOD*. I’m not going to be posting any more about this on CollectiveOtaku, the purpose of this post is just to drive people towards them and let them know they exist! So here’s the link to today’s entry, day 5 of the Steam sales! Future editions (and past editions) can be found on my Youtube channel here!
Incidentally, you may wonder why I’m calling this section ‘JGaming’ for this update. “But oh great and powerful Mindez!” I hear you cry, “This has nothing to do with Japanese Gaming! Surely you should call it WGaming or something!” To which I respond “Oh, there’s a reason, Billy. There’s definitely a reason.”
And there is, for the second reason I made this update today was because today I discovered that I will be getting a Japanese 3DS and an import of the Japanese 3DS Professor Layton game, レイトン教授と奇跡の仮面 (Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracle), for Christmas this year. So I feel justified in calling this section the ‘JGaming’ section. (Actually, I’m calling it JGaming because I can call it whatever I want! It’s not like this blog has editors or anything.)
This will probably be my last update before Christmas, so have a happy Christmas. And think of me playing my new Layton game as you sip your eggnog and watch domestic disputes break out in houses up and down the country this Christmas day. …All families have those at Christmas, right?
Back in November, Nintendo made the announcement that a new Pokémon game would be announced before the end of the year. Yesterday, they followed through with that and now we know what the next DS Pokémon title is going to be. Is it Pokémon Gray, like everybody thought? No, in fact they have very clearly stated that there will not be a Pokémon Grey. In fact, it’s not even a new game in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series, or the Pokémon Ranger series, or a sequel to any of the standalone Pokémon games.
I can just imagine the pitch meeting. Everyone sitting around thinking of ideas. One guy suddenly snaps his finger and goes “Got it! Pokémon in FEUDAL JAPAN!” to which Tsunekaz Ishihara jumps up and shouts “Yes! This man is a genius!” and then there would be some brofists and high fives and they’d order pizza or something. I have a pretty good grasp of how these kind of meetings go, I think.
The game is slated for release some time in Spring 2012 in Japan. No immediate plans for a US/EU release. The game is a crossover between the Pokémon franchise and the Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise. Both have a significant number of games in their respective series’, and both are fairly popular in Japan. I can’t really say much for the popularity of Nobunaga’s Ambition outside of Japan, being from the UK we’ve actually never had a Nobunaga’s Ambition game, so I’d only heard of the series when this was announced. But it seems like an incredibly weird and incredibly unexpected crossover.
So, Nobunaga’s Ambition is a turn based strategy game where you have to conquer land, build armies and use them to battle your enemies. Pokémon is a game where you roam the world collecting cute monsters and use them to battle your enemies. So I guess there’s a FEW similarities – They’re both bloodthirsty battling simulators. Yeah, that pretty much sums up Pokémon.
From the looks of things, the gameplay seems very closely modelled off of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series, and in my opinion it probably will turn out to be simply Pokémon Mystery Dungeon with an overarching storyline set in feudal Japan. Which I don’t think is by any means a bad thing, I’m a fan of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games and I do think that it’s the story that lets those games down, so this definitely has the potential to take a good idea and making it better. And I think this game definitely has potential. I’ll certainly be importing it since it’ll probably take numerous years to see a European release.
And who knows, maybe next year we’ll see Pokémon + Professor Layton or Pokémon + Phoenix Wright. I could definitely see Layton and Phoenix Wright being awesome Pokémon trainers.
Well, it kinda looks like this blog has become a little bit defunct. The hosting’s going to run out soon and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be renewed. A real shame. So chances are, nobody is going to see this post.
But you know what? I’m going to post it anyway. Partly because I just woke up this morning thinking about this blog and how much potential it had when we first got together to start it, partly because I have another episode of Layton 4 to post (albeit one that has been on Youtube for a good few… months now) and partly because I’ve spontaneously decided to have a little competition with myself to see who can get the last post on CollectiveOtaku before it goes down. I’m winning, by the way. That’s the joy of having competitions with nobody but yourself.
It’s kinda fitting, then, that the last post on CollectiveOtaku, and my last post on CollectiveOtaku, and my last JGaming update, should also be the last episode of Layton 4. I put it off too long – In two days, Layton 4 will be released in America (Although I won’t be able to get it for another month and a half thanks to the time it’ll take to localise from English to English which I understand is a VERY complex matter). And I’m sure I’ll get that game, and I’m sure I’ll be LPing that game in another couple of weeks or so, on my channel, in English. There’ll be other Japanese games I’ll want to play of course, down the line. I’d love to make it a habit to import Japanese games and LP them. It’s just not something that will be happening here.
I really do think this place had potential, but I don’t think any of us (Myself included, Navarr excluded) were really putting in the time or organisation that would have seen it. And now we’re all off working on our own projects, our own studies, our own lives. And while I never really got the opportunity to get to know many of the writers for this blog (Excluding the couple that I already knew before starting it), I’m glad to have been part of it. See you around.
This is how the blog ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
When I was a kid, I had a Sega Master System. But that’s kinda irrelevant because I can’t actually remember almost any of the games that were on it. So yeah, let’s just skip that generation. When I was a (slightly older) kid, I had a Sega Mega Drive (Or I guess a ‘Genesis’ for like 95% of people that are going to read this). The Sega consoles were the first that I ever owned and I have many memories of games I used to play.
For some reason, I guess from some yard sale or somewhere, I actually owned a Japanese copy of a game on the Mega Drive that I’ve come to learn was called “Shining in the Darkness” (Or “Shining and the Darkness” in Japanese). It was a hassle to get the game to work to begin with, since Japanese Mega Drive cartridges were differently shaped and the console actually did have a built-in software region lock, but I eventually managed to play the game and, well, there I was playing a game entirely in Japanese. That was my first encounter with the Japanese language, actually. Quite fitting that my first encounter with Japanese would be related to gaming, actually. Perhaps this is subconciously fuelling my desire to be a Games Programmer at a Japanese company. Who knows.
But yeah, I didn’t understand a word of it. But it was still an awesome game that I was really enjoying; the story itself was very minimal, basic dungeon roaming kind of experience. As far as gameplay elements went, it was easy to see my health and level. I think the main stumbling point of that game came when I had to figure out the shops, since enemies were just smashing through my armor. That’s probably the point at which I gave up. Since I got the English version a few months later, it wasn’t a big deal for me at the time. I gotta say as well, younger me had a lot more patience than I did, considering the opening cutscenes are kinda long to not understand any of it.
Shining and the Darkness, my first ever Japanese gaming experience.
So yeah, it’s kind of fitting that my first experience with Japanese at all came from a gaming point of view considering the topic of this post. But the point I’ve tried to make, in a kind of roundabout tangential kind of way, is that I am a gamer. I’ve been a gamer since first turning on my Mega Drive, and I’ll be a gamer until… well, probably until some big company ruins everything about gaming in their hunt for profit (I give it about 3-4 years at an outside guess). Even then I’ll probably still be gaming, dusting off the hard drive with all my emulators and playing through all the classics again.
Back in February of last year, I started a Youtube channel. Well, technically not STARTED a Youtube channel, since I’ve had the channel for about 5 years now. But I started posting to it. Attempting to follow in the wake of big star Youtubers like Chuggaaconroy, SSoHPKC, NintendoCapriSun, ProtonJon, etc. as a Let’s Player; someone who essentially just played games, recorded it, and talked. A simple formula, but one that tends to result in amazingly entertaining videos, particularly from the aforementioned people. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but hey.
In the last month or so of my LPing career so to speak, I’ve been a bit too busy to work on actual LP series’ for having to do lots of intense revision for some exams that are coming up, so to avoid major prolonged downtime I decided to start another series. A quick series, a series that I could basically just open an emulator, hit record, blabble on, then post it. Lemme just tell you… that didn’t work out.
For some reason I’d decided to play through a Japanese game; Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Flute. I.. can’t remember why I started this project when I knew I’d basically have next to no time to do anything, but I did it anyway. The idea was that I could pick up some Japanese while translating every line, it’d be super quick and it’d be a pretty awesome idea for a series. It may have been an awesome idea for a series, but it sure wasn’t quick. Oh well, who really cares about revision anyway. Right? Guys? …Right?
Ah well. So this is going to be my little niche in Collective Otaku – I’ll be posting occasional 15-or-so minute videos on my Youtube channel, http://www.youtube.com/mindez, and I’ll be mirroring them right here on Collective Otaku. They probably won’t be THAT regular, but they’ll exist at least.
So now, I present to you, Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Flute, the fourth game in the Layton series, set before all of the other English released ones so far, FULLY translated, line by line, painstakingly, including puzzles. The first three episodes are below! (Although the audio quality sucks on the first two because I was using my laptop. NEVER AGAIN!)
