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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elessar123 said:
At this point, you might as well wait for the complete edition, since The Answer is already going to be another $35. Then they said they won't add FEMC, but who knows.
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I believe them. Porting the FeMC route without halfassing it means new recorded dialogue for existing content (to replace pronouns, alter gender specific scenes, etc) AND for all of FeMC’s social links, which is a substantially bigger investment than the Answer—not a big enough investment that they couldn’t do it and make a little money off it, but one I’m sure the team leads aren’t keen on with their little men-only man club for MegaTen protags.
 
Souffrir said:
I believe them. Porting the FeMC route without halfassing it means new recorded dialogue for existing content (to replace pronouns, alter gender specific scenes, etc) AND for all of FeMC’s social links, which is a substantially bigger investment than the Answer—not a big enough investment that they couldn’t do it and make a little money off it, but one I’m sure the team leads aren’t keen on with their little men-only man club for MegaTen protags.
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Kazuhisa Wada actually just recently stated FeMC in Reload would have been too expensive to add: https://www.gamesradar.com/persona-...ost-two-to-three-times-that-of-episode-aigis/

I was certain before this article came out that we're never getting FeMC in Reload, considering it always seems like she was made simply to sell Portable to female players and players who had already potentially bought the game twice on PS2 (plus, new FeMC content would help soften the blow of losing a lot of the original game's production values due to the PSP's limitations). I've accepted she's essentially fanfiction, albeit very good fanfiction that I prefer over the male MC. And yeah, the boys club over at Atlus is a little tiring. But hey, we got Ringo in Soul Hackers 2 and she was amazing, easily one of the best MegaTen protagonists.

I'm around 40 hours into the game now and it's still fun as hell. I paid $50 for it and it's easily worth $40 if you want to play it now. There's these new night hangouts with the party members that are really cute and fully voiced! I'm actually stunned by how much dialogue is voiced (a lot still isn't, of course, but it's way more than I was expecting). Still not a fan of Akihiko and now Shinji's VA, while Fuuka and Aigis are fine, I guess. The original Aigis VA sounded more (fittingly) robotic, kind of like Lal from Star Trek TNG, and I feel I'm one of the few people who actually liked Fuuka's first VA. Ken and the Strega members are also fine, nothing special (there is no beating Takaya's original VA). But, I won't beat that dead horse any further. I've gotten used to the new voices.
 
 
Bandai-Namco's hatred for Tales fans continues. All of the games are available on-disc, but the story DLC for Zestiria and all of the other miscellaneous DLC are lost to the digital void.
 
Tothoro said:
Bandai-Namco's hatred for Tales fans
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Other than Pac-Man and anime fans, I’m sure pretty sure you guys are Bamco’s favorite people. They certainly like you more than fans of any of their other RPGs, their back catalog of arcade IPs other than Pac-Man, their fighting games, or their racing games, not to mention people named Takahashi.
 
DesertLeo said:
....shit, now I need to convince myself not to grab Trinity Trigger, Silent Hope, and Loop8 for $60 shipped.
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Yesterday I was able to resist... but today your post had me look again as I wasn't aware of the free shipping... and I ended up caving in on Day 1 editions of Trinity Trigger, Silent Hope, and Akiba's Trip Undead & Undressed and opted out of a standard copy of Loop 8. I have the vita version of Akiba's Trip U&U, but I didn't dig too deep into it and that's more likely to happen on the switch.

$0 shipping on orders over $50 and they didn't collect tax for my zip code. So $59.97 for three day 1 edition games (not that I care about extras). I can't imagine there was going to be a better deal than that later.

Tothoro said:
Bandai-Namco's hatred for Tales fans continues. All of the games are available on-disc, but the story DLC for Zestiria and all of the other miscellaneous DLC are lost to the digital void.
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I would assume Tales Fans buy the games and dlc? IF so, nothing is lost to them. The stuff is only lost to those who are casual fans or who just discovered the series that didn't buy the content when it was listed.

It's like all the fear over Scott Pilgrim or the Capcom Marvel games being delisted on the PS3.... I stil can download those games and all the dlc for scott pilgrim.
 
Speaking of the Zestiria DLC, I have been watching the Bonus Chapter: Alisha's Conviction for years waiting for it to go on sale, it never has for some reason. I just noticed it came out in 2015! I guess I'm going to have to pay full price. The Evangelion Costume Set is also cool, also never on sale.
 
scorponok said:
Speaking of the Zestiria DLC, I have been watching the Bonus Chapter: Alisha's Conviction for years waiting for it to go on sale, it never has for some reason. I just noticed it came out in 2015! I guess I'm going to have to pay full price. The Evangelion Costume Set is also cool, also never on sale.
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The Alisha DLC was free for a limited time, which is the only reason I played it.
 
nightc1 said:
Yesterday I was able to resist... but today your post had me look again as I wasn't aware of the free shipping... and I ended up caving in on Day 1 editions of Trinity Trigger, Silent Hope, and Akiba's Trip Undead & Undressed and opted out of a standard copy of Loop 8. I have the vita version of Akiba's Trip U&U, but I didn't dig too deep into it and that's more likely to happen on the switch.

$0 shipping on orders over $50 and they didn't collect tax for my zip code. So $59.97 for three day 1 edition games (not that I care about extras). I can't imagine there was going to be a better deal than that later.



I would assume Tales Fans buy the games and dlc? IF so, nothing is lost to them. The stuff is only lost to those who are casual fans or who just discovered the series that didn't buy the content when it was listed.

It's like all the fear over Scott Pilgrim or the Capcom Marvel games being delisted on the PS3.... I stil can download those games and all the dlc for scott pilgrim.
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Tales of wise graces had a smaller print and sales were only around 65k back then. Mostly because bamco mishandled the series. It didn't get localized till years later which is why they had a backlog of unlocalized titles for years. Arise vesperia de and symphonia crappy port aside added an large influx of new players who never played those ps3/vita titles besides symphonia.

So less than 10% of the fan base hasn't played graces to sum things up. Even fewer played Xillia 2 as it was around 40k. But to be fair that was a low budget sequel that reused assets and started the awful trend of forced party members and avatars.
 
shadowysea07 said:
Tales of wise graces had a smaller print and sales were only around 65k back then. Mostly because bamco mishandled the series. It didn't get localized till years later which is why they had a backlog of unlocalized titles for years. Arise vesperia de and symphonia crappy port aside added an large influx of new players who never played those ps3/vita titles besides symphonia.

So less than 10% of the fan base hasn't played graces to sum things up. Even fewer played Xillia 2 as it was around 40k. But to be fair that was a low budget sequel that reused assets and started the awful trend of forced party members and avatars.
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While it's a shame it's not more available as a series to people that newly discover the series, it's kind of surprising a lot of these games managed to survive being available for purchase this long after the death of those platforms.
 
nightc1 said:
While it's a shame it's not more available as a series to people that newly discover the series, it's kind of surprising a lot of these games managed to survive being available for purchase this long after the death of those platforms.
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Probably due to the bundles they did. There was a graces symphonia bundle they did a few years later. I wasn't aware of the Xillia 1 and 2 bundle someone posted on Twitter. I assume that it didn't get localized outside eu.
 
62t said:
I think it was 2 weeks. People were upset that Alisha was only in the game for a short time.
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No it was around a month I believe but may vary depending on your region and platform. I know for pc it was closer to 8 and a half weeks since I was a preorder person so I got the tos freebie plus the God eater and Alisha dlc for free and the other add ons.

Iirc console players got hosed and had to get a code directly from bamco to redeem the dlc within a month.

As for the Alisha debacle that was due to their false advertising and then shady as hell backpedaling and actively going out of the way to update their games to remove any reference for her being the heroine.

Originally Alisha was in the party in the demo for a dragon boss when she isn't for the real game.

A lot of the advertising materials marketed her as well despite her only being in the party till shortly before the end of part 1. Rose takes her slot unless you exploit a glitch to keep her in the party. Said glitch they also quickly patched out. But didn't fix any of the other ones including falling through the ground losing skin among other things. Worst being saves randomly disappeared. I had to start the game over after losing my 11 hour save and later lost a 6 hours worth of progress save. Both reappeared towards the end of the game. There was a positive glitch where instead of repels encounters the holy bottle removed almost all the encounters in the final dungeon.
 
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nightc1 said:
While it's a shame it's not more available as a series to people that newly discover the series, it's kind of surprising a lot of these games managed to survive being available for purchase this long after the death of those platforms.
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The PS3 and Vita stores are still up and running, although they are annoying to use. I don't really think it's unreasonable to expect content to continue to be available on a storefront, especially when no announcement about delisting was made..

On the note of Tales fans having already bought the games, maybe? I have them all physical, but if I wanted to go back and grab some cosmetic DLC I'm SOL. It's possible people didn't have money at the time, didn't realize there were other titles, lost or damaged their physical copies, etc.

I do acknowledge most of those points aren't unique to Tales (more criticisms of a digital ecosystem broadly), but it's just another dash of salt in the wound for how Bamco treats the series and its fans. 5/30 titles in the series (including spin-offs) are available on modern systems, the quality of the recent ToS port was not great, and the pace of ports/localizations/new games has slowed to a glacial pace, etc. It's a sad state of affairs for a series that (decades ago) was in the same echelon as DQ and FF.
 
Tothoro said:
I don't really think it's unreasonable to expect content to continue to be available on a storefront, especially when no announcement about delisting was made..
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I think it was pretty amazing these lasted as long as they did for the Vita and PS3. I can't even get the free optional fast loading add-on for nine year old Xenoblade Chronicles X because the storefront for even getting free content with the Wii-U is already gone. For the PS3 stuff, it's been two generations of consoles since then and only now are some of the last remnants starting to get pulled.

Tothoro said:
I do acknowledge most of those points aren't unique to Tales (more criticisms of a digital ecosystem broadly)
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This was always going to be a problem with Digital and worse having DLC sold separately as a nickle and dime experience. It's why for some series, I've just opted out of all the side content unless I'm actually playing the game and it adds some story/adventure to the game. I'm not buying character skins or costumes and stuff like that.
 
I own all the Tales PS3 games physically so stonks, but yeah that is a lame delisting. I honestly wonder how long Sony will keep up the Vita/PS3 shops. I doubt too much longer honestly.
 
nitrosmob said:
I own all the Tales PS3 games physically so stonks, but yeah that is a lame delisting. I honestly wonder how long Sony will keep up the Vita/PS3 shops. I doubt too much longer honestly.
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Masterkyo24 said:
i own all the tales games as well. It's good physical copies value go up :)
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I think I have most, if not all of the North American Tales releases physically, but can't recall for sure. Might be missing one one the PSP and/or Vita. Are any of the Tales games outside of the PS1 releases actually worth anything? Like the standard editions or even the special editions? I know the PS1 releases are worth quite a bit.
 
Honestly I don't think so yet. Tales of Hearts R (Vita one) seems to be the one selling for more. If you want to collect them, the prices for all of them are pretty good other than the PS1 ones.
 
While it didn't get an na release I have the eu version of tales of Eternia psp. As well as all the English release titles besides tod ps1 top gba, toa 3ds and toe ps1.

I think the ps2 titles are starting to go up and tos obviously goes for a bit since Gamecube version plus it being still the definitive version of the game as all the other ports are crappy ps2 based ports.
 
Finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Platinum took me 173 hours. Everything I said earlier still holds true but I would emphasize that all of the AI shortcomings really flaunt themselves on Hard and especially the Brutal/Legendary VR challenges. Though again, it's hard to fault the game too much for difficulty on optional content. Solid 9.5/10 game. I think this is the most manically I've played a new game in quite a while - it's pretty much all I've done in March outside of work and errands.
 
Tothoro said:
Finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Platinum took me 173 hours. Everything I said earlier still holds true but I would emphasize that all of the AI shortcomings really flaunt themselves on Hard and especially the Brutal/Legendary VR challenges. Though again, it's hard to fault the game too much for difficulty on optional content. Solid 9.5/10 game. I think this is the most manically I've played a new game in quite a while - it's pretty much all I've done in March outside of work and errands.
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dayam Tothoro. that's an incredible amount of work and dedication.

nicely done. :giggle:
 
I am 98 hours in and just starting chapter 12. I'm exploring everything on my own, doing full map completions, stopping to smell all the roses, and avoiding online guides. (kids these days and their instant gratification amirite?) Game has several very minor flaws that make it an 8.5/10. Then the fan service and fun factor easily bump it back up to 9.5. And that's being VERY generous about recognizing the negatives. The game is significantly better than the sum of its parts. The things is does well, it does really well. The dialogue, music, minigames, and cinematic prodcution. It's the perfect jrpg, and the most Final Fantasy to ever Final Fantasy.

Initially, I had a master plan to offer to trade my disc to an acquaintance on my friends list after completion in order to borrow and play his P3R. Good idea right? But I don't think that's going to work any longer. There's too much stuff to tie up and I don't think I can lose access to this game.
 
I confess that I put the game down
in the middle of Corel. With the bias of strong love of the original game, I pretty much hated everything Remake did with Sector 6. Was not pleased to see all the cringey npcs, bad music, etc magically exported to CDS / Corel. There's enough good stuff in Rebirth without having to recycle those assets. I'll finish eventually, because I genuinely liked parts (Mythril Mine and Upper Junon probably are favorites so far).
 
Starcrest said:
Ultimate Party Animal quest is bugged, so no platinum for me.
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This caught my attention, as that is exactly where I am right now, but was not aware of or experiencing a bug yet. I looked it up and apparently it’s the latest patch that bugged it. If you uninstall game, reinstall and play offline, finish whatever was holding you up on the side quest, then go back online, it should let you get through it. Or you can just save the side quest for later, they should have a fix soon. If you bought digital, out of luck till then.
 
gospelman said:
Haven't seen this posted yet. But there's currently a 1 day extra 10% discount at checkout for prime members using the woot app. This took the P5R CE below the point I was waiting for ($50) so I finally bought it. Rune Factory 3 Special LE around $28 is also good.
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Thanks for sharing, I got Silent Hope for $24 with that discount. Didn't want anything else from the XSeed sale so this was perfect.
 
Man, all this talk of Rebirth and I'm just anxious to get going once busy season ends. In the meantime, I've bought a lot of random FFVII swag during my morning and evening train rides...

Also, Ryza 1-3 reprint incoming via VGP. Knew 3 was hard to find, but didn't realize there was demand for the other two as well since those were reprinted a few times already, I think?
videogamesplus.ca

VGP REPRINT RESTOCK

VIDEOGAMESPLUS.CA
videogamesplus.ca videogamesplus.ca

Also checking my VGP open orders... no shipment for Ys 8, or the two Caligula reprints...:whistle2:/
 
Vinny said:
Man, all this talk of Rebirth and I'm just anxious to get going once busy season ends. In the meantime, I've bought a lot of random FFVII swag during my morning and evening train rides...

Also, Ryza 1-3 reprint incoming via VGP. Knew 3 was hard to find, but didn't realize there was demand for the other two as well since those were reprinted a few times already, I think?
videogamesplus.ca

VGP REPRINT RESTOCK

VIDEOGAMESPLUS.CA
videogamesplus.ca videogamesplus.ca

Also checking my VGP open orders... no shipment for Ys 8, or the two Caligula reprints...:whistle2:/
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I know Ryza 1 was low US availability but UK version was plentiful.
 
Vinny said:
Man, all this talk of Rebirth and I'm just anxious to get going once busy season ends. In the meantime, I've bought a lot of random FFVII swag during my morning and evening train rides...

Also, Ryza 1-3 reprint incoming via VGP. Knew 3 was hard to find, but didn't realize there was demand for the other two as well since those were reprinted a few times already, I think?
videogamesplus.ca

VGP REPRINT RESTOCK

VIDEOGAMESPLUS.CA
videogamesplus.ca videogamesplus.ca

Also checking my VGP open orders... no shipment for Ys 8, or the two Caligula reprints...:whistle2:/
Click to expand...
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1772995954632720524
 
SephirothWF said:
Ryza 1 has had so many reprints.
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Starcrest said:
I know Ryza 1 was low US availability but UK version was plentiful.
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Vinny said:
Man, all this talk of Rebirth and I'm just anxious to get going once busy season ends. In the meantime, I've bought a lot of random FFVII swag during my morning and evening train rides...

Also, Ryza 1-3 reprint incoming via VGP. Knew 3 was hard to find, but didn't realize there was demand for the other two as well since those were reprinted a few times already, I think?
videogamesplus.ca

VGP REPRINT RESTOCK

VIDEOGAMESPLUS.CA
videogamesplus.ca videogamesplus.ca

Also checking my VGP open orders... no shipment for Ys 8, or the two Caligula reprints...:whistle2:/
Click to expand...
Ryza was getting steady restocks on Amazon. And everytime Wario posted it sold out.
 
Are the Ryza games that good/popular? I feel like the Atelier games were pretty niche but Ryza is one that seems to be talked about all the time.

I also had bit of time and played the Steller Blade demo... didn't really think it was that great, certainly not merit all the coverage at least (yes, I get the sexual aspect but come-on, there's tons of horny-games these days). Visually impressive at times (hair/cloths) but so lifeless (boring worlds, tons of foliage that's completely dead still outside of cut-scenes). Gameplay seems like it should be fun but it just feels too clunky, the parry system was great but the dodge felt off, not sure how to describe it (feels more like a Suda 51 PS3 game rather than something more modern like Nier Automata). Music sucks dong- almost put me to sleep.
 
Vinny said:
Are the Ryza games that good/popular? I feel like the Atelier games were pretty niche but Ryza is one that seems to be talked about all the time.

I also had bit of time and played the Steller Blade demo... didn't really think it was that great, certainly not merit all the coverage at least (yes, I get the sexual aspect but come-on, there's tons of horny-games these days). Visually impressive at times (hair/cloths) but so lifeless (boring worlds, tons of foliage that's completely dead still outside of cut-scenes). Gameplay seems like it should be fun but it just feels too clunky, the parry system was great but the dodge felt off, not sure how to describe it (feels more like a Suda 51 PS3 game rather than something more modern like Nier Automata). Music sucks dong- almost put me to sleep.
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Good to see VGP doing reprints. Always for publishers reprinting hard-to-find games so more players can access them at reasonable prices.

As for Steller Blade, I've got it preordered so am avoiding the demo. I feel like it's PS5's "Heavenly Blade," which was another one of those pretty-girl-with-sword games that Sony published (and coincidentally, also one Microsoft passed on as it Stellar Blade). I'm not surprised the gameplay is a bit rough around the edges; the reports thus far in the podcasts I've listened to have been pretty positive so barring news that the game turns out to be downright awful or not on the disc, I'll likely leave my preorder in place.
 
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