Random JRPG News Thread

[Reinhardt]

Tournament.

 

[Walden]

https://twitter.com/koeitecmoeurope/status/914837348243959808


Nioh on Steam, 07/11/17.


Steam page:

 

[Rahdulan]

I can imagine the tears.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I can imagine the tears.

I'd hold that thought until the game is actually released. This is a Koei Tecmo PC port.

 

[Walden]

"The PC version can be played either on Action Mode, which features a stable 60fps, or on Movie Mode, which is described as a cinematic option that can expand the resolution to 4K. Koei Tecmo's note to press suggests you can't deviate from either of these two modes, no matter how powerful your PC."

 

[Hobo Elf]

What did I tell you.

 

[Siveon]

Translation: They didn't want to try for both. I'm sure some modder is gonna tweak an .ini file and get that correctly.

That doesn't make the game worse, since the PS4 option had the same deal IIRC. I think Toei at its worst would be when we purposefully get sabotaged ports that are worse than the PS4 version.

 

[flyingjohn]

Or just wait for the inevitable mod that will fix it.
And these two modes are not something that can't be reversed,especially if you look at previous tecmo pc games and their mods and fixes.
Now i would be much more worried if they were going for max 4k textures and fuck fps mode as the only standard.

 

[Damned Registrations]

https://twitter.com/koeitecmoeurope/status/914837348243959808


Nioh on Steam, 07/11/17.


Steam page:

Been waiting for this news. I love this style of game and there's not really any other contenders; Lords of the Fallen was scarcely worth the ~2$ I got it for. Recent updates suggest good faith towards the consumers as well.

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[IceyD]

Nioh was some hot repetitive fun. I will scoop it again.

 

[YES!]

Do you have questions?

Yeah, do you think western cuck developers will ever manage to make a RPG game as good as a japanese jrpg? I know, I know. It's very unlikely, maybe even impossible, but is there anyone out there who you think might have a chance at achieving such glory?

So no then. You are a pussy and a chicken as well as being a fucking poor taste rpg-hating child posting on site that is supposed to be devoted to against your type of general gamer.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Do you have questions?

Yeah, do you think western cuck developers will ever manage to make a RPG game as good as a japanese jrpg? I know, I know. It's very unlikely, maybe even impossible, but is there anyone out there who you think might have a chance at achieving such glory?

So no then. You are a pussy and a chicken as well as being a fucking poor taste rpg-hating child posting on site that is supposed to be devoted to against your type of general gamer.

So I take that as a no.

 

[LESS T_T]

And I thought Koei Tecmo's PC porting is (slowly) improving: http://wccftech.com/blue-reflection-720p-pc-koei-tecmo/

Dear Customer,

Thank you for your inquiry.

We prepare 2D images basically on the resolution of 1280*720 for BLUE REFLECTION Steam version, meanwhile 1920*1080 for PS4 version.
Therefore, if you play in the environment where the resolution is larger than 1280*720, the images are shown as stretched. We hope you will accept this.
We will consider conforming 2D images to a larger resolution, but cannot promise. We trust that you will understand our position in this matter.

"We hope you will accept this."
"We hope you will accept this."
"We hope you will accept this."

At least they fixed it post-launch: http://steamcommunity.com/games/658260/announcements/detail/1459588336520065815

Update Information（10/04/2017）

- Changed the resolution of the tutorial and other illustrations to 1920x1080.
- Fixed the problem of the game crushing after being played for a long period of time, or during a specific event.

 

[LESS T_T]

The Witch and the Hundred Knight 2 coming to west in 2018, only for PS4:



http://nisamerica.com/games/the-witch-and-the-hundred-knight-2/

Another lack of PC release from NISA. Porting 3D games is too much for them I guess?

 

[Hobo Elf]

How the hell did this get a sequel.

 

[flyingjohn]

Another lack of PC release from NISA. Porting 3D games is too much for them I guess?

More like nisa ceo expected half a million sales for games released years ago at a high price and is now butt hurt.
But with the ps3 emulator coming along there is no need for their ports.
And what the hell were they thinking with releasing phantom brave instead of diagea 3?
Even disgaea fans considered phantom brave niche let alone the general gaming audience.

 

[LESS T_T]

Steam and GOG pages for Zwei 2:



https://af.gog.com/game/zwei_the_ilvard_insurrection?as=1649904300

FEATURES

• Two Playable Characters for Tag-Team Action
  No need to go it alone when you’ve got the power of two on your side. Ragna roughs up foes in melee range, while Alwen fires off salvos of powerful magic or locks down enemies from afar. Switch between the two on the fly to create crazy combos!
  
• Unique Food-Based Experience System Gives Greater Control Over Leveling
  Experience is gained through eating food, so you can choose to cash in immediately, or save it to trade later for food worth even more EXP. You can even beat the game at level 1...if you dare.
  
• Strange and Quirky Setting with Strange and Quirky Characters
  The residents of Ilvard are a lively lot, and you can learn more about each one in your spare time as the story progresses. What’s the deal with that chain-smoking nun? Which of the three maids shirks the most work? And... is that a girl in a giant penguin costume?
  
• Brand New, Expanded English Voices
  We’ve greatly expanded on the Japanese release’s voice acting, with over 2000 never-before-voiced lines bringing the twists and turns of the main story to life.

----

Also non-Japanesse made RPG Maker RPG that doesn't look half-assed:

 

[LESS T_T]

God Eater 3 officially announced: http://gematsu.com/2017/10/god-eater-3-officially-announced

The new God Eater game, which was first announced at Tokyo Game Show 2016, is officially titled God Eater 3, Bandai Namco announced. Platform(s) and a release date were not announced.

Here’s the official description from Bandai Namco Entertainment:

After the successful launch of God Eater 2: Rage Burst, leading video game publisher and developer Bandai Namco Entertainment Asia announces that it will be bringing God Eater 3 that is totally upgraded from last series, the latest iteration of the monster slaying action RPG series. God Eater 3 is developed for home console.

A lot of years have been passed from the last battle. The earth is not anymore the place humans were used to live. The Aragami, terrifying beats are still raging around the world creating misery and destruction. To save the world and re-establish the balance new heroes has been raised – the God Eaters – man who have been gifted or cursed with new version of the God Arc weapons – special implants powered by Aragami cells. Team up with your other God Eaters to take down monstrous new Aragami that are tearing apart locations around the globe. But this won’t be your only mission, something is happening to the God Eaters and the line between dark and light has never been so thin… It’s time to start breaking free from the cursed shackles that bind the soul of the God Eaters while the battle will rush as never before…

God Eater 3 is planned for release worldwide, including the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia,Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia).

 

[Expon]

just let it die already...

 

[LESS T_T]

Some of SakuraGame's upcoming hentai RPGs (and RPG-likes) on Steam. Some are seemingly Chinese-made:

 

[Reinhardt]

Maybe i'll pick King Exit. I heard it's decent. For maker hentai game.

 

[LESS T_T]

Having that macron in the title is going to make search difficult.

And... they changed it.

---

XSEED's Zwei 2 Q&As: http://xseedgames.tumblr.com/post/166262857205/zwei-the-ilvard-insurrection-micro-bloggery

1) I’ve got a huge backlog of games. Why should I bump Zwei to the front of the queue?

It’s been a great year in videogames - perhaps TOO great, if my own backlog stack is any indication, and I have no doubt that many (most?) of you are in the same boat. But every now and then, we’ll get our hands on a game and it sort of effortlessly floats to the front of the queue, like it bought an expensive theme park pass. I’m under no illusion that Zwei will be “that game” for everyone, but for some of you, it might be! Let’s look at a couple reasons why Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection might be just the game you’ve been looking for (but didn’t realize it)!

First, it’s got a great “medium” length. You won’t be rolling the credits in 10 hours, but it’s also not an 80+ hour bear where you just look at it and sigh and think, “I know I’ll love this, but…when will I find the time to play it?” With Zwei: II’s 30-ish hour average playtime, it offers a fulfilling action RPG experience you can sink your teeth into, but you won’t need to cancel all your plans for the next month to make time for it.

Second, Zwei represents a heretofore-unknown prong of Falcom’s action RPG legacy. Falcom is famous for Ys, an action RPG series that has spanned decades at this point, and other titles in a roughly similar vein, like Brandish and Xanadu - in fact, it’s been joked that Falcom’s “XYZ” is Xanadu, Ys, and Zwei. But unlike many of their other offerings, nothing from the Zwei series has ever been officially available outside Japan…until now. As Falcom’s last/most recent PC-exclusive title (made in 2008), it straddles a fun line between old-school charm and modern conveniences and storytelling. It’s the Falcom quality you know, but in a world distinctly different from their other games.

Third, Zwei is made to be easy to pick up and spend some time with without having to invest a ton of time in a sitting. Dungeons are generally broken up into discrete “branches,” each of which can be undertaken on its own, with save points in between and the ability to fast-travel between any save point you’ve been to at least once. If you’ve got 30 minutes, you can get something done in Zwei. If you’ve got an hour, you can do even more! The game reflects modern sensibilities regarding variances in player engagement and time commitment, and that makes it really easy to pick up whenever you feel like playing.

If any of that piques your interest, I’d invite you to consider bumping Zwei to the front of your gaming queue.

More at the link.

 

[LESS T_T]

This post at "Translations of wapanese games" thread reminded me that Star Cruiser's programmer Kotori Yoshimura is making a spiritual successor.

A report by US Gamer last June (I wonder why I didn't post this at that time.): http://www.usgamer.net/articles/kot...er-revived-a-piece-of-japanese-gaming-history

Kotori Yoshimura and Star Cruiser: How Twitter Revived a Piece of Japanese Gaming History
An unlikely Twitter campaign unearths a unique chunk of video game history.


In September 2015, Japanese video game developer Kotori Yoshimura asked for a 1000 retweets so that she could start working on a follow-up to Star Cruiser, a cult first-person action RPG shooter released for the PC-88. The 1000 retweets came two years later, driven by a global network of video game lovers on Twitter. It's a feel-good story sure, but it was a long journey for Star Cruiser and Yoshimura to get there.



Kotori Yoshimura (née Katsunori Yoshimura) is the co-founder of the Japanese video game company Technosoft which was best known for Thunder Force, a franchise Hardcore Gaming 101 said stood out among its many shmup compatriots back in the 80s Japanese video game scene.

From there, Yoshimura went on to find Arsys Software where the company started developing games that incorporated early 3D graphics. Some of these games include WiBArM and Reviver for the PC-88. But it was Star Cruiser in 1988 that became the company's most highly-regarded success. Star Cruiser was an action RPG noted for featuring fully 3D polygonal graphics and unique gameplay that switched between first-person shooting gameplay to occasionally playing as a space flight simulator.

Star Cruiser predated 3D graphics in the industry by years, and won several awards from Japanese computer magazines like Best Adventure Game (POPCOM) and Best Special Effects (Oh!X). Star Cruiser also placed third runner-up for Game of the Year (Tetris won that year). Apparently, PlatinumGames' Hideki Kamiya lists Star Cruiser as one of his favorite games.

Unfortunately Star Cruiser never received a proper release abroad. Namco licensed and planned on releasing a North American rendition of the Mega Drive version of Star Cruiser (renamed Star Quest) for the Sega Genesis, but it never actually came out. Funny enough, an English translated ROM hack came out in November 2016, and you can buy a reproduced Star Cruiser Genesis cartridge on Etsy.

Basically, Star Cruiser still lives 30 years after it first came out on the PC-88, but until last month I had never heard of the game or its developer Kotori Yoshimura. It was first brought to my attention after Necrosoft Games' Brandon Sheffield found Yoshimura's 2015 Tweet asking for 1000 retweets to get back into the Star Cruiser development cockpit.



"I found the tweet while working here in Krakow... whenever I get flown out to a conference like this one (this time it was Digital Dragons in Poland), I get the rest of my team together at an Airbnb and we do a bunch of work in the same place," wrote Sheffield in an email. "Usually while working I just put on some YouTube playlists, and this guy, Dustin Odell, has a great series of Sega Genesis/Mega Drive recordings. While listening to these, I kept coming back to the Star Cruiser soundtrack, because it had such a great vibe to it. I knew Star Cruiser, but I hadn't really looked into the history behind it until I kept looping the soundtrack."

Incidentally, the soundtrack for Star Cruiser and its sequel Star Cruiser II were both composed by musician Toshiya Yamanaka. The music, like today, was well received, coming in third for best Theme Music in Oh!X's 1989 video game awards.

"I wound up doing some research about the game, then the company Arsys that made it, and through the process wound up reading about Yoshimura and her story. I went to see if she was on Twitter, because the last Wikipedia entry says 'she joined another company in 2008.' Then I saw her pinned tweet from 2015 saying if she got 1000 RTs she'd start working on a new Star Cruiser-like. I figured I had to make it happen, if she had had such an illustrious yet troubled career. So I basically wrote the whole story down in a series of tweets, and I guess it succeeded!"



After retweeting Yoshimura's original Tweet, Sheffield started a thread translating Yoshimura's career using her Japanese wikipedia page, as well as the Arsys and Technosoft wiki. In the time following Yoshimura's work on 3D games at Arsys, she went on to work with Polyphony Digital to help create the first Gran Turismo for the PlayStation as co-developer (Arsys was renamed Cyberhead at this point).

It was around this time that Yoshimura discovered the she had Gender Dysphoria. She was fired from several game development companies like Treasure as related to "health problems." Despite the setbacks, Yoshimura still ended up working on the MPEG/DVD format and doing optimization work on Intel's Pentium 4 processor.

Sheffield outlines much of these details in his thread, but what about Kotori Yoshimura? What happened after that 1000th retweet that finally arrived two years after the initial tweet?

"Honestly I thought 1000 [retweets] was the bare minimum I needed in order to keep going with this," said Yoshimura in a brief email interview Sheffield helped arrange. "When at first I didn't get anywhere near this number, I was terribly disappointed. But now, I am feeling like I should finally be getting started on this, making new art, music, designs, and some sort of prototype sample, with the feeling that I can now get greater support."

"Being such an experienced developer she sure doesn't need development help from me," said Sheffield who reached out to Yoshimura through Twitter DM shortly after retweeting her. Luckily, even though Yoshimura said she was very busy right now, she agreed to answer some of my questions as long as they weren't too long.

The first question on my mind though was why she decided to revive Star Cruiser nearly 30 years after the game first came out.

"There were two main triggers. One is that people kept making me offers like "hey, don't you want to revive Star Cruiser?" And one of those was quite recent. The other thing is I've been writing a novel called Kouchuu Senchou [lit: "Aircraft Captain"], which I uploaded to [the free novel-sharing site] Shōsetsuka ni Narō [lit: Let's Become a Novelist]. I sort of wrote it with the intention of it becoming a game, and I thought I could connect these two worlds. The world of Star Cruiser, with the new world I've been making in this novel."

Considering an English translation for Star Cruiser only surfaced seven months ago, it's easy to understand why Star Cruiser is still fresh in the memories of gamers. Really, Star Cruiser was ahead of the curve in terms of early 3D gameplay, it just seems more of a shame that Namco's planned Star Cruiser port never made it outside Japan.

"Even at this point, I haven't come across another game I feel is a true analog to Star Cruiser," said Yoshimura. "The shooting part may be similar to an FPS, but when you take the game as a whole, I don't think there's anything that matches the entire image."

Naturally, that made me wonder what kind of games Yoshimura comes across these days. "Well, I see the rising cost of development for those who want to make huge projects, and on the other hand there's the rise of indies as well, whose quality is increasing," she answered. "Recently in Japan, 'social games' are the thing, but it's 'social' only in name. It feels like most of them are tilted toward just taking money from the customers. Those kinds of games are growing, which is really sad... I'd like to make games that pursue the 'make players happy' angle first and foremost."

As video game companies continue to pursue trends where video games are considered services, it's hard not to look at Star Cruiser and the classic games of those eras as a kind of craft industry, rather than the behemoth size of modern video game production. In a way, the rise of social media is a return to those early offline days.

When Yoshimura first started programming 40 years ago, she says there was no network communication infrastructure for computers, so she relied mainly on magazine articles and reader's columns for new information. "I was active in these offline communities as a general reader, and when I joined the industry I responded to interviews in magazines as much as possible, wrote articles myself, and contributed programs [games] to them," explained Yoshimura.

"When it comes to Star Cruiser, I'd tried this sort of thing many times. For example, at Comic Market [A popular comic convention] in Japan, there aren't so many people selling [games]. So I actually tried to do that myself, several times. But I really didn't have so much time then, and I felt I was really losing sight of what it was I wanted to be doing, so it didn't go too well. I announced a few [games] there. In the current era with Facebook, Twitter, and the like, there are more ways people can see what they want to see, but the basic idea is unchanged."

Yet the thing that's changed the most for Yoshimura isn't necessarily tied to any video game cultural shift or technological trend or advancement. Rather it's the personal changes in her own life. While some of the details are too difficult to discuss, there have been many changes for her since her Comiket and Arsys days.

"For me, the biggest difference is really that I have a partner in my life now, named @marinyan. She helps me in my work, and has really become a strong power in my life," says Yoshimura. "I believe that anything that one person can't do alone, two people can somehow figure out how to do it. This is really why I thought about challenging something like [Star Cruiser] again."

As of currently, Yoshimura is a freelance programmer. While the sudden attention brought on by the resurfacing of a two year old tweet out of the blue has thrust her Star Cruiser project back into focus, she says she's looking for a financial buffer and some free time if she wants to fully embark on the project. She's still updating her game project with the hashtag #スタクルっぽいものつくる (lit. Make Something Like Star Cruiser, Google Translate says: Make stuff things). Either way, now's a good a time as any for interested parties to reach out to her for work.

As it stands, Kotori Yoshimura's story reminds me a lot about a video game history class I took in college. The class focused a lot on the technological history, often brushing aside the community and culture that helped shaped it, and continues to change and be changed by it. This would have been a much shorter piece if it focused solely on Star Cruiser, but like my bogus video game history course, we risk losing out on history if we only focus on the nuts and bolts, and not the living people behind them.

The new game's name is Sword Star, ETA is 2020.

 

[Reinhardt]

Remaster of Star Ocean. 4. For pc too.