🎮 Game Club // Now Voting 🗳️

[WeepingWeeb]

Of course, apologies adding it immediately

[TheNerdyNova]

HAHA OH MY GOSH, you actually did thank you, that’s awesome

[WeepingWeeb]

I’m too excited to start so I’ll do a little poll

• Start the voting early
• Wait until Sunday I’m still cooking up a nomination

[araigoshi]

Doesn’t have to be Sunday but i may throw 13 sentinels in for a nomination

[VikingSchism]

My only issue with this game is the lack of a PC release… I do really want to play it and do have a console that can play it though. But no PC does hurt accessibility a lot

[araigoshi]

Technically the only games in the list with PC releases are deltarune and digimon.

Apparently 13 sentinels does run on modern switch emulators: 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim | EmuReady

It seems to be supported by the Agent text hooker when emulated also: scripts/NS_010045C014650000_13_Sentinels_Aegis_Rim.js at main · 0xDC00/scripts · GitHub

(Disclaimer: I’ve not done switch emulation with text hooking to say how well it works, just that it seems possible)

[Kelsyy]

I want to nominate an Atelier game, I just need time to write a post!

[Daisoujou]

Ooh I’ve never played the series but I’ve been meaning to check out Atelier Marie at some point.

[Adair]

Id love to play an Atelier game for this club, I’ve only played Ryza 1 and 2, so Marie would get my vote.

[CherryApple]

Will This be a Game Club for Games with easier japanese?

[Daisoujou]

At the moment it’s kind of a free for all with nominations, just with the implicit understanding that difficulty is going to potentially impact people’s voting. I’d say there are quite a few nominated on the relatively easier side but not all are.

[WeepingWeeb]

Yeah I think splitting into different difficulty levels will depend on it’s popularity

[Daisoujou]

Racing Lagoon

Genre: Racing RPG
Summary :

Racing Lagoon is a racing RPG. Your earn experience for your various car parts and racing points by challenging other cars on streets modeled after the actual roadmaps of Yokohama, Japan. After winning a race, you’ll get a certain amount of “Reward Points” which you can then use to take a part from your opponent’s car, anything from the engine to the paint scheme. The game is broken up into 10 nights of racing, with main character Sho Akasaki trying to become the king of the underground racing scene.

Availability: Playstation 1
Time to Beat: 33 hours

Personal Opinion: Since people are putting up multiple nominations I wanted to give myself one weirdo pick. This is another cult classic type, once again a game that never left Japan (though did receive a semi-recent fan translation). It blends Square’s usual RPG development talents with a racing game of all things, giving us an overworld to drive on where random “battles” are street races, which sounds very funny. It’s incredibly stylish with neon night cityscapes and some incredible music. Seems pretty story heavy which will help us here, but again it’ll be a new experience for me.

Pros

• Very unique concept
• Stylish aesthetics
• I believe all text waits for you to advance
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RAhV9UZ1cc

Cons

• Once again import or emulate
• It’s apparently quite difficult?
• There are common complaints about frequent long load times
• Racing may be a little stiff?
• No voices

Additional images

[araigoshi]

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim / 十三機兵防衛圏

Genre: VN + real time tactics
Summary:

A non-linear time travel mystery adventure! You follow the adventures of 13 sentinel pilots as they attempt to thwart a sudden invasion of kaiju and understand why it is happening. The core of the game is the Remembrance mode, which is a VN adventure where you can progress each different character’s story to get all the pieces of the mystery. There’s also the Destruction mode where you control the battles against the kaiju. Everything you unlock in these modes goes into the Archive, which you can use to replay or review the mystery so far.

Availability: Switch, PS4
Time to Beat: Howlongtobeat: 35.5 hours (my playthrough took 42.5 hours)

Personal Opinion:

From a Japanese learning perspective, it was one of Game Gengo’s most recommended games, and when I played it, I had a great time. It’s actually the video game story I’ve enjoyed the most in the past 5 years.

From a learning point of view It’s pretty compartmentalized into scenes that can be taken in pretty flexible chunks. I think it’d be a fun experience to go through the game and put the mystery together as a group for people who haven’t played it before. It’s also got a lot of features like the replayable audio in the log and full on replayable scenes that make it pretty good for language learning.

I know a lot of language learners are apprehensive about sci-fi. In general I’ve found there’s two types of sci-fi. There’s the one which coin a lot of new terms which are quite challenging (Railgun comes to mind) and then there’s one where the sci-fi terms are just a lot of katakana English (like タイムトラベル and ドロイド - bet you can read them!). When I played it I had a lot less Japanese skill than I had now and I found the difficulty came more from the plot than the language most of the time. One of the hardest word is from the title which is 機き兵へい - literally machine soldier but I think it’s sort of punning on 騎兵 (cavalry) also? Anyway, even the Japanese logo translates it to Sentinel.

Thoughts on schedules and non-linearity

One thing about doing it as a club is deciding how to deal with the non-linearity. The prologue and the ending are relatively linear but the middle 80% of the game has a lot of choice as to what you do. There’s two types that matter for the club - the first is the stuff you select from menus, like which character to play next, or when to do battles mode, while the second is that some of the scenes themselves have branching paths within them.

So the way the game itself handles it is that you do eventually have to do all the branching paths within a scene, and eventually it will lock characters behind other characters or battle mode to avoid getting too spoilery for other routes. That said, there will still absolutely be things which will either be a big reveal or “Oh, I figured that out already” depending on which order you play the characters. For me that’s part of the fun, every route contributes something to resolving the mystery. I watched an LP in English after I finished the game and the streamer picked a very different order to me, so what was for me the penultimate reveal was something they found very early on, and something that was long established for me was a late reveal for them.

My suggestion for how we handle that as a club then is:

• When a scene has branching paths, then the assignment for that week will cover all the branching paths. That way we don’t have to give spoilers by telling people which paths to do.
• While there’s multiple characters available to play, we do a poll on which routes to cover next week and basically pick like the top 3/4 each week and progress them until the game locks them out again
• Having played the game once and watched it once, my feeling is the battle mode is best left until the game starts telling you to do the battle mode in character unlock conditions

Pros

• Remembrance mode is 99% voice acted
• All lines in Destruction mode are voice acted (though sometimes the voice line is abbreviated)
• Pausable cutscenes
• 99% of the dialogue is in the text log with replayable audio (exceptions: background dialogue and combat chatter)
• You can replay any scene in the archive mode at any time
• The time travel setting lets you see multiple periods of Japan
• Supported by the Agent texthooker if you play it on an emulator

Cons

• If you saw “interactive non-linear time travel mystery” and thought, “Wow, I bet the plot is complicated”, then you would be correct.
• Normal dialogue text sort of floats on the backgrounds, which can be noisy, which might make it harder to read. You can always listen or read it on a black background in the log though.
• The font used in the real time tactics portion is both tiny and stylized
• Fanservicey elements may bother people - Natsuno’s most common outfit (as in the cover) is anime style gym bloomers and characters show a lot of skin in their in-mech dialogue portraits. It’s not a NSFW game by any stretch, but it’s probably earned its Teen rating and that’s worth mentioning.
• I think you need a Japanese e-shop copy to get Japanese text

Some Extra Images

Remembrance mode

Destruction mode

[soggyboy]

Oh man I love Phantom Hourglass (was my first Zelda game) and own it in JP already. Someone @ me if this wins

[WeepingWeeb]

One day left

[Adair]

Well if nobody else nominates an Atelier game I might need to nominate one myself. Hopefully I can find time before the deadline ^^;

[Kelsyy]

Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg

Genre: Adventure, RPG
Summary:

It’s not about saving the world. In this “leisure adventure RPG,” failing student Marie pursues alchemy, adventures, and quests while aiming to graduate in five years. “Atelier Marie,” the origin of the Atelier series, has been remade with new elements! The remake changes include: Character designs and event illustrations have been revamped, 2D animations have added and there are now 3D models of characters and stages. The tutorial and navigation of the game’s features have been expanded and improved. The methods of moving around the city and collecting items in the field has been modified to meet modern-day demands, making it more comfortable and easier to play. The new Unlimited Mode, which allows you to play at a more relaxed pace by removing the five year deadline, and the addition of new events that enable interactions with new characters.
Availability: Steam, PS4/PS5, Switch (I can’t confirm Japanese avaliability on non-steam versions in US/EU stores)
Time to Beat: Main Story: 8½ Hours (Main + Sides: 13½ Hours; Completionist: 34 Hours)

Personal Opinion: I have not actually played this one so I was a bit hesitant to propose it, but after having looked up the game structure (it’s split into assingments!) and having the experience of playing 7 other Atelier titles, I think I could run this club. I do know that compared to other Atelier games, this one is very simple in story, alchemy, and characters. It’s a remake of an old game!

Pros

• IT’S REALLY SHORT. It would not be a long commitment!
• It is split up into assignments, so each week could be “complete two or three assignments.”
• It has two modes, the time-limit mode and Endless. Anybody who doesn’t want the stress of a time limit can play on Endless.
• It includes the OG game!

Cons

• It is not cheap, $40 feels like a lot for a game this size. I would recommend we all wait for a sale lol.
• If it’s like all the other Atelier games, it won’t have furigana. I cannot comment on the difficulty level of the game language-wise.

[Kelsyy]

I ALSO wrote up entire recomendation posts for Atelier Sophie 1 and Atlier Ryza 1, the two most recomended starting points. I had a really hard time deciding which one to submit!! All 3 games are so different from one another, I’ve got the posts saved for the future.

[Adair]

Thanks for the write up!

If you’re looking for input on either Ryza or Sophie, I very selfishly would prefer Sophie as I’ve not played that one yet. Though I’m going to vote on all Atelier games suggested.