After writing my “10th Anniversary” post, I scrolled through my list of posts and noticed a couple of Japanese games I really enjoyed but that still aren’t available in English (AFAIK). With the advent of Kickstarter and Steam and other similar platforms, I thought for sure that more old games would have been licensed and localized by now. There’s no loss for the companies that way, is what I thought.
“Nobody wants to play those games.”
Let the fans decide via crowdfunding.
“It’ll cost too much.”
Let the fans pay via crowdfunding.
“Nobody plays that console any more.”
That’s why PC ports exist.
“It’ll cost too much.”
Let the fans pay via crowdfunding.
I didn’t see any downsides to the approach, but for whatever reason, it hasn’t happened. Maybe the IP holders just aren’t interested. Or maybe they have plans to release things themselves in due time. Some unlikely titles have come out in recent years (e.g. Princess Maker) so that might be the case. But enough with the speculation. On with the list of games I’ve played that I think others will enjoy if they ever come out in English.
The “missing” Atelier games. Marie + Elie received a fan translation not too long ago, but Atelier Marie, Elie and Anis, Atelier Lilie, Atelier Judie, Atelier Viorate, Atelier Lise and Atelier Lina are still languishing in untranslated despair. Or not really, in the case of Lise. That game is pretty crappy. The other Atelier games vary by quality, but they’re all worth playing for fans of the series and much better than Sophie or Annie.
While I’m at it, it would be nice to have other alchemy-based games like Aoi Umi no Tristia, Aoi Sora no Neosphere and Nora to Toki no Koubou in English. I’m not very enthusiastic about them, to be honest, but fans of crafting games with cute characters will enjoy them. And while I don’t care much for world-building, politicking and visual novels, people who do will greatly appreciate the Aoi games.- The La Corda d’Oro (Kiniro no Corda) games! I love them so much, I’m restraining myself from replaying them for the umpteenth time. There’s La Corda d’Oro, La Corda d’Oro 2, La Corda d’Oro 3, La Corda d’Oro 4, La Corda d’Oro Octave (haven’t played yet), and recently a smartphone game called La Corda d’Oro Starlight Orchestra was announced. Most of these games have fan disks as well. The graphics are beautiful, the music and voice-acting are great, the characters are fun to get to know and there’s plenty of challenging gameplay to keep you busy so you’re not just reading text for 20 hours. I think LC 2 is my favorite, but 4 was good too because it was hard.
- Ore no Shikabane wo Koete Yuke. Western fans may know the sequel, OreShika, but the original was way better. It offered a much greater amount of freedom so you could progress in your own way at your own pace. The dungeons were much easier to navigate and the game had a grimmer mood that fit well with the story of the game. OreShika was just a way to promote Nueko, Nueko, Nueko and our family was just accidentally involved, so the “cross over my body” gimmick felt tacked on. Fans of good dungeon-crawling RPGs would greatly enjoy it.
Zill O’ll Infinite Plus – It’s a game I’ve been really meaning to replay one of these days, because there are so many stories packed into one little game. It’s like Octopath Traveler before there was Octopath, except this time the stories are all intertwined and interweaving. And time flows constantly, so bad things can happen if you dilly-dally. Unlike most RPGs, if you leave a party member in danger while you go adventuring halfway around the world, they will die permanently and the story will keep moving, so it calls for very focused play (i.e. don’t spend the first few hours questing like I did). And leaves room for a lot of replays. It’s a great game, very much worth a try. A fan translation patch has been in progress for a while, so let’s hope it comes out soon.- Motto Nuga-Cel! – Despite being a crude game about stripping girls down to their underwear, Motto Nuga-Cel is nevertheless a tremendous amount of fun for people who like challenging battles, dressing characters up and customizing equipment. I also like the way you have a clear goal from the start (take over Tokyo) that you can strategize how best and how quickly to carry execute. It’s not the end of the world that it hasn’t been localized, but it really is much better than it sounds.
Infinite Loop: Kojou ga Miseta Yume – A visual novel/mystery game where you play a murdered prince that possesses various bodies to try and solve the mystery behind his own murder. I’m not a fan of visual novels, but I ended up liking all the characters and working really hard to solve the mystery before the end. Fans of less serious murder mystery adventure games like the Ace Attorney series should enjoy it.- UnchainBlades Exxiv – The improved but ignored sequel to Unchained Blades (UnchainBlades Rexx). I liked the story and characters of the first game more, but the sequel is a higher-quality game in almost all aspects. 65 hours of solid play is a plus for everyone. It’s also not very hard, so it’s a good first game for people trying to get into first-person dungeon-crawlers.
- Tokimeki Memorial 4 – I’ve played 1 and 3, but don’t care if they get localized or not. Tokimeki Memorial 3 was meh anyway. 4 though, that I had a lot of fun with. I liked almost all the girls, the colors were bright and happy, your friends were wonderful bros and the stat-raising gameplay was challenging but not frustrating. If more galges were like this, I would play a whole lot more of them.
- Shining Ark – Saving the best for the last! A localization of Shining Hearts would be nice too, come to think of it, but the third game in the PSP Shining series was definitely the best. The main downsides were the unsympathetic heroine and the too-easy combat, but apart from that it’s one of my favorite RPGs with pretty graphics, moderate length, lots of delicious cooking, plenty of sidequests and a more decent story than I had expected.
Honorable mentions
WiZman’s World – I had a blast initially, but ended up dropping it, which is why it’s not on the list.
Ranshima Monogatari ~ Rare Land Story – It’s good, I enjoyed it, I finished it several times, but it’s not thaaaat good. It’s getting a Switch port though, so maybe a license might be incoming?
Summon Night, Summon Night 2, Summon Night 3, Summon Night 4 – If I had written this list a few years earlier I would have included them without even thinking, but nowadays I don’t care about strategy RPGs as much. They’re too sluggish and long-drawn out. And honestly I’ve played just too many. Good games if you like SRPGs though.
Sakura Taisen 2, Sakura Taisen 3 – Same situation as above. Except I rate them a little higher because they’re very good visual novels first and so-so SRPGs second. I keep thinking they’ve all been fan-translated already, but apparently only the first has.
Not everything deserves localization
There are a lot of other Japanese games I played that were just okay and don’t particularly deserve a localization. Games like Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpuuchou, Last Bullet, and Genso Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki come to mind. I had fun at some points, but they’re not that great. Other games are outright crap and we’re better off not playing them. And there are a few where I was shocked to hear they were coming out in English, like Record of Agarest War Mariage. They left all the other good games and localized this? Life is surprising that way.
That said, things are really good for JRPG fans these days. Deserving or not, most RPGs that have come out in the PSVITA era and beyond get localized sooner or later. There are even Chinese and Korean games getting regular Western releases these days, which is pretty cool. Fan translations projects are also constantly underway.
But there’s still a “backlog” of older RPGs that may never see an official release in English. So, as always, I strongly encourage JRPG fans to start learning Japanese. It’s not that hard and won’t take that long. And then you won’t be at the mercy of fan translators and localization companies any more. Good luck with your studies!👍
I wouldn’t mind playing UnchainBlades Exxiv in any language with a latin alphabet. The first one was my first (and, as now, my only) foray in first person dungeon crawls in many years, and I still remember it as a nice experience after all.
It was a bit frustrating, but I have good memories of the original too. It probably didn’t sell well enough to justify localizing the sequel, but maybe fan translators could make it happen.
I’m honestly confused about Kogado’s localization plans at least since they just throw with no fanfare out of the blue and seems to just be throwing darts on what exactly they’re releasing.
Kickstarter I think, is not that much of a magic panacea, and a successful campaign actually needs a lot of effort if you aren’t already a world famous creator. In addition a company probably can’t do it for every single one of their games since backer fatigue will set in so I assume they’re limited to their “biggest” names.
The lack of fanfare is the strange thing, because they have some good games in their library. But there are probably all kinds of licensing and technical hurdles behind the scenes that limit what they can release and when… or so I want to think.
For Kickstarter, I wasn’t expecting every single game to pass through the process. I saw it as more of a gauge of interest. If fans are interested in the one game in a series (e.g. Atelier), subsequent ones don’t have to go through the whole process because there’s an established fanbase. Plus with a few exceptions, most of the games I listed are from big companies like Sega, who could afford the PR needed for a successful kickstarter.
Of course, since they’re a big company, they don’t *need* to do a kickstarter to localize a game. I’m just assuming they’re risk-averse/don’t think anyone would be interested, so crowdfunding would be a way to get around that. But come to think about it, the most likely reason why they’re not localizing anything is probably “We just don’t wanna.” No way to argue with that!
I genuinely don’t think most of these would sell well at all, though perhaps crowdfunding would determine it better. VNs/dating games are largely unpopular in the West, with “some” exceptions; Korea and Japan are slowly shrinking as markets, so it looks like China will be the next big manufacturer, since their market is huge anyway; localizing into many languages is a necessity for good sales nowadays, unlike in the 90s or even most of the 2000s. Hopefully they just come up with a good simultaneous AI translation device for Asian languages one day, I personally much prefer studying European languages; even Russian would be way more understandable than Japanese in my case, or even better – Spanish or French – but that’s just a “me” thing. :p Personally, I’d love to see Tengai Makyo games fan-translated, especially Apocalypse, due to the wacky US setting, and also – most of the SRW games, but that’s impossible due to the copyright mess…
The VNs may be a hard sell, but stuff like the Atelier and Shining games with an established audience should at least push a couple of thousand copies.
One area of hope is the growing quality of machine translation. If translation costs can be pared down to a minimum while accuracy increases, who knows? Technically it’s no skin off my nose because I’ve played all these already, but I really think others would enjoy them.
Re language-learning: I enjoy Asian languages more myself, currently dabbling in both Chinese and Korean right now, but that’s a “me” thing as well. Though there was a time when I watched too many Mexican telenovelas and almost started learning Spanish… but we don’t talk about that time. 😉