Japan

I have been indulging in games for the past few weeks to celebrate the holidays and the Steam sale. Also I had to bake a rather crappy Christmas cake, because the Japanese ‘Christmas Cakee’ (strawberry and cream sponge cake) just doesn’t cut it. There was a little time for some writing however, Game People (.co.uk) and Play Devil (.com) are now both graced by a few of my articles. Both are great and I recommend you go and give them a look if for some reason you are itching for some DoFuss content.

Tomorrow morning (in four hours to be exact) I am off to my girlfriends home town. Being cut-off from the internet for a week will give me lots of time with the small pile of games I have been building up and give me some time to write, but no opportunity to post. Thus this will be my last, somewhat anticlimactic post of 2009. Expect a little bit more fanfare next week however with a review or two as well as a years round up and the much rumored return of Darren to the DoFuss Show.

Until then I am off to play my new shiny green PSP and whole lot of Dragon Age. Have a great New Year, thank you for reading the site in 2009 and keep your eyes here from the 4th of January for plenty of new content.

I have to confess to being disappointed. Years of hearing about landmark game launches in Japan created in me a misconception. I erroneously believed that somehow games of note drew everyone from their homes in a frenzied fit to politely queue outside any and every game store in the land to get their mitts on the latest installment of their beloved franchise. I was wrong.

It isn’t that Final Fantasy XIII didn’t have a big turn out. I have seen images on blogs, hordes of people waiting anxiously in line outside the downtown stores of larger cities. But this doesn’t seem abnormal to me. These stores always draw crowds. Even in the UK, the release of a big title can draw fevered masses to the streets for a midnight launch.

No, I expected more. This game has been cited as one of the two most anticipated games in the Japanese Famitsu for nearly three years. Every thing blogs and magazine had lead me to believe about Japan’s love of Final Fantasy had me expecting every store was going to be rammed harder than a ewe in mating season. So I headed down to my local store for its early opening on the day of release to see the spectacle for myself.

A pitiful line stood outside my local (but not insignificantly sized) game store. The cold winter morning hosted the bedraggled group of seven (six guys, one girl if you are interested). Each trudged slowly in as the door opened, they politely bought their game before scampering home. They all (perhaps rightly) looked at me like I was the weird one as I surreptitiously took photos on my iPhone, their confusion growing still greater as I didn’t even enter to buy the game. Slowly more arrived, one by one picking up their copies. The trickle of people continued on, but disappointingly it never grew in to the expected torrent.

Of course the reports are already coming in of successful the first day sales. Square-Enix talking of shipping two million copies of the game, with over one million sold on the first day alone. Obviously I am in no position to discount any of this, but I can say that claims of the game having sold out all over Japan are somewhat exaggerated. Perhaps there is a drought in Tokyo, but Osaka still has plenty to go around.

Anyone would be well within their rights to tell me I haven’t been to the otaku centres in my research. They could even tell me that this is the first Final Fantasy release I have witnessed since starting DoFuss; perhaps I mealy misinterpreted the western coverage of previous similar events. Too all of this I would have to hold my hands up and agree, that indeed I haven’t, but I did see the Dragon Quest 9 launch. I saw the state of every retailer in my area that day. Each and every one had been ransacked, and all of the staff looked exhausted. Shelves lay empty, with old Dragon Quest game the only thing left to fill the voids made by the day’s sales.

It’s to be expected. A large audience both due to complexity and platform penetration of course means Dragon Quest 9 was destined to sell better. But I visited a total of five game stores in my local area and all still had sizable stocks of Final Fantasy XIII still available. The game will be number one next week, of that there is no doubt. But unless you are unlucky enough to be looking to pick up a copy in one of the more famous gaming outlets you don’t have to worry about shortages just yet.

Now if youll excues me, I am off to reconstruct my shattered childhood beliefs.

Sony’s recent advertising drive for all things Playstation in Japan used to strike me as somewhat misguided. People faces as the play PS3 or PSP, in horrible high definition close up. I thought of my own time playing. How, for the most part, my reactions are reserved for well into a games experience, after becoming invested in the activity. I knew the players, these ‘faces’, would have only a short time to play their game. I imagined the bored and confused expressions that most would sport.

When the campaign launched these bored individuals were nowhere to be seen. Those on show were thankfully not average players with their faces stretched to fill my TV. Thankfully saved from the HD horrors of acne covered teens, I gratefully welcomed the close ups of handsome/beautiful celebrities as they overacted their way through games.

Then the cynic in me welled up. While the whole “Playface” campaign may appeal to this idol obsessed culture, to me it just seemed like the most blatant exploitation off both the talent involved and the audience. No product was shown, only the faces of melodramatic media personalities, hamming it up, to sell product to adoring fans by supposedly play a Sony system.

Then the other day I happened across one of Sony’s ‘caravans’. These are stages that are touring the country and offering the public a chance to put on their “Playface”. More for the novelty than anything else I decided to give it a go. After filling out a form and picking my game I was forced in to an overly warm booth to play (imagine a black public toilet… but with a plasma television in it). Cameras, embedded in every wall, surrounded me. They were laid out in a way that made me feel like I was being watched by four massive spiders.

I played Tekken 6. After three minutes they kicked me out and gave me stickers of my expressionless face.

I forgot about it until yesterday when I got an email from Sony telling me my face was ‘up’ so I visited their site and had my opinion of the whole exercise totally changed. Thousands of faces, including my own, are on the site. Many young adults, posing and exaggerating for the camera in an attempt to garner favour in the voting (imagine “Hot or Not” for otaku) but others were children. Seeing their faces fill with joy and wonder at playing took me back to how I must have looked when my Dad used to take me to the arcade to play Atari’s Star Wars game.

It made me happy. I could see Sony’s thinking, because for all my cynicism I could see the children weren’t faking. They were in awe. It is a feeling I now realize I have lost, but it is what got me into gaming and to see it in others makes me remember just why, to this day, I love my hobby so much.

Thank you Sony for showing me this joy again, and giving me the opportunity to always vote for the children over the vein young adults. Now kindly take your celebrities from my TV set.

You can see my big ugly mug here.

Yes the wonderful Japanese Famitsu magazine has finally passed down judgment on Killzone 2. Giving it 8-8-8-8 (that’s four reviewers each giving it an eight). That is the same as HAWX this month and Unreal Tournament 3 back in September. But perhaps more importantly it is also less than Haze (8-9-8-9) the much maligned Free Radical PS3 exclusive from 2008. A game that’s Metacritic score was blamed by many for the company’s closure and eventual buy out by Crytek.

I guess if the rumours are true about advertising space equalling scores in Famitsu then the four full pages seen for the game in the same issue equates to two points a page.

Let me be clear that four eights are not a bad score but when placed in the context of these other scores you have to wonder why Sony didn’t put more behind this game in their home territory. Perhaps it’s just them admitting that first person shooters will never appeal to the mass audience in Japan. Or maybe they don’t want to draw attention away from the Final Fantasy XIII trial addition that was released this week.