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Super Bishi Bashi! It's A Square Millenium! Squaresoft has just announced the Square Millenium Private Show, set to happen on November 23rd in Yokohama. This is a massive closed show with only 10,000 members of the public allowed -- there's a ticket application in all current Square games and the first 10,000 out of the hat get to go! A neat idea, and it appears it's going to be worth getting to, because some major announcements are going to be made. It seems almost certain Final Fantasy IX for Playstation will be announced there, as well as some other Playstation 2 titles (although I suspect not any Final Fantasy sequels for PS2 yet -- perhaps a side-story involving Chocobo or something similar.). There'll also be plenty of new playable titles and video of brand-new games, and rest assured us here at the MGT Report will bring you all the hot info from the show.
Square also announced, as part of a Playstation box set with Chocobo Racing and Chocobo Stallion, a new Chocobo title, Dice De Chocobo. Yep, it's a Chocobo-themed board game, innit? The set is due out in December in Japan, but unfortunately, Dice De Chocobo looks unlikely to come to the West, since none of the Chocobo-themed titles except the easy-to-localise and straightforward Chocobo Racing have made it yet. Square fans worldwide curse its selective Western releasing -- we want Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon and we want it now! Shen Mue Delay, Uh-Oh? The unfortunate, or perhaps the downright disastrous has happened to Sega since the last MGT Report, with the confirmation that Shen Mue has been delayed to the spring of 2000. Since the game had already been delayed to October 28th, and PS2 is now due on March 4th 2000, it can't be overstated what a major blow this is for Sega. Japan is still distinctly less enthusiastic about Dreamcast than the US or Europe, even with the recent success of Seaman, and a pre-Christmas release for Shen Mue could have persuaded hundreds of thousands to invest in a DC before the Playstation 2 launch. Surely Shen Mue will come too late for Sega, and yet more ground will be lost to Sony. It looks like the Dreamcast will be resigned to a Saturn-like fate in terms of sales and impact in Japan -- unless, that is, the online capabilities kick off and Sony waits too long to put its Internet strategies into place - but even then, Sega can hardly compete, just improve somewhat. Used Games Banned? Another big story this week is the report that used games may finally be banned in Japan, with a court ruling in Osaka from a lawsuit brought by the major Japanese publishers, including Sega, Sony, Namco, Square, and Konami. Japanese publishers have been trying to crack down on used re-sales for quite some time, claiming it cuts down on their revenues, and while such a step would be difficult in the US or Europe, it may have finally been managed in Japan. It's interesting to note that Enix, one of the larger publishers, is missing from the court action, since it had a special stipulation on used resale and price when it released Tomb Raider 3 in Japan a little while ago. This was admitting that it was OK to resell games, and probably didn't go down too well with the other aforementioned companies. This is a bit of a tricky area to find information about, but we'll try to keep you informed -- tip us off if any of you hear anything. Other News Sony's Jumping Flash 3 should be out by the time you read this in Japan on Playstation. This time it seems to be much more of a mission-based, story-based title, but that crazy jumping gameplay is still very much intact. It's a shame the other Jumping Flash spin-off, the Pocketstation-specific Pocket MuuMuu, won't be coming to the West now, but let's hope Sony decides to bring Jumping Flash 3 across for us. Altogether now.. muu muu! Muu muu!
There now appears to be a valid Dreamcast swap trick to play Japanese games on an American machine and vice versa. It runs a little like the Playstation swap trick where you need to disable the sensor that works out the CD lid is open, and then physically remove the domestic disc and replace it with an import one after the region check but before the game starts loading. I'm surprised Sega isn't doing multiple region checks to prevent this type of thing (or shall we get into the conspiracy theory concerning why import gaming is tacitly encouraged?), but at the moment it looks like this method is effective but dangerous to your discs -- it'll be very easy to scratch them with the laser so close to the disc and the disc spinning. Anyone looking for more info should consult the newsgroups, where no doubt there's a wealth of information about it right now. Oh, good and surprising news that Sega's Space Channel 5, that bizarre dancing-to-defeat-aliens title, is getting a release in December in Japan, unexpectedly soon. There's a very good article and interview with the creators of this title in Edge magazine this month, and it appears the Sega offshoot that created Space Channel 5 is trying to do something genuinely fun and different. Good luck to them!
This time round it's the long, long-awaited Resident Evil 3 (Biohazard 3 in Japan) which rockets to the top of the charts in Japan. It sold a phenomenal 1 million copies in a single week, one of the biggest initial sellers in a very long time (although obviously outpaced by stuff like Final Fantasy VIII), and it looks like a title that will go on to sell a lot more. The Resident Evil franchise in general is still looking extremely strong, although it's a shame that the movie seems to have been delayed, and George Romero is no longer attached to it. Also, the recent news that the Dreamcast's Resident Evil: Code Veronica will be delayed past the end of this year and Resident Evil 2 will be released as a stopgap seems unfortunate. But I'm sure the games will sell bucketloads when they do come out, and the Game Boy version of RE, previewed in a number of places of late, looks spectacular to say the least. Filling up the next two spaces on the chart are two branches of the Dragon Quest franchise, a particularly massive brand in Japan (Dragon Quest VII on Playstation is top of most gamers' 'most wanted' lists right now), and it's particularly interesting to see the Dragon Quest 1 and 2 Game Boy conversion selling a quarter of a million in the first week alone. RPGs are particularly big on the Game Boy in Japan right now, and while the West has still only really seen Link and Ash sock it to them (in Zelda and Pokemon respectively!), there's a lot more Game Boy RPGs than that doing well Tokyo-side. It'll be most interesting to see how well Dragon Quest: Terry's Wonderland will do on GBC when Eidos releases it in the West -- in my opinion licensing it was an extremely astute move, and it's already a million-seller in Japan, of course. The rest of the chart is populated by the usual suspects. Four of the remaining titles on the list are from Konami, which seems to dominate the sports and music genres. But with even Konami apparently admitting that the Bemani craze may be dying down just a tiny bit, how will the company innovate its way to the next level? The redesign for Beatmania:4th Mix, which I picked up recently, is certainly attractive. But functionally, all five Beatmania discs are pretty much identical. Still, more variations on the theme are certain, with Drum Mania looking to come out as a PS2 launch title and Keyboard Mania (complete with a two-octave keyboard!) just announced for the arcades in Japan. Any hackers up for doing a SNES Miracle Piano conversion job for a custom controller? Ahem. Simon Carless is a game designer/project director at a UK games developer. His game credits include design on PC and Playstation titles for (amongst others) Eidos and GT Interactive. He can be contacted at h0l@mono211.com. Simon would like to thank Magic Box, Re:Tokyo, Gamespot, FGNOnline, Core Magazine, and his other Japanese sources for the information that helps to write this column. |
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