Thursday, 6 August 2015

Denied Japanese Gears of War fans vote to add Japanese Dub to North American GEoW: Ultimate Edition

Denied Japanese Gears of War fans vote to add Japanese Dub to North American GEoW: Ultimate Editoin
Yesterday I brought you news that Microsoft Japan had cancelled the Japanese release of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, citing difficulties satisfying ethical conformity standards. This naturally came as a disappointment to the diehard contingent of Japanese Gear of War fans.

Within hours of the announcement Japanese fans took to the official Xbox Feedback page suggesting that in lieu of an actual Japanese release Japanese language support should be included in the North American release of the game. As the Xbox One is region-free this would theoretically allow Japanese consumers to get their hands on an intelligible version of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. The thread has already exceeded the 1,000 vote mark.

There's a trend in the Japanese comments of expressing disappointment in Microsoft's support, or lack thereof, for Japanese Xbox One users, suggesting that some of them don't buy Microsoft's official explanation for the cancellation, putting it down instead to a lack of commitment to the region. Translations follow:
"Enough excuses, get serious already. Don't take your Japanese customers for fools"

"If you aren't motivated [to support the system] don't sell the system in the first place"

"This has me worried about whether other titles also won't see release. I'd like to see Japanese releases even if they are delayed, and are restricted or cut in some way"

"Firstly, you should feel ashamed that AAA third-party titles such as Batman Arkham Knight and Destiny aren't being sold domestically within Japan [as they are PlayStation exclusives in Japan]."
"Right. so you were able to get Dead Rising 3 and Ryse released in Japan, but not Gears? That's just strange. Come on, it can't have that graphic a scene in it".
In recent times the Xbox One has only been selling a couple hundred units per week in Japan but the size of a fanbase and their dedication to a franchise are two different things. This is particularly the case for Gears of War where there's a general consensus amongst Japanese fans that the Gears of War series has consistently sported excellent Japanese dubs.

In Japan Gears of War front-dude Marcus Fenix is played by Kousei Hirota, notable for his roles as Halo's always-motivational Sergeant Johnson and Soul Calibur series villian Nightmare. Fans looking forward to Hirota reprising his role will have to wait and see if Microsoft takes their sentiments to heart.

Credit: Automaton Japan

Wednesday, 5 August 2015

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Japanese Release Cancelled

Marcus Fenix Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Cancelled Japan
It's well known that the Xbox brand has failed to gain traction in Japan, but it's always had an extremely hardcore, if niche, fanbase of gamers who love precisely the combination of sports, shooters, shmups and visual novels the Xbox synonymous with. Today they'll be disappointed to learn that Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, an Xbox One remake of the original 2006 Xbox 360 release Gears of War, has had its release plans dashed indefinitely.

The Official Japanese Xbox Blog had a press release on the matter which has been translated below:
After conducting a development investigation into all the necessary changes that would have to be made in order to get all the content in Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, including new content [to this remake] to pass ethical conformity standards we have concluded that the task would be insurmountable. As such, we have made the choice to forgo a domestic [Japanese] release for the game. We apologise to our all our Xbox fans who were awaiting the release of this game with baited breath for this disappointing announcement.
Later this year we have many anticipated exclusive software releases including Halo 5: Guardians, Forza Motorsport 6, Fable Legends as well as Rise of the Tomb Raider and more planned for the year's end. We will continue to provide all our consumers with experiences they've never had on before on Xbox.
Games in Japan are rated under CERO, which certifies the letters A, B, C, D and Z to releases. A being the mildest classification and the Z rating being the strongest, only reserved for a handful of games (The Yakuza and Resident Evil series, for example, typically net a CERO D).

The Gears of War games have an interesting run in with classification in the past, with Gears of War, Gears of War 3 and Gears of War: Judgement all earning the CERO Z distinction. However Gears of War 2 went through controversial period where a Japanese release looked entirely unlikely before finally releasing with a CERO Z rating. 

Thursday, 30 July 2015

The 30fps Nontroversy: Misdirected Consumer Outrage


Type-0 HD Heroine

There are few things that rile up vocal gamers as much as the number of frames they get for every second they look at their screen. "Give me 60fps or give me death!" they proclaim before, presumably, wrapping their mouse cord around their neck and hanging themselves; a 30fps lock for them is unthinkable. 

A cursory examination of their hastily scrawled departing message reveals discontent with input lag deficiencies at 30fps and ghosting, motion blur, overdrive artefacts and choppy animation making games "unplayable". "I simply can't play a game at 30fps" they insist, to which I say "I don't believe you" (nor do the millions of consumers playing games fine at 30fps). For all their talk of a 30fps cap being developer laziness I can't help but detect a hint of laziness in the gamer who makes no effort to acclimatise to a lower framerate: they are confusing their willingness to play at 30fps for their ability to.

The stigma around 30fps locked games has coalesced into a movement spurned on my videogame critic/Youtube personality TotalBiscuit, going by the tongue-in-cheek title "The Framerate Police". And whilst I can't fault the majority of the arguments he puts forward in his video (60fps is advantageous over 30fps for multiple reasons) or the effort to organise and centralise information on fps caps (these are things that are good to know) I can't help but feel the case for 60fps is just as arbitrary as the one against 30: it’s all a matter of perspective. 

Recently I played through Doom 3 BFG Edition (PC), an enlightening experience from a framerate perspective as the compendium features the first 2 Doom games from the 90s which, despite their blistering pace and responsive controls, top out at a humble 35fps. More importantly the collection also includes a modified version of Doom 3 which, in contrast to its 30fps original release, can run as high as 120fps. And 120fps is a transformative experience; I'm almost entirely certain that the improved responsiveness in the controls did, in fact, change my whole goddamn life. Oh wait, no, nevermind. It didn't. My bad.

But in all seriousness, after dropping back to 60fps I found all the arguments against 30fps applied to 60fps as well: Less responsive controls? Check. Animation appearing choppy? Check. A lack of clarity in motion? Check. Sudden, overwhelming urge to kill myself in a hysterical rage of anti-60fps sentiment? Che-wait, no. That didn't happen either. 

If we are going to take issue with framerates locks then it should be over the implementation of framerate locks at any framerate, anything less fails to address the issues cited with 30fps: again, it’s simply a matter of perspective (and those who only have 60 Hz monitors lack that perspective). But these arguments, which deal with the objective shortcomings of 30fps aren't what I really want to address here. After all, although the arguments against 30fps might only hold weight in relative terms, they still hold weight. Instead, I want to address a bizarre anti-30fps sentiment that doesn't come from any logical reasoning, but a confused pro-consumer stance that's lost sight of why a PC port capped at 30fps is considered outrageous in the first place.

Recently Square Enix shed some light on the PC version of Final Fantasy Type-0 HD but without any reference to framerate. Inquisitive gamers and some publications chased Square Enix's Twitter account up on the matter to be told that the game would indeed feature a framerate cap. And although no specific mention of a 30fps cap was made it was assumed the game would be capped at 30fps.

The response from many corners of the internet was predictable, and disappointingly so. Here are just some excerpts from around the web: "WTF!! I swear, these devs don't care about PC ports. Yeah, I'm not getting it. Laziest thing ever", "lol) No thanks then)", “When companies FPS lock their console to PC port it says much about how little work they had to do”, “Locked @ 30fps then no sale”.

There’s an assumption amongst these consumers that a 30fps lock is somehow indicative of a lazy or poorly optimised port. In other words, to invest in a 30fps locked PC game would be tantamount to willingly supporting the proliferation of sub-par products. Put in its most extreme form: A 30fps lock is the telltale sign of a hostile publisher with an anti-consumer stance that consumers need to meet with indifference or outright contempt.
Batman Arkham Knight Batmobile
This attitude isn’t entirely bereft of logical grounding either. The recent PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight shipped with numerous issues prompting some to dub it Batman: Arkham Shite. These issues ran the gamut, from visual effects from the console versions being entirely absent, substantial hitching and stuttering on machines that matched or exceeded the recommended specifications and, topping it off, an arbitrarily placed 30fps lock that users could circumvent with a simple .ini tweak. 

Now, I’d hesitate to call Iron Galaxy, the 12-person studio behind porting Arkham Knight “lazy”, instead placing the blame squarely at publisher Warner Bros.’ feet for giving the studio an unreasonable timeframe to get the port completed – but whether you attribute it to laziness or poor judgement the end result is the same from the consumer’s perspective; a sub-par product that fails to take advantage of the strengths of the PC platform. And worse, one in a very, very long line of them.

For western developers, many of whom cut their teeth on PC game development before joining (and later supplanting) their Japanese counterparts on console, tying game logic to framerate wasn’t a done practice, making any fps locks arbitrarily placed and trivial to overcome had the developers put in a little effort. Sometimes the effort needed being exceptionally small, such as the aforementioned Arkham Knight .ini tweak (followed up with some basic testing).

In this development culture, the development culture to which PC gamers are accustomed, a 30fps lock is an indication that the developer or publisher didn't care enough to put in the minimal effort required to improve the PC version over the console release. And if they couldn’t be bothered to do that the chances were the game was broken elsewhere and post-launch support would be non-existent as well (along with a host of other issues and disappointments). It was a sign that the publisher had little respect for its PC consumers or the PC as a platform.

So a 30fps lock is symptomatic of poor port when considered in the above context; a short-hand that consumers can use to out cavalier publishers. But Final Fantasy Type-0 HD isn’t part of this development culture. The original version of Final Fantasy Type-0 (on which the HD remaster is based) is a Japanese game that was developed exclusively with the PSP in mind, and one where framerate was tied to game logic in such a way that removing the 30fps restriction would be a non-trivial development challenge.  

In fact key members of the team that handled the HD conversion, the Osaka-based Hexadrive, have made just this point, suggesting that the optimisation effort in getting the game running in 60fps for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One releases would have been trifling in comparison to the effort required to overhaul restrictions built into the base systems behind the game.
Type-0 HD Hexadrive Presentation Slide 60fps
Translation: 60fps or 30fps?
The limitations on the base systems' structure was a bigger challenge than the performance/optimisation issue [in getting the game running at 60fps].
Overhauling everything to 60fps would have required a lot of time.

It should be noted that this statement was made to an audience of technically-minded game developers at Kansai CEDEC (Computer Entertainment Development Conference) 2015 in a presentation by Hexadrive’s Chief Technical Programmer Junichi Iwasaki. CEDEC is a developers’ conference, not a press or publically open event so it’s not the case that Iwasaki was being a 30fps apologist or exaggerating the capabilities of this generations’ home consoles for the sake of keeping face or selling a product. He has no reason (and no means) to fool a crowd of people who know their way around Reverse Reprojection Caching and Scalable Ambient Obscurance. Iwasaki is telling the truth here: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD has non-trivial limitations locking it at 30fps and overcoming them would be outside of the scope of a remaster. 

The long and short of it is that it’s not reasonable to expect Final Fantasy Type-0 HD to run at 60fps for genuine reasons rooted in the culture and development of the original game. It was short-sighted of Square Enix to develop the game in this way, and perhaps indicative of the myopic, Japan-centric view the publisher was dragging into the late 2000’s. TotalBiscuit is right in saying that developers probably shouldn’t tie game logic to framerate in the first place, but unless you have a time machine that’s little consolation for PC ports of games that have their roots in the past. 

But this is important to point out all the same because it’s this development culture context behind the 30fps cap that's important in deciding whether the publisher's stance is hostile to PC consumers (which would make a case for outrage driven by pro-consumer sentiment), not the presence of the lock itself. Consumers aren't being tricked or coaxed into buying a sub-par product. It’s not the case that a 60fps version of Type-0 HD is sitting around on a hard disc at Square Enix HQ somewhere, arbitrarily held back by a dastardly Square Enix CEO (the dastard!). 

Whereas I can understand that consumers who may have already experienced the game at 30fps on console may see no reason to purchase the PC version without a higher framerate justifying double-dipping, I can’t help feel but that those against 30fps locks on principle have lost sight of why a 30fps lock is contentious in the first place. Their stance isn’t justifiable from a pro-consumer standpoint, smacking of misguided entitlement. Their protest of not buying the game, ultimately, little more than willfully opting for the 0fps version of the game.

Saturday, 25 July 2015

Trails of Cold Steel | Import Review

Earlier this year publisher Xseed made two announcements that left JRPG fans salivating (and more than a few confused): firstly reaffirming that Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter (the much delayed sequel to the PSP/PC JRPG Trails in the Sky: First Chapter) would finally be releasing this year; and secondly that the PS3/PS Vita sequel Trails of Cold Steel would be releasing "this fall" (with Tweets from Xseed suggesting English dub recording is already underway).

In Japan the "Trails" series is a popular sub-series of the ongoing The Legend of Heroes (Eiyuu Densetsu) series that has been popular enough to garner mainstream attention, even informing the series' design which has become increasingly mainstream (both streamlined and easier). The series' mainstreaming is embodied perfectly in Trails of Cold Steel, which drops the traditional isometric perspective and sprite artwork of the series for mass-market friendly polygonal models and a near-to-scale 3D world.

Review

I reviewed the import for Automaton a few months back saying:

At its core, Eiyuu Densetsu: Sen no Kiseki [The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel] still plays and feels like a key part of the series, and that’s even after some overzealous streamlining and mainstream-oriented shakeups. But the slow narrative is prone to leaking momentum and does nothing to answer the dozens of questions it sets up across its 90-hour playtime. Inconsistent presentation issues mire the game through its entirety and despite the humble presentation, the game still suffers from performance issues and load times which are, although entirely bearable, overly long for a modern game. Ultimately, Sen feels like a rushed setup for Sen no Kiseki II. But underneath all the cracked paint, Sen is still a solid JRPG, just not a pretty, consistently solid one... or a consistently pretty one.


[Note] This review was written prior to a 1.03 patch update which launched alongside the "The Best" re-release of Trails of Cold Steel. "The Best" series being the Japanese version of the Greatest Hits or Platinum line of PlayStation re-releases we see in the West. However the 1.03 patch only addressed minor bugs, with the lamented performance issues cited in the review being untouched.

Series Background

Trails of Cold Steel is actually the first part of the third story arc within the Kiseki series: the first arc consists of Trails in the Sky: First Chapter and Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter and the second arc  of Trails of Zero and Trails of Azure. These two arcs are then bridged by another game, Trails in the Sky: The 3rd. The third arc consists of Trails of Cold Steel and Trails of Cold Steel II

So far Xseed has only localised Trails in the Sky: First Chapter with Second Chapter expected later this year. In essence localising Trails of Cold Steel this year would mean leapfrogging The 3rd/Zero/Azure, much to the confusion of fans. However this might not be as odd as it first seems given that the second and third arc within the Kiseki universe take place largely simultaneously making either arc a feasible place to pick the story up from.

PS Vita Support: Niconico thrives where Youtube flounders

It would be an understatement to say that the PS Vita has been performing poorly. This year in the US the system has been shifting anywhere in the unstable region of 8,00030,000 units a month, with things looking relatively better in Japan where around 60,00080,0000 units were shifted in any given month. The Japanese figures being not only higher, but showing less volatility between the high-end and low-end.

Perhaps then it's unsurprising that as of January 28 this year Sony withdrew the Vita Youtube app from the PlayStation Store, making it impossible to download (with support ceasing entirely on April 20 for users that already had the application installed) a move that some have speculated is part of a ramping down of PS Vita support as Sony lets the system quietly go out to pasture. 

However, the system's greater clout in the Japanese marketplace might be the reason behind a July 16 update to the Vita's Niconico Douga application. Niconico Douga being a popular Japanese video sharing site much like Youtube or Dailymotion. 

The July 16 update added the functionality to view comments and other information (such as related video recommendations for both archived videos and live streams) whilst keeping the active video  playing in a large panel. Users can now resize a video during playback with the addition of resizing panel icons (or by pressing the Triangle button).

This is in contrast to the way support for the Vita Youtube application has been handled users who started up the Vita Youtube app after April 20 found videos no longer played and the application prompting them to use the system's web browser instead. Quite the predicament given that most web-based media players stump the Vita's web browser video playback capabilities. Curiously it was Niconico Douga (rather than Sony) that sent out e-mails to its users on July 23, detailing the application update.

With the system unlikely to gain global traction it makes sense that the Vita is receiving updates for Japanese-centric video services such as Niconico Douga over Youtube.

Thursday, 23 July 2015

The Need for Critical Import Coverage: What is Imported Goodness?



Aren’t Japanese games already covered to death?
It’s true that the significant niche of Japanese games does get a fair share of press coverage: dedicated sites such as Gematsu and Siliconera collate information from press releases, whisperings from Japanese publications such as Famitsu and Dengeki and reputable leak sources as well as keeping us up to date on sales figures through Media Create. These sites exist and thrive precisely because there’s a group of information-thirsty readers out there whose fervour for Japanese games hasn’t diminished even if the clout and significance of the Japanese videogame market as a whole has for the great majority of the western gaming press.

Imported Goodness isn’t my attempt to steal their Thunder™ (truth be told I wouldn’t know what to do with it), but rather plug a niche gap that’s always bothered me: although sites such as Gematsu are excellent at keeping us in the know about Japanese imports months before western release, they don’t offer uncompromising, detailed and (above all) critical coverage of them the way the western press does for localised releases. In fact, no one does. If you want to read a high quality, no-nonsense review on an import there’s nowhere to turn.

Why doesn’t the western videogame press cover imports?
The reasons for this are a combination of business and practicality: reviewing the Japanese version of a game months before western release might disqualify a publication from localised review code, or at least make it harder to justify reviewing the same game twice. And, more likely, many of these publications simply don’t have Japanese-English bilingual staff who can make any kind of sense out of the text-heavy contexts the games they’re playing are rooted in. Without context their observations become, at best, superficial deductions that site visitors (in the post-Youtube-era) can make for themselves.

Steins; Gate Japanese Screen
Monolingual journalist observation: Oooh pretty!!


So the best place to turn is consumer reviews?
Readers are left in the unenviable position of getting their critical commentary on imports from exuberant super-fans (the exact opposite of critical) whose grasp of Japanese might be suspect at best (or a source of ill-earned holier-than-thou egotism at worst), or relying on translations of questionable accuracy of Famitsu’s one paragraph reviews — which themselves are of questionable integrity. That, or the reader has to rely on the succession of Japanese-whispers as rumour and fact coalesce and swap places across time and repeated misreporting.

So is it all hopeless?
Japanese-English bilinguals who are well-read in videogames are common enough, as are sharp-penned writers, but rarely the two meet: and that’s where I come in. I’m a Japanese-English bilingual who’s been honing his writing skills for the last 18 months under the tutelage of several editors. First at Continue Play (which has grown immensely over the last year or so) and then at Automaton, a curious site that operates under the auspices of Active Gaming Media (a localisation outfit-meets-publisher, responsible most recently for the PC release of D4) that runs in both English and Japanese.

But surely there are some reliable Japanese videogame critics?
Well… not really. In fact my go-to outlet for Japanese videogame criticism is Amazon’s Japanese customer reviews (which are, thankfully, softer spoken and better punctuated than their “barbaric” English counterparts). So rare are actual Japanese videogame “critics” that the Japanese side of Automaton has seen explosive growth owing to the fact that it has critical (even anti-publisher) criticism as part of its repertoire of article types. 
Japanese Amazon Ryuu ga Gotoku Zero page
Sadly "currently" the most reliable place for Japanese videogame criticism
That’s nothing new for those accustomed to the western gaming press, but it’s a refreshing change of pace in Japan, where most videogame coverage is dictated top-down from the publisher, making Japanese videogame press little more than PR-mouthpieces. But this goes back to my original point: looking to (translations of) the Japanese press for critical coverage of Japanese games isn’t going to work when the number of critical publications can be counted by the innumerate. 

So you’re planning on only covering imports?
The original concept behind Imported Goodness all those months ago (before I was swept off to write for other people’s sites) was to show off my collection of import games, whilst offering up interesting facts and insights into the games covered. But the reborn Imported Goodness is going to expand to take into account some major changes since this blog was first started:

1)     Traditional Critical Coverage (Reviews, Previews, Interviews)
Since starting this blog I’ve spent a significant amount of time reviewing games from discs sent out by publishers and review codes, as well as covering pre-release builds of games either sent to me by the publisher or played at press events. It would be crazy not to leverage whatever press access/credentials I have.

2)     Localised Games
With press credentials comes advanced access to localised versions of Japanese games. Naturally I’ll be covering these as well.

3)     PC Games
There’s been a notable shift over the last couple of years (even the last couple of months) where Japanese developers, who are increasingly internationalising, have started taking the PC more seriously. Most recently Square Enix announced Final Fantasy Type-Zero HD only mere months after the home console release, and Bandai Namco announced a PC version of Tales of Zestiria (and a potential Tales of Symphonia port) in advance of the game’s western console release.

Tales of Zestria PC "V" for Victory
Celebrations on the Tales of Zestria port started somewhat early
There’s been a marked acceleration in Japanese PC announcements and the gap between console and PC releases has shrunk as well, meaning the PC is increasingly a viable place to play Japanese games.

Sadly many PC-centric outlets are staffed by writers weaned nearly exclusively on western games, and many writers who grew up on Japanese games wouldn’t know their SATA ports from a PCI-e socket. Imported Goodness then, will attempt to bridge the “Japanese games on PC niche” both by writing on Japanese PC games that should appeal to the traditional console-based gamer, and by reporting on PC games that may fall slightly outside of the readership’s gaming diet (but might overlap with their tastes all the same).

That, and it allows me to work a loophole into this blog so I don’t end up having to play Japanese games and nothing but for the rest of my life.

Of course this is only the beginning for Imported Goodness. I hope to expand the blog to include regular features (with many experiments in the works) in addition to news, reviews, previews, interviews and everything else on my checklist.

So is this blog aimed at Japanophiles?
I want to hit two audiences with this blog. Firstly the audience that doesn't understand Japanese and wants to look at imports from the outside in. They'll be the culturally and linguistically uninitiated that I'll escort through a kind of virtual tourism as seen through videogames.

Secondly (and more selfishly) I want to use this blog as a dialogue between like-minded Japanese-able importers to share and exchange their opinions and experiences with Japanese games. These people often find that, even if they live in Japan, they are only able to talk about games with their colleagues and acquaintances in the most superficial terms. When you look back at the kind of "criticism" (or lack thereof) that many Japanese gamers are accustomed to perhaps this isn't surprising.

For this latter audience I'll be looking into topics such as which western game releases feature Japanese text/audio and how to activate the source Japanese content.

Monday, 10 February 2014

Import Review | Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter


Trails in the Sky is a JRPG developed by Nihon Falcom and localised by XSEED Games. Ever since the dramatic cliff-hanger at the end of Trails in the Sky: First Chapter, fans have waited, and waited, and waited for Second Chapter to arrive.

Sadly that wait is going to go on for just a few more months as Trails in the Sky Second Chapter isn't due out in English until this Summer. But this time TiTS (don't giggle!) is coming to the PC (Steam) and PSP.

Can't wait for the game? Well, why not jump into this review of the import version of the game and find out for yourself how it stacks up?

Note: This is actually the second iteration of this review. The kind folks over at Continue Play have edited this piece to high heaven and made it infinitely more readable than the first version.