Nippon Line 01/12

Welcome back to the Nippon Line – not to be snorted, but definitely to be read. On the table this week: Koei Tecmo Holdings gets its thing going without Tomonobu Itagaki, Famitsu loves Wii game 428, some potentially awesome new Japanese games are pencilled in on the industry’s dog-eared diaries, and Taito releases the world’s first pogo stick coin-op. Get!  

Koei Tecmo Holdings to begin operations on April Fools’ Day

This merger has been in the offing since August, when Tecmo said “No, ta!” to Square Enix after the Big RPG Company suggested they go upstairs for ‘coffee’. In stepped the dashing, likeable Koei to win Tecmo’s affections, and now a lasting union is on the cards. Actually, Koei and Tecmo have been close friends for more than three decades, so this all makes a lot of sense.

Tecmo and Koei will move in together (yeah, this allegory sucks) on April 1st, 2009, when they become one as ‘Koei Tecmo Holdings’. And is this newly merged company going to take the game industry by storm? Hell, no! But I think it’s bound to do an excellent job of turning out games that satisfy the niches successfully formed by both of its constituents – and that should be enough to keep it ticking over quite nicely.

Koei’s top bod, Kenji Matsubara, who is as charming a fellow as you could hope to find in an Executive role, sees things a little differently. He told Famitsu: “In order to meet users’ diverse needs as quickly as possible, we need to develop more imaginative software. We also need to hurry to increase the number of platforms we [produce games for] and adopt a more global approach. At the moment the greatest expanding market is not Japan, but foreign territories.”

When asked by reporters about the possibility of Tomonobu Itagaki being involved with the new Koei-Tecmo partnership, Matsubara responded by clearly saying “there’s no [possibility]” of that happening. So you can forget about Team NINJA being reunited with their wild ex-boss. It ain’t going to happen. 

At any rate, Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 is due out here in a few weeks’ time and (assuming the developer, Omega Force, hasn’t cocked things up since I played the game at TGS) I’m confident it’ll take over the Japanese sales charts with all the power of a hundreds-strong Gundam Wing fleet. Which would be quite appropriate, really. Here’s to Koei Tecmo Holdings!


428 gets a perfect 40 from Famitsu

428 is the sequel to 427. Nah, just kidding: it’s in fact an original ‘sound novel’ game from SEGA. To put it another, less appealing way: it’s an ‘interactive movie’ from SEGA. Yes, an interactive movie! Remember when those were all the rage 15 years ago? Remember when blocky FMV and zero gameplay was the place to be?

Well it turns out the interactive movie/sound novel genre has actually come a long way, baby. According to Famitsu’s reviewers and their bags of sweet superlatives, 428 features high-quality game design – and that’s not all: the story is also finely balanced. It apparently progresses in hour-long chunks while the reportedly excellent acting and tempo and production result in something that you can enjoy “like a foreign drama”. (Presumably, they’re thinking of dramas such as 24 and Lost, and not, say, Murder She Wrote or The Bill.) 

Only thanks to various clues that appear can you complete the game, so you need to be observant and meticulous – that’s 428’s schtick. If the story seems to be winding to a premature halt, 428 enables you to jump from one character to another, switching protagonists just like that. I’ll concede that this sounds like an ingenious piece of game design – maybe interactive movies really have come of age in 428. Famitsu certainly seems to think so: “Best sound novel ever!” one reviewer howls.


Hot dates

I’ve got some hot dates lined up for you. Unfortunately for you, they’re with games. Oh well. At least I’m talking about games so good you’d want to take them to fancy restaurants.

For a start, Ninja Blade – From Software’s ‘Ninja Gaiden meets The Matrix’ effort for Microsoft, a 360 exclusive – has just been confirmed for a January 29th release in Japan. Beyond that, over on the PS3, SEGA has just finalised a February 26th Japanese debut for Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 (which the West will eventually know as Yakuza 3), a game I told you about* some weeks ago. Any notion of a quiet January and February doesn’t apply to Japan’s game industry.


Hopping mad

Taito’s newest arcade game is called Hopping Road and it’s so PHYSICAL that not even Nintendo’s Wii hardware or any Wii accessory would be capable of replicating the experience. Get this: you play as a rabbit and jump up and down on a pogo stick controller – well, more of an actual pogo stick than a ‘controller’ – to advance in inter-rabbit racing championships.

Hopping Road (check the screenshots on this very page, rabbit lovers!) even has a function for cabinets to be linked together, so you could in theory get a few friends together and go for some four-player hopping races in your local arcade. If, that is, you happen to live in Japan and don’t mind jumping frantically in public places…