In all my years diving into the PS2's Japanese back catalog, one of the most genuinely fascinating and gratifying things to piece together over the better part of a decade was how PachiPara, Irem's long-running pachinko simulator-cum-RPG series, played a direct role in the design and evolution of some of the developer's biggest cult classics on the system, namely the Disaster Report series and Steambot Chronicles (or Bumpy Trot if you're a ride-or-die originalist). Outside of my ravings and occasional translation livestreams, to the vast majority of foreign Irem fans, PachiPara is lucky to be so much as an afterthought in their minds, let alone a footnote in any recorded histories overseas. And really, you can't blame them when virtually no other such licensed pachinko games went to this much trouble to court people not already living the pachinko life and sold on simulators as a worthwhile """investment."""

But about two years ago, after seeing just about everything this is to see in Steambot Chronicles, the last pieces of that puzzle finally clicked into place, so I decided to chronicle that design trajectory in the form of a rudimentary flowchart posted on Twitter. I've been thinking about PachiPara again lately and how it's maybe, maybe finally time to sit down to really write about it like I've tried a handful of times over the years, rarely getting past the introduction. But in the meantime, I figured if there's one other place on the Internet that might appreciate that old flowchart, it'd be here.

And so, here it is for your consideration: how a bunch of pachinko games informed your favorite disaster survival/open world mech RPG and then fully fleshed out those ideas at the tail end of the PS2's lifecycle when nobody—and I mean nobody—overseas was looking.

I think it's neat, at least.