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sasuraiger
@sasuraiger

I haven't been in a couple months, but one of the charm points of our Round 1 location is that staff, no doubt on the Japanese executive level, would put in at least one or two Japanese arcade games that absolutely nobody outside of Japan would ever choose to put in a US arcade.

All these games are placed in the fighting game nook, a semi-blocked corner of the arcade that only hardcore gamers ever ventured into.

When it opened they had Genpei Toumaden, a unique, flashy, even kind of cinematic multi-genre action game from '86. This game is pretty well-known in Japan and nowhere else. It's a great choice, I think, because it's actually a pretty cool game. It was also given the lowest price in the entire arcade, but I think that only led to me playing it a lot.

Not too long after they put in Kosodate Quiz My Angel, a very unique genre mix where you raise a daughter by answering a variety of quiz questions. The kind of person she becomes depends on what kinds of questions you answer. Thing is, this game is in Japanese and thus only playable by people fully fluent in the language. I wonder if any such person found it. In any case, a pretty bad choice for public display.

(This trailer tries to sell the game as sexy and that's a huge bait and switch)

I was last at the arcade a couple of months ago and to my glee, they had maybe something less accessible than a game that requires Japanese literacy: a game that requires Japanese mahjong literacy. Higurashi no naka koro ni Jan is a novelty spinoff of the famous horror/mystery visual novel series, in the style of the "cheating mahjong" classic Suchie Pai. It's on free play because someone at Round 1 corporate just really, really wanted someone, I guess me personally, to play this game all the way through.

I realized why when I played it. For one thing, as I mentioned it is in the cheating style of Suchie Pai: As much as the player is allowed to cheat, it's really the heroines whose tiles are insanely rigged. I thought my tiles were suspicious, then Mion pulls a chinitsu ikkitsukan iipeikou dora 2.

It probably took 10 credits to beat the game, though it was more a matter of chance. Can you guess what incredibly on-brand thing happens when you win? That's right, an animated cutscene of the final boss shooting you in the head. Roll credits. Game over. There's a "good" ending to this game, but there's no info on the arcade version in English so I don't know how you'd get it. A one-credit finish seems impractical, but that's not unheard of in this genre.

(The PSP home port appears to just give you the good ending on a second play.)


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