Japan Archives - Page 2 of 4

#WeeklyGameMusic: Tarrey Town (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild)

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Taro Omiya

Relax with this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic, and let your worries wash away. Even when exploring a post-apocalyptic universe, Nintendo still provides some unexpected optimism with tracks like Tarry Town, composed by quite a large team of composers and sound designers, including Hajime Wakai, Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Soshi Abe. As the game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild demonstrates, it’s still possible to rebuild anew from the rubble of the past.

Much like past entries, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild begins with our hero Link being awakened from sleep. But this time, instead of a nice comfy bed, he gets up…from what appears like a high-tech cryogenic chamber. To add to the confusion, it turns out he’s amnesiac. Upon stumbling into an old man, the stranger helps Link catch up with some shocking details: he, the chosen hero, has failed to fulfill the prophecy. With the hero deftly defeated by Ganon and his army, the Hyrule kingdom has succumbed to his destruction. Fortunately, Zelda managed to temporarily seal the great evil, putting both into a century-long slumber. With only these scant details available to him, Link must travel across the vast, now-unfamiliar lands, and devise a plan to defeat Ganon before the seal loses its strength.

Taking notes from other open-world games, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an Action JRPG that involves making use of whatever Link can find around him. This often means that Link steals food, weapons, arrows, and armor from other people, both living and long deceased (though it appears the living town folks don’t mind). In his large pockets include the Sheikah Slate, a handy tablet that can create useful tools out of thin air, including bombs, pillars of ice, and magnets. It furthermore doubles as a map, where useful mini-map markers can be manually placed. The game often starts like a survivalist experience, but it won’t take long for most players to master the elements of the game, and take on some of the most powerful monsters it throws at you.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is available on the Nintendo Switch and Wii U. No other ports exists as of this writing, but a sequel is in works.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Heavenly Star (Lumines II)

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Taro Omiya

The next #WeeklyGameMusic is a popular track that has appeared in quite a lot of games, ranging from No More Heroes to Child of Eden. As far as this writer can tell, though, it originated from Q? Entertainment’s block-based puzzle game, Lumines II. Sung by Genki Rockets, it tells a story of “an artificial space girl” and her rather optimistic understanding of what Earth (which, in lore, she has yet to visit) is like.

Lumines II is the second game in the Lumines series: a color-block-based puzzle game where one drops blocks to create a 2×2 same-colored square to score points. The innovation comes from how the game calculates combos: the 2×2 same-colored squares doesn’t get eliminated until after the Time Line — a vertical line which swipes from the left of the screen to the right in regular intervals — passes over it. In other words, clever players can rapidly drop a ton of blocks to create more 2×2 squares before the Time Line makes a full pass over their formation, thus aggregating to a larger score.

While the basic premise of Lumines is simple, the game excels on presentation, and in particular, it’s dynamic music generation. Much like Tetris Effect, each and every action the player takes creates a sound effect and instrumental that affects both the background music and visuals. As a consequence, playing Lumines often feels like sketching music on the fly, just as much as thinking through the puzzle that you’ve created for yourself.

Lumines II was originally released on the Playstation Portable. While this sequel is no longer in print, its predecessor, Lumines Remastered is available for PC on Steam and Microsoft Store.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Honkey Tonkey Fantasy (半熟英雄対3D)

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Taro Omiya

Ever wondered what would happen if you threw the infamous Final Fantasy music composers, Nobuo Uematsu, to write music for a comedic, nonsensical real-time strategy game? Wonder no more, fellow readers who ask such bizarrely specific questions: this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic has your answer! Here’s Honkey Tonkey Fantasy, from the Japan-only game, 半熟英雄対3D (Hanjuku Hero VS 3D, roughly translates to half-boiled hero), created by none other than Square Enix.

Prince Almamoon’s kingdom is under attack by extra-dimensional beings from the 3D world! They…they’re even voice acted!! With this newfound threat, the “great” prince orders his silent, text-only 2D army to fight back.

The battle system in Hanjuku Hero is broadly divided into two modes: real-time strategy phase, and the Pikmin-like battle phase. The former involves ordering groups of armies to move towards a way-point. When either two groups of opposing armies collide on the map, or your army runs into a fort, the battle phase begins, where both armies are thrown into an isolated stage to fight. The player moves the general, and with it, the armies that follow said general, charging into the opposing forces. To turn the tides in their favor, at any point, the player may use a limited number of “trump cards,” who’s effect can vary from spreading out the opposing army, to reviving fallen soldiers.

半熟英雄対3D was released in Japan on the Playstation 2. Outside of potentially South Korea, it has not been published elsewhere, or ported to any other console.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Time Unfolds (Arrangement 1) (Birthdays the Beginning)

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Taro Omiya

Allow time to fly by in this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic with the relaxing track, Time Unfolds (Arrangement 1) by Takayuki Nakamura. It’s the most common song that plays while playing TOYBOX Inc. & Arc System Works’ sandbox game, Birthdays the Beginning: a bizarre simulation about birthing new animals and species through terraforming. The music matches nicely to the mellow theme of the game that, quite frankly, is a lot more complex than the cutesy-graphics imply.

Like many highly-customizable games, Birthday the Beginnings have a story and creative mode. The narrative for the former stars an unnamed protagonist, who comes upon what seems like a mysterious treasure map. Curiosity gets the better of them, and they decides to follow its directions into a mysterious cave. When our hero delves too far into it, they seemingly get teleported into a new dimension where they can fly over a blank cube, and get pestered by an annoying Navi-like character explaining the rules. Our lead plants the “seed of life” handed to them onto the cube and starts terraforming in hopes of finding an escape from this dimension.

Birthday the Beginnings is essentially a simulation of evolution. Building mountains or digging valleys affects both the temperature of the new terrain, and the overall temperature of the cube. Balancing this aspect is critical to deliberately unlock more creatures, as older ones may need to die off. Aside from simply changing the land’s elevation, items are provided to augment the landscape slightly, including seeds of water and life to make waterfalls and new species accordingly.

Birthday the Beginnings was released on Steam for PC and Playstation 4. It’s sequel, Happy Birthdays, is seemingly only released in Japan for the Nintendo Switch.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Glass Moon (カルタグラ～ツキ狂イノ病～)

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Taro Omiya

In a rare look for this series, this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic is a track from a Japanese (…and adult…and violent) visual novel: Cartagra ~Tsuki kurui no Yamai~ (or in its original Japanese: カルタグラ～ツキ狂イノ病～), developed by Innocent Grey. MANYO’s track, Glass Moon was, as this writer understood it, originally composed with lyrics in mind; however, this writer wasn’t able to find the vocal version. Still, even its instrumentals are great. Take a listen:

Naturally like all Visual Novels, Cartagra read like any other choose-your-own-adventure stories, with graphics, sound, and music to accent the experience. The story is set in 1950s Japan, where ex-police officer Shugo Takashiro is taking on freelance detective jobs. Bit in the dumps, he received a missing person report that immediately catches his interest: it turns out his former girlfriend, Yura Kozuki, whom he had to sadly leave to fight World War 2, has now gone missing. With the help of Kazuna Kozuki, Yura’s twin sister, the two look for clues on what happened to her, only to find a terrifying series of events lurking in the background.

Cartagra is a Japan-only game released for the Playstation 2 and Windows. Fan translations to English does exist, though this writer hasn’t tried them yet.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: 陽の当たる場所 (水平線まで何マイル? -Deep Blue Sky & Pure White Wings-)

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.

Cover Art — Cover art from https://vndb.org/v972

Note: sadly, the music file has been taken down, and I’m unable to locate another source yet.

With love up in the air, I had to look for something special. And now, I’ve found it…in a obscure Japanese visual novel called Suiheisen Made Nan Mile? – Deep Blue Sky & Pure White Wings –!? Regardless of its hentai origins, this week’s music is incredibly catchy. I’ll forgive you if the moment you’ve played Where the Sun Shines, a lovely tune by Yasuhisa Watanabe, you started dancing.

So, forgive me for the scarce information, but this is what I can gather about Suiheisen Made Nan Mile? through a few Google searches. The game is a regular visual novel that focuses on a simple slice-of-life of an average Japanese high school club. You play as Sorata, an average student and a member in astronomy club. As it turns out, the student council deems the club unworthy (which, unfortunately for the lazy club members, is a logical conclusion), forcing the members to come up with a ridiculous plan to redeem themselves: compete with the aviation club to pilot electric gliders for a world competition. And so, their flight begins…

Unfortunately, I was not able to gather what kind of visual novel Suiheisen Made Nan Mile? is. That is, typically, visual novels can be divided into one of the two categories: choose-your-own-adventure like Katawa Shoujo, or stat building like Long Live the Queen and Hatoful Boyfriend. Given the (very) few reviews out there that mentions that honing in on which girl (and a guy) to date tends to be easy lends me to believe it’s the former type of game, but I can’t be too sure. What I can confirm is that, yes, this is another erotic Japanese game (unlike Long Live the Queen and Hatoful Boyfriend), though a tame one at that. Much like Katawa Shoujo, sex scenes are treated as an end reward rather than a pornographic journey. Additionally, since the settings is set firmly in a non-magical world, there aren’t any tentacle monsters or other bizarre fetishes. Lastly, replaying the game with the same starting choices actually leads to new branches in the story as well, increasing the replay value. This does, yes, include more sex scenes.

Suiheisen Made Nan Mile? – Deep Blue Sky & Pure White Wings – was released on the Playstation Portable and PC. It is, as far as I can tell, a Japan-only game.

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