What other middle- and small-sized Japanese dev houses have you been thinking about lately.
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Yeah, are they dead? How’s this stuff work?
You can’t support a full team on reissuing Ikaruga two years ago right?
i actually thought it’d been longer tbh
IIRC they didn’t want to make mobile or gatcha games and probably didn’t have the funds to self-publish, so the development staff were laid off.
Probably because Sin & Punishment 2 was the last noteworthy thing they did and that was in 2009.
It’s ironic that Treasure seems to have more influence now than ever, in the indie scene.
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I think it was on the 8-4 podcast that somebody said that Gaist Crusher was a supposed to be a series they could make some safe money from but the franchise just failed completely. After that they never really recovered.
What
I’ll say
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There are of course a bunch that are still technically alive but only as hollowed out zombified pachinko pumping entities now. Irem comes to mind. It is good to see Treasure’s spirit live on in some form through indies but can the same be said of Irem? Or Treasure in the 3D era? I really hope that becomes a thing! I’m happy to see the PSX and N64 aesthetic gaining traction (PS2 can’t be far behind?) and now I want to see that particular kind of quirky beef jerky gameplay to match.
Gaist Crusher was a Capcom multimedia thing where they launched a cartoon and the first game at the same time and the game immediately bombed but also they started making the sequel for it already it when that came out, it sold like, 3-4 thousand copies
also please don’t ask Treasure about Guardian Heroes, bug Sega about that one
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Buster’s Bad Dream is pretty barebones but it’s good fun. I’d call it an underrated Treasure game.
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i think about g rev studios all the time
oh apparently they made senko no ronde 2 like three years ago is it any good
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I want mid-2000s Atlus back lol
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i miss warp/kenji eno
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the shitty thing about this, besides everything, is that somehow your average japanese developer hasn’t figured out how the whole independent thing works. like, if treasure were a bunch of western developers, they would’ve just launched 3 kickstarter projects 5-7 years ago and been ok. they could still grab half the band back together and do that today, but they’ve probably all moved on to other real jobs.
like when granzella did this with rtype final 2 and had pretty good success I was hoping we’d see it click with more japanese developers
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more like senko yes ronde
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I mean part of the problem is the actual devs that made most of those games don’t actually work at those companies anymore, so it’s not like they can just pivot over.
You’d either need to see old companies build dev teams, or old devs build new companies, and both are risky propositions.
There’s an ever growing japanese indie scene it’s just mostly new folks.
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frustrating enough that BitSummit was formed by gaijin to try to fit japanese indies outside of the doujin scene and into a worldwide market where they can make enough sales to band together and start hitting a mid-90s-sized game scope like western devs have.
That project is 7 years old! And it’s only been marginally successful.
https://www.satakore.com/satmag.php
The Sega Saturn Magazine list is a videogame thing I think about a lot. It honestly sort of changed my life. A page I find a reason to go back to almost every week because a game pops in my head and I want to see where it’s at.
It only goes up to 250 here, but if you browse the site for a certain game you can see the ranking. It goes down to the 900’s.
As far as I can tell, they would take reader ballots every month for the lifetime of the saturn and well into the dreamcast era too, and this is the cumulative tally. And I don’t think there was any criteria other than–did you, the reader, feel like putting in the effort to mail a list of games to the magazine that month. I don’t remember how I came up with that, so maybe I’m wrong.
Beep Megadrive (which is the same magazine, it just got renamed) had a similar list that I wish was published somewhere. Occasionally you see an MD game’s ranking mentioned online.
Anyway here’s a scan of that final special issue which was published in 2000. Maybe it explains the methodology better. https://segaretro.org/File:SnGwSISDRZK_Book_JP.pdf
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