Site Changes, Japan Update

Site News

For all return visitors or people just coming in for the first time, I thought I'd explain some changes we've been making to the site. First off, we have our first podcast. You can expect more of these at a regular rate, however I'm not certain how to deal with hosting the mp3 file yet, so if anybody has a suggestion feel free to chime in. In addition, people who've been coming for awhile may have noticed the inclusion of separate news feeds in the sidebar. Basically, Eddie and I both use Google Reader to aggregate all of our rss feeds from different sites, it's a really efficient way to get updates without having to visit every single site and navigate through a ton of pages, so I highly recommend Google Reader or some other rss feed reader to those who haven't tried it out yet. Anyway, in Google Reader you get the option to share any items of interest you may come across, thus generating a separate feed of just those items you choose. With the little script that Google provides, we're now publishing these feeds on the sidebar, so you'll see them changing constantly. Unfortunately, our feeds only display 7 items at a time for the sake of not destroying the layout, so if you want to see everything we've shared you can either click to see more or subscribe to our feeds separately. I think I find a lot of awesome stuff so I really recommend you give it a try.

Japan News

The past few days have been a whirlwind of major releases in Japan. First, on November 30th, I was there to witness the rerelease of Final Fantasy 6 for the Gameboy Advance. This was actually a pretty big event, with displays all over Akihabara and awesome FF6 music playing wherever I went. FF6 had my favorite music of the series, so it was fun being out there. Pretty much every major store had stacks of copies, and sales seemed really brisk. The buzz for it was pretty strong, with even ShokoTan, the closest thing Akihabara has to a living mascot, releasing a picture of herself biting the box.


Then, on December 2nd, I was there for the Wii launch. Unfortunately, I had to teach a lesson that morning so I couldn't be there for the unveiling, but I was there in the aftermath. Of course, by the time I arrived there wasn't a single Wii to be had anywhere in the city. I asked some clerks in stores when they expect to get a new shipment of Wii's but none were able to give me a date. Interestingly, the Wii is actually quite a bit cheaper in Japan if you compare the exchange rate of Yen for Dollars. 25,000 Yen is about $217 USD. Unfortunately, Wii's aren't region-free though, so when I do manage to pick one up I'm going to have to play games entirely in Japanese. For most games that isn't a problem, but RPGs are hell.


Finally, there was the Blue Dragon launch. Buzz for this game has been good, I've been seeing package deals for it advertised in convenience stores, it got a great Famitsu score, and there are capsule toys and all types of little accessories out for it. The character design was done by Akira Toriyama, that's the artist who drew the Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z comics, the character designer behind Dragon Quest, Japan's other huge RPG series besides Final Fantasy, and the character designer behind Chrono Trigger. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this was enough. Blue Dragon doesn't appear to be selling that many systems, or even that many copies. Unless some surprising news comes in about system sales, it appears Microsoft's single most hopeful gambit seems to have been unsuccessful. Rapid, widespread adoption of the console in Japan is still not happening, and that means serious Japanese developer support is still going to be limited. As long as the US and European developers provide quality titles like Gears of War, the system may do fine in the western markets, but it looks like this is shaping up to be one more console generation where Microsoft has failed to significantly penetrate to the east. It remains to be seen what other strategies Microsoft will take to make it over here.