japan

Phil Spencer negotiating with Japanese creators to bring games to the States

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Phil Spencer negotiating with Japanese creators to bring games to the States 1

Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, is over in Japan right now. But not for leisure- he’s actually responding to the drove of fan requests wanting to play Japanese games on the Xbox One (actually, probably a little bit of leisure). He’s meeting with developers, publishers, and other key figures in order to talk about bringing these much sought-after titles over to the west.

Often, Japanese games are presented during conferences like E3, but players in the rest of the world can only see what they can’t have. Every now and then, we get the odd port and translation, but we miss out on the AAA stuff.

Spencer mentioned in a tweet that he’s going back to Japan for more meetings. He plans to negotiate with local Japanese game devs and pubs to talk about game development and reveal the progress he’s made with local game creators.

Spencer says that he’s already been “making progress with creators” in Japan, so just from that, we can take away that there’s some hope for Japanese titles to finally be released in States.

He’s not doing this solo, either. Xbox Games Marketing General Manager, Aaron Greenberg, talked about similar concepts during an interview at Gamescom 2018. This is good news for those who have been wanting to get their control sticks on a copy of Powerstone.

Japan’s Xbox presence isn’t nearly as strong as the rest of the world, and Japanese gamers tend to stick to Sony, so there aren’t really that many exciting titles. Regardless, it may be an attempt to stay competitive for the PS5’s launch, where Sony is rumored to go all out- complete with backward emulation alongside other features.

Octopath Traveler sells 1M copies; Thanks fans with banner art

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Octopath Traveler sells 1M copies; Thanks fans with banner art 2

Square Enix’s Octopath Traveler for Nintendo Switch has now shipped over 1M copies globally.

Developed by Square and studio Acquire, the Switch exclusive title’s success was relayed through an announcement from the official Octopath PR Twitter account stating that download numbers and shipments worldwide have netted over a million copies. They also drew a “1M thanks” banner using characters from the game for their fans with “1,000,000 Travelers! 1,000,000 Thanks” in text.

Octopath Traveler has become very successful for Square Enix. Over 90% of its initial stock in Japan was sold in July with over 100K units sold in less than 14 days. The game also has several sold-out locations of the physical disc all over the world, but mainly in Japan, to which at one point sold hundreds of copies in just a few hours after a new batch was released tot he public. Square then apologized for the shortage of physical copies and encouraged a digital download on the Nintendo E-shop if possible.

The game is obviously more popular overseas but has garnered a sizable audience in the West as shown by the sales figures.

Traveler is a retro take on the classic RPGs for an older console with 8 different characters each unique with abilities and personalities. There are also 8 stories in total. Some modern revamps include an improved turn-based system for battles and the use of animated sprites in an HD texture environment which was called an HD-2D effect by the developers.

The characters and positioning of the banner alluded to the official artwork of Bravery Default, which was released for the Nintendo 3DS which the producers of Octopath Traveler worked on also. Tomoya Asano and Masashi Takahashi both worked on both titles to create a consistent universe and their style shows in the fan art created for the community.