Re: SEGA!
Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2020 11:37 pm
Most of those games wouldn't have made a difference. I think the only two games that stayed in Japan, and actually would've made an impression on everyone are Dahna Megami Tanjo & Alien Soldier.We also didn't get the first two Legend of Heroes games. There was a Yuyu Hakusho RPG that was detailed as fuck and this RPG Golfing game that was like Golf Story only 20 years before it was released(LOL, sega did Golf Story first).
I actually don't understand why Alien Soldier was skipped over when Sega of America routinely ruined most of their own games by fucking up the balancing and making them needlessly hard for no reason. They didn't have to do that with Alien Soldier coz it's already pointlessly hard by default. It's actually a detriment to that game. I'd like it way more if ammo weren't so limited & the controls weren't so imprecise.
The OG Legend of Hero games were just Dragon Quest clones anyway. At the time, nobody outside of Japan like any of those type of RPGs. Even the SNES never received any DQ type games in the West.
I don't recall a YuYu rpg, there was a JoJo Bizarre's ADV styled YuYu adv game which had rpg combat but it wasn't a rpg.
In any case, I don't see how that would've been a huge improvement to the Western library.
I actually didn't know that Battle Golfer Yui was a rpg. I have all of those games in Super Retrocade, but I don't play them. That golf rpg looks fun, but it'd just be another Beast Warriors/ Beast Wrestler. A cool niche game, which made the Genesis what it was, BADASS.
A game that stayed in Japan that I would've loved is Hybrid Front. (I never heard of it before until I saw it on Mega Drive Mini, it's actually a Sega exclusive.)
That game just seems tailor made for me.
Considering that Shining Force actually was popular on the Genesis, I think Hybrid Front may have had a chance especially since it has a very complex plot which would even resonate well with modern audiences coz that's how well written & expansive Hybrid Front's background setting seems to be.
Eveything about Hybrid Front seems badass from the music, the art style to the story. You even get yuge dossiers on every character, the history and the current geography. It's like a game made from this era, but it stepped on the Terminator time machine by accident and got stranded in the 90s and then had to dress itself up as a game from the 90s. :lol: .
Like you said before, Sega was almost always ahead of everybody in terms of innovation. Hybrid Front is one such game. I've played a ton of Strategy Turn based Rpgs on SNES, and not a single one of them is on Hybrid Front's level. (The setting is as in-depth as Trails of Cold Steel & Xenoblade/Saga/Gears. I have a new found respect for Gears since Xenoblade is basically the same story, the main writers of Xeno has since matured and knows how to properly write a narrative now, using the same exact themes he & she always used.)
The Majin Tensei games are extemely simple in comparison to Hybrid Front with the only thing comparable between the two are the realistic character designs and badass techno/rock music.
Lemme rephrase that, the only rpg that I feel would've added to Genesis's Murican library. King Colossus was basically their Secret of Evermore. Yeah sure Evermore isn't well-liked but it's a hardcore action rpg during an era when action rpgs were relatively easy.We also didn't get
Would I say that Colossus was better than Evermore or Terranigma? No, not by a long shot but it'd be a respectable entry when compared side by side with Beyond Oasis & Light Crusader. I actually owned both of those games on day 1, but i hated Light Crusader back in the day coz it felt too American to me, considering it's a Treasure game.
I've warmed up to Crusader over the years, but it still feels really American, I heard that Light Crusader actually inspired Diablo 1 since Light Crusader was actually the first isometric hack n slash. Amusingly, I've always liked Diablo. I think it's Diablo has a much more consistent atmosphere. Light Crusader looks dark, but the atmosphere is over the place. Sometimes it comes off as gritty as Metroid, but then other times it's weird Japanese shit that looks like bland American shit.
Sega's localization (pre-Bernie) generally left games untouched. (Aside for the aforementioned bad habit, of making the US version harder by ignoring the orignal game's balancing.)X-men 2 and Ecco weren't influenced by SEGA's localization team.
SOA weren't like Nintendo of America who would completely change everything, even replacing female enemies with boys (Final Fight, Ninja Warriors, countless other action games.) most of the time so as to avoid offending Christian cucks.
Splatterhouse 2 & 3 certainly weren't censored in any way and that's saying something coz even the TG-16 version of Splatterhouse 1 was censored in the USA.
What Sega usually did is completely change the promotional art to resemble 70s & 80s era movie posters.
I feel that was a good move since a lot of the art they generated look way better than the scribbles that most of those games had in Japan.
I never saw the Jap cover as a kid, but if I did, I'd be like
9 yr old me: "Meh whatever. Who wants to play as a faggy princess?"
Whereas the actual cover that I saw as a kid made me go
9 yr old me: "Wow mom, buy me that game! That hot nekkid bitch is shooting lightning from her hands & she has such a cool pet Dragon! I WNAT THAT! I NEED THAT!"
That's the exact reaction SOA's marketting was going for and I say that they succeeded for the most part.
The only marketting changes I don't understand is why the fuck did they change Streets of Rage & Shinobi's covers into something that's far more bland?
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread ... -up!/page3
Streets of Rage's American art doesn't even make any fucking sense. It's some of the most amateur art I've ever seen. It's like they never heard of perspective.
Golden Axe is a weird one coz I think the Jap & US covers both look badass as fuck.
Troubleshooter is prob the best example of botched American art work. In this example, I could def imagine 9 yr old me wanting to play the game with the hot blonde & blue haired chick
over that weird one.
It's funny coz they're using the same basic idea, hot half naked chicks on the cover, it's just the girls in the Murican cover, aren't hot.
I did see that game at blockbuster, and no I never rented it coz the cover sucks.
Those games weren't going to penetrate the American or European market at all. Who cares that they stayed in Japan? I was living in Japan back when the Saturn was 'popular' and I still rarely saw anyone even in Japan giving a shit about those games. Sakura Taisen was extremely popular, but that's about it. ST is an acquired taste though, and I don't think it'd have made a difference had it came West back in the 90s.There is also the huge library of Japan only Saturn RPGs and detailed Text Adventure games/VNs. If I ever finish learning how to read Japanese at a competent level, the first thing I'm going to do is tackle the Saturn RPG library.
Grandia was the only one that had potentional coz it had advanced gfx during its era, full voice acting, full battle animations, and full 3d enviornments.
Grandia was the most technogically advanced rpg during its era until Final Faggotry 7 released.
You never hear about how technologically advanced Grandia 1 was coz it didn't finally come to the USA until two years after FF7 released, and to make it worse it came to the PSX instead of the Saturn :lol: .
Nothing that Saturn had, that was stuck in Japan would've ever competed well against Squaresoft's PSX games.
Compare Squaresoft's 90 PSX output to the Saturn Rpgs, Square's games look like they're two generations ahead especially Chrono Cross & Parasite Eve 2.
Only Capcom's fighters that were stuck in Japan, seemed like they could've made a dent on the PSX coz they were the superior versions of the Arcade games.
PS4 & Vita already get all of that VN crap, and they appeal to a small market.
With that said, I hope Nintendo localizes Famicom Detective Club 1 & 2 Switch remake once it releases in Japan. They should finally add Ayumi to Smash, since they always wanted to include her but chose not to since she's not relevant outside of Japan.
Famicom Detective Club is a Visual novel done right, coz it feels like a full blown explorable world. A shame that they only made 3.
I actually don't like that game, & I think it was the most retarded idea ever to design a Genesis exclusive game, for a 6 button controller. It would've made more sense to use a 3 button approach like Virtua Fighter did.I had Eternal Champions. It had a great story and design for what it was, even though the final boss fight was more broken than an SNK boss. I never got to play the seque, and Its a shame the sequel never got a re release as with most SEGA CD games.
EC had a cool setting though, and I generally like chracter design. A lot of people say that they look goofy, but I mean come on. How does EC look even more goofy than Mortal Kombat? MK had like only the ninjas & Kano who looked cool. Everyone else was a geek.
There's been confirmation that Sega of Japan did kill EC.The Shadow only spin-off game was horrible. I didn't think SEGA of Japan killed it off. I thought it was the abyssmal performance of the two followup games.
https://books.google.com/books?id=hxhmD ... it&f=false
I believe the claims due to how Yuzo Koshiro and his sister have always had a hard time trying to get a Streets of Rage 4 greenlighted. They were denied every single time coz Sega of Japan (which was still ran by Nakayama, lol.) have never heard of it, which is bonkers to me coz SOR is one of the few in-house Sega games that actually sold over 2 million units each. (Except SOR3, but it didn't sell that bad for that era.) That to me, signifies that Sega of Japan was willing to kill off anything that was only popular outside of japan.
Yuzo Koshiro has recently stated that the SOR games aren't popular inside of Japan at all.
Too bad SOR4 looks & sounds like hot garbage, but oh well.
Even if Eternal Champions 3 did happen, it sounded terrible from what they were planning.
https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php ... far.35409/
Even if it did bad though, it was still a bankable IP that had mass appeal. (Until Nintendo retaliated with their own fighting game.) EC had way more mass appeal than Virtua Fighter ever had. VF is a classic case example of someone having high technical ability, but zero charisma.
Charisma & sex appeal matters more when generating casuals to your product. If you have 0, nobody is going to care about it beyond the few die hards.
That Shadow & Larsen game were spin off games. If Sega of Japan killed it just coz the spin off games did horrible than they even more stupid than I thought since Mortal Kombat had lfops that were just as big such as the Mortal Kombat jax Special Forces game.
That's the thing, Eternal Champions actually was a household name back in the early 90s. It eventually faded away when Nintendo retaliated with Killer Instinct (which was way cooler under Nintendo anyway. Fuck Microsoft for turning Ki3 gay.)
Eternal Champions could've stayed strong though if Sega of Japan weren't hardcore Xenophobic as fuck.
Nintendo is xenophobic, but they also had great mastermind geniuses behind them such as Hiroshi Yamauchi who acted and looked liked a full blown Yakuza mob boss. :lol:
(I believe that he really did hire a hit on Yokoi, since Yokoi is the entire reason that Nintendo became a video game manufacturer. Yokoi could've easilly started his own systems to compete against Nintendo.)
Yamauchi would always take a chance on an idea that gaijins had if they could convince him that it'd be a success. The same wasn't the case for Hayao Nakayama.
Nakayama is actually the reason why Yamauchi underestimated Sega at first. Nintendo of Japan never saw Sega as true competition ever, coz Sega of Japan were bumbling dumbasses.
Yamauchi ignored Sega coz he was far more worried bout the PC Engine who were SNES's completion in Japan.
Yamauchi had nothing to do with Play it loud, but what was genius about him is that he allowed Nintendo of America to handle Sega of America, coz he understood that it would take an American to tackle a campaign that was aimed towards American rebellious youth.
Unlike 2 inch dick Hayao Nakayama, Yamauchi didn't get jealous of Nintendo of America's successes. He worked alongside them. What a novel concept. ;)