The Week in Gaming in Japan

Next Generation has a piece up today examining recent events on the gaming scene in Japan. From the article: "Ninety-Nine Nights - April 1 Arrival. This week's short interview of Mr. Maruyama reveals -- in addition to his outright declaration that Blue Dragon will sell a million -- that 'The launch period will last through until March.' Why's that? What happens in March? I check my schedule: well, Final Fantasy XI (pre-loaded onto every [Japanese] Xbox 360 sold at launch) snaps out of its beta phase? Ninety-Nine Nights releases on April 1st, and let's hope the joke is that the little witch girl's face isn't as creepy in the actual game as it's been in every piece of press. If they're banking on Japanese guys wasting more than half their disposable income on plastic figurines of that witch girl, they've got some rethinking to do." Relatedly, Forbes is running an article positing that the 360 has its work cut out for it on the Japanese market.

Comments

X360 in stock!

[ajservo]

Apparently the Lawson's (like 7-11) outside my friends apt will have this for sale on Saturday. There have been no preorder takers so far.

He lives 2 hours north of Tokyo in a city with about a half million.

View On The Ground

[patio11]

I live in Japan and had a business trip last week which required about 6 hours of trainrides, so I went to a local game chain to pick up a new DS game for the ride (ended up getting Naruto RPG 2 -- good game, by the way, if you're a fan of the manga/anime and like a fairly conventional console RPG its well worth your $30 if it comes out in the US). While I was there, I asked the manager when the new Microsoft console was coming out. He said, and I quote, "There is a new Microsoft console coming out?!", then one of the clerks said "Yes sir, XBox something or other." They then checked the big book of incoming inventory (its a chain store), and found out that they would get a shipment of two of them sometime in January or so, which were classified as "XBox Accessories". This is the newest, largest video game store in the second largest city in my prefecture.

I'm not optimistic for this console rocking Japan's world.