Japanese Video Game Obscurities. Book review
In the past couple of months I have been indulging in buying all sorts of retro stuff from Japan, mostly artbooks, laserdiscs and games. Though I don’t understand Japanese, at least to an extent that would allow me to fully enjoy purchased goods, I thought it would be nice to have Japanese releases of some of my favourite games. The primary motivation is that European and US editions tend to be prohibitively expensive these days, whereas releases from Japan tend to be rather cheap - quite understandably, given the language barrier.
While browsing shopping sites for retro games - I happen to have an NTSC-J version of Sega Saturn - I often run into obscure games that were never released outside of Japan. Typically, I then search online for information on what these unknown games even are. A page that comes up very frequently in search results is Hardcore Gaming 101, which seems to specialize in all sorts of niche games from all eras. I was then very pleased to learn that Hardcore Gaming 101 also publishes books, one of them being “Japanese Video Game Obscurities” by Kurt Kalata, published in 2019. Once I learned of its existence, I knew I need to have it.
The book contains reviews of 101 games, the majority of which were not officially released outside of Japan. The focus is on retro titles for both consoles and PCs, with most of the reviewed games being released in the 90s, but also some titles from 80s and 2000s. Reviews are grouped into chapters by genre, with each review taking two pages: one page for the review itself and one for the screenshots.
As you can see in the photos above, the reviews are short, yet they are unbelievably succinct. In just a few paragraphs of text, they convey surprisingly large amounts of information and insight, both about the game itself and the context surrounding it. Each review offers multiple trails of further research, typically on the studio’s previous and future titles, similar games, and artists involved.
If you are interested in retro gaming and enjoy learning about games that didn’t make it to the West, then “Japanese Video Game Obscurities” is a must-read. It is well researched, writing is top quality, and choice of screenshots is very good. The only real complaint I have about the book is the lack of an alphabetic index of titles, forcing the reader to search the (non-alphabetic) table of contents when looking for a particular game. Also, the illustration on the cover looks quite amateurish. That’s not a serious complaint, though — just don’t let the cover mislead you.