日本語の投稿って「Dime a Dozen」

HI ALL.

PERSONA 5 COMES OUT IN JAPAN TOMORROW.

SO I AM GOING TO STREAM IT.

STARTING AT 12PM EASTERN TIME, 9/15.

twitch.tv/elliotryo

BE THERE.

LEZ DO THIS.

Download Link

The Sega Saturn Soul Hackers: Extra Dungeon disc is one of those ephemeral trinkets from 90s Atlus history that isn’t widely discussed in great detail. Part of that is circumstantial; only 1000 of these discs were ever given out by Atlus, making tracking one down in the wild extremely difficult (I’ve only seen one ever in person in the years I’ve trawled through Japanese game stores) and limiting the amount of information that’s on it even on the Japanese Internet. Part of it also has to do with the fact that the content on it was by and large brought over to the PS1 and 3DS ports of Soul Hackers and made accessible as post-game content by way of the Extra Game mode. Compound these issues with the fact that, so far as I could tell, there wasn’t a preexisting dump of this disc circulating around publicly online and you had a relic that could well have remained in obscurity if left alone, which I personally think would be a shame, as it’s a neat little thing in its own right.

That’s why I did some detective work and managed to acquire one of these discs for myself and now I’ve dumped it so that you, the readers, can experience the origins of this side content for yourself. Though similar to the Extra Dungeon that you’ll find in those later PS1 and 3DS version, it’s not entirely identical. Here’s an excerpt from the readme I’ve included in the dump that discusses these differences in detail (at least when it comes to the ones I could find and verify):

-Unlike the PS1 and 3DS versions of Soul Hackers, Extra Dungeon on the Saturn actually lets you play through it without having to beat the game. In fact, all you need is a save where you have your COMP and isn’t currently inside a Vision Quest. I tested this myself and the game will in fact let you proceed as soon as you’re done with the first Vision Quest. This isn’t particularly advisable, though; the demons and bosses you fight inside are still designed for late to post-game level characters. I’ve alleviated this problem for those who don’t have a Saturn save file on hand with a hacked one of my own, which I’ll discuss how to use a little further down. -In terms of the actual content, there are minor differences here and there between this original version and the one used in later ports. Most notably, the only final boss present is Kyouji from the first Devil Summoner, unlike the gauntlet that sees you facing Raidou and company in the 3DS game. The layouts of the individual mini-dungeons that you visit also seem to be potentially different from the ones employed in the PS1 and 3DS version. At the very least, I can confirm that the final mini-dungeon where you have to navigate through a door puzzle before fighting Kyouji does in fact have its doors laid out a little differently than those later versions, meaning any maps or FAQs you might consult for that room in English are useless unless they’re updated to accommodate this version specifically, which is understandably unlikely.

And there could well be even more to unearth! I just don’t know because I’m not the biggest Soul Hackers expert, as much as I otherwise like that game, so any input from the game’s superfans would be greatly appreciated.

Anyway, as mentioned, to play this disc, you need to have a save file on hand that meets the requirements of that first bullet point. I’ve included a hacked one designed for use with the Saturn emulator SSF in the archive linked above alongside the actual dump of the game. It has the protagonist and an Agi-type Nemissa at max level with maxed out stats, the best equipment, and 10 of every item. While there are no demons included, I can confirm that this already way more than enough to beat this content. Consult the readme for more specific directions about how to copy it over if you need it. And while I haven’t tested the game in other major emulators or on real hardware, I figure it should run just fine if you have other preferences for how you play Saturn games.

I think that’s just about it for me. As usual, while you’re free to repost this dump elsewhere, a credit to me, PepsimanGB, would be appreciated, along with a link to the Atlus Atlas (http://www.atlusatlas.com), my Atlus blog where I’m officially hosting it. This archive may be updated in the future to include scans of the printed media that originally came with this disc, but seeing as I have yet to acquire any of it yet, you should simply find the disc dump and the save data.

Have fun with this disc! It’s been a journey getting my hands on this hand given how rare it is, but being able to make this happen has made it all worth it!

Up until now, the Atlus Atlas has had a dedicated focus on Shin Megami Tensei and Persona ephemera. This isn’t particularly intentional so much as just a natural consequence of Atlus’ output being dominated by those two franchises. But near and dear to my heart is the Trauma Center series, as well, especially its Wii incarnations. After starting a new run of Trauma Team for the first time since I beat it during launch, I realized there weren’t necessarily a whole lot of translated interviews about the series and its development history, which I find to be something of a shame given its unique place as one of the better showcases of both the DS and Wii’s unique control schemes.

That’s where this translated interview conducted by Nintendo Inside comes into play, which you can find below. Conducted with the first DS game’s director Kazuya Niinou, it’s not very long, but as an initial taste of hopefully more Trauma Center content to come in the future, hopefully it’s at least informative about the series’ history, some of which I didn’t know about. I’m going to try and make a more concerted effort to feature more Trauma Center content when I can make time for it, so wish me luck in pursuing bigger pieces from here.

-Pepsi

Trauma Center: Under the Knife Q&A April 16, 2005 By OKOK, show, and Spelunker

Trauma Center: Under the Knife is an upcoming game set to release for the Nintendo DS on June 16 that revolves around the world of medicine. For this interview, we decided to drop by developer Atlus to have a chat with director Kazuya Niinou about the game. We’ll publish our formal impressions of the game later, but suffice it to say, it’s shaping up to be a great game that’s worth keeping an eye out for once it’s out!

Nintendo Inside: Could you briefly describe what the game is for our readers?

Kazuya Niinou: Sure. Trauma Center: Under the Knife is a science fiction game of sorts where doctors wage war on a mysterious parasite known as GUILT. It’s the first game of its kind to come to the DS, making it a rather unique game, if I do say so myself.

How did Trauma Center even come about in the first place?

In a nutshell, I’d wanted to somehow make a game about surgery in the past and when I learned about what the DS was capable of, I felt like the time had come for me to finally make it. The hardware just couldn’t be a better fit for it. The fact we can work with both dual screens and a stylus has helped realize the game’s potential beyond my wildest imagination.

Would you describe it as more of an action game rather than an adventure one, then?

I would, yeah. It’s not that I don’t get why some people might think it’s an adventure game. There are a lot of elements in the screenshots we’ve released that definitely resemble those sorts of games. But at the end of the day, the story exists in Trauma Center primarily in service of the gameplay experience, to give players a sense of purpose and make things more exciting for them. Obviously, the deeper you get into the game, the more we ratchet the drama of it all and hopefully players will enjoy that, but at the end of the day, it’s meant to be an action game, so the story can’t get in the way of that action or else it’s failed to do its job as a game.

That being said, there’s also been a trend in games lately to have no real loss state whatsoever and just essentially let players keep moving forward until they reach the end. Trauma Center isn’t that sort of game. We’ve limited the number of hints players can find on purpose in favor of just letting them learn the mechanics more organically as they play through levels repeatedly. Some players might think that’s a little harsh, but I’d argue that it makes the act of pulling off tricky surgeries in the game that much more satisfying.

When did initial planning for the game start?

The core concept of a surgery action game itself was something that we’d been looking into for several years, but it wasn’t until around spring last year that we settled on making it for the DS. The actual planning for the game then started around last summer.

Did you and the team get any inspiration from medical dramas while making the game?

Of course. There were a lot of things that we looked at while making the game such as shows like ER, Chicago Hope, and various Japanese TV series, as well as comics. But even knowing that, Trauma Center has its own distinct flavor to it, so in the end, when it came to the actual storyline we came up with, there wasn’t much material from other people’s works that we ended up drawing upon.

Was there anything about developing a surgical game specifically that made it uniquely hard compared to other kinds of games?

Definitely. It took us a long time for us to figure out what we were going to do about the graphics in particular. Early on, the game was pretty gory in its depictions of surgery. We also tried more of a deformed visual style, but in the end, we settled upon the more placid visuals you see in the final game. Even then, just by sheer virtue of the kind of game Trauma Center is and the overall setting it has, the style we adopted still means we couldn’t shoot for an all ages demographic when it came time to start marketing the game. [Indeed, in the end, the game was given a 12 rating by CERO, putting it roughly in line with a T rating from the ESRB.]

Were you aware of the existence of Kenshuui Tendou Dokuta [a Spike-published medical game released as part of the Nintendo DS’ Japanese launch] as you were making Trauma Center?

I was, yeah. But that game is one I’d consider to be much more in the adventure game camp, whereas, again, Trauma Center is pretty firmly in the action side of things. I don’t really view them as competing games in that sense.

How long do you expect it to take players to beat the game?

If you get to be as knowledgeable about the game’s inner workings as us developers, then you can probably beat it in around six hours like we have. That’s probably unrealistic for most players going through it their first time, though. After all, there are over 40 surgeries to perform in the game and you often have things that crop up mid-surgery, not to mention the more marathon procedures that’ll take a while just to get through in general.

It’s a pretty hard game as a result of all that, but, like I said, I think that just makes victory that much sweeter when you attain it. There are a lot of hidden nuances and tricks of the trade you can pick up along the way to improve your skills, too, which I think is a lot of fun. Really, it’s one of those games that you can only really understand by sitting down and playing it, so I hope readers at least give it a shot. We think we’ve made something pretty special here.

Followers of this blog might be aware that I have something of a penchant for digging through old Japanese cheat code repositories in search of fun cheats that English fan bases never got around to digging up, either due to version discrepancies or just lack of awareness. Indeed, in previous posts, I’ve covered how to unlock PS1 Shin Megami Tensei II’s debug menu, as well as how to unlock a dedicated battle debug menu for most versions of Nocturne.

Today’s post obviously focuses on unlocking another such debug menu in Persona 4. While limited debugging features were previously unearthed by others that let you do things like mess with the calendar system and parts of the dungeon crawling, this is a much more proper debug menu that lets you examine much of the nitty gritty of the game, at least insofar as the corresponding menu functions still work. Given the extensiveness of the features on display here, I’ll first cover what you need to do to even trigger the debug menu to begin with before proceeding to translate and break down the features insofar as I could figure them out.

What You Need

A Japanese copy of Persona 4. (Unlike Nocturne, this debug menu has seemingly been disabled in localized editions of the game. It’s also worth noting that this code has only been tested on the original launch release of the game, serial number SLPM-66978. I’m unsure if this works on the PlayStation 2 The Best budget re-release edition and would appreciate anybody who owns a copy testing it and seeing for themselves if that’s the case of not.)

PCSX2. (While this is confirmed to work on actual hardware, for reasons I’ll discuss below, it is highly advised you use the debug menu in emulation instead as a matter of convenience.)

A memory editor such as Cheat Engine. (Optional, but potentially a little more convenient overall if you’re familiar with those sorts of interfaces.)

Inputting the Code

Memory Editors

If you plan on triggering the debug menu using emulation, you have two options at your disposal. First off, if you know how to use Cheat Engine or other such memory editors, you can inject the code directly into the game once you’ve loaded the ISO by manually entering the following: 205F0AD4 00102D10. The first set of numbers is obviously the address you need to manually request, while the second set is the actual number. Make sure the entry is set to hex by right clicking your new cheat under the “Value” column. It’s fussy about this and tends to be set to decimal format by default.

.pnach file/PCSX2

If you don’t know how to use Cheat Engine, you can make a custom cheat file for PCSX2 known as a .pnach that will automatically load the cheat when you boot the game up. Doing so is fairly simple and as such I’m going to basically copy what I wrote for Nocturne since the procedure is the exact same.

.pnach files are the files contained inside PCSX2′s cheat directory that the emulator consults to activate cheats. Making one is simple, even if you don’t understand the actual parlance of what’s contained within them. Just open up a text editor, copy and paste the text for whichever version of the game you want to play using this cheat, and save it to PCSX2′s cheats directory (which should be inside the main folder where you’d normally execute the emulator) using the designated filename I’ve provided (make sure it saves as a .pnach and not as a .txt!). Then, once you’ve opened the emulator, go to the “System” menu option and make sure “Enable Cheats” is checked. After that, you should be set; the emulator will automatically load your cheats into the system once you’ve got the game running. Of course, if you already have .pnach files for Persona 4 in the directory, you can just add this code below whatever else you’ve got and you should be good to go.

Japanese Persona 4 Filename: 43D6E63C.pnach Contents: gametitle=Persona 4 (Japan) Debug Menu patch=1,EE,205F0AD4,extended,00102D10

Real PS2 Hardware

If you want to enter the debug code on console, you’ll obviously need a cheat device of some sort in addition to the actual game. You’ll also need to track down the master code so that you can use cheats in the game without the system freaking out. For convenience’s sake, I’ll include both that master code and the actual debug menu code in a raw, unencrypted format below:

F0100208 0000000E 205F0AD4 00102D10

Many cheat devices will require you to convert both of these codes to another format before you can actually use them. Thankfully, there’s a tool out there called Omniconvert that can do the job for you, which you can download here. Just stick these numbers in the input column on the left, then go to the Input menu and choose “Unencrypted” and then “Standard.” After that, use the Output menu to choose whatever cheat hardware you have, press the “Convert” button on the bottom left, and then copy the final results into your cheat device.

Since most of you will likely need to use Swap Magic in order to boot a Japanese copy of Persona 4 on real hardware anyway, I’ll save you the trouble of figuring out the codes you need for that and include them below:

EC878530 1456E79B 1CCA8DFC 144602B5

Getting to the Debug Menu

Once you’ve input the code for the debug menu using any of the means above, the rest should be automatic. After the memory card check and initial load, you should immediately see this screen below rather than the opening movie. (If you use a program like Cheat Engine to do it, time is of the essence. You need to input that code as soon as possible while the game is booting up or else you’ll miss your window of opportunity. Of course, if you’re too slow, you can just freeze the value and restart the game, at which point, you should get to the debug menu.)

At this point, controlling the debug menu is generally pretty simple. Just scroll through the list using the d-pad and then select or cancel using the Circle and X Buttons, respectively. One important thing to note, though: once you’ve activated an option, the rest of the debug menu tends to be rendered useless and inaccessible, even if you back out for whatever reason. This means that to test various options, it’s highly suggested you use savestates so that you can instantly reload back into the debug menu and not have to restart the booting process from scratch. This is why using the debug menu on real hardware isn’t advised, as you’ll have to reset the system and possibly reenter or reactivate your codes just to get back to this screen. Save yourself the hassle; computers have advanced far enough that you don’t need a top of the line PC to run Persona 4 in PCSX2, especially for this level of functionality.

Debug Menu Translation

Many of you reading this probably understandably can’t read Japanese. Fear not, for I’ve translated and briefly documented below more or less what every option in every menu does, at least among the ones that still work properly. Bold items signify the options in the main menu, while italics signify sub-menu options contained within each main option.

Field (Event) Viewer  MAJOR (#)  MINOR (#)  START POS (#)  FBN (#)  ENV (#)  FIELD HIT (T/F)  Display Imaginary NPCs (T/F)  Event Major  Event Minor  Definition Table Dungeon Viewer  Level (#) (This number covers both the dungeon and the individual floor)  Build ID (#)  No Enemy Symbol Placement (T/F)  No Enemy Attacks (T/F) (Enemy won’t trigger an encounter even if they collide with player)  No Enemy Detection (T/F) (Enemy won’t notice player)  No Treasure Chest Placement (T/F) Dungeon Editor  MAJOR (#)  MINOR (#)    Set your numbers and press circle to confirm to enter editor. Controls are as follows: -L1/R1: Rotate block -L2/R2: Change block type -Circle: Place block Dymap (Takes you to town location menu) SCRIPT VIEWER (Doesn’t work?) EVENT (Doesn’t work?) Food Court (Takes you to food court) Kosaka (For Debugging)  Map Test (Dungeon map layout generator test?)    TYPE A (#)    TYPE B (#)    TYPE C (#)    Level (#)  Set your numbers for the above items and then press Circle. Some combinations of numbers can make menu freeze.  Field Unit Test (Takes you to school and cycles through two areas)  Reload Rain Texture (Doesn’t work?)  Fog Test (Displays rain)  Noise Test (Displays TV noise filter)  Icon Test (Doesn’t seem to work?)  Field Background Clamp Instance (Doesn’t work?)  Field TEX Strip (Doesn’t work?)  Dungeon Parts TEX Strip (Doesn’t work?)  RWS Test (Brings up a text prompt, unknown function) Tōyama (For Debugging)  Load Initialization Data (Doesn’t seem to work?)  pak2 Test (Text prompts appear that can change with button presses; unsure what for)  Display Item Data (Press up and down on d-pad to display item names)  Camp (Opens the triangle button menu)  Cut-in (Displays a bouncing Yukari cut-in)  Bust Up (May not work)    Bank (#)    Character (#)    Kune (#) (Unknown function)    Expression    Load    Display    Turn Off  Movie (Doesn’t work)  Clear Data SAVE (Saves a New Game Plus file)  Memory Card DEUBUG (Should be debug; haven’t tested, but back up memory card files if you venture into this!)    GET MEMCARD INFO    DATA WRITE    UNFORMAT    FORMAT    CONVERT Niida (For Debugging) (Doesn’t work) Yajii (For Debugging) (Brings up a location; choose with left and right on d-pad and press O to load, last option appears to not work; pressing square triggers experience point sound and triangle makes name flash?) Nowatari (For Debugging)  LINE TEST (Does an animation test of the colored menu lines)  SFL TEST (Doesn’t work)  CAMP TEST (Opens triangle button menu)  PERSONA TEST (Change Persona ID +/-1 with d-pad up/down, +/-16 with d-pad left/right, circle to load; L1/R1 to change ID +/-1 and load immediately; Start changes ordering between Arcana, level, and internal hex ID numbers; Square button changes state between normal, level up, and bonus EXP from Social Link bonuses; triangle changes other miscellaneous options; other options appear when pressing other buttons, will confirm later)  MISC (Displays an Izanagi Persona card) Miwa (For Debugging)  FONT (Displays a menu where you can test varying font effects; choose a cell with circle to make value go to 0; increase it temporarily again with R1)  Name Entry (Opens the name entry menu)  System Window (Tests various system message windows; up and down on d-pad to select and circle to choose)  Assist Window (Doesn’t work)  Save (Creates a special save file with RESERVE set as the location name; loading it is like starting a non-New Game Plus Run seemingly; needs further testing)  Load (Opens the save file loading screen; unsure if it actually works)  Time Change (Changes time of day)  Day Change (Advances in-game calendary)  TV World (Triggers transition into TV World; unsure if it does more beyond that)  Pesto (Doesn’t work) Imanishi (For Debugging)  Sample (Brings up a sample screen with katakana and Latin character sets)  BAD Staff Roll (Triggers credits roll for bad ending)  TRUE Staff Roll (Triggers credits roll for true ending)  Verify (Triggers staff-less credits roll for a few roles)  Sample (Doesn’t work) Sample (Same as first sample option in Imanishi) Title (Seemingly doesn’t work)

Whew, that’s a lot to parse through, isn’t it? While I did my best to test the functionality of things in so far as I could, some menus where you’re asked to input a lot of numbers I obviously couldn’t fully test and may not know what all they have to them, so please, by all means, if you come upon things that I haven’t noted here, please feel free to share them with me, especially if they contradict what I have! I want this documentation to be as complete and accurate as possible so that the people who want to dig through this can do so knowing what they’re doing.

Putting Out a Translation Patch for This Menu

While I’ve opted to just do a basic text translation inside a Tumblr test, my own testing leads me to believe that it should be possible to put out a translation patch for this debug menu. The reason why I didn’t go through with it is that text encoding makes doing so a bit of a headache, but for those interested in giving it a shot, here’s what you’ll need to know:

The debug menu code is obviously contained inside the game’s executable, an ELF file titled “SLPM_669.78.” This should be the only file you ever need to touch to get it working.

As with the rest of the game’s text, the debug menu options are encoded in Shift-JIS. The tricky thing, however, is that all of it except for the menu options written in romaji already are half-width size, rather than the standard full-width (e.g.: the word katakana would look like ｶﾀｶﾅ rather than カタカナ). From what I’ve seen, not every hex editor necessarily supports this text rendering mode out of the gate, even the ones that otherwise ostensibly do support Japanese text encoding. You may therefore be forced to track down menu options by searching for the hex values of each character, rather than a conventional text search. This site here should be able to handle it. Chon-chons (the dashes to the upper right of characters that turn characters like カ into ガ) and bubbles (e.g.: ホ into ポ) are also their own separate character, rather than properly integrated into the character being modified, as is normally the case. Finally, each character takes up one byte rather than the standard two, meaning that any English that’s inserted won’t have extra space to work with, at least by default.

To my knowledge, a full English font is loaded into memory in this screen, meaning you should be able to type away as necessary without worrying about any missing characters. You can even choose between uppercase and lowercase letters if you like! Just obviously beware that text space is limited for the reasons stated above.

A partially translated version of these debug menu options does exist in the localized English game’s executable, even though the functionality itself has been wiped out. It’s entirely possible that you might be able to get away with just copying and pasting what’s there for the relevant options, but I would personally suggest doing it from scratch just to be safe. What remains also doesn’t really seem helpful at all in terms of establishing context for the more ambiguous options, but I figure it’s still worth mentioning so that those interested in patching the game have every tool at their disposal.

Though I know Persona 4 does have some file integrity protocols that it runs to confirms in-game files are as they should be, I don’t think hex editing the debug menu should break anything on that front. As such, a basic patch like those used in other PS2 translation efforts should likely do the job fine. If any prospective patchers would like additional translation assistance in the event that more stuff is unearthed or just need more truncated alternatives for text space reasons, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and I’ll see what I can do!

Conclusion

While I don’t recall finding anything new in terms of deleted content, I also obviously didn’t exhaust every last option at my disposal within the debug menu itself because of the sheer scope of some options. As such, I still highly encourage the adventurous among you to take a look inside and share what you can find! If you find something especially interesting or need to contact me about something else related to the debug menu, my IM inbox for this blog should be opened, so don’t be shy! (I can also be contacted at iiotenki on Twitter, if you prefer that way of doing things.) If anything especially juicy comes up, I’ll be sure to update this post and credit the lucky people to find it!

Until then, hopefully this is of use to some of you out there or you at least get some good kicks out of it. Many of the repositories that include these Japanese codes and discussions surrounding them are extremely outdated and could potentially one day be deleted without intervention, so if nothing else, I’m glad I can do my small part to unearth them and share them with foreign fans when possible. For those of you unable to run the debug menu yourself, I’ll leave you with a few fun screenshots of what lies in store, perhaps to tease you into sharing it with friends and stuff.

Enjoy!

-Pepsi

The dungeon editor.

A wild Yukari appears.

Pause menu testing.

Download Link

Longtime followers of the blog know that I occasionally like to veer into other types of uploads beyond Japanse demo discs, mainly in the form of other Japanese game history ephemera such as weird pachinko games with side modes you’ve never likely heard about before and the like. Elsewhere, this has also included scanning manuals and the like for Japanese games that haven’t been preserved well online, something which I intend to start doing now here on this blog. Indeed, this is a scan archive for pretty much everything you’d get in the box with the Mobile Adapter GB, a really neat Japan-only accessory for the GameBoy Color and GBA that let you hook up your portable to a Japanese cell phone for various network-based shenanigans. I’ve been fascinated with this thing for ages, especially because it’s surprisingly not wholly useless in 2016, so when I had a chance to pick up a complete set for very cheap, I jumped on it for archival purposes.

All told, you’ll mostly be looking at a bunch of different manuals which are otherwise well designed and pleasing to look at. That being said, one of these manuals is specifically devoted to the mobile phone functionality of Pokemon Crystal specifically, which infamously had a lot of neat things that you could do in only the Japanese version of the game, namely trade and battle people over phones and also catch Celebi through an in-game event. Even if you can’t read Japanese, there are a lot of screenshots of features that I don’t think are entirely well documented anywhere given how much of the networking infrastructure is inaccessible now, so hopefully that stuff in particular is useful to series fans who are interested in that history.

As I mention in the readme for this archive, feel free to spread the scans to other sites. I’d just appreciate a quick credit to PepsimanGB as the one who scanned all of these things and also a link to Demoban, where you’re probably reading this to begin with. Otherwise, go nuts! Game history is meant to be shared and enjoyed, so don’t hold back!

Enjoy!

Cyberpunk Bartender Action: VA-11 Hall-A OUT  IN JUNE 21st. Windows, Mac, and Linux!

waifubartending.com

Hey, guys,

This is Brittany again, Localization Producer at XSEED and lead editor for The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II and Trails in the Sky the 3rd. While it’s been a while since we’ve done a blog related to Trails, I’d actually like to save that kind of talk for another day and veer into a more personal direction with both the series and my place in the company as a whole. Get ready for some super deep real talk, friends.

A few months back, I was talking with someone who is currently around the same age as I was when I started with XSEED. He was saying how working in games was a dream job, but he was far, far away from anything related to the games industry, didn’t really know how to make his way in because he felt he had nothing special to offer, had never lived on his own, didn’t have any “real” goals with college…pretty much what anyone at 21 would say. I wasn’t much different.

My start in games was completely by chance. I grew up playing video games and loved them, but I was from a small town in the middle of nowhere with zero connections to anything related to games. I never liked school, but I loved working, and even if I didn’t have any particular goals in life, I figured I’d just stay in the small town I never liked and settle for government work and an easy, stable paycheck. Then, right before my 22nd birthday, I got completely plastered at a friend’s house, and in my drunk ramblings to my mother as she drove me home (don’t drink and drive, legally-able-to-drink kiddos), I told her I was going to leave home for the first time and move about 3,000 miles to live on an acquaintance’s floor for a few months while I started a new life in California. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life, but I knew it wasn’t what I currently had, so I figured it was about time I go searching. A couple months later, I did exactly that.

Game Dump Download Link Printed Media Scan Archive Download Link

It’s been long promised, but after much Yahoo Japan Auctions shipping finangling, I finally own a physical copy of Giten Megami Tensei for the PC-9801. For readers of the blog who were here the last time I got a rare copy of a PC Megami Tensei game by way of Megami Tensei for the PC-8801, you know what this means: a whole boatload of goodies included in the package archived and uploaded by yours truly so that series history may be forever preserved.

Unlike last time, this release comes with two distinct links up top. The first is my own personal dump of the game itself, while the second is the actual archive of my scans with all of the game’s printed materials included. This is to allow those who only want one or the other to have the choice to download just what they want, rather than get everything in one big package and potentially waste bandwidth.

I’ll get to what’s included in the scan archive in the next paragraph, but I briefly want to cover why I’m also releasing a proper dump of the game itself since I haven’t often done that on this blog. In essence, the reality as it generally stood until now was that while you could find the Windows port of this game circulating online with some detective work, in my experience, a downloadable version of the original PC-9801 version was basically impossible to come by on either English or Japanese sites. That’s not to say someone else hasn’t dumped it already, but, like many Japanese PC games from the 80s and 90s, I suspect it’s been relegated to obtuse Japanese P2P filesharing systems. While it took a lot of time to research and figure out by trial and error how to install the game and properly archive it, I feel it was important to do so partly so that, again, history can be preserved, but also to give people the option to play a version of this game that shouldn’t be necessarily prone to compatibility issues. Although the Windows copy can still run in today’s operating systems, it’s also very, very old at this point and may well not play nicely on some current computers. Either way, the end result is that now you’re able to play the original version of the game in an emulator of your choice. (Make sure to consult the readme for instructions on how to run it since it’s a fairly specific procedure.)

Anyway, as for the scanned materials, that 7-Zip archive includes the following things:

Cover art

CD label art

Manual

Map (although it’s pretty rough since I had to piece together multiple scans in Photoshop given how big the thing is)

Other miscellaneous paperwork

Essentially, you can check out everything you could possibly see and read in the physical package if you bought it yourself. Aside from the really nice super high resolution box art, the most important part of this archive is easily the manual. Not only does it include a good amount of character art (albeit in black and white), there’s a lot of critical information about the game in terms of story/gameplay content that the game proper doesn’t cover, as well as technical stuff. As such, it’s very much so worth keeping close by if you intend to play or even, god forbid, install it from scratch. (You really shouldn’t do it if you don’t know what you’re doing, though. Just use the preinstalled hard disk and floppy disk images I’ve included in the dump and follow my instructions on how to run it.) Of course, that given the age of all this material, there are visual blemishes here and there, but it should all still be very readable.

And if you do want to give the game a serious shot, I can’t recommend the PDF guides published on this Japanese site here enough. (Obviously, Japanese literacy required.) They’re extremely thorough and very well laid out; I don’t think I’ve seen a fan guide with better presentation and production values, especially for a game with as dubious of a reputation as this one.

That should be just about everything I want to cover.  Do note that you’re free to repost the contents of these archives to blogs, wikis, forums, etc, but I would greatly appreciate a credit and a link back to the Atlus Atlas if you do so considering it took a lot of time and even more money to bring to fruition.

Enjoy the history!

I am very tired because it took a lot of work to get this together and to verify that the game is even functional in emulation.

Game Dump Download Link Printed Media Scan Archive Download Link

It’s been long promised, but after much Yahoo Japan Auctions shipping finangling, I finally own a physical copy of Giten Megami Tensei for the PC-9801. For readers of the blog who were here the last time I got a rare copy of a PC Megami Tensei game by way of Megami Tensei for the PC-8801, you know what this means: a whole boatload of goodies included in the package archived and uploaded by yours truly so that series history may be forever preserved.

Unlike last time, this release comes with two distinct links up top. The first is my own personal dump of the game itself, while the second is the actual archive of my scans with all of the game’s printed materials included. This is to allow those who only want one or the other to have the choice to download just what they want, rather than get everything in one big package and potentially waste bandwidth.

I’ll get to what’s included in the scan archive in the next paragraph, but I briefly want to cover why I’m also releasing a proper dump of the game itself since I haven’t often done that on this blog. In essence, the reality as it generally stood until now was that while you could find the Windows port of this game circulating online with some detective work, in my experience, a downloadable version of the original PC-9801 version was basically impossible to come by on either English or Japanese sites. That’s not to say someone else hasn’t dumped it already, but, like many Japanese PC games from the 80s and 90s, I suspect it’s been relegated to obtuse Japanese P2P filesharing systems. While it took a lot of time to research and figure out by trial and error how to install the game and properly archive it, I feel it was important to do so partly so that, again, history can be preserved, but also to give people the option to play a version of this game that shouldn’t be necessarily prone to compatibility issues. Although the Windows copy can still run in today’s operating systems, it’s also very, very old at this point and may well not play nicely on some current computers. Either way, the end result is that now you’re able to play the original version of the game in an emulator of your choice. (Make sure to consult the readme for instructions on how to run it since it’s a fairly specific procedure.)

Anyway, as for the scanned materials, that 7-Zip archive includes the following things:

Cover art

CD label art

Manual

Map (although it’s pretty rough since I had to piece together multiple scans in Photoshop given how big the thing is)

Other miscellaneous paperwork

Essentially, you can check out everything you could possibly see and read in the physical package if you bought it yourself. Aside from the really nice super high resolution box art, the most important part of this archive is easily the manual. Not only does it include a good amount of character art (albeit in black and white), there’s a lot of critical information about the game in terms of story/gameplay content that the game proper doesn’t cover, as well as technical stuff. As such, it’s very much so worth keeping close by if you intend to play or even, god forbid, install it from scratch. (You really shouldn’t do it if you don’t know what you’re doing, though. Just use the preinstalled hard disk and floppy disk images I’ve included in the dump and follow my instructions on how to run it.) Of course, that given the age of all this material, there are visual blemishes here and there, but it should all still be very readable.

And if you do want to give the game a serious shot, I can’t recommend the PDF guides published on this Japanese site here enough. (Obviously, Japanese literacy required.) They’re extremely thorough and very well laid out; I don’t think I’ve seen a fan guide with better presentation and production values, especially for a game with as dubious of a reputation as this one.

That should be just about everything I want to cover.  Do note that you’re free to repost the contents of these archives to blogs, wikis, forums, etc, but I would greatly appreciate a credit and a link back to the Atlus Atlas if you do so considering it took a lot of time and even more money to bring to fruition.

Enjoy the history!

I am very tired because it took a lot of work to get this together and to verify that the game is even functional in emulation.

All right, one last Atlus phone game video sourced from NicoNico for you all, this time Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Requiem. Developed as usual by Bbmf, Tokyo Requiem kicks off with you being on a date with your girlfriend on Christmas Eve. Soon after receiving a mysterious email containing a demon summoning program, Tokyo is spontaneously struck by nuclear missiles, with things obviously only getting better from there. Design-wise, one of Tokyo Requiem’s main claims to fame is its episode release structure, with the game doled out in six chapters that were released monthly.

That’s all I’ve got for now, but of course, if I find more, you can expect that I’ll throw it up here. I’m also trying to work on acquiring proper data dumps of these games for posterity, but that’s likely going to be a very long term project given the games’ scarcity these days, so don’t hold your breath on that one.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this stroll down mobile memory lane!

-Pepsi

Next up on the Atlus phone game archival footage docket is Shin Megami Tensei: if… Hazama-hen, originally grabbed from NicoNico here. As the title implies, the game stars if’s antagonist. Originally planned to be a part of the original SNES game and then as a special edition version of the game that was scrapped due to budgeting issues, the Bbmf-developed Hazama-hen has a few interesting gameplay mechanics going for it. Notably, as a COMP-wielding protagonist, Hazama is able to utilize magic, something of a rarity among SMT protagonists from that era of the series. More interestingly, while he can still recruit demons, he has no Guardian of his own; instead, he can fuse demons with special pieces of equipment, granting them added stats and abilities.

I’ve got footage for one more SMT phone that I hope to get online sometime tonight, so look forward to that!

And so the archiving of old Atlus phone games continues unabated. This time around, it’s Shin Megami Tensei 20XX, originally uploaded to NicoNico here. Developed by longtime feature phone game collaborator Bbmf, 20XX is a prequel to SMT2. In it, players take the role of an amnesiac protagonist with a nagging obsession for getting stronger for reasons they’re unsure of, constantly getting into street fights in Valhalla until one day a mysterious guy seeking someone just like you scouts you out and gives you a COMP, intent on training you up to be more than just a mere street punk.

Although this is the most footage I can find for the time being, the whole script for the game is actually online over here. From what I understand, this is one of the more well regarded phone-only spinoff games, so maybe one of these days I’ll get around to translating it or at least doing a synopsis. We’ll see!

Following up on the OST collection for the Shinyaku Last Bible trilogy that I reuploaded, it’s time for some right proper gameplay footage from the first two games, Megami Tensei Gaiden: Shinyaku Last Bible and Megami Tensei Gaiden: Shinyaku Last Bible II: Hajimari no Fukuin, both of which I managed to dig up from NicoNico. (The second one is embedded at the bottom of this post.) As mentioned previously, the Shinyaku Last Bible trilogy is its own original set of games with their own storylines, rather than just being remakes of the existing games, as was common with Japanese feature phone games at the time. Gameplay-wise, these two games look similar to the original Last Bible games, but I only played one of them for all of like 30 minutes years and years ago, so I’m no expert on them. Development duties for the first two games was handled by Bbmf, while the final game was done by Menue.

Footage for the third game hasn’t been found as of yet, but of course, should that change, I’ll be sure to upload this post. (As with before, source URLs can be found on the actual YouTube pages, for those curious.) I’m not done uploading more game footage for some of Atlus’ other lost phone games, so look forward to more soon!

-Pepsi

Next up on the Atlus feature phone game archival docket are three OSTs for the Megami Tensei Gaiden: Shinyaku Last Bible trilogy that some anonymous brave soul uploaded to NicoNico. As you might surmise from the title, though these games are part of the Last Bible series that Atlus put out for the Game Boy, these three games released exclusively for Japanese phones are otherwise their own distinct, original series with their own continuity from what I’ve been able to gather about them.

It should be noted that while the first two games’ OSTs are complete, the third game’s isn’t due to a computer failure the original uploader experienced. So far as I can tell, the remaining music hasn’t been uploaded, but of course, if I can ever find the rest, I’ll be sure to update this post. Also, while it should be abundantly obvious, the images in the videos are doodles by the original uploader and not actual screenshots, although an MS Paint Atlus game sounds pretty all right to me personally.

The OST for the first game,  Megami Tensei Gaiden: Shinyaku Last Bible, is up top. For the remaining two games,  Megami Tensei Gaiden: Shinyaku Last Bible II: Hajimari no Fukuin and  Megami Tensei Gaiden: Shinyaku Last Bible III: Mugen no Eiyuu, check the videos embedded below. Because all of these soundtracks were originally uploaded in parts, please check the YouTube page descriptions for source links.

Enjoy!

-Pepsi