The zine finished it's fundraising period and is now out for free, which means we can post our submissions! We're posting them one-by-one throughout the month 💙🍦💙

This one is one of Gamut's pieces, focusing on the Japan-exclusive Kumatanchi, a life sim for the Nintendo DS where you teach a bear gijinka tricks at a zoo. One of the best parts of that game is the ability to change Kuma-tan's palettes ala the kirby sprays in the GBA game, so the piece started there & fanned out, using some geometric touches since Kumatanchi is Vanillaware's only pixel game under its current label. (Princess Crown was back when Kamitani & friends were working at Capcom)

📘: The zine is now available for free on itch.io as an anniversary present to Vanillaware fans!

It's the last day of sales so we have our mods' contributions to the zine! First up is mod Gamut who contributed a bunch of goodies, as well as covered the two JP exclusive games Kumatanchi and Grand Knights History for the nintendo DS and PSP respectively.

Kumatanchi

This article is part of our Japanese Obscurities feature. We put out a whole book about them, which is available as both a full color hardcover and a Kindle ebook from Amazon! If you’d like to see more of these features, please check out the book and if you enjoyed it, leave a five star review so we can do a follow up with even more interesting, offbeat, or historically important Japanese games!

This review was originally featured in Indiepocalypse #8. Please check them out!

The Onboro Zoo is home to a variety of cutesy anthropomorphic animals, including the bear-girl Kumatan. However, it’s starting to undergo renovation, and its inhabitants are temporarily transferred to Nigiwai Zoo. It’s your job to oversee Kumatan during this period in Kumatanchi (“Kuma-tan ‘n Pals”), an adorable life simulation game. 

Spotlight: Kumatanchi

Kumatanchi is a sort of life-sim game, set in an anthropomorphized version of a zoo where you the player take care of a new entry, the titular Kuma-tan the bear. Based on the director Shigatake’s Habanero-tan & related comics, it's one of Vanillaware’s more passive titles, centered around taking care of the main character, giving her food, designing her room, teaching her tricks, and watching her interactions with other zoo residents unfold over the course of a couple weeks.

Despite never being localized, Kumatanchi is notable for a few reasons: it’s the beginning of Vanillware’s relationship with Nintendo as it came out on the 3Ds in Japan, and its a passion project headed by one of the older members of the company, Shigatake, rather than being headed by Kamitani. It was also developed alongside Muramasa, splitting the employees into two teams to see if it was feasible. After production wrapped on Kumatanchi, they decided that splitting wasn’t the best idea, and committed back to doing one game at a time under Kamitani’s direction.

Rabi-Tan from Kumatanchi~! ♥

(The Little Bunny Girl on your side bar~! *haha)