Today Nintendo aired the Nintendo Direct Partner showcase, and as usual, quite a few Japanese games have been excluded from the English livestream.
While we don’t know whether all of them will come to the West, some of the choices of games to leave out certainly felt quite arbitrary, but fear not, as we’re giving them the spotlight they deserve here.
You can check them all out below, while you can also enjoy the dedicated articles about the English Nintendo Direct Partner showcase and the Indie World showcase.
We start with the rhythm game Disney Music Parade Encore by Imagineer, coming to Japan on November 21. Since the original was never released in the West, it’s likely that this will follow the same fate.
Yabuzaki Company presented Doubutsu Tower Battle (Animal Tower Battle), a port of the popular mobile game available for download today in Japan for a very affordable 500 yen.
Spike Chunsoft revealed Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island + Pack, a series of two DLC for the game that lets you play Koppa (on September 5) and Asuka on October 31.
While this wasn’t skipped on the English version, the Japanese version of the Direct included a full trailer of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 1st.
I suppose the reason for the difference is that whoever put the English version together isn’t completely out of their mind. I can’t imagine what’s going on in the head of someone who dedicates only 10 unvoiced seconds to something this relevant but decides to give MySims a full trailer.
In any case, we learn from the Japanese version of the trailer that this is a “full remake” of the original 2004 game that kickstarted the popular Trails JRPG series.
The “rapid fire” sizzle reel was included in the Japanese direct as well, but included a few different games like Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, the remake of The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case The Okhotsk Disappearance: Memories in Ice, Tearful Figurine, Kamaitachi no Yoru x 3, Sword Art Online Fractured Daydream, and Kill the Crows.
Next is a big one, that Konami better bring to the West or else. It’s Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You – Emotional. It’s a remaster of the remaster of the 1995 PlayStation version of the original and beloved Tokimeki Memorial dating simulator.
It’ll release in Japan for Nintendo Switch in 2025, and it’ll come with an option to switch between the original pixel art graphics and the remastered version. It’ll also include the Emotional Voice System backported from Tokimeki Memorial 2, which lets characters say your name.
We then get a new trailer of The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy by Too Kyo Games. It’s the next game by Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi, creators of Danganronpa and the Zero Escape series.
It’s coming on April 23, 2025, for PC and Nintendo Switch and we know that this one will release in English, so there’s absolutely no excuse for excluding it from the Western direct.
Next, we take another look at Onion Games’ Stray Children, an RPG by the creators of Moon: Remix RPG Adventure. It’s releasing in Japan for Switch on December 26, 2024.
For fans of classic anime take a new look at Doraemon’s Dorayaki Shop Story, which has been released in Japan today.
Next was the usual sizzle reel, which was also different from the Western version including Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven, Fairy Tail 2, Romance of the Three Kingdoms 8 Remake, Farmagia, Stray, and Beyblade XONE.
The rest of the Direct ended pretty much like the English version, albeit Yakuza Kiwami and Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma were inverted, which certainly makes sense considering that having a port of an 8-year-old Yakuza game that already exists on every other platform as your “one more thing” is a bit weird.
