Welcome back to Spawn Point, where we take an element from the world of gaming and explain what it is, why it’s worth your time and how you can dip your toes in and get involved. Last time, Brendan gave you a 101 course in Final Fantasy XII, a JRPG that recently got spruced up for PC twelve years after its original launch on PlayStation 2. This time, however, I’m going to be looking at JRPGs as a whole, discussing what they are and which ones you should try your hand at first if you’ve never played one before.
Does the movement of the planets and stars influence your behaviour and your destiny? Other than making you giggle when astrologers talk about “Uranus rising”, I mean. Story-o-puzzler This Starry Midnight We Make [official site] gives the power to shape the sky and change the world.
Starry Midnight is the latest Japanese game being localised and published by Carpe Fulgur, the folks who brought Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale westward. They plan to release it later this month, but for now it has a demo you can try.
Is it odd that we report on the localisation work of one specific company? Regardless, the fallout from their last couple of pieces of work – Fortune Summoners, Chantelise, and Recettear – seem to make up for any oddness in localisation reporting. The news that Carpe Fulgur are now converting Trails in the Sky SC into our Anglo-Internet language is wholesome news. The odd things is, though, this is the second chapter of the JRPG, and the first chapter is soon to arrive on PC without CF’s involvement.
We tasked young master Caldwell with exploring the dungeons of Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stone, the latest translated Japanese indie title from Recettear Anglifiers Carpe Fulgur. He returned with these words.
As the son of a shopkeeper in real life I know for a fact that helping out in the storeroom is not a magical experience. So Recettear, while jovial in spirit and generally compelling, didn’t appeal to me in the same way as it did others. In the storerooms of the non-digital world there are lots of cardboard boxes to tear apart and smelly bins to stand on in an effort to crush rubbish and make space. Once, there was a fist-sized hole torn in the wall by an errant RPG of a completely different nature. It was dreadful and there was rubble in the 10p mix-ups. But that’s Northern Ireland for you, and another story altogether. Read the rest of this entry »
COS WE HAV LIKE A MILLION TINGS 2 PLAY N POST ABOUT RAEDER K?
But: it is well worth observing Fortune Summoners – the latest release from Recettear and Chantelise Westernisers Carpe Fulgur – and Analogue: A Hate Story – the latest from Digital: A Love Story and Don’t Take It Personally dev Christine Love – both went on sale this week. Both are games that at least part of the Hivemind is very interested in, and we will be presenting some manner of opinion about them as soon as we can. We have not forgotten them. It’s just that we’ve been paid $3 million each by Eactisoft to only ever write about their releases and ignore all that indie stuff.
Just a quick one, as I’m supposed to be in the middle of cooking a curry and if my girlfriend catches me posting instead of chopping onions she’ll… WhatwasthatohgodI’mgonnadie.
Okay. Okay. It was only a passing seagull. Got to be speedy here. Side-scrolling RPG Fortune Summoners, the next translated Japanese indie game from Carpe Fulgur, now has an English-language demo. That’s here, at a svelte cost of 66MB. And its release date and price are newly confirmed as January 17th, 2012 and 25 USD/20 EUR/£16. Right, I need to slice some mushrooms before I get sliced up myself. Have fun!
Recettear merchants Carpe Fulgur recently released their second translated Japanese indie title, Chantelise, to the English-speaking world. The all-action dungeon-runner has been a little more divisive than its shopkeeping-centric predecessor, but it’s definitely picked up fans. Seems like a good time to chat to Carpe Fulgur’s Andrew Dice about the reception to the game, the debate over its difficulty, the argument around whether old Japanese gaming traditions such as painful low-health noises and repetition should be revisited, what the Japanese indie scene is like compared to its mainstream, and what to expect from project number 3, Fortune Summoners… Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve spent a few hours nuzzling up to Chantelise, the next Westernised translation/do-over of a Japanese indie title from noble Recettear chaps Carpe Fulgur. Because I appear to be pretty terrible at the game, a full Wot I Think is probably some days off. Meantime though, here’s some early impressions ahead of the release on Friday.
It strongly evokes Recettear while being absolutely nothing like it. Obviously much of that has to do with the love it/hate it/be a grown up and not be too fussed either way art style, but even beyond that a confluence of tone (via Carpe Fulgur’s extensive and breezily charismatic rewrite of the dialogue), references (many items bear similar if not the same names) and interface design paints this as a clear companion piece. Read the rest of this entry »
All of a sudden, we’re just days away from the next release from the merchants of Recettear. Chantelise: A Tale Of Two Sisters is, as is Carpe Fulgur’s M.O., a diligently-translated Western do-over of a Japanese indie title – in this case a dungeon crawler. Which means ACTION rather than COMMERCE.
Chantelise will finally be released later this week- the 29th, specifically. You can warm yourself up with a demo right now, however. Read the rest of this entry »
They’ve not even got out their second game Chantelise yet, but already Recettear‘s translator/Western publisher Carpe Fulgur have lifted the lid on project the third. It’s another translation of a Japanese indie game – this time being side-scrolling RPG/platformer Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stone, which apparently has been something of a pet project for CF boss Andrew Dice. Have you heard of it? I haven’t. But then I haven’t heard of most things, like dinosaurs, cheese and the offside rule. Read the rest of this entry »
Recettear, o Recettear. The out-of-nowhere translation of EasyGameStation’s Japanese indie shopkeeping/dungeoneering hybrid has done pretty well for itself, recently passing 100,000 sales with barely a whiff of marketing or promotion. While that’s just 10% of Minecraft’s paying userbase, it does proves that you don’t need to go mega-viral to make the creation and selling of indie games a plausible career choice. Given that milestone and given the recent announcement that Chantelise will be US translat-o-developers Carpe Fulgur’s next project, it seemed like a good time to chat to the team’s Andrew Dice about what happened, what he expected to happen, more about Chantelise’s when and why, and what game(s) they’re hoping to turn their attention to next. Go words! Read the rest of this entry »
Joyous tidings from Carpe Fulgur, translators/Western distributors of the ever-lovely indie shopkeeping game Recettear: they’ve only gone and sold 100,000 copies of the bally thing, without promotion or publisher and solely via digital distribution on PC. Oh, and they’ve cheekily revealed what the next Japanese indie title to pass through their Westernisotron will be…
While the games industry at large continues to have a nice little a panic about declining retail sales and just a handful of games cornering the market, indie’s looking masterfully strong right now. Yesterday, we got a sense of how many money-hats Minecraft’s Notch gets to wear, and now we hear that marvellous profiteering/dungeoneering hybrid Recettear has “done what we barely hoped it would do.” I.e. sold a whole bunch, and given the folk at translator/co-developers Carpe Fulgur enough money in the bank to make this kind of thing their actual, honest-to-God jobs. Read the rest of this entry »
Shop-keeping/monster-biffing indie RPG Recettear is out at last, following Carpe Fulgur’s elaborate translation of EasyGameStation’s 2007 Japanese game. It arrived on Steam, Impulse and Gamersgate yesterday, and I’ve been playing it on and off during the last week. It seems prudent to report my findings.
What I think is that this whimsical indie tale of manning the tills of a semi-stereotypical RPG item shop is about ten times bigger than I’d imagined. I thought I’d got the measure of it from the demo, but what seemed a small and simple thing unravelled and expanded throughout – every time I sat back and thought “that’s it, I’m ready to write this up” it threw in a little something else.
The key effect of this is that “An Item Shop’s Tale” isn’t all that accurate a description. “A Surprisingly Enormous, Sprawling Roleplaying Game” would be far more relevant, if less neat. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, hopefully. While I’m always of a mind that all games should be available on all possible digital distribution wotsits, it’s hard to deny that getting the nod from Steam is good news for an indie title. And so is now the case for the lovely Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale – the translation of a gloriously bonkers Japanese game about playing as the owner of an RPG loot store. Translators/re-publishers Carpe Fulgur had previously secured an Impulse release but struggled to attract other attention. Yesterday they confirmed the golden handshake from both Steam and the august GamersGate. Both are also offering 10% off preorders. You’ve done the Right Thing, men. Details and videos and quotes and a made-up word are below. Read the rest of this entry »
Cast your mind back. Back! Back to the distant, murky, forgotten times of July 19-22nd 2010. Life was so much different then. We could have been anything that we wanted to be.
We were also talking excitedly about Recettear, the Japanese indie game that had you playing the owner of a cheerfully stereotypical RPG shop. All we had to go on was a demo. Now, we have a place in time in sight for the full version. Ho! Read the rest of this entry »
The demo of Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is one of the best things I’ve played in a while. A Japanese indie game pitching an RPG shopkeeper as the star… well, you can read all that in the last post. Given the slightly unusual nature of the project – it’s only available here thanks to a third-party translation company- I thought I’d chat to said translators about the why, how, who and what next. Interesting stuff – there’s this whole vein of (slick) indie gaming that we otherwise hear nothing about. Take it away, Carpe Fulgur’s Andrew Dice.
Why set up a business translating Japanese indie games? Love, profit, bit of both?
A bit of both, really. Should Carpe Fulgur prove very successful we do hope to take it beyond “just” indie stuff, although the Japanese indie scene is mournfully overlooked. There is a lot of what might be termed “naughty” content being produced by the Japanese indie scene, but it’s also where some of Japan’s future best and brightest are starting to make their mark and it’s almost criminal that localizers on this side of the pond won’t even give them a first look. Read the rest of this entry »
I really, really like this. Even though it arguably gets its core gag absolutely wrong. It’s the old pun about why RPG shops are happy to repeatedly buy and sell the same old crap to the same old heroes writ large, as a rather funny and monstrously compulsive strategy-RPG hybrid. The fact there’s an RPG in that… well, that’s what it gets wrong. The RPG shopkeeper gag is that they don’t know what the hell they’re buying, what animal arse it’s been pulled from or why the guy selling it is covered in bits of town guard. When the shopkeeper’s part of the adventure, they’re no longer the naive/mercenary money-grabber we’ve encountered in a thousand different games.
I still really, really like this. I played the (fairly long) demo through twice. Can’t remember the last time I did that. Read the rest of this entry »
