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Japan-exclusive video games

  • Mitsumete KnightKonami and Red Company joined forces to create Mitsumete Knight in 1998. The project began as a modification of Tokimeki Memorial: Forever with You, but the…
  • Gensō Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no TokiPlayers control a party of up to six characters out of 108 possible recruits. These characters come from three distinct time periods within the game world.
  • Star Wars (1987 video game)Star Wars, released in 1987 by Namco for the Family Computer, arrived in Japan with something unusual attached to its announcement: a photograph of George…
  • Final Fantasy IIIFinal Fantasy III launched on the 27th of April, 1990, and within its first week sold 500,000 copies in Japan. By March 2003, that figure had reached 1.4…
  • Gensō SuikogaidenKonami released the first volume of Gensō Suikogaiden in the autumn of 1999. This title marked a sharp departure from the role-playing mechanics that defined…
  • Tokimeki MemorialThe player stands at the start of a three-year high school simulation. Time flows in fixed blocks that must be allocated between studying, sports, and asking…
  • Tokimeki Memorial (video game)Tokimeki Memorial arrived on the PC Engine on the 27th of May 1994, carrying a premise that made seasoned game journalists stop cold.
  • Durarara!!Durarara!! begins with a headless rider on a black motorcycle that sometimes neighs like a horse, weaving through the neon-lit streets of Ikebukuro.
  • Namco × CapcomNamco x Capcom arrived in Japanese game shops on the 26th of May 2005, carrying inside it nearly one hundred characters drawn from two of the largest video…
  • Tetsujin 28-goTetsujin 28-go arrived in 1956, the creation of Mitsuteru Yokoyama, and it asked a question that would echo through decades of Japanese popular culture: what…
  • Lucky Star (manga)Kagami Yoshimizu began writing a four-panel comic strip in December 2003. The series appeared in Kadokawa Shoten's Comptiq magazine that month.
  • Granblue FantasyGranblue Fantasy launched in Japan in March 2014 on Android, iOS, and web browsers, built by a studio called Cygames. What made it remarkable from the start…