Digimon: Data Squad Review

In my review of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links I said Yu-Gi-Oh was an anime that stuck with me, but another franchise that defined my childhood just as much was Digimon.  The show was Fox Kid’s juggernaut back when it was around, almost like what Teen Titans Go is to Cartoon Network today.  In direct contast to Teen Titans Go, however, it was a well-written character-focused adventure with a lot of heart that many people, including myself, still love to this day.

The first two seasons are the ones the most people remember since they’re within the same continuity and hooked everyone to begin with.  Like some people, I lost interest in Digimon around the time Tamers came along because of the unfamiliar characters and tonal shift.  Then I missed out on the fourth season, Digimon Fronteir thanks in part to airing on a new channel.  I did catch up with the ones I missed on Disney channel re-runs and appreciated them on their own merits, but I still preferred the original adventure.  When I got to Digimon: Data Squad, the fifth series, I wasn’t able to catch every single episode, but what I did watch was interesting and possibly even darker than Tamers.  Fusion, the most recent one, I was able to watch in its entirety.  It was pretty fun, but certainly not my favorite.

For a long time Digimon was unlocky when it comes to home releases.  It was a very TV-only affair for a long time.  Some of the seasons got a few episodes on VHS or DVD if it was lucky.  You could only really watch the series outside of TV through recordings of the TV airings, which weren’t the optimum quality.  After over a decade of this, things changed around the 2010s when New Video Group released them all in DVD box sets for relatively cheap prices.  Crunchyroll also streamed the Japanese versions of the earlier series and Netflix added Digimon Fusion to their lineup.  Since it’s one of the more controversial Digimon seasons not enough people have seen, I thought it best to take advantage of this and get the box set for the season I don’t think enough people have seen: Digimon: Data Squad.

428: Shibuya Scramble Review

Most visual novels don’t capture my attention.  I can read an ungodly amount of text in games, but that’s only when they’re accompanied by gameplay and visualized with detail.  I can read all those files describing monsters and biological functions in Resident Evil’s history, but that’s because you get to see those aspects in practice.  I love the Ace Attorney games and Zero Escape games, but those are broken up with puzzles and interaction on the player’s part (and in 999’s case, the long-winded text did wear on me).  I couldn’t even get an hour into Doki Doki Literature Club because it’s so visually uninteresting.  I know I can’t expect much from that example since it’s a free game, but the majority of visual novels are made like that.  Too much telling, not enough showing.

This is all a preface to why I bothered with the visual novel 428: Shibuya Scramble.  The game has long walls of text and essentially no gameplay so there would have to be something major to set it apart and at a glance that something isn’t apparent.  There is one very important person who made this a must-buy: Yukinori Kitajima.

I’ve mentioned Kitajima more than once on this blog.  He’s the writer of the excellently written Senran Kagura games, the 3DS Ace Attorney games (including working with the Professor Layton writer in their crossover), the underrated Okamiden and at least contributed to the aforementioned 999.

Before all of those, Kitajima’s claim to fame was 428.  It was originally released on the Wii in 2008 and was showered with praise, being one of the very few games/visual novels to ever get a perfect score in the Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu.  After the initial release it was ported to the PS3, PSP and iPhones to reach even more players.

In Japan.

And nowhere else.

It took a full decade for it to finally come out in America and I wanted to play it for about half of that time after being exposed to Kitajima’s genius.  It was finally translated and localized by Spike Chunsoft in 2018.  For reasons I’ll get into, it’s kind of understandable as to why it wasn’t originally released.

Hong Kong 97 Review

There’s something that piques my interest about games that are hard to find.  Obviously they have collector’s value and that almost makes playing them feel like a privilege, like getting to see one-of-a-kind artifacts in person.  I have a few games myself that are considered pretty rare, like One Piece: Unlimited Adventure and Dokapon Kingdom, but for some of the obscenely rare ones like Limbo of the Lost, which was taken off store shelves within a week and only in another country, you pretty much have no choice but to pirate them.  Such is this case with Hong Kong 97, probably the single rarest game I’ve ever heard of.  It was released only in Japan on floppy discs for the Super Famicom, but they’re impossible to actually find.  Even pictures of physical copies online are hard to find and stores refused to sell it when it first came out.  After playing it for myself, I think I have an idea as to why.