Interesting Playstation 2 Japanese-only games

[youxia]

It's PS2's turn in my console rotation schedule. I've dusted it off and realised I know literally nothing about the NTSC-J library. What are some good games which never got released in the EU/USA and are playable despite the language barrier? I'm interested in pretty much all genres, perhaps with exclusion of some mundane sports (the bonkers are ok) and mahjong + similar.

[newtmonkey]

Shadow Tower Abyss is a good one.  It's almost like the missing link between King's Field and Demon's Souls/Dark Souls/Bloodborne in a way.  It's an action-RPG (with very light RPG elements), so it's playable but you'd miss out on the minimal story.

[IntelliMission]

I know this is a mundane sport game, but my favorite sports game of all time is a Japan exclusive PS2 soccer game, Winning Eleven 5: Final Evolution. The game is in Japanese, but you can apply this tiny translation patch: https://mega.nz/file/9gAwmIhQ#zFsODk9-AMKyVq96l_mXKVEhQWt03JgCbDWLyTFEUco

 

 

I know a guy who's heavily into manga, RPGs and Japanese games since the 90s and the Winning Eleven series was the only sports game he liked to play. This one is the best in the series and rewards tiki-taka (passing game) more than any other game in history, probably.

 

As an example, Konami made dribbling too easy in the next game, Winning Eleven 6 (PES2 in Europe/US), and you could just run and change the direction with Ronaldo-like players (the old Ronaldo!) with a bit of practice to create goal chances easily without any combination play, and WE7/PES3 was a disaster as they introduced a new engine which looked amazing, but all the AI had to be (apparently) reprogrammed.

 

Around 8 years ago I rediscovered this game (I played it on a friend's PS2 back in the day) and couldn't stop playing it. I still have a TXT file with all my records. The most fun for 1 player is to play world cups without saving the game, trying to win the 7 games consecutively. When I did it with all the teams, I tried to make my center forward the maximum goal scorer of the tournament. In the end, the challenges I created were really difficult and fun, playing with terrible teams like China or Iran and destroying Brazil or France with my tiki-taka while some unknown player scored in every game like a boss.

 

As an example, one of the things you always do in this game is to check the form of your players before starting, which changes randomly or depending on previous results. If it's not their day, it's a good idea to use someone on the bench instead. You can feel that on the pitch when controlling them, they have more stamina and accuracy when they're "on fire".

 

(youxia will probably ignore this, but hey, maybe someone else reading this may benefit from it...)

[Steven Pendleton]

"Playable despite the language barrier" makes it difficult, as I'd normally list a few Tales games (specifically Destiny Director's Cut, Destiny 2, and Rebirth). I guess Thunder Force VI is probably the only Japanese PS2 game that I own that you might consider playable, but the game's complete crap, so definitely try it if you like terrible games. There is Twinkle Star Sprites La Petite Princesse, which is the sequel to the rare and crazy expensive Neo Geo shooting game. I haven't played it so I can't say how it is, but try it, I guess.

[youxia]

Thanks for the tips. I've played a lot of Shadow Tower on PSX, love it, so was going to check out the Abyss too. Luckily there's a translation available.

I've heard a lot of good about Winning Eleven series so might give it a go one day...even though these footie games are the sort I enjoy until I lose a game, and can never learn to control my players properly.

 

About Tales & other jRPGs, yeah, it's a bummer about language but I guess some have translation patches too. Will check these STGs, I thought it's not possible to ruin Thunder Force series, so it'd be interesting to see.

 

With 8/16 bit games I just go through all of the Japanese games one by one, but since the medium moved to CD/DVD the size matters. The entire PS2 NTSC-J Redump set weighs ~3TB....

[Steven Pendleton]

lol Thunder Force VI is insultingly bad: poorly designed and short stages that end in about 45~70 seconds, other stages that are more or less copied almost directly from Thunder Force V, a bad camera that likes to move around and be cinematic but ends up just being annoying, dull and lifeless graphics, equally dull and lifeless music that you can't even hear over the sound effects (which is the worst part; it's Thunder Force. and every game besides the first one and VI have unbelievably excellent soundtracks that anyone would and should feel privileged to listen to), it's occasionally extremely difficult to determine what is in the background and can't kill you and what is in the foreground and can actually kill you, and general lack of challenge.

 

I suppose it does at least have some unlockable ships, one of which makes it play a little closer to Thunder Force, but it's not much. It's completely forgettable aside from having the Thunder Force title, which it doesn't deserve to bear. If it had any other name, nobody would remember that it exists.

 

Anyway, yeah. Almost all of the notable Japan-only PS2 games that I can think of are RPGs or visual novels, but there is also the Sega Ages 2500 series. I have never played any of those, but I've heard mixed things about them collectively. Some are apparently quite good while others are apparently fairly disappointing. Still, lots of them are arcade games, so try any of those that you might be interested in. I do want to try the Phantasy Star 1 remake, but RPG = language barrier for most of the planet's population. I've been playing games in Japanese for about a year now and am quite comfortable with playing RPGs and visual novels in Japanese, so my perspective is kind of odd, but yeah.