JAST’s failure to market Seinarukana as an RPG could doom English H-RPGs

[sanahtlig]

I explore a quote by JAST USA chief Peter Payne that the failure of Seinarukana could mean the end of JAST's RPG license spree, and therefore the end of H-RPG English localization.  Is lack of fan interest to blame, or is JAST blind to its own failures?

 

JAST’s failure to market Seinarukana as an RPG could doom English H-RPGs

[Decay]

RE:  Aselia the Eternal and JAST's failure to pursue a steam release: They actually infamously did and were turned down. This was the era before Greenlight, when employees by Valve had to look through and personally evaluate every single applicant for Steam. They had almost no Japanese games, I think Recettear was the one of the only ones and was considered an anomaly. Valve was considered biased against Japanese products and especially against anything with an anime art style. To further complicate matters, Aselia was a censored version of an H-game, and this scared the bejeezus out of Valve. So because of especially the last factor, they denied its entry onto Steam.

 

This leads directly into my next point, the perception of H-games in the west. JAST can't exactly send Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun builds of Seinarukana and expect comprehensive coverage. Maybe they could have gotten some mentions if they tried harder on Aselia, but Seinarukana has no all-ages version right now. Almost no one is going to cover it as an RPG even if JAST tries their damndest to get them to do so. How do you market it to a crowd that refuses to touch anything with any sort of H in it? It's a really difficult task and I'm not sure if there is an answer at all. 

 

I think an all-ages version of Seinarukana can be made, though, and the way JAST is thinking and operating these days, they will almost certainly do that. It may take a while, though. Romanesque's all-ages version is taking longer than I expected, Seinarukana's may take even longer. They won't attempt to market it as an RPG until that's ready.

[sanahtlig]

My proposed solution does require an all-ages version of Seinarukana.

[Decay]

If Seinarukana's success hinges on a Steam version, then the future of H-RPGs in the west is already kind of screwed, and there's not much anyone can do about it. You have to appeal to ero-gamers who are okay with complicated gameplay systems, and that's a very thin market here. On Steam, you have to compete with non-ero games and, well, to be honest that's a really hard sell. When you take the H out of H-RPGs and try to judge them purely on the merits of their gameplay against non-H-RPGs, they always come up short. They always have and always will. How do you get the crowd who plays stuff like Fire Emblem but won't touch eroge, to look at an all-ages version of Seinarukana favorably? I'm honestly not sure such a thing is possible. Take the H out of an H-RPG and you're simply left with an underwhelming game in practically every case.

[sanahtlig]

Have you played Seinarukana?  It's a lot of fun.  Even without the H.  I think among the NISA crowd there's a lot of latent demand for games like this.

 

If games like Sakura Spirit can succeed on Steam, I'm confident Seinarukana would do well.

[BookwormOtaku]

There may be the problem of its being a sequel that Seinarukana could face on a few fronts:

1) To the unknowing the instant they see the title their first thought would be "Wait, this is a sequel to something?" which could generate a bit of disinterest depending on whether information is available as to whether they need to play the first game or not.

2) If the first game is available could lead to the problem of whether or not the buyer likes it determining if they want to play the second. Because Aselia as far as I know doesn't have a demo one would have to buy the first game outright and seeing as Aselia has the problem of a slow start and and slower tedious gameplay that even people who had what it takes to beat it and liked the story disliked one could very well end up discouraged from trying the second game.

3) If the first game is unavailable on Steam and the buyer finds out he has to look around on the internet for where to buy it he's likely to look around on Steam for something else which may also be cheaper.

[sanahtlig]

Seinarukana shouldn't be marketed as the sequel to Aselia the Eternal.  It's essentially standalone.  Aselia provides some background on the setting but playing it by no means is necessary to enjoy Seinarukana.  If no one tells them, the casuals will never know the connection to Aselia anyway.

[Decay]

I haven't played Seinarukana, but I've played Aselia and Yumina. I understand that Seinarukana is generally considered to have better gameplay than those, but they still underwhelmed me in that department. Same story with every other H-RPG I've played. Kamidori is inferior to many grid based SRPGs, Rance is inferior to most proper first person dungeon crawlers, Sengoku Rance wasn't as good as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Nobunaga's Ambition games, and so on. So my general impression of these games is that once you take out the H, you're left with a pretty middling experience. I'm not trying to crap on H-RPGs as a concept, I see the merit they hold, but if you try to make them go toe-to-toe with other games on Steam, I wonder if the audience will stick around after the first couple releases. Even disregarding the competition on steam, how likely is it that someone will look at an all-ages version of Seinarukana and think "So it's like a crappier version of Ogre Battle?" Or maybe they'll go "Oh, it's like Ogre Battle and there is barely anything else like that." I don't know, really. 

 

I think Doddler put it well when he said why MangaGamer doesn't go after that genre very aggressively. If the game designers responsible for these were good enough to stand toe-to-toe with non-ero games, they'd just work on those instead because the pay is better and there's more fame in it for them. It seems to me that H-games are kind of like the minor leagues of japanese game development. If you're telling me that the only chance they stand are to have alternate all-ages versions on Steam or else they're done for in the west, I can only respond that then they don't stand a chance at all. It would be like making a minor league team compete in the majors. Sakura Spirit is not a valid point of comparison, it's a completely different kind of experience. And it will also end up outselling Seinarukana by a large margin if that ever makes it onto steam. 

 

Note, there may be a few h-games that defies everything I've said and are brilliant experiences. If there are, it hasn't been translated into english, and it doesn't look like Seinarukana will be that either.

[BookwormOtaku]

The thing is the subtitle: "Spirit of Eternity Sword 2" is there; a number does kind of indicate a sequence.

[sanahtlig]

JAST can name the title whatever they want.

 

re: H-RPGs are just inferior knockoffs of mainstream games

I think that's the wrong way to look at it.  H-RPGs (or without the H, VN-style RPGs) are unique experiences unto themselves.  They're a blend of VN-style storytelling with an RPG combat system.  Imagine a scale of Japanese-centric games on one end and Western-centric games on the other.  

 

Visual novel <-> H-RPG <-> JRPG <-> WRPG <-> First-person shooter

 

Here I'm imagining that adjacent "nodes" are likely to have some overlap in audience, while non-adjacent nodes are much less likely.  The catch here is that JRPG players have been lamenting a sparsity of good JRPGs for some time now.  Many of them look back fondly on the good old SNES / PS1 / PS2 days of sprite-based JRPGs with anime-style character portraits.  Many of these fans hang around places like NISA, eating up the shovelware that Idea Factory puts out because they don't have much choice.  Enter Seinarukana.  Maybe it doesn't have the best battle system they've ever seen.  Maybe it doesn't have the best story of all the VNs they never played.  But it has a better anime-style JRPG story than they've seen in a long long time.  And it has a battle system to hold their interest.  For fans of the Ar tonelico series starved for something similar, Seinarukana would be an easy sell.  Seinarukana is the sort of gateway game that could appeal to JRPG fans that maybe might like VNs, but never gave them a try because they aren't "games".

 

As for the argument that H-RPGs are an inferior experience to either VNs or other RPGs...those are fighting words.  I'll disagree with that.  And I bet Clephas would too.  Both of us being longtime fans of RPGs that got into VNs, but still have a fondness for H-RPGs.

[Clephas]

Jast is to blame.  Partly it is because of hastily announcing they were working on it, considering that Jast's actual translation speed meant that it would be years before the US saw a release.  Another reason is because Jast in general is terrible at advertising their products.  I mean... I don't see Jast ads on any of the otaku sites I visit, and most actual advertising is by word of mouth and to people who are already staring at Jast's homepage, waiting for news.

[sanahtlig]

Ironically, pirate sites are where I see JAST's ads.  It's pretty amusing actually.

[BookwormOtaku]

Come to think it the only site I've seen their ads on that isn't a pirate site is sankaku

[Decay]

I saw romanesque ads on 4chan and nyaa.

[sanahtlig]

Tiagol from the MG forums reminded me that RPGFan reviewed Aselia the Eternal.

 

RPGFan was pretty impressed by it, though it criticized the low resolution graphics.  I think that's evidence that an H-RPG (without the ero) is capable of achieving critical acclaim in the "mainstream" RPG press.  And that H-RPG happens to be the prequel to Seinarukana.

 

If anything, the barrier to selling these games to the mainstream is that JAST takes so damn long to release them.  In 2003, Aselia's graphics were actually not half bad.  8 years later, 640x480 wasn't so impressive anymore.  Eushully's latest games are 720p, and they actually look pretty good.

[SilverLi]

JAST/J-List is marketing Littlewitch, onaholes and their own website more or less on some piracy websites. 

 

But I agree with you sanahtlig. I am more of a SRPG player but I am floating between them all. Sengoku Rance is a really good game which I can't really drop and always return too later on. But that game is an impossibility to not butcher completely if they want an all ages release. You don't release Rance all ages.

 

But what I've read about Seinarukana the H content isn't the big part? VNDB say low sexual content on a <50h RPG. An all ages release on Steam with some marketing is a necessary thing. This way it is more likely we can promote RPGs/VNs to the large masses of Steam. Of course I want the 18+ version of the game. But I am already a frequent customer of J-List. They doesn't have to get me interested. I am already keeping track on new projects and it isn't me they have to persuade.

[sanahtlig]

Alicesoft isn't interested in licensing their games.  So a Rance series release probably isn't feasible to begin with.

 

Seinarukana is an SRPG.  There's no random encounters at all and all battles (except for boss encounters) initiate from the overland map, similar to Aselia the Eternal.

[Getsuya]

It doesn't really matter what they market it as. What matters is whether it gets on Steam or not. Honestly the success of any PC game is basically determined by whether it gets on Steam or not in this day and age. Sakura Spirit/Angel are proof that any crap that looks anime that gets on Steam gets bought (often ironically or for 'so bad it's good' reasons but who cares sales are sales) and hell Compile Heart/IF junk like Agarest are probably doing fine now that they have Steam versions. Neptunia probably will too once that hits Steam.

 

It really is the be all end all of PC games nowdays. Either they need to focus on doing whatever they need to to get their game on Steam, or openly admit that they just honestly don't like money very much.

[Kelebek1]

Tiagol from the MG forums reminded me that RPGFan reviewed Aselia the Eternal.

 

RPGFan was pretty impressed by it, though it criticized the low resolution graphics.  I think that's evidence that an H-RPG (without the ero) is capable of achieving critical acclaim in the "mainstream" RPG press.  And that H-RPG happens to be the prequel to Seinarukana.

 

If anything, the barrier to selling these games to the mainstream is that JAST takes so damn long to release them.  In 2003, Aselia's graphics were actually not half bad.  8 years later, 640x480 wasn't so impressive anymore.  Eushully's latest games are 720p, and they actually look pretty good.

 

All latest games are 720p, that's the standard now. Some are going 1080p as well. It makes a huge difference too, I really can't go back to games under 720p any more. Obviously getting the license takes time, and translations take time, but 8 years in this industry... It's like trying to bring out a movie from 4 years ago, say trying to release Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 in Japan today. I can't see many people being that interested, at least in comparison to 4 years ago.

 

I don't know how well Japanese companies respond to people like MangaGamer or JAST, but the Japanese devs must realise that their game won't hold interest forever. If they want some sales in the west, they must realise that the earlier the better, so I'd be sort of shocked if companies were unwilling to license out their games until x years have passed or something like that. Maybe it gets cheaper though, and that's the only reason western companies wait.

[sanahtlig]

I don't know how well Japanese companies respond to people like MangaGamer or JAST, but the Japanese devs must realise that their game won't hold interest forever. If they want some sales in the west, they must realise that the earlier the better, so I'd be sort of shocked if companies were unwilling to license out their games until x years have passed or something like that. Maybe it gets cheaper though, and that's the only reason western companies wait.

My guess is that part of the reason is that English titles have an MSRP of about half their Japanese counterparts (sometimes even less).  If I were a Japanese customer, I might be unhappy that Westerners were getting the same product at the same time as me for half the price, and I'd ask Japanese publishers why they couldn't do the same for me.  If eroge sold for $100 each in English, I think there'd be a lot less resistance from Japanese companies overall, and particularly for recent and popular titles.

[SilverLi]

Are games in Japan that expensive? I am complaining when new releases from big companies cost around 60£+.

[sanahtlig]

8800 yen is typical for full-length titles from popular developers.  That used to be $90 (USD), but with current exchange rates looks like that comes out to $72.  I wonder if the growing interest in the English market may in part be due to the relative strength of the dollar against the yen at the current moment.

[Darklord Rooke]

There seems to be an economic strategy in Japan to drive down the value of the Yen.