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Japan
Feature
I miss the summers in Japan: How videogames overcome language barriers
I sat cross legged in front of the TV and watched as Alex carefully removed the Super Nintendo from its dusty, neglected box. Our grandfather hardly used it, preferring to play Shogi on his computer instead of the console. Also stored away were a pile of games with labels we couldn’t read. The Japan
News
Prepare your cat butts for a live-action Neko Atsume movie
Neko Atsume (2014), the beloved cat game for smartphones, is being turned into a live-action movie. Meow indeed. That means it’ll feature real cats—proper little fluffballs that deserve all the strokes—so perhaps it stands a chance at being the best videogame-to-movie adaptation (not that it would t
News
The Japanese folktales that inspired Miyamori
Last summer, we stumbled across Miyamori, a lovely folktale-infused videogame about Japanese mythology in the Tōhoku countryside. The game follows a Japanese woman named Suzume as she attempts to find her missing brother. Joined by the shrine guardian fox Izuna—who is looking for her partner Gedo—th
News
All bow down before the mighty Shin Godzilla
At one point in Shin Godzilla, Toho’s 29th entry in this ancient series, a character calls Godzilla a “perfect organism.” This might sound familiar to anyone who’s watched Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979): it’s how the devious android Ash describes the xenomorph. Godzilla movies don’t typically reach out
News
I’m feeling some scarlet curiosity about the new Touhou game
Being bored sucks. There’s many ways that we find ways to cure our boredom: videogames, books, music, watching a decent show or movie. For the 500-year-old vampire Remilia Scarlet, those petty activities are far below her. Her boredom is on a whole other level, one the likes of which her maid compan
News
You shouldn’t be surprised that the Japanese PM dressed up as Mario
So at this point you likely saw what happened during the Olympics closing event. Yeah, I know. At first glance, it seems like an unnecessary commercial incursion in an already saturated Olympic event. Nintendo, a $42 billion-dollar videogame company, needs no additional exposure, especially of the h
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Miyamori will be a foxy love letter to Japanese folklore
Japanese folklore is a pretty common inspiration when it comes to storytelling in videogames. From Clover Studio’s Ōkami (2006) to ZUN’s iconic Touhou Project, Japan’s mythological spirits and creatures provide a familiar backdrop for Japanese game makers to tell their own, new stories to their audi
General
Embrace your fetish in a videogame about washing a giant foot
Ashi Wash is a ridiculous game with a ridiculous premise—a terrible, funky foot comes crashing through your ceiling. It’s got a serious fungus problem. (I’d suggest crashing into a doctor’s office next time, foot.) Its toenails are overgrown. Also, it can talk. The giant foot makes it pretty clear—i
News
New documentary hopes the “indie” game invasion of Japan is a good thing
One of the first things that Anne Ferrero says to me is that her new documentary isn’t “Indie Game: The Movie [2012] in Japan.” She tells me this as she’s aware that many people will assume that to be the case. But it’s not just a matter of a director looking to ensure that her potential audience is
Feature
The videogame that helped popularize Japanese mecha in the west
In the early 2000s, the Japanese government started to evaluate the value of the country’s popular culture industry following international successes in anime/manga such as Pokémon and Dragonball, videogames like Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda and Super Mario series, and films including Spirited Away (2
News
Two game artists share the Japanese yōkai that inspire them
After living in Japan’s seaside city of Niigata for a year, French artists Cécile Brun and Olivier Pichard learned, among many other things, an appreciation for the island nation’s mythology and art. They’ve told us about their visits to Buddhist spiritual sites on Japanese mountains, and as we’ve w