Free-to-play role-playing-game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius will be turned into a musical for the stage next March. Final Fantasy Brave Exvius debuted on mobile in Japan on October 22, 2015, and went worldwide in June 2016. According to IT Media, the musical version will be written by Fumiya Matsuzaki, who previously penned the Super Danganronpa…
Located in Kawasaki, the arcade Anata no Warehouse (“Your Warehouse”) was designed to look like Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City. The multistory arcade is one of the most unusual in Japan. Make that, was The following notice was posted outside the arcade. It reads that Anata no Warehouse is closing down on November 17. According…
Out of nowhere, it was revealed that the character Lisa in the Bang Dream media franchise has a younger brother. Fans who have been playing the app since 2017 are now learning this in the most recent event. Some are not happy. Bushiroad exec Takaaki Kidani addressed the controversy but made things worse. In the…
Forty-four-year-old Tadaaki Abe has been arrested in Kagawa, Japan, for modding a PlayStation 3 and then selling it. According to NHK, Abe is accused of jailbreaking PS3s so game discs could be copied and then played without re-inserting them. He was arrested for selling a modded PS3 for 15,555 yen ($145) to a Tokyo man…
Back in December 2015, Hideo Kojima announced that he was setting up his own studio, Kojima Productions. He had struck a deal with Sony. It all seemed so easy, but was it? No. But it didn’t hurt that he was Hideo Kojima. Toward the end of a Famitsu interview, Kojima talked about the difficulties he…
This isn’t the first pair of One Piece shoes from Puma. The first collab was based on the Straw Hat Pirates ship the Thousand Sunny. The latest one, pictured, is treasure hunt themed. The Thousand Sunny-themed Cell Endura do look like the ship, I guess. The latest shoes are very shiny! And there are jingly chains…
Founded in 2000, AlphaDream was originally known as Alpha Star and was staffed with people who had formerly been at Square, including former Square President Tetsuo Mizuno. The studio is best known for the Mario & Luigi RPG series. It was announced today that AlphaDream has gone bankrupt. According to Yahoo! Japan, revenue was sluggish…
Don’t expect a Hollywood version of Nausicaä. As NHK reports, Hayao Miyazaki has turned down that offer. But you can look forward to a kabuki adaptation this December. Announced last year, the kabuki version will star Onoe Kikunosuke as Nausicaä and Nakamura Shichinosuke as Princess Kushana. Keiko Niwa, who has written several Ghibli films, is…
One of Japan’s greatest, if not the greatest, manga creators is having his work tapped into with the power of AI. Osamu Tezuka died in 1989, but next year, artificial intelligence will create new art based on Tezuka’s work. Update Oct. 1 – 3:10 am: The name of the company has been updated. Tezuka is…
Remember pagers? Maybe not! If you were around in the 1990s, you might’ve carried a pager in case someone wanted to get in touch. Mainichi reports that today in Japan, service for pagers finally ended after first being introduced 50 years ago. Tokyo Telemessage Inc., the country’s last pager service, began shutting down radio signals…
In 2005, Brain Age first went on sale in Japan for the Nintendo DS. The game, which had players solve math problems and more to judge the age of their brain, became a national sensation in Japan. Brain Age was one reason why the DS became a must-have handheld. Now, in 2019, it’s back. The…
The brand new Pokémon TV anime will star not one, but two trainers as the main protagonists. According to My Navi News and Famitsu, the new main character is named Go (ゴウ or Gou), a 10-year-old who dreams of catching all them all with Scorbunny as his partner. Go will be voiced by Daiki Yamashita, who…
If you are steeped in SNK fighting game lore, then you are more than familiar with Terry Bogard. If you’ve never played Fatal Fury, you might not know who he is. If you like Pokémon, he might look familiar. The announcement that Terry was coming to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with met with puzzlement among…
Shoji Kawamori’s career in anime has spanned four decades. While still in his teens, Kawamori joined the industry in the late 1970s. Since then, some things have changed. Other things have not. Besides co-creating Macross and designing some of the anime’s most famous machines, Kawamori has also worked on the early Transformers iterations and has…
This is Hamako Mori. At 89, she’s not new to video games. She has been playing them for nearly four decades. In an interview with GameSpark, the Tokyo native says the first console she played was the Cassette Vision, which was released in 1981. After that, she was into the Famicom and played The Legend…
If there’s one thing Yoshitaka Murayama knows better than most people in the world, it’s how to bring Japanese role-playing games to life. While at Konami, he created the Suikoden series, and more recently did the scenario for The Alliance Alive. During the Tokyo Game Show, I sat down with Murayama and asked him how…
Between 2002 and 2012, Bandai Namco released a mainline Tales game almost every year, save for 2006 and 2010. After 2012, there was a two-year gap before Tales of Zestiria. The following year, Namco Bandai released Tales of Berseria. But since then, there hasn’t been another Tales game. The next one, Tales of Arise, won’t be…
The Sega Genesis Mini is small, but these capsule versions are even smaller. Sure, they don’t play games, but they’re tiny and cute. Over the years, numerous game consoles have been miniaturized for capsule toys. As IT Media points out, what makes this latest line so interesting is how extensive the peripherals and add-on versions…
During the Tokyo Game Show, legendary Street Fighter player Momochi forfeited tens of thousands of dollars in prize money because he doesn’t have a pro-gaming license in Japan. He wasn’t the only one who lost out on money. The winner of the Puzzle & Dragons tournament did, too. Junior high school student Yuwa came in…
Next April, an esports-themed hotel will open in Osaka’s geek district Nipponbashi. Called Esports Hotel E-Zone Cyberspace in English, it is the first of its kind in Japan. Including the basement’s shower area, the hotel is nine stories. Fashion Snap reports that floors one to three are the gaming floors, with over 70 high-spec, streaming-ready…
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