It was around late June that I visited my local Japanese import store. While I was there, they showed me a limited edition of a new fighting game. A loli fighting game in fact. It was called Phantom Breaker. Since I am a huge fan of the Arcana Heart series, this game was definitely up my alley. But my euphoria soon turned to despair. I noticed that it had the Xbox 360 logo on it.
For those of you who aren’t avid import game players, there is something called “region locking,” which I have found to be the bane of my existence. This means that games, movies, or what have you are made for a certain region of the world and will only work on players made for that part of the world. It is well known that handheld consoles have been region-free until those bastards at Nintendo decided to make the 3DS region locked for even god does not know why. So for those of you who are already complaining about how the PS Vita is going to suck, at least the Vita doesn’t have region coding.
Also, for those in the know, the PS3 also isn’t region locked. Many times I have ordered games from Japan and played them on my PS3, not to even mention the Blu-Ray anime movies I have also imported that I can watch on the PS3. But unfortunately, the Wii and the Xbox 360 are region locked. I have been lucky in the past when some of the Cave SCHMUPS go gold, they release it as a region-free disk, meaning it will play on any Xbox. But even Cave doesn’t do that anymore.
It is for this reason that my euphoria died as quickly as it had sprung up. Phantom Breaker was an Xbox exclusive, which meant no Phantom Breaker for me. The guy at the import store tried to sell me a Japanese Xbox that they had in stock. He told me that it was practically brand new and that it would cost me about $425. Now for those of you who think that is an outlandish price, the things are over 600 USD brand new if it is a 250GB model with the Kinect, which this one was. I am ashamed to say that I actually gave this idea some serious consideration. There were a couple of other games I would like to get that were Japanese Xbox exclusives. But the other games I was interested in I was not interested to the same degree as I was interested in Phantom Breaker, and the limited edition looked so friggin’ sweet, too! But I came to the conclusion that it would not be worth sinking this kind of dough into what would be, in essence, one game. Not to mention that I didn’t really have the money to do so either. As much as an addicted gamer as I am, I decided to be prudent and hope to hell that this game would come out locally.
It was insane the amount of times I would check the internet to see any news of Phantom Breaker being picked up in North America, and when there was none, I decided to take matters into my own hands and actually write companies to see if they had any plans to import this game to North America. As any avid Japanese video gamer could tell you, there are a handful of companies whose bread-and-butter, whose entire essence of being, is to import Japanese games to our shores. Companies like Atlus, Aksys, XSEED, and Nippon-Ichi Software America or NIS America are main importers. Atlus and Nippon-Ichi are Japanese software companies to begin with, but happen to have localized divisions that sometimes bring certain Japanese games. On the other hand XSEED and Aksys Games specifically look for Japanese games that they feel will do well in North America, acquire the rights to distribute those games in this region, and will then do so with the addition of slapping their logo at the beginning credits of the game. I guess it isn’t quite that easy. Oftentimes they would be responsible for the translations and record any English voiceovers they felt necessary. Many imported Japanese games are starting to simply forego the English voiceovers and are directly porting the games to us with only the addition of the English subtitles.
So, I emailed some of these companies, focusing most of my efforts on Aksys Games, seeing that they seem to be the company mainly responsible for importing fighting games (BlazBlue and Arcana Heart series). They told me that they were indeed aware of this game and were tracking it, and that I should keep my eyes open and check back with them from time to time.
It was about a month later when news broke that the rights were acquired by Southpeak Interactive. Who the hell is Southpeak Interactive?! I had never heard of them, and even those who broke the news were surprised by Southpeaks’ acquisition. It turns out that Southpeak did all those Brave games and Two Worlds II, which you may remember coming out about a year ago. The verdict on that game was that it was disappointing. Many people had it on their radars and hyped it up because of its promise and early details, but Two Worlds never delivered the goods that many anticipated.
The reason the rumor was leaked to begin with was because Amazon already had a listing for Phantom Breaker for the 360 on their site, with Southpeak Interactive listed as the distributor with a release date of January 2012. When Southpeak was asked about this, they said that they had looked into the possible acquisition of the rights to distribute and were very interested in possibly doing the porting to North America but that Amazon had jumped the gun.
I followed this story for months. After waiting 2 months without any more developments, I wrote Southpeak, basically asking them to sh*t or get off the pot. I believe my exact words were, “If you do not have any real intentions of bringing this game to North America, relinquish your rights so someone like Akys Games can do it.” I never did get a response back. Can’t really say I’m surprise though. I don’t think I would have answered me either. I probably lacked some tact, but I wanted the damn game so bad!
When November came, I decided to say, “Eff it; I’ll just place the preorder with Amazon!” If the game never came out, there was no harm, no foul. I wouldn’t be out any money, and, well, at least I tried. So I placed the order and waited. Amazon changed the listing to January 31st. Kind of a coincidence that it was the LAST day in January, which didn’t bode well; kind of like all those December 31st 2012 release dates, but screw it! I was locked and loaded for the long haul. Finally, January rolls around, and I keep checking Amazon. During the first week of January, I noticed that the vague Southpeak Interactive logo that was used for the product pic had been changed to actual artwork of the game box! This had to be a good sign! I went to my best friend Google, and lo and behold there was the press release. A firm release date of February 28th (again with the whole damn end of month thing) and the distributor was now 7sixty. [UPDATE!!!!!!! Amazon just sent out an email saying that 7sixty has pushed the release date back to March 20th.] It turns out that 7sixty is part of Southpeak Interactive, so I guess Amazon wasn’t too far off the mark after all.
So, all of you Japanese game lovers can celebrate with me, and maybe even thank me. Who is to say that my little pep talk didn’t spur them into motion. Well, it didn’t hurt obviously, but I will be forever grateful to Southpeak for making this game available to us. And one thing you have got to love about some of the imported game companies, they definitely make it worth your while to pick up their games. I mean, most limited editions with extra swag can run you between $80-$100 while this limited edition is only $39.99! All new Xbox releases are permanently stuck at the $59.99, mark and that is even for a regular edition! And although I doubt I like this game as much as the Arcana Heart series, anything similar is good enough. Because as someone much wiser than myself once said, “You can never have too much loli-fighting.”
