I thought about filing this under the Japan Scares Me category, but frankly Oneechanbara doesn’t scare me. It merely makes sense. I am not surprised that Japan makes games about a woman in a cowboy hat and lingerie who runs around with her pre-pubescent sister killing zombies with a gigantic sword and who ultimately goes insane when she’s completely covered with blood. This is just what Japan does. I’m pretty sure that there are soft drinks whose canisters are decorated with the exact same scenario. It’s probably called Refreshing Breast Blood No Zombie Drink White Plus. Chances are I would drink it. Because I delight in these things.
It’s curious, though, that Oneechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers is coming out in America at all. It’s actually the sixth entry in a franchise spawned out of D3’s Japan-only Simple 2000 series, bargain titles that typically riffed on basic game types that were *ahem* self-descriptive (see: Simple 2000 Vol. 15: The Rugby, Vol. 37: The Shooting,) but sometimes had bizarre, and distinctly Japanese, premises. Like Vol. 95: Zombies Vs. Ambulances, Oneechanbara is an odd one: instantly familiar as a game thanks to the raunch and violence, but just as familiar for its J-grindhouse tropes. It’s the sort of game – not especially well-made and too extreme to get a marketable ESRB rating – that Western gamers have only got a sampling of over the past twenty-years, a devoted-importer-only title. But D3 is bringing Oneechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers anyway, and they’re not altering it a bit, adding English to menus, subtitles for the dialogue, and nothing else.
The trend’s growing. Sega of America, after two years of acting like the game didn’t exist, just brought Yakuza 2 to the States, foregoing the B-list-Hollywood voiceovers that plagued the domestic release of its prequel, and making no effort to localize the game’s many mini-games built on Japanese cultural eccentricities. For example, the hostess bars you can go to certainly have English subtitles and menus, but there’s no effort to make them culturally relevant to an American or European player like you see in games like Phoenix Wright. Similarly, rogue-likes Izuna: The Unemployed Ninja and Shiren the Wanderer are also starting to appear, two-dimensional niche titles that don’t have a prayer of selling more than a handful of copies and would, previously, have never left Japan for exactly that reason. So why are games like Oneechanbara crossing the Pacific?
Two factors to consider: one, the cultural cache of Japanese media is no longer restricted to seedy basements covered in Evangelion wallscrolls and fan-subbed VHS tapes. Walk into any Barnes & Noble in the world and there’s an aisle of manga littered with be-hoodied people nose-deep in stories about schoolgirls killing zombies for you to step over. Also, as has been discussed many times in the past year, videogames are an international business now, so if a Japanese publisher is going to turn a profit on their game, they have to make sure that every dollar available in every corner of the planet can be spent on their product. But I’m not sure that these are the sole factors behind our newfound access to such peculiar games. What am I missing, dear reader?
Related links:
Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
Surprise of the Week: Sega Releases a Good Game
Japan Scares Me: To Love-Ru - Exciting Outdoor School Version
It’s Dangerous to Go Alone
Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS