Yea, it does feel like the fact that the game had so many big names working on it did help halo effect it to at least some level of sales though it's crazy how badly concord did at a lower price too
Holy shit, I remember seeing this when it was announced and thinking it had a pretty cool concept. Kinda sad to hear the game wasn't great, but I think these kinds of games deserve to be remembered.
Yea same, was really hyped when the game got first announced and all the magazines were talking about it so was really sad to see the end state it was in but even then, the concept was really interesting and I hope that someday some other company tries to do it better. (I would say I hope they do it better but they said they would learn from the mistake and make a better sequel then got dissolved)
This game was kind of special to me because it was the first game playthrough that I watched on my first tablet, a Samsung Galaxy Tab. At the time, I'm kind of used to Japanese games that have an anime aesthetic getting mixed with a bad review from a mainstream website like IGN nowadays I just watch TH-camr for game reviews, but I didn't realize that this game review score was just a scratch on the surface.
@@JulioOther The first one on your first tablet sounds all the mor3 super special ☺️I hope that playthrough of it was a fun watch! Tbh I didn't know about its reputatiom at the timn either. This one specifically was apparently not that well received in Japan either which was a shame as I was really hyped for it on first seeing it and it just lingered in my mind for years on end.
It was so shit that this game used to be omitted from Koshiro Yuzo's wikipedia page for a while which made it even funnier. Like it was so shit that even though his music was great people didn't want his name tied to the project or something lol
As I was listening to you describe the battle system, it reminded me of Blackrock Shooter the Game's combat system, and lo and behold, same company! Their PSP games were honestly pretty fun (for me) so it'd be nice to see a deep dive into the company.
Yea their titles prior to this were all pretty interesting and even with this game it does feel like if it were paced better this system could've worked... it's just not as well implemented in this game I guess unfortunately >.>
This game is like a prettier Virtual Hydlide. It's like they came up with the whole animation idea, and just ran with it, thinking everything else would work itself out along the way, like some high schoolers trying to make a project about something they are passionate about, but without any experience or skills. I remember being surprised at the time that this game was getting a localization, even after hearing it was not well received. The lack of animation frames really makes it look slower and stifer. I wanted to play this game back then based on the screenshots alone too, but after I saw some gameplay videos, I could tell it was bad, like everyone else did.
Virtual Hydlide is such an apt and funny comparison I really like that lol. Wish I though of that for the video XD I remember seeing a speed run of that game and it was really funny. That said it does feel like a large part of the industry in Japan back then especially at the medium to small team firms tended to kind operate like that. Even in the company I entered recently, everyone still operates off that vibe with no talk about pillars, GDDs or the like and it's more a case of write me a paragraph on what you think is a cool concept and the team kinda tries to inteprete that into a game lol so I can very well see them having tried to do that too. I guess the only difference is that they actually took theirs all the way to market on that idea alone and well... if the company was in a better state at the time I feel like this could've ended up being a pretty interesting game but it the financial straits they were in prolly killed it especially in the animation department...
1:12:14 so basically the universe is creating infinite loops to prevent their waifus from marrying a dude ... The Something Four items are wedding related. Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. Things a bride should have for a happy marriage. It is common but not required that the bride gets those from her female friends and relatives so it somewhat makes sense that she gets replacements from her friends.
I never thought about it that way since usually here it's not common but when you bring that up it does make sense 🤔 It just felt weird to me at the time that we went from getting the blessing of the Gods to somehow dropping that off a bridge to her getting the same thing from her friends only for the game to tell us it was too weak to actually do anything in the end. There's prolly more meaning to it like you mentioned though that I might've just missed out so thanks for bringing that up. 🙏
I also saw this game being sold when i was visiting gaming shops.Something about the cover art and title made me avoid it...good job,insticts! Better lower the game sound when you are talking over it,cause i had to do several takes at some points to hear what you are saying
You made a very good choice in avoiding it then lol XD And got it thanks for pointing that out o7 Tried to lower it a lil but prolly didn't lower it as much as I ought to have my apologies m(_ _)m
Been waiting for the next kuso game video for a while, glad its finally here! I rewatched the older videos and seeing your room back when you did the Nugia video, and seeing it now, lol its like night and day. Anyways, what a whacky little game this is, the sound mixing is really bad like you said, it was actually hard to hear your commentary when the battle footage was being played just cause its so loud, and I want to point out in the scene with "Netherpuss" (like what the actual fuck is that name???) that the translation went to the Better Business Bureau (a non government org) instead of the Federal Trade Commission, which probably would've been a more accurate parallel. I didnt think I would see DNF in the Kusogame of the year list, I thought it was exclusively games made in Japan, but I guess bad games transcend borders and are universal lol
I'm glad you enjoy these videos. 🙏 Yea the room certainly got a lot messier over time especially compared to back when I first started out as I kept unpacking more and more stuff to place around the room. XD DNF was a surprise to me too since I remember people not liking it but didn't realise it was on this level. It's rare to see kusoge from overseas on the list though nonetheless though it does popup from time to time like this. Guess it really was a lot worse than expected XD Also thanks for pointing that out. Truth be told I didn't know the better busines bureau was an actual thing since usually on youtube all I hear about is the FTC getting involved in lawsuits so it's interesting to hear about this point too!
I played this back in the day and I knew it was bad, just never realized it was kusoge bad. Thanks for enduring this, it must have felt like.... an eternity.
lmao indeed it truly was one lol... though yea even compared to some of the other kusoges it's definetly not as bad though the ending was a lot more stressful than expected
I remember Yuzo Koshiro (the game's composer) talking about this game on twitter, with how the project initially seemed to be full of bright and creative ideas but in the end no one knew what they we're actually doing and nothing materialized, which is sad cause there are some aspects of it that make it seem it had good intentions in mind, oh well.
Yea it does feel like the game had a good mix of what would've been needed to make an interesting title but it feels like it needed a lot of planning that perhaps the people who were in charge just weren't as well equipped to deal with. Especially since the more well-known people in the company didn't work on this title in as high of a capacity it seems. That said, all the people they brought in to help including the artists, composer and seiyuus did a fantastic job either way though so props to them for sticking it through with the project all the same because frankly the bgm in this game is fire
I'm glad you like it it came to me in the spur of the moment and I knew I had to do it though I wish there was a way to get a higher res image of that...
54:57 Well I'll forever think the fortuneteller in this game is named Infidave and is obsessed with yuri... And yes I would love to hear more about the company itself. Those stories are always fascinating.
Let it be known, Infidave will forever be now known as the fortunetellerghostwhispererconwomanspiritgodgateguardianlevel20magelookingforlove that is obsessed with Yuri. Will keep looking into the company more then. I'm just hoping one of them would be down for an interview but... suffice to say quite some time has passed since I reached out to them T.T
I always dreamed of playing a game where the graphics felt like you're controlling an anime, so I was really hyped for this game. At first glance, it was like my dream finally came true! But then, I saw how shitty it was on youtube and skipped it. I really dodged a bullet there. Years later, Guilty Gear Xrd would fulfill that dream. Please, do make a video about Image Epoch! I loved their games so much! Like Last Ranker, Saigo no Yakusoku and Sol Trigger. I really miss them, and really want to know what exactly happened to them.
Yea they had such good games it's a shame that the company ended up the way it did. Guilty Gear definetly did the whole 2.5D concept pretty well though it feels like part of what made it worked so well was that it was designed with the characters being displayed in a fairly controlled environment as well (By that I mean rotations of the char and all that were well restricted so they could make those look as good as possible) which feels like a fair better and more cost-effective way of doing it for sure.
Now here's a game that caught my eye in my teens! Though looking back at it now, it looks like a parody of a game you'd find actual anime characters play because the animators needed some filler. Still have that "want" to try and play this game when I see it, and looking at how you are explaining it, it seems like an experience that looks like it would be zen and quiet on one hand and comically silly and cute on the other. I'm already use to the silliness in Disgaea, having watched the anime and owning the first game on Switch. Helps that the game looks convincing as an anime in some areas. But that just kind of goes back into the "parody of a game" aspect. Dunno if I can say anything about the gameplay based on what you said, but everything else definitely seems like my unironic cup of tea that I may never play because game "preservation" and "Japan" don't mix well.
Y'know that sounds about right in that the plot of this game does feel kinda like anime filler lol. Though that's the thing with silly plots though. In stuff like Disgaea or even Criminal Girls by imageepoch themselves, those are games where the plot has silly elements by design but they they still do really good emotional scenes when the time and place is right which is what I feel makes those games work as well as they do. That and the game does feel a lot better paced in that with something like Disagea you can suspend a battle and come back after a few days and individual battles aren't too long either way (item world aside >.>) which makes the games not feel tiring to play through tho taht might just be me
I remember following this game since it was announced mainly because of Vofan's art and the pitch of "playing an anime". Shame that it turned out the way it did, but I've played worse. I'd be really interested in you pursuing the Imageepoch story. Between the CEO's story, and Toushin Toshi it's all fascinating. They were the company to get me to buy a PSP because of Black Rock Shooter too.
I've been trying to reach out to the CEO and the others in the company though unfortunately none of them got back to me 😥 But either way hopefully they will eventually and I'll try to make that video great!
This was such a wierd game to watch even though I could only catch a little bit of it. It feels like in another universe this could have been a banger.
I wish we lived in that universe because I would've loved to see what this game could've been in a world where the company had the cohesion and funds to pull it off.
We can't thank you enough for sacrificing your time to cover such abomination of a game for us. I wasted my time on a lotta things, but just thinking about completing this game makes me age ten times faster. o7
Yea 7th dragon was interesting and they've released so many other interesting titles before and after this one too so it was def surprising that this one ended up the way it did
How whole game works actually make a lot of sense to me as animator. Way Japanese anime studios work, especially more traditional ones, in my opinion, is a bit stunted. Game devs in general have trouble implementing 2d animation into their games due to rigidness of the process. It can be improved obviously but even for more adaptive western pipelines it can be hard. Never worked on a game specifically but I can imagine how their process was organized and why everything came out as it is. However I actually like idea of hand drawn characters in a 3d game a lot. Those designs are so much more appealing to me. Everyone look like a vietnamese buns, cute.
Especially considering how old this game was it feels like all the more the processes here were likely to be less well adapted to what the game wanted to be. It does seem like one of those cases where they had an interesting vision but the way that animation is done here even till this day it might've been tough producing this for the game in a cost-effective fashion without sacrificing quality perhaps
@@overworkedsalaryman idk about cost effectiveness, Japanese animation is already overoptimised for price/quality, as for poverty level investment you get like the most detailed shit ever. But yeah, it seems the process is even older than how it is done in overseas freelancer era. They definitely did most of the work on paper.
@@akiradkcn oh. Oooooooooooooooooh. That's what you meant XD no no my bad I misunderstood that. Yea it certainly was more copies than expected sold though that number is just the conservative estimate. (I can't believe saying a high of 40k is conservative) In taht there were speculations that it was less than 17k as well but finding evidence of that was tough so I didn't go wtih XD
Look at the bright side, atleast this game sold ≈40k units compare to Concord 25k units.
And it didnt cost 400 gorrilion dollars to make LMAO
Some games back then would have killed to sell 40k copies like E.X. Troopers or Gaist Crusher (this may have cost a ton - not Concord numbers though).
Yea, it does feel like the fact that the game had so many big names working on it did help halo effect it to at least some level of sales though it's crazy how badly concord did at a lower price too
3:41
>"When I was young"
tfw you realize that 2012 was 12 years ago...
Time has passed so quickly it's crazy
Holy shit, I remember seeing this when it was announced and thinking it had a pretty cool concept. Kinda sad to hear the game wasn't great, but I think these kinds of games deserve to be remembered.
Yea same, was really hyped when the game got first announced and all the magazines were talking about it so was really sad to see the end state it was in but even then, the concept was really interesting and I hope that someday some other company tries to do it better.
(I would say I hope they do it better but they said they would learn from the mistake and make a better sequel then got dissolved)
This game was kind of special to me because it was the first game playthrough that I watched on my first tablet, a Samsung Galaxy Tab. At the time, I'm kind of used to Japanese games that have an anime aesthetic getting mixed with a bad review from a mainstream website like IGN nowadays I just watch TH-camr for game reviews, but I didn't realize that this game review score was just a scratch on the surface.
@@JulioOther
The first one on your first tablet sounds all the mor3 super special ☺️I hope that playthrough of it was a fun watch!
Tbh I didn't know about its reputatiom at the timn either. This one specifically was apparently not that well received in Japan either which was a shame as I was really hyped for it on first seeing it and it just lingered in my mind for years on end.
Perhaps the real friends were the time and eternity we had along the way
It certainly feels like we spent a lot of time building that friendship. Some could even say... AN ETERNITY
Yay another salaryman video :)
I hope it ends up being a fun watch
NORIO WAKAMOTO VOICED SOMEONE IN THIS GAME????? HOLY SHIT
Yea it's almost bizarre how many big name seiyuus were working on this game lol
You know what they say, the prettier box the shitter the game
It was so shit that this game used to be omitted from Koshiro Yuzo's wikipedia page for a while which made it even funnier. Like it was so shit that even though his music was great people didn't want his name tied to the project or something lol
As I was listening to you describe the battle system, it reminded me of Blackrock Shooter the Game's combat system, and lo and behold, same company!
Their PSP games were honestly pretty fun (for me) so it'd be nice to see a deep dive into the company.
Yea their titles prior to this were all pretty interesting and even with this game it does feel like if it were paced better this system could've worked... it's just not as well implemented in this game I guess unfortunately >.>
This game is like a prettier Virtual Hydlide. It's like they came up with the whole animation idea, and just ran with it, thinking everything else would work itself out along the way, like some high schoolers trying to make a project about something they are passionate about, but without any experience or skills. I remember being surprised at the time that this game was getting a localization, even after hearing it was not well received. The lack of animation frames really makes it look slower and stifer. I wanted to play this game back then based on the screenshots alone too, but after I saw some gameplay videos, I could tell it was bad, like everyone else did.
Virtual Hydlide is such an apt and funny comparison I really like that lol. Wish I though of that for the video XD I remember seeing a speed run of that game and it was really funny.
That said it does feel like a large part of the industry in Japan back then especially at the medium to small team firms tended to kind operate like that. Even in the company I entered recently, everyone still operates off that vibe with no talk about pillars, GDDs or the like and it's more a case of write me a paragraph on what you think is a cool concept and the team kinda tries to inteprete that into a game lol so I can very well see them having tried to do that too.
I guess the only difference is that they actually took theirs all the way to market on that idea alone and well... if the company was in a better state at the time I feel like this could've ended up being a pretty interesting game but it the financial straits they were in prolly killed it especially in the animation department...
you not being worked to death hard enough if you have time to make 1 hour 44 minute video Mr. Salaryman
We have to contact his work place and tell em their employees aren't overworked enough.
No please, I already really need a rest after weekly uploads this month lemme sleeeeeeeeep
1:12:14 so basically the universe is creating infinite loops to prevent their waifus from marrying a dude ...
The Something Four items are wedding related. Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. Things a bride should have for a happy marriage. It is common but not required that the bride gets those from her female friends and relatives so it somewhat makes sense that she gets replacements from her friends.
I never thought about it that way since usually here it's not common but when you bring that up it does make sense 🤔
It just felt weird to me at the time that we went from getting the blessing of the Gods to somehow dropping that off a bridge to her getting the same thing from her friends only for the game to tell us it was too weak to actually do anything in the end. There's prolly more meaning to it like you mentioned though that I might've just missed out so thanks for bringing that up. 🙏
I also saw this game being sold when i was visiting gaming shops.Something about the cover art and title made me avoid it...good job,insticts!
Better lower the game sound when you are talking over it,cause i had to do several takes at some points to hear what you are saying
You made a very good choice in avoiding it then lol XD
And got it thanks for pointing that out o7
Tried to lower it a lil but prolly didn't lower it as much as I ought to have my apologies m(_ _)m
Been waiting for the next kuso game video for a while, glad its finally here! I rewatched the older videos and seeing your room back when you did the Nugia video, and seeing it now, lol its like night and day.
Anyways, what a whacky little game this is, the sound mixing is really bad like you said, it was actually hard to hear your commentary when the battle footage was being played just cause its so loud, and I want to point out in the scene with "Netherpuss" (like what the actual fuck is that name???) that the translation went to the Better Business Bureau (a non government org) instead of the Federal Trade Commission, which probably would've been a more accurate parallel.
I didnt think I would see DNF in the Kusogame of the year list, I thought it was exclusively games made in Japan, but I guess bad games transcend borders and are universal lol
I'm glad you enjoy these videos. 🙏
Yea the room certainly got a lot messier over time especially compared to back when I first started out as I kept unpacking more and more stuff to place around the room. XD
DNF was a surprise to me too since I remember people not liking it but didn't realise it was on this level. It's rare to see kusoge from overseas on the list though nonetheless though it does popup from time to time like this. Guess it really was a lot worse than expected XD
Also thanks for pointing that out. Truth be told I didn't know the better busines bureau was an actual thing since usually on youtube all I hear about is the FTC getting involved in lawsuits so it's interesting to hear about this point too!
I played this back in the day and I knew it was bad, just never realized it was kusoge bad. Thanks for enduring this, it must have felt like.... an eternity.
lmao indeed it truly was one lol... though yea even compared to some of the other kusoges it's definetly not as bad though the ending was a lot more stressful than expected
I remember Yuzo Koshiro (the game's composer) talking about this game on twitter, with how the project initially seemed to be full of bright and creative ideas but in the end no one knew what they we're actually doing and nothing materialized, which is sad cause there are some aspects of it that make it seem it had good intentions in mind, oh well.
Yea it does feel like the game had a good mix of what would've been needed to make an interesting title but it feels like it needed a lot of planning that perhaps the people who were in charge just weren't as well equipped to deal with. Especially since the more well-known people in the company didn't work on this title in as high of a capacity it seems.
That said, all the people they brought in to help including the artists, composer and seiyuus did a fantastic job either way though so props to them for sticking it through with the project all the same because frankly the bgm in this game is fire
22:25 couldn't have picked a better example of an fmv game tbh.
A thumbnail masterpiece
I'm glad you like it it came to me in the spur of the moment and I knew I had to do it though I wish there was a way to get a higher res image of that...
54:57 Well I'll forever think the fortuneteller in this game is named Infidave and is obsessed with yuri...
And yes I would love to hear more about the company itself. Those stories are always fascinating.
Let it be known, Infidave will forever be now known as the fortunetellerghostwhispererconwomanspiritgodgateguardianlevel20magelookingforlove that is obsessed with Yuri.
Will keep looking into the company more then. I'm just hoping one of them would be down for an interview but... suffice to say quite some time has passed since I reached out to them T.T
I always dreamed of playing a game where the graphics felt like you're controlling an anime, so I was really hyped for this game. At first glance, it was like my dream finally came true! But then, I saw how shitty it was on youtube and skipped it. I really dodged a bullet there. Years later, Guilty Gear Xrd would fulfill that dream.
Please, do make a video about Image Epoch! I loved their games so much! Like Last Ranker, Saigo no Yakusoku and Sol Trigger. I really miss them, and really want to know what exactly happened to them.
Yea they had such good games it's a shame that the company ended up the way it did. Guilty Gear definetly did the whole 2.5D concept pretty well though it feels like part of what made it worked so well was that it was designed with the characters being displayed in a fairly controlled environment as well (By that I mean rotations of the char and all that were well restricted so they could make those look as good as possible) which feels like a fair better and more cost-effective way of doing it for sure.
Now here's a game that caught my eye in my teens! Though looking back at it now, it looks like a parody of a game you'd find actual anime characters play because the animators needed some filler. Still have that "want" to try and play this game when I see it, and looking at how you are explaining it, it seems like an experience that looks like it would be zen and quiet on one hand and comically silly and cute on the other. I'm already use to the silliness in Disgaea, having watched the anime and owning the first game on Switch. Helps that the game looks convincing as an anime in some areas. But that just kind of goes back into the "parody of a game" aspect.
Dunno if I can say anything about the gameplay based on what you said, but everything else definitely seems like my unironic cup of tea that I may never play because game "preservation" and "Japan" don't mix well.
Y'know that sounds about right in that the plot of this game does feel kinda like anime filler lol. Though that's the thing with silly plots though. In stuff like Disgaea or even Criminal Girls by imageepoch themselves, those are games where the plot has silly elements by design but they they still do really good emotional scenes when the time and place is right which is what I feel makes those games work as well as they do.
That and the game does feel a lot better paced in that with something like Disagea you can suspend a battle and come back after a few days and individual battles aren't too long either way (item world aside >.>) which makes the games not feel tiring to play through tho taht might just be me
I remember following this game since it was announced mainly because of Vofan's art and the pitch of "playing an anime". Shame that it turned out the way it did, but I've played worse. I'd be really interested in you pursuing the Imageepoch story. Between the CEO's story, and Toushin Toshi it's all fascinating. They were the company to get me to buy a PSP because of Black Rock Shooter too.
I've been trying to reach out to the CEO and the others in the company though unfortunately none of them got back to me 😥
But either way hopefully they will eventually and I'll try to make that video great!
This was such a wierd game to watch even though I could only catch a little bit of it. It feels like in another universe this could have been a banger.
I wish we lived in that universe because I would've loved to see what this game could've been in a world where the company had the cohesion and funds to pull it off.
I've been waiting for this! 1hr 45m WOOOOO EATIN GOOD TONIGHT
Hopefully it ends up being entertating!
We can't thank you enough for sacrificing your time to cover such abomination of a game for us. I wasted my time on a lotta things, but just thinking about completing this game makes me age ten times faster. o7
Always glad to enjoy the gamingpoops in the place of others o7
Though hopefully the video was enjoyable though XD
On yes imageepoch and tokitowa what a story 7the dragon was cool
Yea 7th dragon was interesting and they've released so many other interesting titles before and after this one too so it was def surprising that this one ended up the way it did
How whole game works actually make a lot of sense to me as animator. Way Japanese anime studios work, especially more traditional ones, in my opinion, is a bit stunted. Game devs in general have trouble implementing 2d animation into their games due to rigidness of the process. It can be improved obviously but even for more adaptive western pipelines it can be hard. Never worked on a game specifically but I can imagine how their process was organized and why everything came out as it is.
However I actually like idea of hand drawn characters in a 3d game a lot. Those designs are so much more appealing to me. Everyone look like a vietnamese buns, cute.
Especially considering how old this game was it feels like all the more the processes here were likely to be less well adapted to what the game wanted to be. It does seem like one of those cases where they had an interesting vision but the way that animation is done here even till this day it might've been tough producing this for the game in a cost-effective fashion without sacrificing quality perhaps
@@overworkedsalaryman idk about cost effectiveness, Japanese animation is already overoptimised for price/quality, as for poverty level investment you get like the most detailed shit ever. But yeah, it seems the process is even older than how it is done in overseas freelancer era. They definitely did most of the work on paper.
another wonderful review!
I'm glad you enjoyed the review!
Stella glow was a masterpiece tbh
Stella Glow is pretty fun
Yea that game really is great. Tbh aside from this title I feel like in general Imageepoch does really good work with the titles they develop.
More copies than I expected
wdym by copied 😵
If it ended up fairly similar to others' reviews I do apologise since I've not seen any other reviews of the game
@@overworkedsalarymanuh????? It was supposed to be "more copies than what I expected"
Sorry!!!
@@akiradkcn oh. Oooooooooooooooooh. That's what you meant XD no no my bad I misunderstood that.
Yea it certainly was more copies than expected sold though that number is just the conservative estimate. (I can't believe saying a high of 40k is conservative)
In taht there were speculations that it was less than 17k as well but finding evidence of that was tough so I didn't go wtih XD