Hideaki Fujiwara

Since the release of Sega’s Sonic Frontiers on November 8, the game has been having a strong showing on platforms like Steam and Twitch.

TiMi Studio Group and Capcom have announced that they are jointly developing a new mobile game in the Monster Hunter series. Like the majority of Monster Hunter games, it will be a hunting action game where you take on powerful monsters.

Ukraine War Stories is a free visual novel that was released last month on Steam. The game supports a wide range of languages, including Japanese, and Japan actually boasts the highest number of players out of all countries where the game is available. We talked to the game’s developer, Starni Games, and asked about the reason behind Japan’s high player count.

Imagineer has announced that Raoh will be joining Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star as a boss and instructor character. To commemorate the news, a giveaway campaign was launched on the game’s official Twitter account, but shortly after, the account was mysteriously suspended.

Publisher Krafton has announced that The Callisto Protocol has been cancelled in Japan. The official Twitter account explains that the game was unable to pass through its rating review from CERO. As an aside, Dead Space has also been removed from the PlayStation Store in Japan.

Despite six years having passed since Bandai Namco Entertainment and FromSoftware released the Dark Souls Camera mobile app in 2016, it has seen a recent surge in popularity here in Japan. Dark Souls Camera is an app for iOS and Android that lets users create Dark Souls themed photos.

Pino are bite-sized pieces of vanilla ice cream covered in a chocolate coating. In Pino Koi, there’s a character with a giant Pino for a head that looks to be a male high school student. Players talk to the Pino guy to raise their affection levels with the goal of falling in love.

Capcom has released Ver.12.0.1 of Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak, an update that includes a change to gestures and pose sets. Despite recently being reduced to one gesture input per second a few days earlier, the game now accepts up to 4 inputs per second while maintaining the stability of its Lobbies.

Bandai Namco Entertainment has released update data ver. 1.30 for SD Gundam Battle Alliance. What is particularly notable about this new update is the fact that it addresses a multitude of issues that players had with the game.  

Steam version of CHAOS;HEAD NOAH will be releasing as originally planned, despite an announcement that it was canceled only a few days ago. ""Valve's content review team, the group that made the original decision, has re-examined CHAOS;HEAD NOAH and decided to reverse course and allow the game to ship on Steam, as is."

Capcom has released the patch notes for Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak’s free Title Update 2. Among the additional content, bug fixes, and balance adjustments, players seem especially pleased about a line that says, “Fugen's endemic life traps will no longer hit the player.”

One Twitter user’s love of Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin inspired them to grow their own rice field, and they’ve now posted their current progress to social media. The tweets from the user have drawn a big reaction with one of the developers of the game even taking notice.

There’s been a recent increase on social media in Japan of accounts claiming to be video game retailers that are closing soon and offering suspicious PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch giveaways. The tweets ask that users share their LINE messaging app information for the purpose of contacting the winner which social media users have been wary of.

Square Enix has announced that service for the action RPG Babylon’s Fall will be coming to an end at the end of February 2023. Babylon’s Fall initially released in March of this year for PC (Steam), PS4, and PS5.

Capcom has released a notice warning players about illegally modified game data in Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak. It asks players to avoid creating or using illegally modified Anomaly Investigations. These modified Anomaly Investigations have become such a big deal that they even started trending on Twitter in Japan.