Wacky Japanese games - Majima never killed anyone

[PomegranateKing]

So while I love many games, some of my favorites have been games that fall into the category of "wacky Japanese games." Essentially, these are games that can be japanese themed, or just have that one scene that is clearly based on some odd stuff. Some of my all time favorites include:

Nioh: There's a scene where a man pulls a cat out of his kimono, looks at it, and remarks "dawn is breaking." He then walks away nonchalantly.

Yakuza 0: You go bowling, get a turkey (three strikes in a row), and are rewarded with a turkey dinner. Only it's not a turkey dinner, it's a live chicken. Whom you decide to keep. The chicken becomes an agent for your real estate company, and you name him nugget. And he's decent at it.

What are some of your own experiences in these wacky Japanese games?

 

[some Sketchy dude]

Shadow of Memories (シャドウ・オブ・メモリーズ, Shadou obu Memorīzu) (Shadow of Destiny in North America)

I played this on PS2 when I was a kid. It's a game where you are a German dude who gets stabbed to death in the beginning of the game. A demon(I thought as a kid, Wikipedia says Homunculus or genie) resurrects you and gives you the ability to time travel to different eras of the same small German town. You use this ability to attempt to piece together a plot that spans hundreds of years in the towns history.

It was pretty fun and interesting to explore a town across several generations of people from the same families that are the other characters you interact with. And it's all with some mysterious otherworldly being pulling the strings. Also, your entire time is spent trying to prevent another unknown entity from constantly trying to kill you in increasingly dramatic ways after each attempt fails from your time travelling thwarting.

It's probably a pretty basic game by today's standards, but the story had me gripped when I first played it.

 

[Looney Troons]

OP,

I don’t think anything in the opening post contains anything “wacky.” That’s just Japanese humor and it’s very random, and very hit-or-miss.

Wacky, to me, is the number of sex simulation games pushed out by developers such as Illusion Soft, et al, per year. They’re all themed with very rape-y undertones despite coming under fire for the debacle that was Rapelay ages ago. This software is extremely popular and very easily torrented, so much to the point where I have no idea how these developers/publishers stay afloat financially.

Ever more weird are the fanatical communities that mod and contribute to these games, and the slapfights they get into over whether or not loli character models should be prohibited (yes, and any lolicon fan should die), to racist mod creators who will not add support of fan-made translations for countries and languages they dislike.

Japanese gaming is full of weird shit. You can find troves of if based upon how they view and manage horror and sex.

 

[$5.3 Million Dollars]

I have a special place in my heart for Swery games in this vein such as Deadly Premonition with its Japanese take on a Twin Peaks murder mystery where you're forced to eat cans of pickles and guzzle gallons of coffee after you smoke outside someone's house for hours because you need to turn in a goddamn quest item. The mechanics are kinda meh, but the story is bonkers.

Also his D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die (which hilariously is kinda dead right now) which is in the Telltale style of games and revolves around finding a murderer referred to as 'D'. There's like three versions of Laura Palmer that haunt you, a detective partner who checks in on you to make sure you're still alive and to eat ten hotdogs in a single gulp as you play with your food, and a giant black man living in the vents of an airplane with zero explanation of why he's chilling there or if you're just hallucinating.


Special mentions for FFXIV's specific Hildebrand questlines, Michigan: Report From Hell, and Way of The Samurai 4.

 

[MemeGrey]

Wacky, to me, is the number of sex simulation games pushed out by developers such as Illusion Soft, et al, per year. They’re all themed with very rape-y undertones

Remind me to never visit your funhouse.


I think my first exposure to this was the Dog ending of Silent Hill 2. I'd throw the Senran Kagura games in as Wacky too just because the idea of using ultimate ninja powers to make people naked is funny to me.

 

[The Shadow]

My favorite wacky Japanese game is Nobunaga's Ambition.

That one's just 100 percent wild off the chain party.

 

[Irwin M. Felcher]

 

[SnowBall]

My PS2 memory card still has save files from 2005 on them.

 

[Ponchik]

i wasted too much time as a kid reading hardcore gaming 101 (before they went to shit), i can do this shit all day

 

[StalinMan53]

This thread about wacky Japanese games is not wacky enough. It need to go deeper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRywm_VgZMQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgFKgoek74I

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

Probably the weirdest experimental ones

More normal wackyness

This one from From Software

 

[ditto]

hardcore gaming 101 (before they went to shit)

Wait.. what happened to Hardcore Gaming 101

 

[salmonjerky]

LSD: Dream Emulator for sure- considering literally everything about it.
Yume Nikki /2kki /.flow have some incredibly weird sequences in them (there are lots of other fangames, but those three stand out most and are made by japanese devs)
ChoroQ (it was ported to america) may count? idk bc my personal experience with it is very vivid and it stuck with me as much as LSD did. It has a lot of really strange story elements that I didn't really expect.

I feel there's more, but I can't particularly remember the names right off the bat.

 

[Xenomorph]

 

[Ponchik]

unfortunately the "surreal japanese arthouse game" scene has been co-opted by enby twitter furries and variety streamers like vinesauce, so have fun digging for these games in [current year] <_<

giving a special shoutout to akira ueda and suda51's avant-garde survival horror masterwork, michigan: report from hell (2004)

Wait.. what happened to Hardcore Gaming 101

tldr the site's founder (kurt kalata) is a smug white cunt who went on a crusade against a fan translator for daring to use the word "tranny" in his ganbare goemon 3 patch. said fan translator apologized, claimed that he didn't know it was an evil meany slur and that it was the most accurate translation of the original game's line, but that didn't stop twitter and reesetera from fucking obliterating his ass. the incredibly credible "crappy games wiki" has mentioned this along with a few other oneangrygamer-tier news sites, but if you really want you can go comb through old tweets (fun!) or look for hg101 beef in old /vr/ posts on desuarchive

also they've been pozzed for years and their articles and books have only gotten shittier, which blows because their older articles (specifically their weekly kusoge series) got me interested in more obscure games i likely never would have heard of otherwise. i would still recommend them to anyone who wants a cursory introduction to weird ass underground games, but at the very least, don't rely on them actually being accurate

to this day, one of my personal favorite games they've covered is yume penguin monogatari, a famicom exclusive konami game. you play as penta, a chubby penguin motherfucker whose fake ass girlfriend threatens to cuck him and hook up with another megachad penguin solely because penta is such a fat piece of shit. it has to be seen to be believed

 

[PomegranateKing]

There's also Baten Kaitos and Baten Kaitos 2, for gamecube. It was a card-based battle engine, with odd characters (one is a mask-wearing caster called the great mizuti. Another is a fisherman who I believe fights with a paddle), and mechanics like consumable items being trapped in cards, which aged over time. There were floating islands, people with wings, and ancient evil. Plus the main character turned out to be evil halfway through, and you were some odd voice in his head.

It's also a long couple of games. The exploration areas were just static images with npcs walking around.

The second game gets extra wacky. Being a prequel, it explains that the ancient evil from the first game (malpercio was the name) was actually named after a hill, and was created from 5 people trying to save others. It was also how the world got messed up. Moral of the story? Doing good always leads to bad things. Enjoy your prequel.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Long ago Treasure of Gunstar Heroes/Dynamite Headdy/Mischief Makers fame made a tech demo for a game where you could deform the environment. They showed it off at some tradeshow and their publisher thought it was an actual game. Weird corporate intimidation shit happened and it got quickly turned into a .. thing, and released.

Behold, Hippa Linda and/or Stretch Panic. It's a boss-rush game but only has about a dozen bosses, each of which runs 3-4 minutes. To pad for content these bosses are gated behind doors that require currency to enter. Currency is gathered by going into one of a couple freeroam zones and defeating the enemy there.

Note, I say 'the enemy' because there's only one singular enemy type and said enemy is the sole reason why anyone remembers this game. Skip to about 3:30 into this video while remembering this is a game whose core mechanic is grabbing and deforming things and wonder how the hell this game got an American release in the early 2000s.

These enemies also notably have no AI and tend to wander off platforms and fall into the void. The game has an interesting mechanism for dealing with this and it's visible around 5:30.

 

[lemonsensei]

My favorite wacky Japanese game has to be this underrated game called Bible Black. Very wholesome.

 

[Sundae]

When it comes to weird/wacky Japanese games, Cubivore and the original Animal Crossing will forever be two of my favorites:

So many fond memories of playing these games back in the day.

My PS2 memory card still has save files from 2005 on them.

The sequel, We Love Katamari, is one of my favorite games. The level where the bird and elephant ask to roll as big as possible is one of my favorite levels in gaming:

Really hope this series can make a comeback someday.

 

[Ly Erg]

Hungry Ghosts is an interesting one. It's First Person Horror Dungeon Crawler with a setting possibly based around being in some sort of Swampy Purgatory? I don't really know much about it due to it not having any Translation aside from one FAQ on Gamefaqs which is a shame since this game seems like it's right up my alley on the whole Paranormal Mystery Dungeon Crawler vibe it's going for.