Comiket 82: Preview Video

By: Derek Yu

On: August 7th, 2012

This is a video that mashes up quite a few trailers for doujin games that will be available at this year’s Comiket (Comic Market), a Japanese self-published comic book festival (and the largest in the world, with half a million attendees last year). The video was put together by Edelweiss, a doujin game developer that created Ether Vapor and is attending Comiket 82 with a new shoot ’em up called Astebreed. The festival is taking place this weekend on August 10-12.

Links to each of the games featured in the video are available here on Edelweiss’s website.

(Source: Elixir)

Posted in Action, Community, Doujin, Platformers, Previews, Racing, RPG, Shoot-em-ups, Sim, Strategy, Videos | Tags: Edelweiss

CobraLad

Saw it eysterday.
Spoiler: everything is Touhou.
Moczan

Better than most western games imho
iffi

There sure are a lot of SHMUPs in here (can’t say I’m surprised about that though).
iffi

inb4 “The game at 14:15 looks better than Fez”
Phil Fish

This game sucks!
what?

why is it all little girls
Matt

So how do we go about getting these games if we live in America?
News

Petuhh Pahn seenduom
Maxim

Soooooo much aping of Touhou! The shamelessness is baffling. I wonder how Zun feels about his style being spread so thin. At least some of ’em have some nice-looking patterns to dodge.

Astebreed and REVOLVER360 really stood out though! The former reminds me of the Banpresto/NMK Macross games, which is always nice. Wonder how REVOLVER360 actually plays though… certainly looks awesome.
CobraLad

Except there is like 20 minutes of original games, and whole hour of Touhou related games. Seriously, Touhou TBS, Touhou RTS, Touhou Metal Gear, Touhou Touhou…
They could just name it “Toufest” and never waste my time.
Maxim

I know! I was hoping you were exaggerating with your original comment before I watched it, but… you were dead serious :(
Tazi

only lolies, and the same drawing style used over and over again. we just need some “real time weapon change” and it will be perfect
whatindeed

It is pretty odd isn’t it? But here’s three main reasons why there tend to be a lot of young girl characters in Japanese games/comics/anime:

1) Because a lot of Japanese culture tends to glorify and worship cuteness and cute things.

2) Because a lot of Japanese culture tends to glorify and worship youth and youthfulness. Which is why the vast majority of characters are rarely above high-school age. This is sometimes a target audience thing of course. One reason for this is high-school age is seen as the last moment of innocence and freedom in much of Japanese society – the last opportunity for adventure before career/family etc. Many of these games are designed with escapism in mind.

3) There is also unfortunately a lot of pedophilia, especially in the Japanese doujin (fan made whatever – comics, games, erotic comics, erotic games etc) subculture. This in turn influences more mainstream subcultures in terms of character design. This point sometimes overlaps with the above three, but not always. Perhaps because of this there’s often a very fine line between making a character “cute” and outright sexualising a character.

As for me, I long for the day when I can play a JRPG with only jaded 30+ characters.
Scrape Wander

That Fez-y, Cave Story-y stealthy game looks really fucking good. I’m trying to download it right now, though I’m sure to be thwarted by the language barrier.
Anon

Where did you find it? That game looked really interesting.
http://twitter.com/googoogjoob42 googoogjoob

i am disgusted by the absence from this video of hatoful boyfriend, which also will be at comiket
http://twitter.com/elhuesudoii Ricardo Meléndez

TOUHOUS

TOUHOUS EVERYWHERE
http://twitter.com/AeonLocien Aeon Chaosfire

They already have “touhoufest”, it’s called Reitaisai. http://touhou.wikia.com/wiki/Reitaisai
http://twitter.com/phubans Paul Hubans

Yeah, I hate to be such a negative nancy but this kawaii moe uguu
bullshit really rustles my jimmies… I miss when Japanese games and
anime meant something.
designatedpiledriver

Meant something? Anime never did. You should like you came from 4chan or /v/.

There has always two kinds of anime. The shounen anime was shown during the day and got licensed to America for cheap and then the stuff for otaku, the other side that the west never saw which involves “cute girls doing cute things” (which goes as far back as Sally the Witch in the 60’s).

Only now anime is more widespread with people fansubbing and publishing everything through the internet, to the point where you can watch anything online. It is only now that Toonami fans in the west are going EWW DISGUSTING when it’s always been this way.
designatedpiledriver

Also, search with quotes “”kawaii is the latest fad”

You should find a few really old Usenet threads.

Notice how back in 1994 people were complaining about the same thing. Both Japan and anime have always been the same shit.
designatedpiledriver

“kawaii is the latest fad” rather (didn’t mean to input ” twice)
http://twitter.com/phubans Paul Hubans

Really? What about Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Fist of the North Star, Berserk, Demon City Shinjuku, Wicked City, Golgo 13, Ninja Scroll, Ghost in the Shell, Violence Jack, Devilman, Genocyber, Crying Freeman, Neo-Tokyo, Angel’s Egg, Blood Reign, 3×3 Eyes, Doomed Megalopolis… Where are the anime like that today? There is nothing today that even comes close to any of these titles in terms of maturity, quality, or grittiness.

Do you want me to continue with Japanese games, too? The list of quality games circa 1980s & 1990s that aren’t focused around little girls is quite extensive, but I’d be happy to provide you with a list for those, too.
whatindeed

Most of these are titles that were imported by Manga Entertainment (in the UK anyway) back in the day. I remember watching those cheesy trailers at the beginning of the vhs with over the top voiceover and KMFDM in the background… :D “THE CYBERPUNK COLLECTION!! FAST FORWARD TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY!!”

I wouldn’t call the likes of Violence Jack and Genocyber quality… but they were very different right? The reason you never see anime like that today.. is because it is no longer the 90s. Unfortunately.

Many of these titles that were imported to the west during the 90s were often fairly obscure in Japan – likewise a lot of titles that were more popular in Japan didn’t get exported. This often (but not always) applied to games as well.

But these days, like designatedpiledriver said, you tend to get more of everything thanks to the internet. The anime industry is a lot bigger than it was as well. You tend to hear most about shows aimed at an already established audience – the 9AM saturday shounen/shoujo stuff or the high school girl slice of life stuff aimed at otaku men with varying levels of pedophilia. I guess the same works for games as well: You get the bigger Japanese companies producing escapist jrpgs with characters/stories that follow design conventions and the small doujin producers producing doujin games that appeal to the doujin/otaku subculture.

So yeah, you get a lot of shit. But there are plenty of good things there too – it’s just the sheer volume of stuff you have to sift through in order to find them.

For anime films you have stuff like Tekkonkinkreet or Red Line. Good recent(ish) anime series I’ve seen are Seirei no Moribito and House of Five Leaves.
In terms of games I have no idea because I don’t really follow the latest games (aside from idie games of course) but I was reading about a game on HCG101 which I had never heard of and seemed to have a non-kawaii artstyle: http://hardcoregaming101.net/operationdarkness/operationdarkness.htm
There are probably plenty of worthwhile doujin games out there (considering the amount that get made!) but the most publicized are the otaku Touhou-whatever games. If you trawl round the Vector site, every now and again you come accross something without a cutesy art style. But the language barrier is the big issue here. The people that are most vocal about importing or translating Japanese games tend to be anime fans as well, so that is probably another reason why imported games tend to cater to their tastes.
http://twitter.com/phubans Paul Hubans

Thanks for your post. In regard to import publishers, some of the best were Streamline Pictures (in the 80s) and ADV Films (in the 90s) … Yeah, that list wasn’t entirely quality, but I do miss 80s & 90s media pretty badly :(

I did see Redline and I enjoyed it. I’ll have to check out the other stuff you mentioned, too… But my biggest beef with modern day isn’t always the lolicon BS as much as it’s the gratuitous use of digital technology to create everything… But I doubt people are going to return to traditional methods anytime soon. I just feel that something was lost in that, but I digress…

Hopefully more gritty, masculine, creepy, weird, and supernatural anime and video games will make a renaissance in my lifetime, because I can only watch & play the same pieces of media so many times.
Theon

I’m hyped for Ghost92! :D
Scrape Wander

here you go buddy, have at it. translate the page with google chrome or something similar.

http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/winnt/game/se460397.html
http://twitter.com/AeonLocien Aeon Chaosfire

It looks like the file is from a few years ago(2010.7.3 looks like the date August 3 2010), and is version 1.0. So i’m guessing it’s not the full current version, but a previous, less complete version.
zexx

down votign it wont make it any less true
Anon

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