Game Of Thrones RPG Is Coming To Stores, Thanks To Atlus

To be fair though they haven’t actually ditributed many Naruto titles aside from those previous two a couple of years ago. Not to mention that they had no hand in publishing them, they simply distributed them like they do for some of NISA’s games.

But concerning the news I’m kind of disappointed as well, nowadays the only companies that are releasing the interesting games are XSEED (Grand Knights History) and Aksys (999). I’m not really into NISA since their games are pretty much all the same either being repetitive grindfests or fanservice-laden nonsense, both of which share the same juvenile bathroom humor (of course they do release the odd gem here and there such as GrimGrimoire and Sakura Wars, but those are few and far between).

That’s a fair assessment. When I think of shovelware, I think of those DS games like Bratz and games based off movies like Cars. At least Cursed Crusade is an original game, albeit a mediocre one. I’m disappointed in some of Atlus’s recent localization choices, but I think people are being a little hard on them because they still are putting out quality titles. There’s definitely been some misses on their part in the past. Where was 7th Dragon? and Growlanser? As long as they keep putting out SMT titles, I’ll be happy. I’m not too worried about that though. 

Pardon me, but I’m not insulting anyone in the slightest, belittling publishers’ difficulties regarding handheld games (and as much as we know them, we also know other publishers are still doing exactly that) or demonizing Atlus USA saying it’s doing nothing right: if you check, I took care to defend them in this same thread when someone else said they’ve become a shovelware company, which they most surely have not.

That said, I think comment sections are meant to debate things, and I hope I can continue to do that while abiding to the Siliconera rules (not that I would like to insult or flame anyone if they were different, just to say).

Having cyclical debates on Japanese game localizations on a site such as this is fairly normal imho, and this can indeed lead to repetitions in many comment sections (and I can understand they can be annoying, especially if you disagree, since I happen to think the same in other occasions).

That said, I don’t think this means people should shut up simply because a certain debate is frequently brought up, or that would destroy the possibility to discuss things every time we have more material to consider.

Also, I think everyone here is free to disagree with anyone else, and as much as I like to defend my ideas I haven’t done anything to attack other users for their opinions, especially considering the kind of issue we’re discussing here is all but “black and white”.

i’d rather take quirky weird niche japanese game published ,rather than generic crappy western game like cursed crusade:p

That’s why I wrote

“Of course metacritic can be as wrong as any aggregation of quantified subjective reviews, but even among players the consensus seems to be that Genesis was a really poor use of the ASOIAF licence : ”

in my post, though (and I meant it for both user and official reviews). I think any gamer interested in niche titles has learnt to take metacritic with a grain of salt (or two), but that doesn’t mean refusing the existence of actual bad games, demolished both by users and reviewers in many outlets.

I checked up on that game since I was interested in buying it (ASOIAF fan here :P), but sadly I found almost nothing positive said by people who actually played it.

I would agree with you if people were asking Atlus USA to localize anything Japanese regardless of the quality just to show it’s still adhering to some unspoken “niche” rule, but there’s nothing like that going on.

People are hoping to see more Growlanser, Super Robot Taisen OG, Dept Heaven or Luminous Arc games, all series that are considered great or at least decent in the fanbase (of course other people could dislike them, something that happens for every single title) and that thousands of people wanted to play, not to mention stand-alone games like 7th Dragon.

I don’t remember anyone in those debates asking them to bring some obscure, completely unknown, blatantly low quality game just because they could have done so in the past. Some hit-and-miss localizations are pretty much unavoidable when you try out new series and developers, too, especially if you try to have a stable flow of releases like Atlus USA used to do in the past.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a middle point between localizing Zoids Assault and Master of the Monster Lair and completely stop any non-Atlus jrpg localization, though.

I get your point, but technically speaking, importing shouldn’t be the solution. If a game is available in Europe but not in the USA, even if it were region free, it would still be better if some american publisher steps up to it. It also means that, when a game comes out in Europe that is actually region locked, someone will have it covered, which is pretty nice.

Also it would be a bit unfair to assume that the games Atlus is picking up could have been picked by any other company. Niche western games are niche for a reason: just like japanese ones, there isn’t much demand for them. There’s no guarantee that if Atlus hadn’t picked them up, somebody else would have.

I should also point out that this kind of path is probably less expensive for them, since publishing a game which is already in english (either because it was in Europe or because the developers were american or whatever) is certainly cheaper than localizing a japanese game. That must have influenced their decisions too. Especially since DS and PSP games don’t sell that much anymore, so localizing them would be a greater risk than usual – and japanese games in the last couple years too often were made for DS and PSP.

I would complain about Atlus too, if it were 2007 or 2008… but they’ve only started this behavior in 2010, when the portable consoles had already established themselves as either software sales failures (PSP) or aimed at younger audiences (DS).

Let’s see how they act with the 3DS out, then we can start to complain.

Yea, it really bothers me sometimes. This is just me speaking for myself, but it’s kind of sad to see people around here lap up any old garbage certain Japanese publishers will put out, but genuinely fantastic games like Trine get ignored.

I feel the same way.  I play pretty much any genre of game, and if the game’s good I don’t give a damn what country it came from or who developed it, but a lot of people just don’t care about broadening their horizons and would rather just hang out where they’re comfortable.