Pepsiman

@sweep: I've never even posted in this thread to my knowledge, but since your post showed up in my friend feed, I'll just say that we as a community have all come this far. We'd best not temper with mother nature when it's panned out okay thus far.

Sega Japan just posted a new video a while ago announcing that Phantasy Star Online 2: Episode 2 is set to come out this summer over there. For those that can't read the Japanese themselves, the big things being implied by this update/expansion(?) include:

• A new class
• A new species
• New weapons
• A new planet
• A new character(?) by the name of Photona (not a big Phantasy Star person outside this game, so if it's already a thing, say so!)
• More plot for that game I bet you were totally invested in that way to begin with

As such, here's the video embedded below. Not a whole lot of information outside of what I just provided, but I suppose it's better than nothing. No word about whether it'll be a simultaneous release for the PC and Vita versions or not; I know that some updates thus far have had staggered releases, but I don't know if that's still an ongoing thing at this point.

As always, it continues to suck if you're an English-only fan, given Sega still has yet to provide much of an update about when the base game will arrive in any sort of localized capacity. That being said, I'll probably jump back into the game soon thanks to the announcement of this update, so if any of you duders feel like playing then and don't want to wait for wiki/translation patch updates to know what the Japanese text is saying, hit me up and we'll work something out!

@little_socrates: As with many other developing fields in science, wah-wah classification is still in its infancy and peer reviews such as this will surely go on to perfect and refine the system as new, er, New Super Mario games are introduced and give the scientific community more material with which to work. Once these findings have been formally published in a scientific journal in the near future, I expect work in this field to take off, hopefully to the extent that one day it becomes a socially-accepted standard that is taught to children throughout classrooms nationwide.

Seeing this makes me curious how easy it would be to stream broadcasts of their international propaganda radio stations. I know they at least have material in English and Japanese due to how their foreign ministry is staffed and it would be neat to hear some of their political stuff in either language since I speak both.

(Edit: It's also worth mentioning for the curious that it's possible to obtain some of the movies their film industry has produced with some torrents roaming around online. I doubt they come with subtitles, but it's neat that they exist since I imagine obtaining the physical DVDs is otherwise pretty hard since they're only sold to tourists visiting North Korea.)

As possibly the only duder on this site who's played all three of the main games (the third one never got an official localization, so I played it to completion in Japanese), I'd say Valkyria Chronicles 2 is definitely not the one that shows the series' strong points. Some of the gameplay changes that are introduced in it make the game, at least in my book, a better playing experience than the original, especially in terms of character class flexibility, but it's indeed severely offset by its brain-dead cast and thoroughly mediocre plot. That alone is reason enough for me to never recommend to English-only speakers that they start the series with that game, especially since they're not otherwise that different that the original game is rendered irrelevant by 2's changes or anything of the sort. I wouldn't typecast 2's trashy narrative as an issue that plagues the rest of the series in general, though; 2 just has the misfortune of having really bad writers attached to it and only it for whatever reason. 1 has a somewhat cheesy, but otherwise interesting and fun storyline and 3... well, 3's is so intriguingly provocative in places that I have yet to find another (mainstream) video game that touches a lot of its thematic territory. There's still some lighthearted cheese every now and again, but the cast is much more down to earth and overall, it's a game with some pretty neat political allegory. I pray that element in particular survives the transition to a fan translation all right because it really deserves a good English script. It completely made up for 2's numerous narrative pitfalls in my mind when I was playing it in Japanese.

So I guess what I would say is that it really may well be worth it down the line to track down a PS3 and a copy of the original Valkyria Chronicles. It's the favorite for a lot of series fans, not the least of which because it actually has the hardware necessary to live up to its graphical ambition. 2 is okay to skip if you find yourself just completely unable to bear the narrative (it's only gonna go further downhill, I assure you) and if it turns out that 3 actually gets a respectable translation patch, then by all means, forget 2 ever existed and consider 3 to be the only PSP entry in the entire series. The boldly told plotline and the additional gameplay refinements make it my personal favorite in the series. 2 is not worth forsaking the rest of the series when the other games are pretty much miles ahead of it in most every other respect beyond pure gameplay.

You are looking for this animation, I imagine. God knows I couldn't walk two feet without tripping over that video in its heyday as a Japanese speaker on that part of the Internet.

To reply to OP, a lot of my personal favorites like VVVVVV and Happy Wheels have been mentioned, so instead I'll chime in with Nanaca Crash. It's probably the best/worst way to appropriate old eroge character portraits (it's a safe for work game, I promise), but the mechanics themselves are otherwise surprisingly fleshed out for what's ostensibly a basic physics game about crashing into stuff.

That's more or less how the entire Yakuza series can be defined, yeah. They all have a few wonderfully ridiculous moments, so they're not always games that take themselves super seriously, but they're largely grounded in a really realistic rendition of Japan. Having lived there myself in some of the regions the series has covered, I'd say you'd be hard pressed for a rawer depiction of the country in a mainstream game in a lot of aspects both big and small.

Disaster Report and Raw Danger might be of interest to the OP as well. I only played them in Japanese, so I was spared their pretty hilarious awful localizations (all the Japanese characters have blonde hair!), but they're neat games about surviving natural disasters with down-to-earth plotlines that don't go into any bizarro supernatural directions per se. (They're realistic enough about the disaster aspects that some Tohoku survivors were known to have made it through that ordeal because of what they learned from those games!) Between the two, I'd say that if you don't speak Japanese, Raw Danger is probably the one whose localization is probably worth trudging through since the mechanics are a huge improvement over the first game and its implementation of choice and consequences in a game where you play as multiple protagonists with intersecting plotlines is just brilliant.

My credentials as a scientist have been shamed. You are correct. The first thing you actually hear in that video in 1-1 is a single wah, which I had absentmindedly recorded as a full wah-wah. I will go ponder the implications of your correction on science and possibly submit an edit to the journal I already submitted this to in the hope that the real truth arises out of this mess.

Oh god, this continues to be a mess when I try to post it in parts. Fixing up real fast like. I guess shift+enter doesn't play nicely here anymore for line breaks.

Edit: This has been fixed to the best of my ability. I'd love to not have a line break for the science stuff, but apparently having HTML code like linking and bolding makes this thing throw up, so I'm just leaving this as is, lest I risk it exploding any further. My apologies to my readers!

I've got a PS1 debug unit and some GameCube SDKs I acquired on a whim off eBay years and years ago. Never really gotten much use out of the GameCube stuff since I don't have the skills to do much with them, but I keep meaning to dump the tech demos lying around on them to see if they'll run on Dolphin. The PS1 debug unit has occasionally come in handy, though, since it has no region lock or any of the usual protective mechanisms built into it, so I'll sometimes pop in my copy of Japanese Vib-Ribbon and marvel at how nice it is to have that game just run smoothly and not have a 50/50 percent chance of crashing when I put in a music CD like on emulators.

Hard to be certain what the rarest thing I own is if we talk in terms of things that most members of the public could buy through proper channels. It might possibly be my shrinkwrapped Asian-region copy of Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 1/Disaster Report since Irem stopped printing copies of all games in that series really soon after the Tohoku Earthquake in March 2011. My complete copies of the two Megami Tensei games for the Famicom also seem to command a decent amount of money outside of Japan, as do some other miscellaneous import pickups I've made over the years. My shrinkwrapped copy of Blue Submarine No. 6 for the Dreamcast, which was a game I just picked up on a whim from a local mom and pop shop in the States, is probably really high up on the list, too. There's other stuff that I have like Ni no Kuni on the DS, which comes with the book by default, that a lot of people outside of Japan would probably like owning, but their actual value is dubious with enough research.