No Need for Despair with NIS America

You have to hand it to NIS America. They always know how to put on a good show to impress their fanbase, a trait they undoubtedly recognize at this point. The company holds conferences full of announcements often throughout every year, and fans know them so well that they had a good idea of what they would announce. While that makes them predictable, that’s fine with them.

Well, unless you’re a fan of their anime output. They’ll presumably make some new anime announcements at another time, as all they had to share were trailers.

You knew it was coming: NIS America is indeed localizing Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. The big question here is what factors led to them making this decision. It’s possible they always intended on localizing it, and realized they needed to release them separately in order to make a profit. Voice actor Kyle Hebert accidentally spilling the beans might have been a clue that the sequel was dubbed shortly after sessions for the first one completed. But publishers have started localizations for games they’ve never released, so it’s likely that pre-orders for the first game were all they needed to convince them that it was worth bringing over. Limited editions always sell out from NISA’s store (even in the case of Time & Eternity!), but they even sold out of the standard edition.

That it’s coming is relaxing, considering buyers of the first game feared it wouldn’t sell after many played the fan translation of the first one on PSP, and NISA unfortunately announced the localization after it released. But it sold well enough anyway. See, it turns out you can trust your fellow gamers. Sometimes.

Anyway, I hear that both games are pretty good adventure titles, similar to the Ace Attorney games. I have no intention of reading many impressions since some people are terrible about not discussing serious spoilers. If you like the genre and own a Vita, you’ll probably enjoy it. The second game releases this fall in western territories, at retail and digitally through Playstation Network.

You could have predicted what the other announcements were. The Vita version of Disgaea 4 that released in Japan a few weeks ago is coming over as Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited. Like the Vita port of Disgaea 3, it will come with the plethora of downloadable content the PS3 version received (over $50 worth) in addition to the entire main game, and includes extra content on top of that. The extras come in the form of a new scenario, and cameo appearances from Disgaea 3 characters. It will be available at retail and and on PSN sometime this summer.

NISA is also localizing Fairy Fencer F for PS3, an RPG released by Compile Heart back in October. It was developed by a sizable portion of the team that worked on the Hyperdimension Neptunia games, and though both Yoshitaka Amano and Nobuo Uematsu were involved, their contributions were lower than the marketing campaign in Japan suggested. The main character designs are still provided by Tsunako, of Neptunia, and Uematsu is one of the game’s seven composers. The few import impressions scattered around were mixed, with some acknowledging that it’s a flawed-but-fun game. We’ll get a better picture of what people think when it releases in the west this fall, at retail and on PSN.

The last new title announced was the Apollosoft-developed Battle Princess of Arcadias for PS3, a side-scrolling action/RPG published by Nippon Ichi Software in Japan in September. In a way, this was the most surprising announcement of the four, because it bombed hard in Japan. NISA clearly isn’t expecting much considering they’re going the PSN-only route for the west, and hopefully it meets their expectations.

It’s not all about new announcements, though; the company has previously-announced titles they need to promote. Assuming you started from the beginning of this post, youalready know that Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc for Vita is already available. The company is also releasing The Witch and the Hundred Knight on March 25th, which you might remember from being in development hell for well over a year. It released in Japan back in July, and it’s finally making its way out in English. First-person dungeon crawler Demon Gaze, developed by Experience Inc., is making its way to Vita, on April 22nd. Someone…might have asked for Mugen Souls Z? That’s coming in May, and yes, they’re removing content from this version too. There’s also Neptunia: Producing Perfection for Vita, an idol game featuring Neptunia’s characters that’s coming this spring. It released in Japan under the name Neptunia PP, whose name was changed for reasons that should be obvious.

That’s it! They put on a good show, though some games were curious in their absence. It might be too early to discuss the Neptunia strategy/RPG spinoff starring Noire for Vita, but I’m surprised there was no mention of the enhanced version of the first game on that same handheld. Games in the franchise have apparently been consistently profitable for NISA, so I can’t imagine them passing on it, especially when it’s mostly already localized. Either they want to release PP (you know, the game I mentioned above) before that, or Idea Factory International is handling it. There was also no comment on a hilariously-named game their Japanese parent company announced, roughly translated as “If You Thought It Was Harem Paradise, It Was Yandere Hell” for PS3. NISA isn’t big on localizing adventure games, though DanganRonpa might represent a turnaround. They didn’t localize their previous internally-developed games in the genre, however, and this one might be out of reach too.

But hey, that’s OK. This is enough, so let’s just celebrate what we have for now. And we’ll have more in the near future when NIS announces their first Playstation 4 game at Tokyo Game Show this year.

You can see details of the announcements they made on their official website.