

Some of these may be familiar if you’ve comprehensively read Hardcore Gaming 101 website archives (though the actual text for this book is completely original), but we’ve also included a large number of titles that aren’t (currently) reviewed, and in some cases, have little to no English-language coverage whatsoever. Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents: Japanese Video Game Obscurities seeks to catalogue many of these titles – games that are weird, compelling, strange, cool or historically important. Even the older games have a visual and aural style that make them distinct from similar games from around the globe.

Plus, for quite a long time, the Japanese industry developed separately from American and European output, with their own landmark titles that created trends and inspired later games.

Some of these games are oddities, the kind of uniquely Japanese title that wouldn’t have been commercial viable outside of the country others may have done well but were victims of circumstance. While many of these titles have since been documented by the English-speaking video game community – and in some cases, even unofficially translated – a huge proportion of the Japanese game output is unknown outside of their native territory (and even, in some cases, within it). For any number of reasons, not all of them were ever released outside of the country, especially in the '80s and '90s. Japan has produced thousands of intriguing video games.
