Pushing Buttons: At Tokyo Game Show, I saw the Japanese games scene I grew up with is still live and kicking | Games

Tokyo Game Show takes place at the Makuhari Messe, a series of cavernous halls in a suburban complex about 45 minutes east of Tokyo city centre, and given its late September slot in the calendar, it is always either horribly hot or pouring with rain. Either way, it’s humid as heck, and there are many thousands of people crammed in, creating what can only be described as a suboptimal sweat situation. Nonetheless, I’ve always had a soft spot for TGS. I attended my first one in 2008, and so the experience of playing games in packed halls while understanding very little about what is happening has become powerfully nostalgic.

And I surely wasn’t the only person feeling nostalgic in Tokyo last Friday, because the halls were filled with series and characters from 15 years ago. Silent Hill 2 was back on the Konami stand, along with Solid Snake’s grizzled face for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater remake. Capcom had two huge areas given over to Monster Hunter, a series that was unbelievably popular in Japan throughout the 00s and finally broke through to the world with Monster Hunter World in 2018. Sony was also back at the show in a big way for the first time in five years, showing off the PlayStation 5 Pro, and its especially gorgeous-looking PlayStation 30th Anniversary special edition. The Japanese-made Astro Bot was also everywhere at the show – I hope its sales have reflected how brilliant it is.

Sega, meanwhile, had given over most of its floorspace to two upcoming games: Persona-like medieval fantasy RPG Metaphor: ReFantazio, and the beautifully, gloriously ridiculous Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, in which one of the infamous antagonists from the Yakuza series, Goro Majima, loses his memory and dosses around in Hawaii on a pirate ship. There were other newer games around, too: Palworld’s developers had splashed out on a massive stand adorned with extremely Pokémon-like creatures and costume mascots, making an ostentatious showing despite the recent news that the company is being sued by Nintendo over alleged copyright infringement.

Namco Bandai was there with Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, out next week, a beat-em-up that is sure to sell millions. And Infinity Nikki, a dress-up online adventure game from Chinese developer Papergames, also had an elaborate presence with lots of frills and hot-air balloons. I am delighted to report that after 10 minutes of dressing Nikki up and running around a fantasy city before jumping down a well to find a crowd of unhappy frogs, I still don’t know what this game is about.

The last time I was at TGS, a good 10 years ago, most of the floorspace was dedicated to smartphone gatcha games, as the console-centric big developers and publishers faded into the background. It was dispiriting: when I was growing up, Japan was the games industry, and the diminished state of companies such as Sega, Atlus, Konami and even Nintendo for most of the 2010s felt quite sad. This year it looked and felt as if the whole Japanese games industry was in good health.

Xbox, which has always been weak in Japan, also had an unexpectedly large presence: in a news broadcast late last week it announced that the venerable Starcraft and Starcraft 2 were coming to its Game Pass subscription service on PC, and showed off several new games from Japanese developers. Among them was Tanuki: Pon’s Summer, which was one of my personal favourites, made by DenkiWorks in Kyoto. You play a lazy tanuki who has to get a job as a delivery boy to fix up his shrine in time for an important festival, riding around a quaint, small Japanese town delivering packages to people with strange hobbies and pulling off sick tricks on your little BMX. It’s got tremendous personality and cartoonish appeal, and even in the space of a 20-minute demo there were playful nods to about 15 different games, from Tony Hawk to Animal Crossing .

That’s another thing I noticed at Tokyo Game Show this year: hundreds of indie games in the quieter halls, from all over the world but plenty of them homegrown, something that you definitely didn’t find 10 years ago. One of them was called Rolling Macho: Tumbling to Earth by Serialgames. “There is no time to worry about why macho is in space or why he does side rolls,” reads its description on Steam. “All you need to understand is that he is in space and must return to Earth.” Isn’t that a video game premise we can all get behind?

I have returned home feeling pleasingly reassured that the kinds of Japanese games I grew up with are still alive and kicking, having played a bunch that piqued my interest. The first of them, Metaphor: ReFantazio is out in just over a week from Studio Zero. There’s a demo available now, if a stylish medieval-fantasy JRPG sounds like something that would enhance your life.

What to play

I felt massively uncomfortable playing Apartment Story, a short Sims-esque life-management game about a broke twenty-something games journalist, made by Glaswegian developer Sean Wenham – because it is so … intimate.

Confined to a small flat, you can shave, rearrange your meagre belongings, snoop into your housemate’s room, do the dishes, stare despondently into the fridge and, uh, take the protagonist to the toilet, all in the low-poly style of a PlayStation 2 game. The story goes off the rails pretty quick, but this game is only £6 and a couple of hours long, so it’s worth a shot anyway. Before it turns into a far-fetched thriller, it’s better as a grimly fascinating portrayal of the mundanity of modern life.

Available on: PC
Estimated playtime: 1-2 hours, multiple playthroughs possible

What to read

• Ubisoft has delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows into February next year. The game has been embroiled for months in a contrived culture-war controversy, prompting an (in my opinion) ill-advised apology from its developers a few months back for having “caused concern”. It’s hard to tell whether this delay is a show of faith on the part of Ubisoft, or damage control. The French publisher’s stock price is at an all-time low after its Star Wars game, Outlaws, sold worse than expected.

• The Simpsons: Tapped Out has been a mobile game mega-success for 12 years, but it will finally be removed from app stores in January. If you were ever a player, you can play a final farewell quest if you return to the game this month.

• After playing the new Yakuza game, Pirates in Hawaii, and spending most of my demo time playing a Mario Kart-esque minigame, I came across this insightful breakdown of the series’ characters’ tattoos and their symbolism on Twitter. Meanwhile, the Amazon Prime Yakuza TV series is out this month, and has a new trailer.

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What to click

Question Block

Reader Guy furnishes us with this week’s question:

“I’ve never been a PC gamer but want access to games that either never or belatedly make their way to consoles. I’m therefore interested in a Steam Deck, but am concerned I may not be enough of a tinkerer to enjoy it. I’ve read about the need to adjust multiple settings to get a playable experience on all sorts of games. Given the not-insignificant financial cost, is a Steam Deck [a good choice] for plug-and-play folk like me?”

Valve’s Steam Deck, designed to be a portable PC, ranges in cost from £349 to £569 depending on whether you go for an OLED or LED screen and how much storage you want – so it’s not an insignificant cost. It is, however, so much easier to use than a PC. I’m like you, Guy, in that I am allergic to the troubleshooting and settings-fiddling that has always been part of PC gaming.

I play a lot of games on my Steam Deck, from indie PC stuff like UFO 50 and Dredge to Elden Ring, and I find it really good as a plug-and-play device. I have encountered one annoying problem with Elden Ring that required a small amount of tinkering, but thanks to the blessed nerds of Reddit, I fixed it quickly. There’s always going to be a small chance that a game won’t work perfectly on the Deck, as it is a portable PC, but most PC developers are taking Deck players into account these days and shipping games with specific settings profiles. And if you do buy a game that doesn’t work perfectly on Deck and you can’t be bothered with the tinkering, Steam offers no-questions-asked refunds within two weeks of purchasing a game if you’ve played it for less than two hours.

If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on [email protected].