Posts Tagged ‘D3’

Vitamin Z!

OK, I’m still here!

I’m very excited about the Vitamin Z game scheduled for next spring, and the December B’s Log had a big spread on the characters.

It’s a whole new bunch of students and teachers, and they seem pretty original.

Let’s start with the main character, Kita Manami. She just got her teaching license when she got a job offer from Seitei. Then the ‘Aho 4′ or A4 start at Seitei and are put into her new class, Class Z. As before, she has to try and guide them towards successfully finishing high school and getting into college.

The Idiot 4:

Narumiya Tenjuurou – the charismatic leader of the A4, Tenjuurou is uncomplicated – he loves surfing and watching pro wrestling, and dislikes indecisive people. Though he’s also the son of a big company like Tsubasa, he has a good relationship with his family and is very loyal to people once he sees them as friends.

Fuwa Chisato – the most apathetic member of the A4, his family has been servants of the Narumiya family for a long time, and Chisato kind of takes care of Tenjuurou. He’s an expert in martial arts and likes cooking.

Mine Arata – Arata’s major goal in life is to be popular with women, and he spares no effort to achieve it. He plays tennis (to look cool), always takes care of his looks, and prefers French cuisine to gyoza (they smell too strong).

Tachibana Yakumo – a cute and slightly selfish idol, apparently there’s some secret about his family. He’s usually cheerful, but people say you should try not to make him really angry.

Next up, the Perfect Twins and the teachers!

Little Anchor – The first sci-fi otome game?

I finally got around to reading through D3′s site for its newest game, Little Anchor.

The story sounds very interesting – the main character is the captain of a spaceship! Awesome!

More about the setting: In the near future, the founding of a city on the moon allows science and our knowledge of space to improve rapidly. A worldwide organization, EUG, is founded to organize the new space activities, but like today, powerful countries decide things to their advantage. Another group forms in protest, the ICSEO, and war breaks out.

Several years (generations?) later, the EUG wants to make peace with ICSEO, and prepares to send a large spaceship as an olive branch. The main character, as the daughter of a hero, is chosen as captain, and a crew is chosen, all with their own peculiarities. However, as they’re preparing to launch, ICSEO starts a large attack on EUG, and the ship has to make an emergency take off.

Can the main character win the war and bring peace to the world, which is what her father wanted? That’s the object of Little Anchor, which is scheduled right now for Spring 2009.

I should be getting the December (really November but w/e) mags tomorrow, so maybe they’ll have some more info!

D3′s new otome game…speculation

So, I found a ‘teaser site’ at D3 for the new title they’re announcing (have announced?) at Tokyo Game Show 2008. All it shows is silhouettes in modern clothing against a picture of Earth with some computer grid laid on top. Tantalizing! It’s a collaboration with V-Ridge, who worked on the Bakumatsu Renka series.

Hopefully more will be up soon!

TGS Tidbit

Ah, it’s good to be back! Thank you for the comments, by the end of my vacation I would have posted a ‘net news’ thing if I could, but internet was very.very.slow. Like, remember dial-up? Slower than that.

If you weren’t dead to the world like I was last week , you may have heard about the Tokyo Game Show, the biggest Japanese industry show in the year for publishers and developers to show off their stuff. It’s going on all this weekend, and though the big game sites may be distracted by names like Square Enix (btw, I just saw that the two main characters for their upcoming RPG Last Remnant are Nojima Kenji and Ono Daisuke!), but I found some info on otome game publishers over at otomen.jp - including photos of the final two of the Harutoki 3 hachiyou, RizVaan and Atsumori! Senseiii hoshiii!!

Ahem. Anyways, another interesting thing mentioned: a D3 rep said that their next otome title would be sci-fi. 

I’ll try to keep checking the next couple days and report back!  But probably tomorrow my main post will be Princess Debut! 

Vampire Knight

I’ve been running around getting ready for my vacation, but I finally read the info on Vampire Knight!

It is scheduled for a December release on the DS, and is said to be a ‘what if?’ story – it’s not really part of canon. That’s so that you, as the heroine Yuki, can have a love story with not just Kaname or Zero, but 4 other guys as well!

If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s set at a school with a ‘day class’ and a ‘night class’. The day class admires the night class because they’re good-looking and cool, not realizing that the night class is actually all vampires! Yuki, attacked when she was little by vampires, was raised by the school president, and together with Zero, the last in a line of vampire hunters, acts as a ‘Guardian’, keeping the day and night classes separate to preserve the secret. In return for living a semi-normal and protected life, the vampires in the night class aren’t allowed to drink blood directly from humans.

Character Seiyuu:
Zero – Miyano Mamoru
Takuma – Chiba Susumu
Hanabusa – Fukuyama Jun
Akatsuki – Suwabe Junichi
Senri – Hoshi Souichirou

Apart from Zero, they’re all in the night class.

The gameplay will consist of 7 chapters, and will be simulation – you raise Yuki’s six parameters with your choices, as well as minigames. Apparently you also use the DS to touch characters for some minigames…

That’s about it for now! And now I’m off to Cuba for a week in the sun, so no posts from me for a while!

My first otome game…

I think it’s pretty common for otome game fans to first have gotten into anime or manga – I got into anime (way back with Sailor Moon!) and then collected a huge amount of shoujo manga while studying in Japan. I didn’t know anything about otome games until I started buying Japanese RPG games though – I couldn’t wait for them to be translated to English, lol. On the import game site where I ordered them from, I saw something that looked interesting, a game with all cute guys on the cover, and the description said the main character was a girl! So I tried it out – it was 放課後のLove Beat(After School Love Beat), one of D3′s earlier releases.

Wow, was it cheesy! But I loved it. And the gameplay was actually pretty fun, with J-pop/rock songs where you had to push buttons to make the sounds come out right – like a very primitive Guitar Hero…and it was pretty funny if you didn’t do it well. Of course, the part I’d never experienced in a game before was the romance part, and while it had a pretty typical shoujo plot, it was sooo much fun hearing the guys talk and actually choosing responses!
And so, my otome game love was born. (BTW, if you haven’t played the game, D3 released a cheap version of it that’s around $20, it’s a steal!)

What was your first otome game? Did you buy one because of a manga or anime you liked?