Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents: Japanese Video Game Obscurities

Segagaga (2001)

Developer: Sega

Platform: Dreamcast

Sega was in pretty dire straits at the turn of the 20th century. The Saturn was failure in North America and was soundly beaten by Sony even in Japan. The Dreamcast had a strong start but its momentum was quickly dashed thanks to the promise of the PlayStation. We all know how history went: eventually Sega gave up the console game and shifted to third party development. But before then, they published Segagaga, a weird little game for the Dreamcast, which had one goal: save Sega.

Segagaga is half-RPG, half-management sim, with some minigames tossed in there to round things out. As a kid named Tarou Sega, you must restore the company's good fortunes by scavenging through the company's buildings to round up developers, and then decide how to allocate their resources to create new games. It's a remarkably self-aware game, made explicitly for long-time Sega fans, as it's loaded with characters, jokes, and other oddities. Your assistant, for example, is Alis from the original Phantasy Star, just in disguise. At one point, you meet up with former mascot Alex Kidd, who's been forced into retail work after Sonic the Hedgehog took his job. Many of the developers you "fight" are represented by all numbers of Sega characters. The final battle is designed like a Thunder Force-style shoot-em-up, where you zoom into space and fight against variations of Sega's many consoles. Along with this, there's also tons of jokes about the Japanese video game industry and otaku culture.

It's a profoundly weird game, and even in Japan, it was originally only distributed through the company's mail order service (a second printing was made more widely available.) But it's a beautiful game, just because it's a niche product and it knows it, so it really does revel in its obscureness.

Kuma Uta (2003)

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Platform: Playstation 2

Among all of the weird, experimental games on the Japanese PlayStation 2 library, one of the most fascinating is Kuma Uta ("Bear Song"). It stars a polar bear who decides to ditch his peaceful life in nature and become an enka singer. "Enka" is a very particular style of Japanese music that takes the form of sentimental ballads, often with themes of nostalgia, love and loss. It's very divisive, even in Japan, as it's generally seen as sort of "old people" music. So obviously, seeing a polar bear standing on his two legs, wearing various outfits and crooning songs about life and love is pretty ridiculous.

Your goal, as the player, is to help the bear, Kuma, reach the top of the charts by helping him write these songs. Here, you can suggest various topics, after which he'll scrawl out some lyrics and show them to you for approval. The main gimmick is that none of the songs are prerecorded, and are instead "sung" on the fly using a synthesized voice, one of those things that's made easier in Japanese thanks to its syllabic structure and consistent pronunciation. If this sounds similar to Hatsune Miku and the virtual idol phenomenon, that's absolutely correct... except Kuma Uta predates the Vocaloid software by a few months, and a good number of years before it really caught on with the greater public.

Obviously pop idols and their peppy music are a much easier sell than the absurdist crooning of a disaffected polar bear, which is why Hatsune Miku and friends are basically household names, whereas nobody really remembers Kuma Uta. Plus, unlike the rhythm-based titles from Sega, there's not much of a game in Kuma Uta – you just help write songs and then listen to them. Without understanding Japanese, some of the humor is lost, but its surrealness is still universal.