There was a lot of excitement recently when rumours began to spread that Persona 4 Golden was coming to PC. When it was finally released on the 13th of June, it quickly broke the concurrent players record for a JRPG! However, the effort that eventually saw Persona 4 Golden released on PC actually began many years ago.
As I’ve spoken about before, there was a long time where Japanese game publishers and developers didn’t release their games for PC. This was for a variety of reasons but, around 2010 to 2012, we began to see more Japanese games release on PC. Excluding the Sonic series, the only Japanese game that Sega released for PC at the time was Binary Domain (the port of which proved divisive).
However, in 2014, Sega Europe, along with Little Stone Software, oversaw the release of Valkyria Chronicles to PC. It quickly topped the Steam charts with John Clark of Sega Europe calling the release a “phenomenal success“. The PC port itself was also viewed as being of higher quality than ports of other Japanese games.
Continuing to exclude Sonic games, the next release of a Japanese game from Sega on PC didn’t occur until 2017 when we saw the release of both Bayonetta and Vanquish. Sega used an interesting marketing strategy which saw a release of an 8-bit Bayonetta game on Steam on April 1st. One of the achievements acted as a link to a teaser page which featured a countdown to April 11th, the day which saw Bayonetta release on PC. Vanquish was later teased in a Bayonetta update and saw a release in May.
2018 proved to be a very interesting year for PC ports of Japanese games from Sega. We saw the release of Puyo Puyo Tetris in February and, in June, Sega announced a line-up called “Best of Japan on PC” which promoted the upcoming releases of Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, Shining Resonance Refrain, Valkyria Chronicles 4 and Shenmue I & II.
2019 saw the release of several Sega games for PC such as Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, Puyo Puyo Champions and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD but none were as important as the release of Catherine Classic on PC. Catherine Classic was the first Atlus game to be released for PC in over a decade and was ported by Australian company, The Eccentric Ape.
Finally, this year, we saw Persona 4 Golden, a game that was previously locked to the PS Vita, released for PC. While Persona 4 Golden has already proven to be a success, the most interesting aspect of its release is that Atlus handled the port internally. This might mean that Atlus will dedicate themselves to releasing their games on PC (it helps that they have also created a Steam developer page).
I’m looking forward to the future of Japanese Sega games being ported to PC (although the only one currently confirmed is Yakuza: Like A Dragon). Let me know which of these games you have played, your thoughts on Sega’s PC push and what Japanese games you’d like to see Sega release on PC in the future.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.
The more platforms games are available, the better. Everybody wins even though companies might not seen that in the first place or actually, they get a “money incentive” form a specific platform to be there only for a while. That’s how the industry works because expenses needs to be paid so I get that.
Even though they aren’t Sega games, Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn will soon hit PC. Are you interested in one of these? Also, I can see that happening soon too with Final Fantasy VII Remake, though we have to wait at least 1 year for the game to be out to see what happens. Even though is not confirmed (I think), it will come out for Xbox at the time but I wonder if it its PC too at the same time. I guess we have to wait and see.
That’s true. Even though I only play on PC, I know there are a lot of people who want Persona 4 Golden on Switch and PS4 and I hope that they will get a release eventually.
I have Horizon Zero Dawn on my wishlist. I’m not going to buy it immediately when it comes out but will buy it once it has a sale. Yeah, hoping I get to play the FFVII remake next year. I’ll just have to wait and see.