Up there with in the category of quirky Vita titles, Hideboh is a rhythm game about a group of teenagers (and a robot) entering a competition in the future (guided by a hologram) to help save the art of tap dancing, which should be more than enough craziness to sell you on this one. It’s been delisted from digital storefronts so prices are starting to creep up too, meaning you should jump in while you can! Mixing in elements of the A Certain Magical Index series, the story-heavy elements are impenetrable but at its core this is still a 3D arena fighter with unique movement and KO mechanics that makes it an absolute joy to play to this day. Who would have thought that the long-dormant Virtual-On franchise would be revived on Vita of all consoles. Hot Shots Golf meets Super Monkey Ball is quite a clever gaming pitch on paper and the team at Sonic Powered actually managed to deliver on it with The game suffers from launch year issues in that it tries to use all the hardware gimmicks including an over-reliance on the gyroscope, but hitting balls and then slowly guiding them around obstacle courses to score points is understandable in any language and most importantly, also is a lot of fun. I’ll also not be considering fan-translation patches (such as Trails to Azure), but I will be factoring in ease of importing (meaning that a visual novel or similar is unlikely to make the ( review) To qualify, the title needs to not have released on Vita in English (which means I’m excluding Asian-English localisations such as Gundam Breaker 3) and also not be available on other consoles in English (such as Dragon Quest Heroes II) or be an odd case like Chaos Rings II where the Japanese version has English. It’s the 10 best among these remaining Japan-only imports that I intend to look at in this article. Vita was really one of the last bastions of this. There was whole world of games out there that I wanted to play, from Robbit Mon Dieu (the third Jumping Flash!) title to the bizarre sequel to Vib Ribbon ( Vib Ripple).Īll of that has changed in recent years, with the new standard being that consoles are region-free, allowing many people like myself to finally get into importing. At the same time, we’ve seen the rise of localisation publishers picking up games for official western releases (something I covered in a previous article), meaning newer consoles such as PS4 and Switch don’t have huge libraries of Japan-only imports to hunt down compared to say, PSP or Saturn. As a gamer growing up, I was always fascinated with the idea of importing games from other countries (mainly Japan), despite the PS1 and PS2 (and many consoles of the time) being region-locked.
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