ABOUT ME
Hi there,
While I want this blog to be about Lovedelic, and not a personal account of my life, it probably doesn’t hurt to know a little of who I am.
I’m a games journalist by trade. I live on the south coast of England and have been obsessed with videogames for almost as long as I can remember. I guess this blog is a reflection of that. I work on a monthly games magazine and still don’t feel like I can express all I have to say on the subject matter.
Please feel free to email me if you have any comments/questions.
ABOUT THE SITE
So, you’re probably wondering why I’ve started a blog about an obscure Japanese developer that no longer exists. Well, let me tell you…Like all such stories, my obsession with Lovedelic began with a girl. Actually, that’s not true at all. It began with a game called Chibi-Robo. This brilliant GameCube game, released in 2005, captured my imagination from start to finish. It’s a brilliant, original game; full of the sort of charm and personality I’m not used to seeing in modern videogames. Naturally, once I’d finished Chibi-Robo, I wanted more and began researching the development team behind this masterpiece.
It turned out that Chibi-Robo was made by skip, a small developer in Tokyo who were responsible for the untranslated Giftpia as well as most of the Bit Generations games. There didn’t seem to be too much here to pique my interest, until I learned that the Director of Chibi-Robo, one Kenichi Nishi, had created several other games under various other developer names.
Nishi’s greatest works appeared to have been made while he worked at a company called, yes, Lovedelic. And with this piece of information in hand I knew that I had to track down and play as many of Nishi’s games as possible. I also endevoured to play those games made by other people who had worked at and left Lovedelic. These people had gone on to work at companies like Grasshopper Manufacture, Punchline and Vanpool. And as I dug a little deeper, I found that the games made by these other companies were equally as intriguing as Chibi-Robo.
Is this all beginning to get a little bit too convoluted? Exactly!
That’s why I decided to start this blog. There are very few websites out there that detail the games of Lovedelic and their spiritual descendants. There are great starting points, such as this handy set of reviews at RPGfan and there’s a (now discontinued) Japanese weblog that attempted to do much of what I’m trying to do here. But, as far as I’m aware, no such resource exists for English speaking gamers.
So here we are. As this blog evolves, I hope that it will become a comprehensive guide to the games of Lovedelic. I’ll be starting with basic information about the developer and its games but will also be posting my impressions and reviews of certain titles as I play them. I haven’t sampled all of them yet you see, so many readers will be learning with me.
I don’t think there’s much else to say (as I’ve already said loads) but if you have any suggestions or questions then please drop me a line. Any good questions I’ll make sure to respond to on this blog so that everyone can read the answer.
hi, I happen to bump into this blog while I was surveying about lovedelic whereabouts. more than 10 years before( I guess), I was into a game by the name of ” moon” created by Lovedelic then in Japan and almost failed my paper while I was preparing my dissertation. I recalled this funny memory recently and tried to find the current Lovedelic’s work. I found Lovedelic was wound up and one of its creators, Mr. Nishi set up hiw own small firm and he is posting a personal blog and he lives in my adjacent town, etc.
It was nice to know someone over the sea has obsession with the same game and its creator.
hope you have nice day.
koma@ tokyo
Hi Ashley,
I came across an article on Lovedelic’s moon soundtrack which lead me here. I work, well did work, in the games industry as an interface designer, I quit recently as I couldn’t take the mis-management any more. I’m in the UK too, London.
One of the things that really surprised me about working in the industry was how many people had never heard of some of the most original titles and even once informed had no interest in them. Mind you there were a large proportion of employees with no interest in games at all.
My background is graphic design, designers in graphics are pretty clued up on the most original work being done, I expected artists in the games industry to be the same but it wasn’t the case. Games like Chibi Robo and Captain Rainbow would more often than not be described as “weird” Japanese games. Of course there were exceptions, I worked for a big company and I knew five or six people with similar tastes but to put it in perspective the number of employees was somewhere around 5-600.
It was great to read your blog and see your obvious passion for the subject. I hadn’t heard of these titles so will be checking them out. Looking through some of my more obscure titles are you aware of Odama, Cubivore, Magic Pengel and Stretch Panic? As you’re a journalist I think you’ll probably know them but they’re all a bit more unusual.
Do you have any theories on why it is so much games creativity comes out of Japan compared to the West? The irony is it seems like companies like Nippon Ichi and Grasshopper are now looking to bolster their sales through exports to the West. All very interesting and a shame I can’t work on titles like these over here.
Hi Edwin,
I share your surprise and concern about people’s general unwillingness to expand their horizons. Even within games journalism, the overwhelming majority of people are only interested in whatever the “next big thing” is supposed to be.
Personally I blame consumerism as a whole. People are trained to consume and dispose as quickly as possible, while marketing and PR ensures that there will always be something new for them to spend their money on. There’s simply no time or inclination for anyone to take an interest in anything outside of what is made readily available to them in a convenient manner. Which is why very few people will do the necessary research required to find out what else exists on the periphery – whether it be retro, import or indie.
As for most of the creative games coming out of Japan, I’m not even sure if that’s completely true. They’re certainly much easier to come by in Japan since there are a handful of brave publishers, like Nintendo, who don’t see non-violent software as a risk. Such games exist in the west too, but they tend to be made for free by hobbyists and just for the PC, thus limiting their exposure. Occasionally, as with the likes of Braid and Everyday Shooter, they’ll get ported to consoles if enough people make enough of a fuss over them… but it doesn’t happen as often as I’d like and it’s sad to see that the big western developers rarely take any inspiration from these “smaller” titles.
To answer your question about Odama, Cubivore, Magic Pengel and Stretch Panic – I’ve heard of them all but have only played Odama and Stretch Panic. I though Odama was a great idea but found the voice recognition a little random… Interesting to see that Ubisoft are doing similar things now with EndWar, only within a safer more traditional template of course. I also played Stretch Panic (or Freak Out as it’s known here) when it first came out. It’s a great little game with brilliant use of physics and some wonderful art direction. It’s also, in my opinion, one of the last truly original Treasure games to ever be made. Even this legendary developer has had to resort to making sequels and licensed games in order to survive it seems.
Anyway. Thanks for your comments and I’m glad you like the blog. Keep reading for more obscure joy.
Ash
Hi Ash,
You’re right about the PC market, I always overlook that one. I haven’t played Odama yet, I understand the voice system is a bit flaky. I think you’ll like Cubivore. I’ve been playing the Japanese version called doubutsu banchou, the first word being animal and the second is gang leader (juvenile). There’s an incredibly strong art style to the game, everything is made of cubes, hence they localized it to “cubivore”, it has a real minimalism feel.
Its a kind of evolution game in which your animal evolves into different kinds and you have to collect them all. To be honest I’ve been playing it for over a year off and on as I’m playing it in Japanese translating every word and it’s a slow process but good study material. By the way I loved Stretch Panic too, I thought it was rated too low.
I subscribed to your RSS so yes I’m on here now. Always looking for creative games news sites, glad to have found you. I’m also subscribed to siliconera, I expect you know them.
Cheers, Edwin.
These sites is what makes the internet worthwhile. I’ve had and loved Lack of Love since the release (bought it on a whim back then) and have done some small research to find other games by the same developper. Lack of Love reminds me vaguely of “The story of the Seven Winds Island” for Saturn, a game by the crazed Special effects maker Keita Amamiya. The same type of “how the heck can they expect this to sell” type of game. I can only hope I’ll be able to catch any other of Nishi’s games in the future.
Hey there and thank you for the website.
My interest in this company started all the way back to 1996…looking in the back of a gaming rag at pictures of an upcoming game called MooN, made by ascii and slated to hit the US by next year.
The logo, the character, the graphics….they were all so trippy and in tune with everything I like; things like moonlight, the glowing color of green and the sound of owls and crickets…beyond that I had no idea what the hell the game was about. Not even the genre it belonged to.
The game never came out to the US and in time it slipped from my memory until years later, in 2003 I did everything I could find out whatever I could about the game…but information was so sparse…I wasn’t even sure it existed.
Anyway, long story short, it’s cool having people to talk to about these games. Glad they are getting some recognition finally!
Thanks again!