My friend Shota and I were arguing the other day about what is to be done. He took what I would describe as a mild and possibly self-defeating attitude regarding ideology and he accused me of an all or nothing approach that was ultimately more likely to paralyze than inspire. I see value in clearly defining the mountain we are moving towards regardless of if we ever reach it. It provides direction and can keep us from chasing waterfalls, or even making phony calls. Our conversation was vague enough to be applicable to the desire of achieving world socialism or the viewing of every episode of Double Dare. Of course both of us are much more mired in the academic than actual praxis because we generally desire to be seated on couches rather than interacting with strangers.
Shota’s incremental position may seem politically defensible to cowards unwilling to have grandiose, unprovable ideologies that implode the moment they meet reality but it has been my experience that the absence of a grand vision hampers coherent video game collecting. I know this because I have half-heartedly attempted perhaps half a dozen differently themed collections over the past 20 years and largely failed to complete them. Editor Pat is generally an accomplice in many of these unsuccessful endeavors as he eggs me on either by encouraging me to waste my money or actually wasting money with me in order to not accomplish our goals. That’s maybe the biggest difference between Pat and AI. They both encourage me to do stupid things I shouldn’t do and love the rule of three, but AI has yet to deposit money into my PayPal account.
Treasure games were probably the first collection I put any real effort into building. The inspiration should be obvious enough – the company made great video games. I already had the more common stuff like Gunstar Heroes, Dynamite Headdy, Gradius V, and the boob stretching game so I figured why not go for broke. Well, broke I went buying up used copies of rarer games from NeoGAF users before that forum’s significant shift rightward. Alien Soldier, the Japan only Sin and Punishment, Radiant Silvergun, Rakugaki Showtime, and the Japan superior Silhouette Mirage all came from one or two people off that forum, and I actually got great deals on them. Unfortunately, a great deal on a $400 game is, for arguments sake, $300.
I already had Ikaruga and Bangai-o because I bought a lot of Dreamcast games once upon a time, and then nobody knows where Guardian Heroes came from – likely one of my many purchases from eBay in the early 00s. Sweeping up the cheaper, more appealing stuff was easy enough. A Light Crusader here, a Wario World there. But then there were a good number of Japan-only games that didn’t appeal to me at all, and Dragon Drive is just supposed to be shitty. The Yu Yu Hakusho game on Megadrive is roughly $600 and the biggest remaining white whale of the collection. It’s hard to care about it, though, as it is McDonald’s Treasure Land, Tiny Toon Adventures, Hajime no Ippo, Bleach: this, Bleach: that, and the Gaist Crusher games I can’t play on my 3DS.
Based on the Wikipedia page, I have 20 of a total of 32 released Treasure games. Not bad, but not a few games away from a complete collection. Maybe some day I will come back to these and just grin and bear buying a bunch of stuff I don’t actually want, which may point to an inherent flaw in the concept of this sort of collection.
A Compile collection is more of an aspiration than something I made any real progress with. My soft spot for the company is weak and puny compared to the size of their catalog. I maybe have Golvellius, Robo Aleste, and Puyo Puyo Sun. That’s 3 of over 60 console games, a bunch of Japanese computer games, and some ungodly number of games that came out in magazines called Disc Station 1 through 478,000. Their high quality shmups attracted me but even if I could afford most of them and the Japan only Mega CD Shadowrun game, MUSHA is just not something I will be able to justify without winning the Power Ball. It’s currently going for around $800 complete with manual, and I’m only stupid enough to spend maybe $400 if I am feeling nihilistic and particularly drunk.
I got close to buying the Spriggan games on the PC Engine because unlike the Aleste series, this one was small and getting both felt doable. Unfortunately for humanity, Pat was uninterested and felt focusing on one of our other half-assed collections made more sense. For example, our From Software collection. Being a fan of abstruse adventure games, we naturally had the North American King’s Field games and multiple region’s copies of Demon’s and Dark Souls. The PS1 version of Shadow Tower is around the ceiling of what I’d spend on an old game, and Lost Kingdoms 1 and 2 for Gamecube are appealing. What is not are the 496 mech games From has released. I have Frame Gride, obviously, but what about all the Armored Cores? And then there’s the poorly reviewed elephant in the room, the $1,500 Kuon. I’d need one of those scam COVID grants you don’t have to pay back as long as you make videos about how student loans need to be repaid because that’s how loans work in order to afford Kuon.
Another collection I considered with Pat is the full North American Dreamcast catalog. There are still a few heavy hitters we need, namely the Giga Wings and Mars Matrix, but we already have a few of the big games. Specifically, Illbleed and Cannon Spike. There are a few problems with working on the Dreamcast collection. The first is that a lot of the most expensive games are not interesting at all. ECW Anarchy Rulz and some cover variant of Speed Devils are unappealing yet expensive. I also owned but lost, likely via the selfish act of lending it to someone, a copy of Typing of the Dead and rebuying that will hurt – let’s call this a gaiden, so problem 1.5 of collecting for the Dreamcast. The second issue is that even cheap games add up quickly and buying two hundred mediocre games to finish a collection kind of sucks. The final problem with this collection is assholes keep releasing Dreamcast games. We could only collect the officially released games, but that feels somewhat unsatisfactory. Most likely, I will continue buying a game or two a year for the console that specifically appeal to me. Like The Ring, I should have that because it sucks in appealing ways.
The newest collection I pursued was mostly a spreadsheet exercise, much like most of my unrealized goals and abandoned hobbies. It began as considering collecting all the Shining games of the Camelot era. This led me to buy the Japanese Windows port of Shining in the Darkness, which is cool because of its obscurity, and then led me to telling Pat to buy a Game Gear Shining Force while in Japan doing 80s business guy stuff. But then just buying all regions versions of all Shining games seemed too easy, despite not being at all close to accomplished. I began researching all the related stuff, for example, Climax was started by a programmer from Chunsoft who had worked on Dragon Quest 3 and 4. Climax helped make Shining in the Darkness and the first Force, so clearly I would need all versions of Dragon Quest 3 and 4 to make this Shining collection complete. Climax then splintered into Max, Matrix, and Climax Graphics who would become Crazy Games. Luckily I already had Blue Stinger and Illbleed, Crazy’s Dreamcast output. But would this mean I’d need the not-Shining-Force game FEDA for the Super Famicom, the FEDA Remake (which I already have) for the Saturn, and FEDA 2 for the PS1? This approach quickly spirals out of control once you chase down the work the people who made the Shining games did at other companies. Also, why on earth would I have decided this was the way to form this collection? I’m not sure, either. So I gave up on the Shining and adjacent game collection.
Anyone who has read more than seven books but fewer than nine, as I have, has already anticipated that I saved the success story for the end. But it is only a very narrow success that I luckily expanded into failure. Love-de-Lic is an almost mythological company for gamers of a certain type. If you like old JRPGs, artsy console games, and frustrating but interesting game concepts, you may have heard of this studio formed by ex-Square people in the mid-90s. Each of their games is maybe a hundred dollars on the second hand market, but the upside is there are only three of them – Moon: Remix RPG, UFO: Day in the Life, and Lack of Love. They were easy enough to procure… too easy enough. So I expanded my scope to include the games the main Love-de-Lic guys developed after the company folded.
Kenichi Nishi was the head of Love-de-Lic and probably had the most successful career after they disbanded. He worked on the strange and good minigame collection Incredible Crisis, which was easy enough to get. Then we moved onto his Skip stuff – we bought and couldn’t play GiFTPiA (which may be related to NiGHTS if the spelling is anything to go by), nor Captain Rainbow. Pat and I obtained and enjoyed Chibi-Robo but refuse to buy LOL, the chat-based DS game. Close enough to a Nishi complishi.
Taro Kudo made Endonesia, a game I have not yet bought that sounds very similar to all the Love-de-Lic games and their ilk. As a director at Vanpool, he went on to make a bunch of Nintendo games I don’t feel are necessary for the Love-de-Lic collection. Although I did get Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland for other, more personal reasons.
Akira Ueda did some work on Grasshopper’s Flower, Sun, and Rain which I have and like even though it’s incomprehensible. His game Contact was a major disappointment in my life, tied with the realization we are alone in the universe (in the angst sense, not aliens sense). But I have it, and owning things is the one true combatant of nihilism. Shining Soul 1 and 2 we are without, but I sort of don’t want because I am rationally enraged by any non-Camelot made Shining stuff. Then there’s the very expensive PAL only Michigan: Report from Hell. Maybe one day for that one, but not being able to play it on an unmodded console certainly puts a damper on my desire. Like Kudo, I do not care about Ueda’s Nintendo related output specifically for this arbitrary collection’s sake. I am, however, very interested in Sakura Note, the Japan only DS adventure game I am waiting for Chris to translate.
Finally, there is my boyfriend, Yoshiro Kimura, who for unknown reasons still lacks a Wikipedia page (how many games did you direct or produce, Sebwite?). Luckily, his Conservapedia page is well written and lays out all the ways his games are woke. I think we have all of Kimura’s major output, including Chulip, Rule of Rose (I recommend going back in time and buying poorly reviewed PS2 games from GameStop for a few dollars each – while you’re there, grab me a copy of Kuon), and Little King’s Story. His newest company, Onion Games, mostly releases digitally but there are some limited editions of physical games. Some day I will maybe hunt them all down.
Despite having the trio of Love-de-Lic games, the truth is I have never played any of them. Sure I spent some time with Chulip, Contact, Rule of Rose, Chibi Robo, and maybe a few other post-Love-de-Lic games, but the core of the collection goes unplayed to this day. Maybe there is some deep lesson here I am too lazy to tease out. Like one of those classic be careful which old Japanese games you try to collect sort of morals. Trite stuff, really.