The Cat Knows Where It's At
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
No I did not. That's really good to hear. Of course, there's no way in hell my PC will be able to run it but at least it's available.
Also, I give it at most a week after release before an uncensoring mod is made.
No I did not. I am a Nintendo fanboy first and foremost and I know exceedingly little about Sony and basically nothing about Microsoft. The only non-Nintendo gaming system than I own is my PS 2 although I had a PS 4 from a rent-to-own place for I wanna say about a year.
edited 5th May '17 12:09:17 AM by Zelenal
Let the joy of love give you an answer! Check out my book!
It was a bit weird that Mamori and Mirei lack the final transformation of the anime but I guess it would've been a nightmare to include into the game and not kill the framerate. Mamori's second drive form is from the anime although is a sword instead of a polearm.
Oh an a nude mod might take a while. People poked around the game's files when the Vita was hacked and discovered the censoring was hard coded into the models, removing it would imply a complete rework of the models' textures.
edited 5th May '17 12:24:17 AM by Tzitzimine
The Cat Knows Where It's At
Seeing as how people have used mods to literally remake games almost from the ground up, that won't stop anyone determined enough.
Senran Kagura had one up within a week for Shinovi Versus, and day 1 for Estival. People do care enough to remake the textures.
And since this is a Takaki game, the fanbase should largely carry over.
Well now you know. A PSTV can't play every Vita game, but it's good enough to play some of the gems like Persona 4 Golden. It also has a built-in 1GB, so you don't need to buy the expensive memory cards to save your game (you'll need one to play any digital-only games though).
The Vita has a lot of gems, so it's worth keeping in mind for the future, in case another one of its games catches your eye.
edited 5th May '17 2:43:06 AM by burnpsy
https://twitter.com/marvelous_games/status/862006664102371328
Curious the way they quote the future of the series bit.
really though
http://store.steampowered.com/app/550080/VALKYRIE_DRIVE_BHIKKHUNI/
June 20th
You get a 35% off on the Complete version (with DLC) if you have SV on steam
https://marvelousgames.com/blogs/news/valkyrie-drive-bhikkhuni-coming-to-steam-on-june-20th
Some gameplay from the port
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmACkLO3Dg8
And perhaps more importantly
Takaki also revealed some stuff his company is working on
Additionally, Honey∞Parade Games is working on two Play Station 4 titles. The first title may be able to be released this season. The second title is relatively big and is planned for the next term.
Other than those, several small things and mid-scale titles are also moving forward, which Takaki says should all be present next term. There’s a traditional smartphone title, and about two new and existing TV anime he’s working on. Takaki wants to announce all of his upcoming titles collectively around the summer, and is currently in preparation.
http://gematsu.com/2017/05/honey-parade-games-retail-switch-title-two-ps4-titles-development
I'd say odds are good for one of the PS 4 titles and one anime to be VD related.
Well, one of the titles is basically guaranteed to be Senran Kagura 7. I'm not entirely sure Valkyrie Drive is getting one of the remaining slots.
Why not?
Because I'm more inclined to believe the anime for an existing series also goes to Senran Kagura. Valkyrie Drive's anime did poorly (~2.3k), and then the franchise went silent aside from the PC port.
Senran Kagura's didn't do great either, but it was still better (~2.7k), and we're getting consistent titles for it.
With that in mind, I don't see much merit in making an additional game unless the game sold amazingly. It opened 39,013 in Japan, which looks fine, but Senran Kagura was apparently selling below expectations with much higher numbers than that, so I don't know.
edited 31st May '17 2:22:18 PM by burnpsy
The anime director said there were more VD on the works on october last year and it hasn't been completely silent either. Just back on January Marvelous released a "GOTY" edition for Bhikkhuni and then in march a new Mirei figurine was unveiled. You simply don't push more product from an IP you don't plan to continue exploiting. To not mention that Bhikkhuni was a great success on the west and while it sold 45k copies on release in Japan, it sold 80%~100% of its shipment. A number it was repeated with the re-release.
There's also the fact that VD is not only backed by Marvelous what makes easier to fund a second season for it compared to SK that is just Marvelous. Otherwise we would've seen a second anime by now.
While I wasn't aware of some of that, a few points:
- Even with more investors, selling poorly is selling poorly.
- A "GOTY" edition doesn't mean anything other than "this game sold decently and has a lot of DLC, so we're making an excuse to sell it again with all of that bundled in".
- Even if the second shipment brought it to 80k, I repeat, Shinovi Versus sold 120k in 5 days and was considered to be below expectations.
- I would like a source for it being a great success in the West. All I can find is an interview where they said "the feedback has been great", which doesn't necessarily mean that it sold particularly well.
On your point of continuing to push an IP you don't plan on using... your statement can be interpreted in two different ways.
- If you mean that they want to make more money off the IP, the figurine and the GOTY version can be considered cheap ways to do so. The figurine also doesn't mean much, due to the niche and limited nature. I will note that Gosick got a figurine for its lead in 2014, 3 years after its anime, and all that's come up since then were some epilogue novels.
- If you mean using the IP in various places means they plan to make further use of it, I see your statement and raise you Sega's various franchises and Nintendo's treatment of F-Zero.
The anime director's statement could mean that there's more games coming, but I would like to see the source on that so I can respond to the actual wording of the statement. Probably means more anime, but I don't know how involved Takaki's studio would be on that.
edited 31st May '17 6:17:38 PM by burnpsy
While I don't believe the anime sold that bad, having more investors also means less risk for them, plus since one of them is AT-X, they now own an anime they can rerun at their leisure and syndicalize. Even now I can find tweets about reruns from diverse channels. The merchandise was also successful with most of it being sold out and in some cases, getting re issues due demand. So while not a smashing hit I doubt it was a flop.
It is significant when the game was the second best selling title for Marvelous during 2015 and only 10k units shy from the Vita version of the best selling one, EV. There's also the fact this is the third game for which Marvelous re issues in a new format.
You have your facts mixed up here. First, SV didn't sold that well, according to Media Create it only sold 91k on its first week and 149k on its entire lifetime and second, it didn't perform below expectations, the opposite happened. It blew Marvelous expectations so much that set a bar no game has been able to meet since. That was SK 2's downfall and why the series wasn't considered profitable on their fiscal report for 2015.
Those were comments from the game's translators on 4chan and P Qube staffers over different threads at Neogaf.
Well, the steam port for Bhikkhuni has been rebranded to be a Honey Parade Game and both it and Mermaid are listed among the projects Honey Parade has worked on
Here's the link to the director's comment
https://twitter.com/negiosyo/status/777530831367614465
Too much adorableness
Oh man, Nep vs Sega then 1 week later it's Valkyrie Drive...not to mention Rising Storm 2 just came out...this is going to be nuts for my wallet. At least I have SKSV for the discount!
Still, guess I have to push Everspace purchase out to later then...
edited 31st May '17 9:57:11 PM by onyhow
Give me cute or give me...something?
So when developing VALKYRIE DRIVE, I decided to create a new way of thinking when creating the story drama by describing more about the relationships and the minds of the characters. In Japan, it is a very popular trope to have a cast of ‘Top’ and ‘Bottom’ for a pair of characters and the thought of the character in the ‘bottom’ role taking initiative in the battle scenes was a very exciting proposition.
There was one idea that never came to fruition but sadly I couldn’t make it happen, but I wanted to make it possible that each pairing of characters, rather than the defaults, would each have a unique weapon mode, but due to their being seven characters, that would mean many unique and possible combinations to contend with outside of the defaults.
http://www.tech-gaming.com/qa-with-takaki/
Well that explains a lot.
Just 2 things:
- Wrong on me mixing up my details on Shinovi's first five days. Marvelous said so.
- I quouted you the anime sales figures. 2.3k is poor (I can fetch you the exact average for its run if it helps.). If the merch sold out, that's basically the saving grace.
edited 1st Jun '17 1:06:19 PM by burnpsy
Marvelous was obviously talking out of their asses with that report
http://gematsu.com/2013/03/media-create-sales-22513-3313
As for the anime sales, unless you can find a source on the production budget for the series, is impossible to know if it broke even with disc sales.
I'm also sidestepping the byzantine world of revenue distribution among animation production committee members for the moment. Most anime is financed by multiple investors (for example, publishers, video distributors, music labels, figure and toy manufacturers, television stations, animation studios, etc), each of which may take differently-sized cuts of the various revenue streams. Video sales alone will not define "hit" or "flop" for every investor. If your only cut of the pie is figure sales, video sales are, at least directly, irrelevant to you.
What's attractive about video disc sales is that we're presumably here because we like to watch anime, and the video discs containing said anime are the most direct manifestation of the anime in purchasable form. It's understandable the numbers interest us and it's fairly obvious I'm no exception to that - but keep in mind their many, many limitations.
1.2 What's the break-even point for anime?
There is no such thing as a single break-even point. If the implication of 1.1 is that disc sales are of unequal importance from one show to the next, it follows that shows can't all have the same break-even point.
Budgets also vary. Animation is not the only cost. You would expect a Hollywood blockbuster or "AAA" game release to set much higher sales targets than independent or niche films or games. Anime is no different -the marketing budget alone for Shingeki or Madoka likely dwarfs the entire production cost of shorts like Teekyuu or Morita-san.
There is also no assumption that video sales alone will recoup the entire budget. This is not remotely true for the vast majority of series. Even 10k sellers may well not recoup all costs through video sales. This makes the concept of "break even" problematic.
What about the Manabi Line?
The Manabi Line is a reference to the sales (2,899 vol. 1 / 2,319 average) of Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight, a 2007 series by ufotable. It's gained notoriety as a "break-even" line, but is outdated and overly broad and unproven. It only continues to exist due to inertia -you’d even have seen it in my Vol. 1 rankings until recently, when I replaced it with 3,000. While all "lines" are just arbitrarily selected numbers and 2,899 is equally as arbitrary as 3,000 or 10,000, the "break-even" baggage of the Manabi Line suggests that a rounder number may be less misleading.
http://www.someanithing.com/sales-faqguide
edited 1st Jun '17 1:27:58 PM by Tzitzimine
Digital sales likely made up the difference. Trackers can only report physical.
And I said nothing about breaking even, just that sales on the anime were bad. Strong merch does justify more.
Let's be realistic here, you honestly believe that SV sold more than 25k digital copies in Japan, when Takaki made a huge fuzz over PBS selling 10k digital copies on release week and that only because it sold out its first shipment?
And what is the metric you're using to say the anime sales were bad? For all we know it was within their projections. At the very least you can't find the bonus of the discs' first print with any retailer.
And you honestly believe that the publisher is lying through their teeth about sales figures? Their investors would eat them alive. There's also how your numbers come from February 25 to March 3 when the game came out on February 28, meaning it only caught 4 days. 4 days at more than 23.5k per day, means day 5 is probably... you get the picture.
My metric is general anime. Even other fanservice anime often double or triple that. Your own argument about unknown internal projections also means you have no ammo with which to say the numbers were good, either. For all you know they thought the disc sales were horrid but saw huge profits from the merch and went "We can deal with this."
You already brought up merch numbers being strong. If the retailers needed to sell those off at the time, it would have been easy. Without insider info, that's a dead-end argument.
edited 1st Jun '17 4:37:16 PM by burnpsy
It wouldn't be the first time Takaki gives numbers widely different to those reported by actual trackers. When EV was released he said it had sold 100k units on its first ''three days'' (with only 10k of those sales coming from digital but when the actual numbers hit. Turns out it only sold 75k copies in 7 days There's also the time he said the series had sold a million of units worldwide but thing is, numbers doesn't add up. It was before both Deep Crimson and Estival Versus were released worldwide and adding the LTD sales of every game released so far in Japan
Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson 66,484
Senran Kagura Burst 102,944
Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus 149,909
Senran Kagura Estival Versus 108,181
Dekamori Senran Kagura 7,686
The grand total is just 435,204. And while we don't have actual sales numbers for Burst nor Shinovi on the west, is a stretch to think more than 600k units were sold here. Especially with Marvelous reporting Estival was the only localization to return record profits to them during their Fiscal report for last year.
Oh and the idea that Shinovi sold 23k~25k copies in just one day? Is debunked by numbers for the 3/11/13-3/17/13 week. According to Media create, Shinovi sold 6,902 additional copies on the entire week. So yeah, whoever said it topped 120k units was lying or got some very wrong reports.
At this point both of us are merely speculating. I linked it before, unless someone got insider info on the budget for a particular anime, you can't apply a standardized metric to determine if sales were good or bad due how many variables are in play.
edited 1st Jun '17 9:50:54 PM by Tzitzimine
Physical + Digital though, typically only Sony and the devs have access to digital sales, instantly I might add. A racy game like these likely have a lot higher digital sales than other games.
edited 1st Jun '17 9:56:41 PM by Memers
10~15k digital copies seems to be average for SK titles. Assuming that Takaki is being truthful with those numbers of course and isn't inflating them as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYA-VNeRypw
Bhikkhuni is releasing today in Steam worldwide. If you own Shinovi Versus, you get an additional 25%off for it.
In addition to![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]")
, you realize the barrier to entry if you really want to play a Vita exclusive is like $40 for a PSTV, right?