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One inevitable reason is that streamers are the best form of advertising but it doesn't mesh well with a story-focused game... Watching a story game be played usually means it either you're spoiled and don't want to play it anymore or you avoid the stream entirely (which the streamer advertisement effect didn't affect you.) Asmongold boosted FF14 because he didn't play the entirety of the expansions available (2 out of 4, verge on releasing 5th), serving as an ideal sampler, whereas T9 currently doesn't have nearly as much content in comparison which leaves very little for a player to experience for themselves. There's even less in terms of combat stuff. (FF14 is also very text heavy with little voice acting so streamers just reading it out loud is content... It is really sad but the truth is majority of the gamers now refuse to read... T9 being subtitle and therefore reading-heavy is also something that goes against it in the US market.)
Another publicity issue is that I feel like the devs. really think a DR collab is the Ace up their sleeve but that's actually the very least they could do for this game. I honestly do not believe that would be any player who hates DR but loves this game -- that potential segment isn't fully saturated yet but it's still limited... Why not go for low-hanging fruit first? The DR fanbase definitely grew by word-of-mouth, not publicity.
To add, as a DR fan who's chronically on the internet, how I finally gave T9 a chance was when it was on game reporting sites that T9 changed gacha rates and refunded Engima in response to feedback.
When I first heard of T9, I had no idea when it would release and it took a while, so I totally forgot about it. Late last year, I started looking for other Kodaka games but Rain Code honestly doesn't have the greatest reviews and knowing nothing of this T9 I thought it was some baseball game that shared illustrator with DR but not devs... leaving me to not touch it. It was only this year's late spring I finally gave it a chance still unaware of what kind of game it was because I just wanted something new to play.
Being the prime market (DR fan), this is exactly what I mean by publicity fail. And what I can see so far, many DR fans still don't even know this game exists or that it's a spiritual successor spin-off to DR.
I might as well say it too when its another thing that can't be changed now but... T9 already tripped with it's name and main/banner art. It's nowhere as interest-grabbing as DR or clear what kind of game it is. It either looks super generic or as a baseball game, which both do not grab or evoke interest, which is apparent from the player count.
On a tangent, while impossible, to truly pop, this game needs a new coat of paint and rework. I can't continue to think why this game isn't a RPG but an ARPG the more I play it. Especially with how the enemies are animated, the attack patterns, the way they balance them... it all feels like forcing RPG enemies to ARPG. If this game came out when Genshin was the only kid on the block, then this game had potential. But now, it's leagues behind in gameplay and a Honkai Star Rail system would fit so much better. Add full English Dub and ofc, a rename/rebrand, then finally we have a truly top contender in its genre that also doesn't alienate the non-action player base that is majority of DR fans.
I think 1.1 was a perfect example of a good amount of advertising, reaching nearly a million people with their JP/EN trailers for 1.1
I would rather ♥♥♥♥ in my hands and clap than wake up to see asmon promoting this
- The characters have a unique aesthetic but some of them look too 'alien' even by anime standards and anime is already 'weird' in many places.
- Catgirls and maids and other weird fetish stuff is why they avoid anything anime. (I kinda agree with this, it is really off-putting to those not used to it).
- All the stories are the same with 'teenagers saving the world' and this one is doubtfully no different. (Surprised how accurate they called it even without playing the game, just looking at the trailers).
- All the girls look way too young and don't wanna deal with eventual swimsuit outfits that sexualize teenagers and they don't wanna expose their own kids/teens to that stuff as trying to keep them off TikTok is difficult enough. (Some parents responded this way but again I don't blame em, can't really argue against it).
Gotta realize that the 'anime' stuff is ruining Japan when it comes to social things. Otaku is effectively a dirty word there. There's far more going on beneath the glossy surface that the industry likes to ignore. I don't blame non-anime-fans from avoiding this game entirely.
And for those wondering, there's a USB drive collection quest that has 'nude photos of the director' as the quest title. The guy says multiple times to the (teenage) protagonists 'dont look at the USB drive contents' and 'keep your minds pure' (these are teenagers but lmao). This happens regardless of which characters you have in party, so it is fair to say that at least some of the characters are under-18.
Honestly, the game's difficulty and psycho as hell casts already makes it impossible to rec to normies. But maybe the souls fiends would bite, it wouldn't cost them nothing more than their already non-existent sanity to play.
Feels more like you promoted it to people who aren't the slightest bit interested in anime games, which feels like a pointless endeavour anyway. For the majority of this post you may as well have said "they don't like anime, so they didn't like the anime game".
I'd rather people who are interested in those kinds of games got this game shoved in their face a little bit more, because the game still has issues reaching people who would give it a chance, let alone people like in your post who were never going to play the game even after knowing about it.
Playing the game for the story, probably gonna uninstall it afterwards depending on how quickly they can release new actual story content (instead of an endless stream of time-limited 'events'). So far in my personal viewpoint, I haven't seen anything outfit-wise or otherwise to indicate sexualization of the underage characters. If there were such content I'd have nope'd out long ago and never bothered.
The game doesn't need to be 'shoved in anyone's face' if they aren't interested in these kinds of games. If they are then they likely already know about it and/or are playing it. I know Persona games have had their own can of worms like outright pedophilia with an elementary-schoolgirl but that kind of stuff is so well-hidden that you don't find out about it until you play the game, check reviews, and/or read up on the controversy online. Despite these aspects, Persona games are still quite popular and often promoted publicly in the mainstream without major issues.
Plenty of people like anime (Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, etc) but they don't like the weird fetishistic nonsense of anime (catgirls, maid outfits, one-piece school swimsuit outfits, etc etc) that dominate so much of the anime and anime-games industry. To use an analogy, if someone likes cars but they don't like cars emblazoned with lolicon decals from stuff like Azur Lane and/or Blue Archive, that doesn't mean they don't like cars at all. They just want the cars without that extra stuff. In other words, LESS is MORE.
Anime overall has a PR problem and a good portion of that is self-inflicted. Allowing and openly promoting the weird fetishistic nonsense to keep it in the public eye without knowing about cultural differences (that mainstream Western people don't always tolerate things the same as mainstream Japanese people when it comes to that content) is what leads to situations where the audience is niche and remains as such.
One of the featured characters, as of writing, is what appears to be a grown woman cosplaying as a maid catgirl with robot-appendages. That's quite far from the mainstream and even further from something like the Persona games.
Cosplay itself aka 'costume play' only became acceptable/mainstream after years of ridicule by mainstream gaming sites once they saw their website visits skyrocket when they actually started promoting cosplay girls instead of ridiculing them. Money talks.
Have you ever gone on YouTube to see 'weird stuff from Japanese TV'? Actual (adult) people being completely nude and performing lewd acts on TV; really weird stuff like upskirting a schoolgirl and 'measuring' how much wind is required to do so, etc. The whole 'weird Japanese game show' stuff is a meme but it is one of those things you can't really translate outside of Japan.
In the Western World, we have soldiers in space-armor (storm troopers) battling other soldiers in regular clothes (rebels) while both sides shoot 'pew pew' lasers at each other and/or use laser swords to slice through one another. Star Wars is still mainstream because while it is different it isn't overtly fetishistic about it aside from promoting accidental-incest among siblings.
Wanting more 'ecchi' aka 'lewd' content involving minors is a gross thing to ask for tbh. You should quit while you're ahead. I'm perfectly ok with adult-only content involving obviously-adult-only characters in an adult-only game. Outside of that context it isn't acceptable IMHO.
There is nothing 'modern audience' about wanting things to be rated and categorized properly. Looking at the US-based ESRB website there is no official rating listed for Tribe Nine, yet it still has an M rating on the Google Play store. It seems Google and the ESRB have an understanding to license use of the ESRB ratings without the ESRB having to actually review the game's content. All ratings are apparently self-provided by the app developer and that's led to many issues on both Google Play and the Apple App Store because game devs tend to misunderstand how their content will be perceived.
So the loophole is obvious. A game rated 'M' for Mature (aka 17+) but all it has listed is "Violence, Blood, and Gore" with "In Game Purchases" as a secondary descriptor. Nothing about the lewd and inappropriate content that I've mentioned in my posts.
Neither the devs themselves nor the fans seem to have any issue with how bloody weird some of the content can appear to a mainstream audience, but the lack of proper content description is indeed an issue with the rating system as a whole. The ESRB and PEGI themselves are both corrupt machinations owned and operated by the industries they're meant to 'regulate' and this self-regulation nonsense is partly why stuff like FIFA the gambling game attached to a soccer/football game is somehow suitable for ages 3 and up.
SURPRISE MECHANICS! JUST LIKE A KINDER EGG! Anyone else remember that nonsense? Lmao.
So I do agree with you that this game should be rated and categorized properly with some more accurate descriptors. I would like to see the lewd and inappropriate content involving minors to be removed entirely. Alternately, an easier approach would be to drop the 'teenagers saving the world' nonsense and have them all be 18+ college aged students instead however that's probably something best saved for a future game. Something built with that in mind from the ground up.
If a Western studio could take this aesthetic and IP to make a game worthy of the name, one properly age-rated and with the proper content descriptors, then I'd love to see how that would happen.
I also agree this kind of game probably should've stayed as a Japan-exclusive game if this was going to be the end result. They already had to walk back the worst of it after the massive backlash received from the obscenely-greedy initial gacha rates and the removal of the farmable free premium currency from open world content that was in the beta version.