The REAL Reason So Many NES Games Stayed In Japan

[Music] the NES launched in 1985 but it actually began life in Japan a couple of years before its Western debut as the Nintendo famicom a story you've probably heard the nesa redesigned westernized version of the Japanese original unsurprisingly many popular NES games began life in Japan as famicom games some others though didn't make the cut and never appeared over here sometimes it's pretty obvious way a game might not have made it but not always some of the best most technically Advanced titles on the system never got a chance outside of Japan so what happened well the reason is at least partly to do with technology and it starts with a restriction the original NES or famicom cartridges were limited to just 40 kiloby 32 kiloby of program data and 8 kiloby of Graphics data that separation of data is unusual in Game cartridges but it ended up being quite important and it meant no more than 512 Graphics tiles or character blocks for you to draw your graphics with usually 256 for Sprites and 256 for backgrounds soon that really wasn't enough and Nintendo's original solution was to supply games on floppy disc via the famicom disc system but that didn't go to plan long term other games developers working on the famicom though came up with the more obvious solution bigger cartridges gelo was first out of the gate in 1985 with City Connection which had a massive 48 kiloby capacity 32 kiloby of program data and two 8 kilobyte Banks of Graphics data 1,24 tiles to play with you can't just shove more capacitor into a cartridge and expect it to work though so they also included the components needed for the famicom to access this memory 2 to add extra storage you need to find some way of swapping it in and out of the consoles memory map which is why circuitry like this is called a mappa though often more casually called an enhancement chip other companies quickly followed initially borrowing gelo's mppa circuit but soon developing their own more sophisticated cartridges a new generation of games arrived that broke out of the 40 Koby restriction with great results like konami's gradius a 64 kiloby cartridge with 48 kilobyte Graphics Banks having Graphics in a separate Bank might sound like a minor detail but this Quirk of the famic common NES architecture allowed mappa chips to be much more powerful because they could directly manipulate Graphics data and this Innovation was allowed to flourish because in Japan Nintendo let games Publishers make their own unique cartridges with their own technology not the case elsewhere but speaking of Nintendo they themselves also got in on the Act 2 it was their platform after all coming up with their own mappers both for famcom games in Japan and NES games outside the interesting light gun game gum Sho seems to have been the first of these International releases using Nintendo's GN ROM mappa which allowed for a total ROM size of 160 kiloby for times the size of original cartridges Nintendo kept innovating and soon games that had launched on the famicom disc system in Japan were brought to the West as cartridges using their new MMC one mappa this emulated just enough of the functions of the dis system to make porting games possible for Nintendo and other developers too who'd made disk games but it also had features that made it attractive for developing new games from scratch like Double Dragon from technos Nintendo's mappers offered a lot more of the same features that other mappers did and more besides in some cases but they absolutely had to because outside of Japan Nintendo didn't allow developers to make their own cartridges if you wanted to make an NES game for the rest of the world you had to pay Nintendo to manufacture it for you with their own cartridges and mappers enforced legally and technically with the lockout chip installed in the NES which would not let a game boot unless it found an approved key chip in the cartridge if you'd made a game with your own mappa in Japan you are going to need to find a way to make it work with one of Nintendo's mappers to release it worldwide many developers did just that City Connection came to the NES in a slightly updated form in 1988 and gradius his American release came just a few months after the Japanese original pretty much unchanged gradius especially was a big game introduced the famous Konami Code alone enough to make it an icon but for some reason we outside of Japan never saw its sequel gradius 2 and this is the big issue because gradius 2 really is a great game in every respect and one that surely could have won fans worldwide a conversion of konami's own arcade sequel which debuted just a few months earlier this was not a quick casat in though but a brilliant home version produced by the originator with amazing Graphics huge bosses destructible levels and some very nice voice samples released in 1988 it set a new standard in famicom games loaded with brilliant coding tricks and utilizing hardw knowledge of the famic coms in a workings and hey it's a straight up action game not a word of Japanese text in the whole thing surely the only thing an army needed to do was slap this in an NES cartridge and hand over the cash to Nintendo and they'd have a smash hit on their hands that didn't happen though gradius 2 stayed in Japan and never went anywhere else why well it seems to be about mappers Konami for this game used their own vrc4 mappa but converting it to one of Nintendo's mappers for worldwide release might not have been possible the most advanced mappa the big n offered at the time was the MMC 3 which was hugely popular with developers hundreds of games used it but whilst it was pretty Advanced it wasn't just quite as capable as konami's vrc4 chip what did it do that made gradius 2 possible what amazing effect couldn't Nintendo's own chip reproduce well it is pretty complicated remember how I said the original gradius had four Banks or pages of Graphics elements available to draw the game with well here they are again notice how the ship Vic Viper appears in everyone makes sense whatever is going on in the game you need to have the main ship when you flick between Pages you need to have the ship available to draw but it is wasted space though the same thing repeated four times wouldn't it be better to just not swap out whole pages but smaller bits at a time so you can mix and match different graphical elements well yes it would be and that's what a lot of mappers do the mmc3 chip lets you swap Graphics in and out in two 2 Koby sections and four 1 KOB sections the vrc4 chip used in gradius on the other hand though allows all 8 kilobytes to be switched out in 1 kilobyte sections or 64 Tiles at once so yes it's not this game's amazing smooth four-way scrolling all the dozens of objects on screen at once that this magic mappa makes possible but details it lets the Game Swap in and out different graphical elements with more granularity it allows for this fairly complex animated flame background to appear with different types of enemies or this huge core boss with one type of enemy switch to this Corridor section with another and then onto this crawling boss the MMC 3 chip makes you choose whether you want the Sprites or the background tails to swap in and out in small chunks but the vrc4 lets you do both at once would it have been totally impossible for Konami to have released this game with Nintendo's mappers was it doomed because of its advanced technology and Nintendo's rigid requirements well probably not actually in the end there might be a bit more to it than that but that is a topic that I will come back to at the end of the video but let's move on now to look at some other games that were even less likely to make it out of Japan starting with Digital Devil story Mami tensei 2 coming out in 1990 sadly an era when Japanese game developers still thought that Western Gamers didn't care about Japanese RPGs at all and they were probably right yes newer games in this sprawling franchise get localized as a matter of course but not this back then a dungeon crawling RPG with an Overworld map it's pretty stylish and got quite an intriguing plot but possibly a little too adult to religious for the NES but there's one thing about this game you won't ever see or should I say hear on the NES no matter what mappa would have been allowed because of this game's expansion [Music] audio yes this definitely sounds a bit different from the standard NES audio and that's because this game's mappa includes a whole new sound synthesis chip built into it he could do this on the famicom because its cartridge socket had an external sound input pin which allowed for an audio signal to be mixed in with the rest of the system sound and sent out to the TV but on the NES that same pin was moved to the expansion socket on the bottom of the console no one really knows why but it makes extra ra audio not impossible on the western NES but a lot more difficult there is a mod you can do to make this work and it isn't particularly complex but no one would ever release a commercial game that required it but as I've already hinted there's more than just technical reasons more than just unpopular genres that might prevent a game crossing the Pacific how about we take a look at Splatterhouse onean pacu graffiti another classic another one that seems to have been unfairly robbed of its place in Western childhood memories a home sequel to the arcade original but yes it's the content here that would have made this very unlikely to find a home on the NES an action platform a hacken SL thing that plays really well has a wonderful cute super deformed style and manages to cram in a reference to just about every single Hollywood horror Trope ever and does have a rather nice nice Thriller inspired dance number it's loaded with zombies vampires the occult mild sexual suggestiveness and worst of all religious symbols all the things that Nintendo was absolutely determined not to let Western kids see on its watch no way leave that to Sega yes Nintendo had a ridiculously strict content policy back then outside of Japan anyway I don't know for certain that they would have completely refused this game's publication I can't find any specific info but if they were going to self ban their own early game devil world for its religious symbology then they surely would have canned this too it does use its own mappa but it doesn't do anything in this case that another mappa chip can't easily reproduce the mmc3 would certainly have worked and I really think this could have been a hit on the NES there's nothing on here that's really offensive it's clearly very cartoony and the original splatter house was ported to other consoles with no issues the kind of thing that I'm sure many twins of the era would have absolutely loved most of all though it seems like Konami suffered the most from Nintendo's restrictive policies crisis Force here being another one stuck in Japan a stunning looking game and a late release coming out in 1992 this goes even further than gradius 2 with the insane effects like these huge vertical Parallax trenches this uses the vrc4 mappa again and achieves these unusual Effects by swapping out the background tiles in an animated Loop that sinks up with the vertical scrolling to create that sort of Parallax effect this map has capabilities here though don't matter as much because by 1992 when this came out Nintendo had their own mappa that could easily match it the MMC 5 the last in the line of Nintendo's NES mappers it was about the most advanced that anyone ever came up with full of fancy features a lot of which never got used by any game if Konami really wanted to release crisis force in the west they most likely could have made made it work with this but this leads us to another reason why many games didn't make the jump and that's because Nintendo limited the amount that a company could release in Japan Konami could churn out as many games as they liked and they put out a lot but on the NES they were limited to just five a year the max Nintendo allowed for anyone Konami even went as far as to create a shell company Ultra games to allow them to release another five under a different name presumably covering the mouthpiece of their old timey telephone with a hany to disguise their voice hello yes this is uh Ultra games and we are completely unrelated to Konami I assure you that did seem to be enough to fool Nintendo but one game ran the gaunlet of all these restrictions faced every bar to being released and still made it yes it's Castlevania 3 again I'm sure I don't need to introduce the Japanese original made use of konami's new VR6 mappa but it was reprogrammed to work with Nintendo's mmc5 when it made it to the West it also featured expansion audio originally and that meant that the Western NES release had to have a totally Rewritten soundtrack and also there were some content changes too some of these seem to have been minor tweaks and revisions that many games go through but the game in Japan was a tiny bit more graphic in some details not by much but some very minor nudity was edited quite a lot of work must have gone into preparing this for its Western debut but it just goes to show that if there was a will there was a way and if a game was going to be big enough while it was worth going to Great length to meet Nintendo's requirement and this wasn't the only game that Konami revised when taking it out of Japan they did it with a few of their titles including Contra which was totally rejigged going from a 256 kilobyte VRC 2 carts to a 128 kiloby Nintendo un ROM cart cutting out some details entirely but also using Innovative compression techniques to cram more into a smaller space and on top of that the European release had a total Rebrand and a graphical overhaul to meet stricter content requirements in Germany there's plenty of other examples I could give but it is pretty clear that Nintendo's rules added an extra layer of complexity to bringing a game to the NES and financially too they took a 30% royalty on everything plus required cash up front to actually make the cartridges and if they didn't sell well that was on the game developer not them and that coupled with the five game limit meant that if you were in the business of NES games you had to make sure that not just what you released was going to be a hit but it was going to be a bigger hit than anything else you could use your limited number of releases on Nintendo did seem to relax things in the later years of the NES life the amazing batman Return of the Joker used Suns soft's own mappa in both the NES and famicom versions but for most of the ness's life Nintendo held very firm so the real reason so many of the most advanced famicom games never made it to the NES was that Nintendo's restrictions made it tough to bring them here technically and legally even if it didn't require much localization Atari had got into serious trouble a few years earlier with the 2600 the market being overwhelmed with fairly low effort games and Nintendo were trying their best to avoid that situation and it's hard to argue that Nintendo didn't know what they were doing their success is undeniable but their policies maybe prevented some quality software being released as well as preventing a flood of crap with all that said though if Konami really wanted to they probably could have brought gradius to West somehow they could have tweaked it to work on another mappa and certainly Nintendo's MMC 5 would definitely have done the job I can say that for certain because of this modern hack of this game to use that map which makes reproduction cards easier and helps it to run on certain emulators Konami could surely have done the same hacking back then within a year or two of the original release if they thought it would make the money the original radius might have done quite well but they presumably thought they had other games they could promote that would have done better so once again I think this is the end for now of course there were some companies out there who didn't play Nintendo's game at all and released their own regardless of the rules and I think maybe that would be an interesting topic for another video but thanks as ever to my ever loyal patreons your help is appreciated as always and there is a link below if you would like to join them that would really be great and I will as I always do say thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 113,150

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Id: oZwU0rUYNjQ

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023