Because it has a special chip with Kanji font that most games simply included on the disc.
These games include:
Sword and Sorcery (localized as Lucienne's quest)
Demo version of Alone in the Dark (play the full game instead)
Twinkle Knights (hentai game)
Blue Forest Story (Saturn version available)
Cradle Moon
Blue Chicago Blues
(any more?)
Do you know of any other consoles that have this problem? Not a region locking chip, not the foreign cart won't fit in, but missing a little quirk that prevents certain foreign games from loading?
The 3DO had no region lock (and no copy lock) so it's peculiar that some games need a JP console.
Moon Cradle was also on the Saturn.
Blue Chicago Blues was also on the PC, PS, SS, and PC-FX.
The 3DO is a machine known for having many ports to and from the system and those ports were often the best versions.
>>3086256
Not.peculiar in the slightest. This is a well known issue seen on many jap systems.
>>3086282
Fuck, most of my systems are NTSC/UC.
So which consoles must I buy the Japanese version of to get full compatibility?
>>3086256
>so it's peculiar that some games need a JP console.
If I recall correctly, some games extract its Japanese fonts from the console itself, but the American consoles only had the English alphabet.
>>3086331
Anything that has a game you want to play that requires the jap rom. Lots of old pc shit. Couldn't give you a list of console games.
>>3086331
osomatsu kun won't run on a genesis unless you have a region switch set to japan which is easy enough to do but still the game wont run on anything but a japanese mega drive unless it has a region switch.
>>3086341
Why didn't other consoles do that? It was common on computers of the time.
Kanji need 512 KB and it seems wasteful to require the developers to spend large parts of a cartridge on that.
>>3086243
Fuck, you just reminded me I have Sword and Sorcery and Blue Forest Story (and Doctor Hauzer and the Policenauts demo) but I never got around to actually buying a Japanese 3DO. It's like the last thing I would ever think to buy at this point...
To stay on point, I will say that there are a couple PC Engine Super CD-ROM2 games that will not work on the US bios. A Train III is one of them, I can't remember the rest atm, but there were 4 or 5 of them.
>>3086517
Because cartridge games generally don't use kanji, or use a very limited character set.
>>3086457
What if you use an Everdrive to load the ROM?
>>3087782
It got more common over the years as the size of games increased. With a Kanji ROM in the console they could have used kanji without such limitations. Maybe not for the Famicom or Mk3 but for the PCE, MD or SFC it should have been possible.
