BREAKING NEWS - JAPAN IS WEIRD!

:D

Especially if your payment method (credit card or paypal address or steam address given) is outside of Japan, you could contact Steam and ask them.
Usually, you can see what the other country would see by adding ?cc=US or ?cc=UK to the end of the URL.

They don't want you to play such filthy games and look at their rapu-games instead?

^ This XD

iirc i read somewhere japanese dev tend to avoid pc because pirating. console are way easier to control

Yeah, I can't even imagine microSD adapters for Nintendo DS or USB-loaders for Wii
and PSX-CDs never got copied too afaik. :D

I'm not complaining so much about prices per se as pointing out that it's weird how old games never go down in price and cost more than brand new products. A friend said, "wanna go to Japan"? I answered, "I don't see why not". So here I am. That's my childhood, right there. It was pretty hard to find for a while, though.

About console being bigger, that's a non issue. My concern is more on the line of why would companies (and not only Japanese ones) cripple themselves on purpose by restricting PC sales in Japan. I can accept Japanese devs acting strange, even if I don't really understand it, but why is a western publisher like EA restricting sales of their games in Japan too? Not wanting to make a boxed and localized release for Japan due to poor sale expectation makes sense, outright refusing to sell the PC version does not.

Yeah, feels like it's going to be tough.

Your popcorn comment alone makes me discard you from the sane goglodyte list.

This reminds me that when I tried to learn some Japanese years ago, I tried downloading some Japanese games to practice and all I could find over the net were some porn visual novels. I actually went through with them and it was pretty OK: there were some with interesting stories to tell, and the sex parts could often be safely skipped. Several felt like they put the sex in there because they thought without it it wouldn't sell, but it's hardly the main appeal of the VN. The main point to me was having the sentences go one by one, being able to repeat the one I didn't get as many times as necessary and having the text and the voices one next to the other. Pretty good for practicing. The gameplay itself was serviceable at best, though. Anyway, at the time I thought that I could only get porn games because that's how the internet works, now I'm having second thoughts about it.

haha yeah or cross regional chip ;p psx cd are easy to pirate, btw i read it on old article so perhaps they also have hard to chance (gaming +business ) culture. if i'm not wrong that article coming from nintendo honcho

In Japan, there are few PC games available here...and prices are weird.
Thanks GOG, I can play many PC games with cheap prices.

Well, one reason might be that nobody has room for a gaming rig over there.

You're probably reffering to "Doki Doki Majo Shinpan!". It wasn't really porn, it was more like underage, sexualized nudity. Okay... that only makes it sound worse... But it still doesn't count as porn and is in the same league as "Hyperdimension Neptunia" and "Mugen Souls". It would easily get a mature rating, but the content isn't strong enough to warrant an "Adults Only" porn game rating.

I think Japan is mostly focused on visual novels & erotic games when it comes to PC gaming. All of them are really simple in terms of gameplay (choose an answer every 10 minutes and choose which location/character to visit), but people over there love to read and listen to their games. Maybe most people over there have horrible PC's only suitable to playing simple games?

On another note, MMORPG's are really huge over there.

The only Japanese I know (somewhere near Kobe) said, that people over there don't care for western games anyway, especcially complex RPGs (Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Gothic, etc..) and the like.
Maybe it has something to do with national pride.

I'd probably just chalk it all up to "Japan" honestly. I try to tell people how strange it is there but nobody believes me. In the couple months I was there ( I know, not long enough to really get to know it) the most rational thing I saw was a vending machine in the middle of an otherwise empty field, with Tommy Lee Jones' face on it and the word "BOSS" writ large beneath.

Every other thing every day was a constant litany of "WTF, Japan?"

EDIT: it was a vending machine for cans and bottles of coffee, in case that makes it somehow better. Which it does not.

SEGA has released some of their Mega Drive games on PC (namely the Shining Force games), so you always have that option. Out of the Japanese SRPGs, I find those to be among the best (only beaten by the Fire Emblem series). There is a decent amount of SRPGs on PC as well, though western SRPGs tend to be a bit more crunchy (as in more complex ruleset and they also tend to expect you to understand the system behind the numbers to a greater degree).
Which is interesting, as JRPGs as we know them grew out of some of the (at the time) most complex WRPGs on the market. Mainly the Wizardry series.