Tokyo Game Show 2020: Friday’s big moments

With that being said, there was still more than a few tidbits of information that were of interest from yesterday’s streams. Things kicked off with a young Chinese publisher called GameraGame. GameraGame specialises in finding indie projects from China and bringing them to a global audience, and there were a few announced through their show that are well worth taking note of, including Chinese mythology adventure game, The Rewinder, and Death Scream Land, which looks like a hellish fever dream at its most nightmarish. Just look at this thing:

There was also a little tactics strategy game, which has been kicking around on Steam for a while but will be coming to Nintendo Switch “soon.” It’s called Warriors of the Nile, and while I don’t expect this to set the world on fire, it does look alright.

The really big shows were reserved for the evening, however (and fair enough, since people otherwise have to work. Might as well save the big guns for when people are going to be around to watch). GungHo spent its entire show with Ninjala – a free-to-play Splatoon-like game that must be doing well for GungHo to dedicate an entire hour (and some truly surreal humour) to show off.

Capcom’s show, meanwhile, wasn’t surprising in the slightest, being focused on The Village (that new Resident Evil thing) and the two Monster Hunters it recently announced. That was always going to be its show, though, and having a big dump of information on those games in Japanese would have been useful for the local audience. The one that was perhaps the most surprising was SEGA’s event. It started out with a look into SEGA’s 60 years of history, including some ads featuring some of Japan’s major acting talent, before segueing to highlighting a series of major games on its horizon (Project Sekai featuring Hatsune Miku, Phantasy Star Online, Shin Megami Tensei) and… finishing off with a Virtua Fighter esports teaser. Does this mean an old game being turned into an esports event, or a long-awaited new Virtua Fighter? Who knows right now… but for fighting game fans, either way was a very exciting announcement indeed.

The rest of the streams yesterday were very industry-orientated. Huawei highlighted some new phones and devices, for example, but also spent a lot of time talking numbers and the opportunity that Asia presents to developers now. A high school group got up and… played esports? I wasn’t paying close attention to that stream. BenQ Japan had some new monitors to show off, and DMM games, which won’t mean much to those of us in the west, highlighted an intimidatingly-impressive list of games that it is publishing to the Japanese market, including:

Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark, Elder Scrolls Online, Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Iron Harvest 1920+. Mortal Shell, Remnant From The Ashes. 

Something people often forget about TGS is that it is a show that is targetted towards a domestic audience first and foremost, and presentations such as DMM, which don’t mean much to us, are valuable to the target audience. The industry-focused side of the event is also overlooked, but when you consider that Asia-Pacific is now the largest game-playing audience in the world, and TGS is an opportunity to engage with those companies involved with that, it makes sense as an industry show. 

But, as I said, the biggest day of the show from a consumer perspective is today, the day ahead as I write this. We’ll have a wrap for you tomorrow for anything you might miss from the 12+ hours of streaming ahead.

Editor-in-Chief
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