Daniel at ChinaJoy 2024.
In the videogame world, event season is well and truly underway. In June, I spent a week in Los Angeles during the period that in the old days would have been E3 week. Now it's a loose collection of game expos all happening at the same time in different parts of the city. Either way, June is when many of the year's biggest games are announced, with a series of showcases and chances for hands-on demos.
IGN held our own event, IGN Live. Game fans could come to try upcoming games and watch developer interviews being filmed live. Or they could just chill at the retro arcade game area.
Meanwhile, Summer Game Fest held its annual showcase before a huge audience at the LA YouTube Theater. That was before opening Play Days, a private three-day event where invited members of the media and influencers could try newly announced upcoming games from publishers big and small.
Xbox and Ubisoft also held events, all overlapping in the same few days. Meanwhile, our small team mastered the impossible art of being in multiple places at once, playing the latest games and then discussing our impressions in videos. That ranged from Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake to Star Wars Outlaws, a new Street Fighter 6 update, and first-look footage of Yasuke and Naoe in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
A brutal schedule, yes, but tons of fun as well.
But while June was busy, July was… busier. It brought two major events for our IGN Japan team to cover.
To Kyoto for BitSummit
Held every year in Kyoto, indie game festival BitSummit is an annual highlight. This year's edition, titled BitSummit Drift, was the biggest yet. It took up two whole floors of the Miyako Messe exhibition center and drew close to 40,000 attendees over three days. There were hundreds of games on show, all made by small independent development teams or solo developers. IGN Japan showcased our favorites live on air during 10 hours of livestream programming, broadcast from our booth on the show floor.
One highlight of our show included first-ever gameplay footage of Hotel Barcelona. That's an upcoming action game made by legendary developers Hidetaka "SWERY" Suehiro (who joined us on the livestream) and Goichi "Suda51" Suda. The game blends the slick OTT action of Suda51's No More Heroes series with the dark horror sensibilities of SWERY's Deadly Premonition games, with a smart mechanic that allows players to turn failure into strategy, fighting alongside the ghosts of their previous runs through hordes of zombie creatures.
Another highlight was an interview with yet another legendary developer, Hideki Kamiya. He is best known for his Bayonetta series at PlatinumGames. Kamiya left Platinum last year, despite being a founder of the studio. He is unable to formally work in the game industry for a full year following his departure – so he essentially joined our livestream as a member of the public, albeit one with a ludicrously rich career. Kamiya told us about a conversation he recently had with Fumito Ueda (ICO) and Yoko Taro (NieR) about how few games they can realistically make in their senior years, and about the energy he gets from attending an indie game event like BitSummit.
IGN's BitSummit Awards
Each year at the BitSummit Awards, IGN Japan selects one game to win a special media prize. It's a tough task given the high quality and variety of games on show at BitSummit.
This year's recipient of the IGN Japan Award was Bobls by Softlock Interactive, a high-difficulty platform game that demands precision and patience. But it also takes teamwork, as two players work together to beat each level, working out the most efficient way to bounce on bubbles and reach the exit together. Throughout BitSummit, Bubls drew constant lines and brought smiles to the faces of all who played it.
This year, while our team was busy livestreaming, I also took to the main stage to participate in a media tournament playing a fun new VR game called Death Game Hotel – another SWERY joint. It's basically a high-stakes parlor game where failure means losing parts of your body. But graver still, I was competing against editors from other Japanese game news outlets, our friendly business rivals. So I really didn't want to lose.
Busy in the run-up to BitSummit, I had little time to practice. However, I managed to learn the basics and come up with some gambling strategies. By playing steady hands while taking some well-considered risks, I won the whole tournament by some margin. That caused my opponents to burst into pools of blood (in the game). However, I got to take home a shiny trophy. It was just a relief to not come in dead last.
ChinaJoy in Shanghai
Barely three days after returning home from Kyoto, I boarded a plane for Shanghai to attend ChinaJoy. Nearly twice the size of Tokyo Game Show, ChinaJoy is the largest game expo in Asia. Unlike TGS, many of the bigger booths at ChinaJoy did not have games to play.
Instead, gigantic booths from gigantic game companies such as NetEase and Tencent hosted photo spots, stage events, and giveaways to immerse visitors in the worlds of their games.
The PlayStation booth was the biggest booth to visit for demos of upcoming games. Sony has invested heavily in China over the past few years. And its China Hero Project has brought games from local developers to the global stage. It's had past hits such as F.I.S.T: Forged in Shadow Torch finding fans around the world. The project has proven so successful that PlayStation recently announced a similar incubator program in India.
Two New Games for PlayStation
This year at ChinaJoy, two newly announced China Hero Project games were at the PlayStation booth, and I got to play both of them. Both Unending Dawn and Project Jinyiwei take heavy influence from FromSoftware games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring. But each takes the Soulslike formula in a different direction.
Unending Dawn's melee-based combat rewards players with satisfying clangs as swords and spears clash, as you carefully defeat guards one at a time in a maze-like open fort with a tough-as-nails mid-level boss in its center. It plays along similar lines to FromSoftware's Sekiro. But what sets Unending Dawn apart is the elements it borrows from the hit Chinese game Genshin Impact. That starts from its bright anime visual style and idealized female protagonists to its climb-anything mechanic that lends a new layer of strategy to exploration.
Combat felt great, with its "just-guard" mechanic reminiscent of Bayonetta's Witch Time system, whereby successfully dodging an incoming attack at just the right second briefly slows down time to allow the player to reposition and attack. I'm excited to see more.
Project Jinyiwei, a Work in Progress
Project Jinyiwei, on the other hand, took a more traditional approach to the Soulslike template. Set in the late Ming Dynasty, it presents a realistic visual style closer to something like Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty or the Japan-set ninja stealth series Tenchu. Meanwhile, it adds a grounded layer of fantasy action.
Sneaking my way through an old wooden castle, I dispatched a number of guards using a mixture of stealth and all-out action, quietly climbing rooftops and loudly smashing up beautiful bamboo interiors, before having my backside handed to me over and over again by a lightning-fast ninja boss character. Project Jinyiwei's parry system was a little too tight for me to master on a show floor demo station. And while the game's partly automated combo system made it easy to unleash a volley of cool attacks, the camera struggled to keep up, making the action difficult to follow.
A Project Jinyiwei developer watched me play and said he plans to make tweaks based on feedback from me and other players at ChinaJoy, opening up the tightly confined boss battle area, and so on. Of course, this direct feedback is what makes in-person expos indispensable.
China Game Developers Conference
In the same period as ChinaJoy, the same organizers also held the China Game Developers Conference, which took place in several ballrooms in a hotel next to the expo center. This year, I had a couple of chances to go on stage and address the local game developers, publishers, and media in attendance.
First, as the keynote for CGDC's action games track, I interviewed Keiichiro Toyama. He helmed the original Silent Hill game at Konami before joining Sony to create Siren and Gravity Rush. Toyama now has his own company, Bokeh Game Studio, whose debut horror-action game Slitterhead is due for release on November 8.
On stage at CGDC, we talked about Toyama's experience of creating a new studio and a new game at the same time. We also talked about the influence he drew from the films of Wong Kar-wai for Slitterhead's nostalgic 1990s Asian city setting.
Half an hour later, I gave a presentation on Japan's videogame market, offering insights on where Japan's game scene is in 2024, and the opportunities in Japan for game creators from China.
I also helped arrange a keynote session for SWERY, who talked with typical candor and insight about his focus on storytelling that resonates throughout the decades. It's a skill he has proven on evergreen cult classics Deadly Premonition, The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, and The Good Life. SWERY's knack for instilling empathy in players is astounding, and he generously shared advice for the assembled game developers at CGDC.
Coming Up Next
Now back in Tokyo, I am enjoying the calm before the storm – Gamescom in Cologne at the end of August, and then Tokyo Game Show in September. These are two of the biggest shows of the year. This means more coverage from the front lines, more sleep deprivation, and more fun for me and my team at IGN Japan. I'll tell you all about it in future columns I'm sure!
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Author: Daniel Robson
Daniel Robson is the chief editor of videogame news site IGN Japan. Read his series Gamer's World on JAPAN Forward, and find him on X (formerly Twitter).
