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Since every now and again people pop questions about dojin games, I thought it would be helpful if I just started a thread and listed some handy dandy things about them...

first off, many have never heard of dojin games before. That's natural. The word "dojin" means "fan" more or less, and my personal name for the dojin games is "dojinware"... Dojin frequently has a bad name due to the extreme volume of hentai (read: porn) that is made based on already existing anime/manga. Indeed, the volume of Card Captor Sakura dojin hentai alone would be enough for many to condemn Japan as a bastion of sin and corruption.

However, there are a good number of quality games that are dojinware. The most frequently asked about ones are the Queen of Heart games. Among the major releases recently are also Eternal Fighter Zero (which is in the mmcafe news recently) and AIRRADE. The Valkyrie Fight games are somewhat less known, but are pretty fun.

Alright, here some important sites for you to know to help you get around the place:

The Watanabe Factory:
Link Here
- this is the home of the Queen of Heart (QOH'98, QOH'99, and QOH'01: Party's Breaker) and Glove on Fight games. The links section is very extensive, and a good resource if you want to browse around. In fact, I found out about most of the following sites through their link section.

The best Queen of Heart site i know of:
Link Here
- extensive information on QOH, and a few other dojin games. You can download voice packs for the games here, as well as a tech demo for QOH'01 (last time i checked...) Note that it's in the Watanabe Factory links section.

Luna Fiesta:
Link Here
- really good site for EFZ and Glove on Fight info. Shows you how to extract the music from Glove on Fight :)

Twilight Frontier:
Link Here
- the home of the stupendous Eternal Fighter Zero, a truly remarkable achievement of recent dojinware. The demo and patches for this game can be found here. Note that the manual for EFZ on this site is not always up to date with the patch.

Studio SiestA:
Link Here
- the home of the fun and funny shooting game AIRRADE. Patches and a game demo are available here. The music in this game is made mostly from remixes of the Air/Kanon music, and was demanded enough that they have released an OST for the game!

amaginZ:
Link Here
- the home of Valkyrie Fight and Valkyrie Fight TAG, fighters based off of the PSX RPG Valkyrie Profile. VFT is a hoot with it's tag team gameplay, crazy and loose game mechanics, and tribute to Tekken 4 (two words: WALL DAMAGE). A playable demo for Valkyrie Fight is available, though i don't think there is one for the superior VFT.

run-liatto:
Link Here
- the home of Comic Party War, a fighting game featuring the Comic Party characters. Nice graphics, silly gameplay, and won't run on non-Japanese Windows 95/98.

Altavista Babelfish:
Link Here
- unless you are literate in Japanese, this liitle tool is going to be an ESSENTIAL. No matter how broken the translations are, it's better than having no clue as to what's going on.

Kagami's guide to making Windows XP/2000 compatible with games that demand Japanese language:
Link Here
- if the game won't start up or crashes mysteriously, it is often because of language incompatibilites. This guide will be a big help.

Home of the Underdogs:
Link Here
- place which hosts a ton of abandonware games, many of which are very, VERY good (two words: SYSTEM SHOCK. If you don't know what that and Looking Glass Studious are, it's because of DOOM and id Software. Seriously). Absolute storehouse of PC gaming history. But what'll interest most of you is that you can find QOH'98 here...

Himeya Shop:
Link Here
- online store for import games, some dojin, lotta hentai. Prepare to pay stupefying prices for anything and everything. Believe me, most dojin games only cost around $25 US in Japan, but due to import fees and such, they can cost around $50 US at Himeya Shop.

GameFAQs:
Link Here
- you can find info on a few of the Queen of Heart games and Valkyrie Fight here. I was going to do a faq on VFT, but I never got around to it.

WinMX:
Link Here
- it's like Napster, only that the newest versions are a lot more powerful but a lot more myridian. More on this later.

Handy tips for those poking around:
- Navigate sites by the URLs (appears in the lower left status bar in MS Internet Explorer), since most sites have their URLs written in english. This is particularly handy when trying to find your way through the sites which offer guides about the various fighting games.

- Be familiar with consistent misinterpretations by the Babel Fish (e.g. "necessary shooting skill" or "shooting skill" really means "special move").

- If it doesn't install properly (e.g. crashes during installation, etc.), try copying the files directly to your hard disk, then selecting the folder and remove "read-only". This was a consistent problem with many early releases of dojin games.

- If WinRAR/Winzip/etc can't extract the files, get Range (it's somewhere here in the mmcafe... or ask the Prof for it). Due to language code issues, sometimes even though Win XP/2000 has all the correct language settings, the unzipping program isn't capable of handling the Japanese character strings. Such is the case with Comic Party Wars.

- Dojin fighters frequently use and combine game mechanics from multiple games; EFZ features Just Defense from Garou, Roman Cancel from Guilty Gear, 3 level super gauge from Street Fighter Alpha, etc. Guilty Gear is the inspiration for the game mechanics for many dojin fighters. Remember that spoofing other fighting games is extremely important in most dojin fighters, so having experience with those fighting games will be very useful when you are trying to learn how to play.

- Dojin games are a lot funnier if you're somewhat familiar with the background/source material. Queen of Heart is funny just by itself, but if you know what fighting games it's spoofing and how it's using the characters to spoof them, it's hilarious.

- WinMX used to be, for reasons I cannot fathom, a repository of asian file trading. Why there were so many asian users (that were actually in Asia, not just some HK folks in Richmond) and so few North American/EU users I don't know. The latest updates which are now available (which they had said were "coming soon" back in May'01 :) have really boosted it's popularity (read: english speaking user base). If you want to find obscure Japanese games, this is a place to look. Note that Japan is on the other side of the world, so "peak hours" for them are around 3am on the West Coast. Dojin games are some of the few games these days that I would honestly pay money to support, but the import fees are ridiculous, and some of the games just can't be found (like the Valkyrie Fight games) as they were neither super popular nor in large production.

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Awright, if you got any more questions, shoot them into this thread. If this Forum supports "Sticky" threads, I think that might be good for this for future reference for all those other people whose curiousity has been piqued by dojin games.

PS: There's probably stuff I've forgotten to put in here, but i think this post is laboured enough already :p

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bump

I need to retitle this thread. The subject name right now sounds like a newbie question.

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