Hi folks! I see there have been a few new Patrons recently, so a huge thank you to those of you who have decided to pledge some money towards my efforts. Every little bit makes a difference — your money is mostly spent on new games and hardware to add to my collection, which I will subsequently write about, so you're directly benefiting the site with your ongoing donations. Plus you're just being awesome, which is even better.

I've been a bit lax on these Patron-only updates for a little while so I want to try and rectify that now, beginning with a bit of a chat about some broader aspects of Japanese culture that aren't directly gaming-related but which I still find interesting.

Specifically, today I want to talk about denpa music.

Dempagumi Inc, photographed by Christopher Woods – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46206160 

I have a subscription to Google Play Music — I switched over to it from Spotify and Apple's iTunes Match when I switched from iOS to Android, because as well as a good streaming service, it also allows you to upload your songs online and access them from other devices and the Web; this means you can do stuff like stream your library at work where you might not be able to install external software like iTunes.

Anyway, I've had a "J-Pop" playlist on Google Play Music for a while, initially consisting of just Babymetal and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (the latter of whom I can't remember how I became aware of, but enjoy a lot). Recently, I decided to explore things a little more broadly, making use of Play Music's recommendations to find related artists and just add them to the playlist and see what they were like. In the process I came across a group called Dempagumi, Inc. and the broader phenomenon of denpa music in general.

For the unfamiliar, denpa music is broadly defined as music that is intentionally incredibly catchy and memorable, but often nonsensical in nature, featuring off-key melodies, strange rhythms and other unconventional aspects. The term comes from "denpa", which means "electromagnetic waves", and stems from a derogatory term from people who appear to be out of touch with reality; the original form of denpa music was deliberately creepy rather than the energetic sense of excess now associated with the genre.

The otaku subculture, as many of us know, often embraces the fact it is "out of touch" with reality, deliberately eschewing reality in favour of a happy colourful world of 2D waifus and whatnot, and consequently denpa music found quite a following among the otaku of Akihabara, even while it was spurned by mainstream J-pop. There's also a certain amount of crossover between it and video game music — a number of denpa artists have either worked on video games or produced arrange albums of popular series like Touhou, for example, and many denpa tracks incorporate elements of chiptunes and synthesised sound effects. Several albums from artist IOSYS also sound like they were recorded from a late '90s wavetable synthesis sound card such as the AWE32, which is an audio aesthetic I very much approve of.

I've enjoyed my exploration of this peculiar genre so far; not every song or album has been what I'd describe as "good", but the same is true of any type of music. If you're interested, I'd particularly recommend checking out Dempagumi, Inc. as an introductory experience, since they're more of an idol group that draws inspiration from denpa song than an outright denpa outfit. Plus they have some really catchy songs and are a group of cute girls supposedly with otaku tendencies. What's not to like about that?

I must confess that outside of my 24-hour Extra Life stream from last Saturday — which you can see a summary of here, including unedited video archives — I haven't had a whole lot of time to actually play games recently! There's been a lot to do, both in "life" generally and on the site, and I've been ill, too. Twice. Tonsillitis sucks.

Now that what are probably the most challenging of the Rance articles to write are out of the way, I can concentrate on ploughing through the rest of Rance VI ahead of writing about it towards the end of the month; a Rance 5D writeup is coming next week, meanwhile. I've already written that one — I actually composed it immediately after beating the game as I wanted to get some thoughts on paper while they were fresh in my mind.

It's not an exaggeration to say that as a result of Rance 5D, what I've played of Rance VI so far (just under half of the main story, I believe) and what I learned while assembling the lore article, Rance has become one of my favourite series. I was ready for this possibility — I recall a former podcasting buddy enthusing about the fan translation of Sengoku Rance a few years back and his tastes have typically aligned rather nicely with mine — but I seriously wasn't expecting the setting of The Continent to have quite so much depth to it. I should know better by now that a game or series being "eroge" most certainly does not preclude it from having good writing or source material crafted with care, attention and love.

Aside from Rance, I've been continuing to pick up PSP games, as I mentioned in the last update, and got my hands on the original PSP version of Half-Minute Hero — produced and directed by Senran Kagura's Kenichiro Takaki, fact fans. I really enjoyed the Xbox 360 and PC versions of this game and its sequel, but there's something rather lovely about the PSP version. There's a bunch of additional content that was chopped out of the later ports, too, so it's nice to play the game as originally intended.

I'm pondering what to cover once Rance is over and done with. I have a heap of brand new stuff that is all worth talking about; presently I'm leaning towards Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online because I started it during the Extra Life stream and had a good time with the four hours I played. Plus it's been a long while since I covered something Neptunia-related!

Thank you all once again for your continued support of MoeGamer here on Patreon; it is massively appreciated. Every day I see clickbait nonsense from commercial sites trying desperately to squeeze some ad revenue out of their audience — sometimes even trying to shame them out of using adblockers — and I'm reminded that I always wanted to do something different.

Creators — and I'm not just talking about me here — deserve to get paid for their work, but the ad revenue-based model just isn't conducive to the production of thoughtful, well-crafted content. I'm glad there are people out there — like you! — willing to show their appreciation for and compensate those of us who want to produce something a bit different. You are the people who can help make a difference in the mess that is online media, so thank you, and please keep supporting those whose work you enjoy. <3

A lot of your generous Patreon donations go towards expanding my collection of Japanese games on a variety of platforms.

For the moment, I've been taking advantage of the fact that certain platforms have extremely cheap games in order to pick up as many as possible! For those of you who are also collectors, PS2 and PSP games are both dirt cheap right now, so jump in and grab some while you can.

The nice thing I've found is that the sort of thing I'm into — overlooked, underappreciated or otherwise niche-interest Japanese games — tend to be on the cheaper side, which is nice. Many of D3 Publisher's Simple Series titles on PS2 were around the 50p mark, for example, and most PSP games I've picked up recently have been no more than about £5 tops. Bargain.

There are a few exceptions, obviously, some of which are games I'm quite interested in grabbing. In particular, I'm quite up for snagging a copy of Fate/Extra on PSP after how much I enjoyed Fate/stay night — this is a game I've actually had my eye on for a long time, but had wanted to hold off until I was a bit more familiar with the series. At present, second hand copies of this seem to be around the £40-45 mark; still reasonable, but not quite in "impulse purchase" territory, particularly when there are a bunch of current games and VNs I want to pick up.

My latest batch of orders haven't arrived yet but I'll be sure to share them with you when they arrive. PSP is turning out to be a ton of fun to collect for, so I'm looking forward to expanding my library further!