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This new 3DS eShop game looks like Elite Beat Agents...

Deft Beck

Member
So, Office Create, the creators of Cooking Mama, recently released a game for the US 3DS eShop called Johnny's Payday Panic. It seems to be an English localized version of a game called Gekidou! Arbeiter Koji, released during the summer.

Here's the game's English website: http://www.ofcr.co.jp/koji/en_index.html

For convenience, here's the main image of the site:

B1PzCP1.jpg


The artstyle of this website and of this game seem to strongly resemble that of EBA's comic-book-inspired artstyle. The logo font in particular bears resemblance to many of the bold gradient fonts used in Elite Beat Agents. Johnny/Koji himself looks very similar to characters in EBA/Ouendan 2, as well. Even the little icons of the places where Johnny/Koji work resemble that of the stage select icons found in EBA/Ouendan 2.

Therefore, I suspect that an employee of Office Create, or at least someone they contracted, might have worked at iNiS Corporation at some point, in particular, on the Ouendan/EBA series.

I have purchased the game, but there is not a credits sequence accessible as of yet. Maybe this is all just a big coincidence, but I'd like to figure this out.

Am I crazy, or do you follow me with this?
 

Deft Beck

Member
The demo makes it not as bad as I was expecting. Def love the style.

It's kind of fun! A little repetitive, but as you do better, you earn perks to help make your shifts more efficient/less error-prone.

The way the game punishes you for errors by docking your EXP bar is a little harsh, though.
 
What was the original artist's name? Atsushi Saito, I think?

Does he still work for INIS or is there a possibility he's gone freelance and is working on this?

Man, this whole game's aesthetic is such a throwback to the DS era. I kinda have a soft spot for the overall look and attitude of those games. I gotta check this out!
 
seems pretty uncanny to me honestly

a brief search is getting me no link between the games at all, but i still wouldn't dismiss the possibility of shared staff. i'm sure documentation on this game's credits are very light, lol. don't really think i'd have the time to purchase and finish the game to document it myself though, lol

still, if it's not shared staff, it's an awfully odd choice of game to take inspiration from. that alone is leading me to believe it's more than just inspiration.
 

Owari

Member
Elite Beat Agents was so good. A sequel that could easily be churned out by Nintendo, but will probably never see the light of day due to "reasons"

:(
 
Elite Beat Agents was so good. A sequel that could easily be churned out by Nintendo, but will probably never see the light of day due to "reasons"

:(

I imagine that the reasons are that it probably won't be profitable. After you've licensed all the music you've gotta sell a bunch of copies to make your money back and EBA sold about twelve copies.

I'm not even sure about Ouendan now either, that sold tons but I remember reading that quite a significant number were to outside Japan, and that's basically not an option now so sales of that series would definitely suffer.
 
ouendan 1 did pretty not-great, first year sales were 48,291 according to famitsu. not sure if import sales were included here, but they were a pretty non-negligible amount relative to total sales.

ouendan 2 did alright though, at 218,248 in its first year. not really a sales expert, but that seems much closer to the kind of expectations one would have for this sort of game. still not setting charts on fire or anything, but probably not "this franchise is unsustainable kill it now" numbers.

if anything i'd say eba alone probably killed the franchise with how high its expectations were, lol. the number of copies shipped/printed seemed pretty crazy. guess if they figured they couldn't make it successful international franchise, it wasn't worth it?
 
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