Just curious if it kills anyone elses motivation to play certain games upon learning that the sequels don't have a snow ball's chance in heck of ever getting an official non-Japanese (preferably English) release.
Was reviewing the situation of three recent game series tonight and must say it's a bit disheartening. I'll start off with one were all pretty familiar with and move on from there.
Phantasy Star Universe
A total of six episodes to this series exist. Of those we missed out on one of the most important of them all, the final episode!
Epsiode 1: PC, PS2, X360
Episode 2 (AotI): PC, PS2, X360 (paid DDL through XBL).
Episode 3: DDL, maybe? - If we did get this, it was as DDL only.
Episode 4 (PSP): PSP - Technically a side story taking place between episodes 2 and 3, it is however a stand alone with cameo's from main story characters.
Episode 5 (PSP2): PSP - The beginning of the expanded PSU story.
Episode 6 (PSP2:I): PSP - Japanese exclusive final climactic episode of the PSU franchise. Due to worse than poor PSP game system sales and a ridiculous amount of liscensing from cameo stuff in-game not owned by Sega we're probably never going to see an official translation of PSP2: infinity get released here.
Valkyria Chronicles
There are three games in this series... we only got the first two.
Valkyria Chronicles (PS3) - First game in the series, obviously. Didn't sell well enough in Japan to warrant the series continuing on a console.
Valkyria Chronicles II (PSP) - Direct sequel to the first game. Tragically we got ripped off on this game as it itself is divided into two episodes, the second episode being a DDL PSN exclusive additional purchase. And it's no longer available to be had. Arrgh!
Valkyria Chronicles III: Unrecorded Chronicles (PSP) - Final, or at least most recent, game in the franchise. And once again, a direct sequel. No chance of a U.S. release with PSP essentialy having been dead for fully a year now.
Fate/
Painful to see an entire franchise being mishandled. Of all the games in the Fate franchise, only two have been released here, and of those only one was not a paid DDL.
Fate/Extra (PSP) - Thank you Aksys Games for localizng this.
Fate/Extra CCC (PSP) - A sequel of sorts to the first "Extra" game. Shockingly this game doesn't launch until next month in Japan. The down side to that being that as far as Sony is concerned the PSP is already dead in North America, all upcoming PSP games for us are being forced by Sony to be released exclusively as DDL though the PSN. Aksys has already discovered that DDL doesn't sell so well for them, so not much chance of them even trying to license this sequel.
Having now typed all this out, it seems rather apparent that the PSP is at the root of the problem. I hereby blame Sony for these greivences.
Anyways, really kills my motivation to play titles for these franchises knowing already that I can't see things through to the very end. I did already beat Fate/Extra before learning of the sequel being made, so at least that's not such a big deal for me as it could've been.
But PSU... now that's seriously depressing. And Valkyria Chronicles? So we can literally play halfway through the existing franchise and then there's nothing more for us to do but wish Sega had had the finished the job? Ridiculous.