Swan Song

So I’ve been pitching the idea around various places over the last week and I guess I should formalize my thoughts on it here: I’m going to attempt to play all 198 titles released on the Bandai WonderSwan and document each one with its own video. I’m calling the series Swan Song and hope to make it a regular thing on my YouTube channel starting very soon.

I’m currently working on a trial run of 4 videos for each of the WonderSwan’s launch titles in an attempt to determine roughly how much work is required per video, as well as whether or not I can envision myself repeating the process another fifty times to complete the whole library. The 4 launch titles in question are Gunpey, Chocobo no Fushigi na Dungeon, Densha de Go!, and Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling Toukon Retsuden. Once I have a better idea how much time is needed per episode, I’ll try my best to put the videos out on a regular interval, because I feel like that tricks my brain into getting things stuff done more than just feeling like I can put them up whenever.

So why am I doing this anyway? The WonderSwan has kind of a bad reputation in the West for being a dumping ground for licensed anime games and hardly having any standout titles of its own. But I feel like that opinion may be clouded by the fact that so little information is available out there on the games in the WonderSwan library aside from games that are easily playable without knowledge of Japanese, or ports of established franchises on other consoles. I want to document these games in order to give people a better idea of what the WonderSwan’s library was really like, but also to tell some of the interesting stories behind these games that have been inaccessible due to a language barrier.

So keep an eye open for that!