- Pronouns
- He/They
this has been an extremely long decades-long road to get to this point, and i'll explain it simply.
his first video game work was the 1994 adventure game "Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou", a particularly unusual quest that takes place on a giant green version of Osamu Sato's own head. of particular relevance is 2 parts that would become notable as his career continued.
- this was the only project he worked on to get an actual English localization back in the day, being picked up by Sony Imagesoft.
- it had a Japan-only sequel known as "Chu-Teng", which would become the first of his projects to be rediscovered after several years of being lost to time. with a copy getting uploaded online in 2013.
the 1998 release of "LSD: Dream Emulator" was a fairly unique title for the Playstation. as the title suggests. your sole goal is to explore various dreamlike locations. with very little else provided other than the player's own interest in exploring. (there is a ranking system which grades each dream you go through on a graph. but this is doesn't really affect progress.)
the premise being very unusual and easy enough to understand without knowing any Japanese, combined with it being released on a system with a worldwide market. lead to gaining a fair amount of attention beyond it's initial Japan-only release. marking the initial western interest in Sato's work.
it also gradually transformed into being his most readily available project, with the game notably getting re-released on the Japanese Playstation Store in 2010 due to high demand.
he would also make two other games for the Playstation 1 (Tokyo Planet Planetokio, and Rhythm N Face.) but those have stayed relatively obscure due to their nature of being readily preserved thanks to their status as console games. and Planetokio in particular having a fairly decently sized storyline with plenty of Japanese dialogue.
which leads us back to the Rolypolys series. they were basically a pair of educational games released in 1997. "Rolypolys no Nanakorobi Yaoki" and "Bana Bana Ichi-gō: Rolypolys no Sekai Daibōken". albeit with the surreal qualities you'd expect from Sato.
unlike everything else he worked on, there was pretty much very little info about them online for decades. you could get a somewhat okay idea of what Chu-Teng would have been like by playing Eastern Mind, and LSD was known by basically anyone with a slight interest in obscure games. but the Rolypolys were just a blank.
this finally changed in 2019, when a copy of Nanakorobi Yaoki was dumped online. it even had a promotional video for Sekai Daibōken. with a proper demo of it being discovered on a MacPeople demo disk that was dumped 2 years later.
and now, the full version has been found. completing the collection of video game projects Osamu Sato has worked on.
