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A post at Ani-nouto under the same title dealt with the Kanon angle of the port to iPad, let's look at the iPad itself as a vehicle for Kanon. It should be obvious immediately that as far as proprietary platforms go, iPad is infinitely superior to PSP. Screencaps required a hacked firmware on PSP, but are fully supported on iPad, for one thing. Of course games being 100% downloaded has the usual downsides of "end of ownership", but it's not like I could archive UMD media either.

A bigger problem really is the region lock. UMD was not region-locked, but finding Japanese games for iPad requires certain trickery. The sole reason I hit on Kanon was that it was one the few untranslated games available in the American iTunes. Having that much beats having none, however, which is the situation at Kindle.

Within the confines of iTunes, Kanon has an advantage of right-pricing: it's only $8. It's not one of the disposable $3 gamelets, and not the "equal price to what oppressed Japanese consumers paid on game consoles" (hello Shiny Festa, now back at $55). Best $8 I have every spent in Apple empire, no doubt. Having played it, I would actually be happy to pay more, say $20, considering the amount of entertainment hours extracted and the quality of it. But the problem is, I had no idea at the time. If it were $20, I would have put it on the wishlist, but not actually bought it.

Coming back to the whole untranslated game thing, iPad also offers an advantage of running support applications. I bought one Japanese lookup app and used it extensively with Kanon. Imagine fumbling with the volume of The New Nelson dictionary in a passenger seat of an airplane.

Speaking of which, the battery life of iPad and immersiveness of Kanon is the killer combo. I was able to play it on airplane for 4 hours at a time without being bored. At some point the guy in the next seat had a PS Vita, but too bad for Sony. Too little, too late.

Pictured: Kanon in Der Biergarten, Atlanta.

P.S. If someone could verify the status of Area 11 gaming in Google Store, that would be interesting. Note that on most tablets I can easily side-load APKs.

P.P.S. Or how to use Japanese iTunes.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 08:02 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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