Short and sweet, this is a courtesy sticky, to be removed, letting our loyal readers know account holders are no longer being denied access to their IMAGINE accounts in Japan under the auspices of CAVE. As a fellow long-time IMAGINE player, this is good news and cause for celebration. Yee-hah!

Update, June 19th: The blocking of foreign IPs has been ended. Though it appears some parts of the world might still be blocked out for particular reasons. Please let us know if you’re still blocked out where you live/play. This post is now de-sticky-fied.

This is a short and simple sticky until the block is lifted. I don’t know much except I can’t login, and I’ve sunk hours into this game, and can’t wrap my head around the entity that would just pull the plug on that sort of investment for someone else. So in short, this is a petition. To pledge, not to spend any money on Megaten products from any region until the block is lifted. You don’t have to play on the Japanese server to sign the petition - ie. leave a comment. Just agree it’s a shitty thing to do, and the wrong way to treat your fans. We live in a day when pirating software is much easier than ponying up at your nearest retailer. This site makes no bones about piracy, it’s a personal decision, made by people who feel like they’re being served or not.

We have our phasers set to IMAGINE! And are dedicated to finally giving Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE some timely coverage. We are committed to covering everything Megami Tensei in-depth even if it sometimes takes a little longer than we’d like to rally our forces. Expect retro-posts and up-to-date posts and updates just over the horizon. Including detailed information pages just as soon as we can get them to print.

We have a new author, Aren, who has volunteered to focus efforts on IMAGINE exclusively. We have their word they’re committed to the cause. The rest of our crew will be doing everything they can to help. And our new administrator, yksehtniycul, is also banging out a new IMAGINE page with up-to-date and in-depth information regarding the Japanese IMAGINE experience so far.

IMAGINE is filed under the database’s Megaten Online page. These pages our by far our most popular at this moment in Megaten history. We’d like to apologize to our readers, who were probably unable to find their sought information within our pages. We hope however that our pages have been there to shed some light on IMAGINE to date.

update: There is a new IMAGINE news item retro-posted just a few posts down from this one on the front page…

Retro-posted January 21st, 2009

Aeria Games & Entertainment announces that it has obtained the rights to host and translate Shin Megami Tensei Online IMAGINE, a Megaten MMORPG produced by CAVE headquartered in Japan. This announcement comes only a week after a polled petition was spotted in Aeria’s game forums. Out of the 1230 votes cast 70 percent of respondees pledged interest in patronizing a local edition of Imagine.

www.aeriagames.com » New Game - Need Your Opinion

I’d donate a Kidney to play this! Looks very interesting! Well, I’d try it. Doesn’t look all that interesting Definitely wouldn’t play this.

25% (316 Votes) 27% (340 Votes) 23% (285 Votes) 13% (170 Votes) 9% (119 Votes)

Aeria appears decided in marketing the title “MegaTen”, though the original title has not been airbrushed from promotional materials. Announced are plans for eventual North American and European releases including English, Spanish, German, and French services. So far it is unclear whether any restrictions will be placed on foreign currencies as is now done for the long running Japanese market.

Aeria (located in Santa Cara, CA) is a company well known within the online gaming community for it’s freely playable online games including Shaiya, Twelve Sky, Domo, and Last Chaos. This is Aeria’s first Megami Tensei title and it is yet to be seen how MegaTen might differ from Atlus USA’s offerings. As stated by Aeria all Aeria productions are “free-2-play” or based on some variation of the “cash shop” business model where an “item mall” allows players to buy virtual commodities via AP or Aeria points, which are in turn purchased in exchange for domestic currency, or “real world” money, at Aeria’s website. Unlike MegaTen’s Japanese counterpart, it is reported Aeria has a history of rewarding players AP. Otherwise it is unknown how Aeria’s version might differ in terms of game-play.

The following day “SpencerC” explained his role as “the producer for MegaTen” and announced a need for “tech savvy volunteers” to aid with translation and localization. Unfortunately Aeria has chosen to remove these announcements from public view, including the acquisition press release. If anyone has remaining copies of these materials, www.digitaldevildb.com would like to include this information in its database.

Retro-posted January 23rd, 2009

yksehtniycul was nice enough to make a Digital Devil Database based klan in Shin Megami Tensei Online: IMAGINE. The name of the klan is DDDBジャンプ— and it can be searched for from the terminal in the city you start out in. While it only currently contains a handful of members, we obviously hope it will increase in size as time goes on. As is pointed out in the thread, the klan is largely to help people get started in the game . . . .

Read the rest of this post »

I managed to get the Shin Megami Tensei Online: IMAGINE section back up today. As of this post the screens page still needs to be added (and the banner has to be changed), but every thing else is the way it was. This includes the beta play guide, since I’ve been asked about that a few times recently.

If there’s something that’s changed since the beta or should be corrected, just let me know.