Posted by VortexSpin on August 03, 2026 at 13:24:55 EST in reply to Has anyone played Mizuki Shigeru's Ghost Photo Studio? Obviously a language barrier, but I figure some folks here might know Japanese and have played it. I've gotten a 100% English translation hack of it completed and I'm bugtesting now. (Which isn't trivial, there's a lot there since it's basically an RPG.) It's a delight to play - the photo taking "capture" mechanic has surprising depth, and the theme is loaded with flavor. I think the light travel mechanic of having to figure out where a Yokai lives, get there via train/plane/boat/foot, and sleuth out how and when it appears (to even get a chance of catching him) is solid as well. Overall an overlooked game. Lovely pixel art for a handheld game. And so fun that Mizuki Shigeru and his daughter appear in game as NPCs driving the story. (n/t) from VortexSpin.
It's been harder than I expected to learn and playtest a game that has no English materials as a non-Japanese speaker. The manual is light on details but between that and the old website I was about to figure out the details. Like I said, it's surprisingly deep vs. what I expected. Different Yokai types, power distributions, lenses, and a card battle game! I should have said this in the first message but I'm using machine translation + AI and I'm doing this just as a hobby project for myself. Not claiming that it's as good as a human translator. But nothing existed and I figured if I wanted to play it I would just have to do it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001006030014/http://www.neogeo.co.jp/mizuki/index.html
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