Tokyo, Japan (May 30, 2026) – We did it! Our studio’s first sponsorship for any kind of event—in this case, BitSummit, the biggest indie game show in Japan! There was a whopping 68,000+ visitors across the Business Day (May 22nd) and both Public Days (May 23rd & May 24th).
We were able to showcase various things in our cute, awesome 3 meter by 3 meter booth!
We’re still early in development, but we were able to prepare a very short prototype of what the second game in the trilogy is going to look like. Both the English version and the Japanese version are being developed concurrently—We are working with with Matsushita Asuto (Persona 5), who will be handling the bulk of Japanese translations and will serve as an additional JRPG advisor.Every single Japanese player that stopped by was impressed by the music, game feel, and the overall vibes, and it gave us tons of motivation! The music was masterfully composed by Ryo Noguchi, with amazing artwork and dialogue handled by our Art and Writing teams.And lastly, to clarify, we are in fact rebuilding this entire game from scratch (brand new project), which is why it is taking a little bit more time than usual to get things back up to speed. However, May 2026 was a fantastic month for development and the efficiency in which new features, both fresh and newly innovative, will be added will be very fast!
There’s more! We are glad to announce that we worked on a one-shot manga in collaboration with Matsushita Asuto, a game planner who worked on Persona 5’s confidante system!
This one shot was prepared in English and Japanese, and we printed and handed out hundreds and hundreds of copies in person by our Rice Games booth!
In addition to preparing this manga, which is an original scenario that takes place within the events of the Genya Arc, we also prepared a PlayStation 5 Manga Reader App that allows you to read it and toggle it between English (or Simplified Chinese) and Japanese modes!
That’s right! Finally, a dream come true—LINE stickers (スタンプ) for the Shujinkou cast in the Genya Arc! This was drawn by our awesome teammate Catthy Trinh, with photo/text editing done by Julian.
We passed out TONS of different goodies. Honestly, it was crazy how much the crew was able to get ready for this event. Some include:
チラシ (Chirashi) – We handed out thousands of thick handouts that showcased the cool aspect of our DRPG, as well as the announcement of the recently released Shujinkou Manga Reader App on the PlayStation 5. We went through at least half of the 9000 A4 slips printed.
Premium Stickers – With the artwork of our awesome teammate Catthy Trinh, we got 30 stickers printed on a single A4 slip that was then handed out to people walking by our event. We were able to send off all of the sticker sheets that were printed and brought to this event.
Jin Plushie – That’s right. Our Jin plushie has made his debut! We didn’t hand this one out, but he was there (and visible in a couple images above) cheering us on. as we all worked. hard to spread the word.
Bookmarks – Yup! Why read a manga if you don’t have a bookmark to use? We passed out some 300 of these during the event and ran out! People loved the colored-version on one side / manga-style monochrome-version on the other side concept.
Anyway, that just about sums up our time. We were able to talk to hundreds of media, journalists, consumers, gamers, and even met a few customers that had ALREADY purchased Shujinkou sometime in the past. It’s exciting, puts us on the map as a video game company seriously looking to jump into the Japanese video game space, and allows us to gain solid feedback and motivation for our next move.
We’ve got more cool news coming soon (perhaps relating to development on a certain new Nintendo console…), and LOTS of awesome development to do too. Thanks so much for reading!Team @ Rice Games
Oh, and if you haven’t checked out the Manga Reader trailer, you can do so below! We are currently considering bringing this app to Steam if there is demand for it.