Many great games don't even get released in Europe. Not only we get most games later than then rest of the world but we also miss some of the biggest gaming treasures out there, even from internationally famous companies. That is sad indeed. Most of the times Europe even gets the worst videgame convertions since it is a lot of trouble for japanese companies to convert NTSC to PAL and translate them to the several european languages. And I'm talking about BIG companies like Square and so. Many countries care a lot if a game's in their original language or not. I'm not that sort: as much as the game's in English I'm fine with that. And it's been like that since I was 7 or so. Not everything's negative though. There are certain companies that care to do things right and make sure we also get good quality games. Konami and Capcom, for instance, seem to care about that. Even Square-Enix came up with a good conversion for Final Fantasy XII this time (or so it seems).
The Picture above shows one game series that is well-known in Japan and even America but was unknown to many people in Europe: Shin Megami Tensei. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the first game to be released in PAL territories was Lucifer's Call (Nocturne). So far I've been targeting the SMT saga for PS2. In my collection I currently have Lucifer's Call, Digital Devil Saga Collector's Edition, Digital Devil Saga regular edition, Digital Devil Saga 2 Collector's Edition and bonus Soundtrack.
The Digital Devil Saga Collector's Edition exists in extremely low numbers. It was only available for purchase by pre-order in Ghostlight's uk site (the official distributors I think). If you preordered the game, you would see your name written in the last pages of the manual. Theoricaly, if you count the names you would know how many copies of this version exist but I can't be bothered doing that (maybe some day...). Despite that, the only difference is the shiny cover instead of the regular print and it came with a bonus T-shirt. I totally missed this because I didn't know about the pre-order. I only know two people from this country that preordered this game. When I first heard about it, I knew I had to get it. I managed to purchase one copy from Germany (thanks a lot to the seller who didn't mind posting to my country). I surely don't have my name in the manual, but I couldn't care less. As for the Digital Devil Saga 2 Collector's edition, well one could not make the same mistake twice so when I heard about its release I started to watch Ghostlight's site to see if they would do the preorder thing again. And they did. But the game is available to public in UK shops for a very limited time though . It seems, however, that people who preorder also received a bonus soundtrack disc and a poster. The poster was a bonus added later because Sony dellayed the game release for a few days and Ghostlight added the poster to compensate for the delay after apologizing by e-mail.
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