# The Japanese Leakage: Shinobigami tags: #thoughts ![[Shinobigami interior (illo).jpg|300]] This recent hard crossover with the Japanese timeline on X[^1] has resulted in me finding a whole bunch of games that I hadn't really thought of or considered before. Some of them are hard to find in English. However, I just discovered one called *[Shinobigami](https://shinobigami.com)* from [Kotodama Heavy Industries](https://kotodama.itch.io). I should have expected this. The same company that published the translation of *[[Tenra Bansho Zero]]*. A quick look over it on the website definitely tickles my fancy. It's a pretty highly structured, fiction-forward game that is specifically intended to do something quite specific: the "ninja battle" style media where a group of characters are introduced to a situation. They have a set number of interactions, including some bloody, violent fights, and then somebody is "the winner." Western audiences are probably more in tune with this being the Battle Royale setup. Hades knows you find it in a whole lot of Asian cinema, not just with ninjas. Yakuza facing off in the rain-streaked streets. Child soldiers preparing for the front lines. Hell, probably with a little bit of stretch, you could make it work for mecha pilots. Structurally, it's intended to be played in a single sitting, about a four-hour session, which is pretty fantastic. I'm down for a series of one-shots that sketch out the surface of a setting over time with multiple characters. It's an underused method here in the West, but damn if it's not cool. It took me a while to figure out what title that I already own that it reminds me of structurally. But if that sounds like your kind of game, you might also want to check out *[[Despair Dilemma]]*, which approaches it from the Western side of media through settings like *Saw* or *Cube*, where there are a group of characters thrown into the same situation who may or may not have to do violent things to one another or someone else to get out. Have I added *Shinobigami* to the collection yet? No. It's still on the "I should probably pick this up at some point" list. But that list **does** exist, and I often do get around to it. > [!info] > If you haven't checked out X lately, I have to say the relatively recent addition of automatic translation to and from Japanese and increasingly Korean has really expanded my tabletop RPG timeline, and it's fantastic. I get exposed to new games and structures that I haven't had the pleasure of before. They get tortured by my rambling, incoherent thoughts and decades-old commentary on the field. It's a match made in the Hell of Boiling Alive. I love it. [^1]: This has provided me the legitimate opportunity to say what I've always wanted to say with real backing. "I'm big in Japan."