It’s time again for Comiket! Doujin circle Edelweiss has uploaded over an hour of doujin game trailers from the 90th Comic Market convention.
Founded in 1975, Comic Market, also known as Comiket, is a twice yearly convention where doujin creators gather to show off their new works. The Japanese doujin scene is similar to the Western indie scene, however doujin creators consider themselves hobbyist more than anything else. The convention started as a space where independent Manga creators can gather to share their work and communicate with fans and each other. As a result, the convention’s presence has fostered a bevy of independently produced content all throughout Japan. The first Comiket was attended by 700 people and 32 publishers. The number has since skyrocketed to 35,000 content creators and 590,000 general attendees. The 90th Comiket will be held on August 12th to the 14th in Tokyo. There’s an English version of the convention catalog here. The catalog explains some more about the history of Comiket.
Before the convention takes place a trailer collection is released, featuring all the games that will be available at the event. Thankfully for us, Edelweiss has uploaded the trailer to Youtube. Edelweiss itself is a doujin circle responsible for the game Astebreed. The trailer runs the gamut from creepy visual novels to old school style platformers. Additionally, there are plenty of Touhou fan games sprinkled throughout.
There are obvious language and location barriers to playing these games for a lot of us. However, some of these games will most likely be ported to Steam. Some recent examples of localization are Battle Crust and the upcoming Magical x Spiral, published by AGM Playism and Sekai Project respectively. So, hopefully, some platformers and a couple of cool visual novels will be picked up and featured on Steam in the near future.
Let us know which games you found the most promising! You can find a breakdown of all the trailers here.