Metal Gear Rising: Metal Gear Rising Revengeance is a straight-up great film. Long in the works of Kojima Productions, it was eventually outsourced to co-developer PlatinumGames to add to the action, and while its development was a bit of a problem, it came out in 2013 and was one of the best and most OTT hack-and It was one of the best and most OTT hack & slash romances ever made. Seriously, if you've never run up on a Metal Gear after slamming yourself into it and then slicing the whole thing in half with your magical cybersword, you're missing out.

Publisher Konami is currently working on its own "Metal Gear" rescue project, the first step of which is to re-release many classic games as "MGS: The Master Collection Volume 1," followed by the upcoming "MGS3 which is a remake of "MGS Delta: Snake Eater". A small coup in this is the release of MGR: Revengeance on the DRM-free storefront GOG: The Game became available on July 4 (it had been available on Steam since early 2014).

The announcement received particular attention from Japanese players, and for good reason: MGR: Revengeance is also available worldwide on Xbox 360 and PC, but in Japan only on PS3, which was its original target; the Steam version was not available in Japan. The Steam version was not available in Japan. However, there was a GOG version!

For almost an hour, the GOG version of MGR: Revengeance was released on July 4 and was available for purchase in Japan, but was removed shortly thereafter. Konami later issued the following statement to Game*Spark in Japan: "Due to a misconfiguration on the part of GOG, the game was temporarily available for purchase in some Asian regions. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

So, while there is not much mention of the reason for this, we suspect that one of the reasons may be due to PlayStation's old exclusivity terms. Metal Gear was at one time the PlayStation's largest exclusive title, and while most of the games have since been released on other platforms, key parts of the series remain locked to the PlayStation platform. Most notably, Sony went all in on Metal Gear on the PlayStation 3, and MGS4 remains locked to that platform. So it is very possible that there is some sort of historical arrangement that MGR: Revengeance was only released on PS3 in Japan.

However, it should be emphasized that this is speculation in the absence of any official explanation from Konami. For example, Konami may have intended to include this title in the "Master Collection Vol. 2" and wanted to be the first opportunity for Japanese players to purchase this title on the PC.

Japanese players are used to this. Unfortunately, it is common for Japanese publishers to region-lock the digital versions of their titles in this manner, a remnant of a time when physical retail was a more important factor in sales, and some see such decisions as protecting their distribution channels.

Whether such practices have meaning in 2024 is debatable, but they continue regardless, a phenomenon so widespread that it has its own term: omakuni. The slang derives from the Japanese phrase "not sold in your country" and is widely used to refer to Steam games that publishers either do not allow to be sold in Japan or sell with significant restrictions (e.g., non-Japanese support) that detract from the experience.

Either way, it sucks to be a Japanese Metal Gear fan. It seems bananas that a game from the classic Japanese-developed series is available worldwide on PC, but Japanese players can only access it on the PlayStation 3, a two-generation old piece of hardware that was discontinued in 2017. We have reached out to Konami for comment and will update if we hear back.