Katsuhiro Harada is a busy man, what with a new instalment of Tekken, the Pokémon cross-over Pokken, the Street Fighter cross-over and two new mystery projects. Well, he's not about to get less busy, but we are about to get a bit more informed, since one of those mystery projects has been unveiled!
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Summer Lesson is an upcoming communication game for Sony's Project Morpheus. The virtual reality device for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita set to be released in 2015 (no exact release date known so far) will already be supported by a number of big mainstream games (such as Thief and Project C.A.R.S.), and now Harada-san's Summer Lesson will be one of them.
Communication games are part of a form of media in Japan intended to help out those with social anxieties (the most extreme cases called hikkikomori) in order to get them to open up to other people. There's a whole DVD industry based on "instructional videos" where a lady looks at you with a smile on her face for 90 minutes and occasionally says "hello" or "how are you" so that the viewer can choose to reply or just not avert their eyes.
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We can see in the first video that the player can nod "yes" or shake "no" at a schoolgirl, so it definitely looks to be in the same mold as previously mentioned DVDs.
What do you think of this socially conscious side-project of Harada-san's?