Kowloon High-School Chronicle (2004) — it shared a release day with Pokemon Emerald, and needed 16 years to cross the ocean

September 16, 2004: the game shelved next to Pokemon

Hello, Toki here. Episode 57 of “Today Is Release Day.” Today's game was probably the least eye-catching thing on the shelf.Screenshot from the Steam store page for Kowloon High-School Chronicle: ORIGIN OF ADVENTURE (Arc System Works)

Kowloon High-School Chronicle. PlayStation 2, published by Atlus, developed by Shout! Design Works. The standard edition was 7,329 yen; the deluxe pack was 10,479 yen. It went on sale in Japan on September 16, 2004. Today, September 16, 2026, that is exactly 22 years.

On the same day, Pokemon Emerald went out on the Game Boy Advance shelf. The PS2 shelf had Samurai Warriors: Xtreme Legends and Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2004 Climax. That kind of day.

And yet this one's name is still around. The way it stayed around is a little unusual.

There are ruins under the school, and the transfer student is the one digging

The setting is Kamiyoshi Academy in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Deep beneath it lie the ruins of a super-ancient civilization. The hero arrives as a transfer student; he is really a treasure hunter.

By day he makes friends at school, by night he goes underground. A school story, a myth and a dungeon crawl live inside one game. The story draws on the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki.Screenshot from the Steam store page for Kowloon High-School Chronicle: ORIGIN OF ADVENTURE (Arc System Works)

Exploration is a first-person walk through 3D dungeons, spending action points and trading turns with enemies. You can also combine the materials you pick up into weapons and healing items.

The strangest part is the Emotion Input System. You answer people not with words but with feelings. Eight emotions sit in a ring, and you pick one with the D-pad. You decide not what to say, but in what mood to say it.

There is even a bonus mini-game, Rockford Adventure, styled after an old Japanese PC screen. Another, older-feeling game is buried inside the main one.

About 42,000 copies. What moved afterwards was the second-hand price

Here are the numbers from the time.

According to the fan-maintained database Game Catalog @Wiki, the original version sold roughly 42,000 copies. Two years later, in 2006, an expanded edition called re:charge appeared — and sold roughly 23,000, fewer still.Screenshot from the Steam store page for Kowloon High-School Chronicle: ORIGIN OF ADVENTURE (Arc System Works)

Commercially, it was a quiet game. It launched in the busiest week of the PS2's healthiest years, so that is hardly a surprise.

But the people who played it did not drift away. If anything, the number of people who wanted to play it grew later.

Where did that growth show up? On used-price tags. re:charge, the version with the extra content, became hard to find, and its going rate climbed.

Here is one small discovery. “Hidden gem” is usually a label applied afterwards. With this game, the second-hand price moved before the label did. The popularity showed up on the price tag rather than the sales chart.

Sixteen years later, a different company rebuilt it from scratch

Now for the present-day part.

On June 4, 2020, Kowloon High-School Chronicle: ORIGIN OF ADVENTURE came out on Nintendo Switch. Arc System Works published it; Toybox handled the remaster. The art and the interface were largely rebuilt, and full voice acting was added.

Then it crossed the ocean. The North American Switch version arrived on February 4, 2021, the European one on May 21 of the same year. The PS4 version followed in March 2022, and the Steam version on November 10, 2022. A game released in Japan in 2004 took 16 years to become playable in English.

The remaster scored 72 out of 100 on Metacritic. IGN Japan gave it 8 out of 10; RPGFan gave it 68 out of 100. Not universal acclaim. But those are the numbers of a game somebody judged good enough to put out again.

The video below is that Switch version's opening movie. You can see what face a 2004 project came back wearing.

Let me write down the year: 2004

2004. If I don't write the year down like this, an article never feels finished to me. The Japanese release was September 16, 2004. Today, September 16, 2026, that is exactly 22 years.

One note on coincidence. Pokemon Emerald, released on that same September 16, 2004, became one of the games of its year. This one, sitting in a corner of the same shop, finished at about 42,000 copies.

And yet 16 years later, it was this one that got rebuilt and sent out into the world. Who wins a release day does not seem to be decided on the day.

Is there a game you walked past in the shop and only started caring about later?