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5
1d ago
Atlus released LINE animated stickers for Persona 5 The Royal, drawn from scratch by creator Kawaisouni!, known for Opanchu Usagi and Npochamu. Joker and the other Phantom Thieves appear in a cute touch. The stickers cost 120 coins or 320 yen. Collaboration merchandise using Kawaisouni! illustrations follows, with acrylic keychains, multi clear cases, tote bags, mugs, plush mascots, and plush badges. Advance sales are planned at SEGA STORE TOKYO and OSAKA in December 2026 and January 2027, with general sales in January and February 2027.
1d ago
Sega has implemented the Ver.4.11 update for Persona 5: The Phantom X, adding a Persona 3 Reload collaboration event titled Walking the Path of the Moon, Beautiful Ice Rapier and Mitsuru Kirijo as a new 5-star character. The pickup contract Sub-Zero Rapier runs until November 12, 2026, and login bonuses and broadcast rewards run until October 29, 2026.
3d ago
Hamster will release Arcade Archives Special Forces U.A.G. on October 15, 2026 for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. Arcade Archives 2 Special Forces U.A.G. arrives the same day for Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The original Seta shooting game shipped in 1987. Owners of the Switch or PS4 version can buy the Arcade Archives 2 release at a 330 yen discount.
3d ago
Liquid AI released LFM2.5-24B-A2B, a 24 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model with 245 million active parameters, pretrained on 33 trillion tokens and further trained for agent workflows. The company reports it scored higher than Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Gemma-4-26B-A4B-it, and Nemotron-3.5-Lightning (30B-A3B) on agent benchmarks including AutomationBench and BFCLv4. Inference support already exists in llama.cpp, MLX, vLLM, SGLang, and ONNX, and the model is downloadable from Hugging Face as an open model.
3d ago
The creator hub 404 Not Found will hold the talk event "Yoshi-P Radio & Yoshi-P Night" on October 24, 2026, hosted by Shuhei Yoshida and Masahiko Murakami. Indie developer Takahiro Miyazawa speaks in Part 1 about game creation with special controllers, and Level-5's Akihiro Hino covers the trial and error of launching a new IP in Part 2. A networking session follows.
4d ago
The Prince of Tennis 25th Anniversary Event -Fever- Vol.1 was held on October 11, 2026 at esports TOKYO BAY studio, with 10 cast members from Aoyama, St. Rudolph, and Rokkaku appearing across a day and evening session. The program included a newly written reading drama, a talk on the anime's history, a game corner, an audience quiz, live songs, and the announcement of Vol.2.
4d ago
Z.ai announced GLM-Legal, a model tuned on GLM-5.3-Flash for legal work. Its harness is also optimized for legal tasks. The company compared benchmark scores against GLM-5.3-Flash, Kimi K3, Claude Fable 5, and GPT-6 Astra, saying GLM-Legal improved on its base model and surpassed Claude Fable 5 and GPT-6 Astra on some tests. GLM-Legal is in beta testing, is scheduled to reach Z.ai's AI agent AutoClaw, and is accepting API access applications.
4d ago
Diecast Master is releasing three Christmas ornaments, each a transparent sphere holding a 1/87 scale painted diecast Caterpillar machine on a bed of cotton that looks like snow. The set covers the CAT 320FL hydraulic excavator, the CAT 950G wheel loader, and the CAT 730 articulated truck. Platz is scheduled to import and sell all three in November 2026 at 3,300 yen each.
4d ago
Universal Studios Japan held "1st Anniversary EXPO 2025 ~That Excitement and Emotion Once More~ @Osaka Kite na! 'EXPO Beat Jam'" on October 13, a memorial event for the first anniversary of Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai's closing. Myaku-Myaku appeared, with live performances by Atarashii Gakko! and Kobukuro. Football Hour served as MCs, and Osaka Mayor Hideyoshi Yokoyama and Osaka Governor Hirofumi Yoshimura attended.
4d ago
Microsoft has changed the storage for Microsoft 365 Family and Premium from an individual allocation of 1TB per person to a shared pool used by up to six people. New subscriptions started on or after October 8, and subscriptions repurchased after expiration, get the 2TB shared storage from the start, down from the previous maximum of 6TB.
4d ago
Sony Interactive Entertainment will release the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition Midnight Black Japan-Only on November 19 at a suggested retail price of 55,000 yen including tax. The console is a color variant of the existing PlayStation 5 Digital Edition Japan-Only, which launched in 2025, and swaps the white shell for an all-black finish on the console cover and bundled DualSense controller. Because it is the Digital Edition with no disc drive, playing packaged software requires a separately sold disc drive. Sony will ship a matching Disc Drive Midnight Black on the same day for 11,980 yen including tax. Preorders for both products begin October 20 at PlayStation retailers and e-commerce sites in Japan. The console can only be used with a PlayStation account whose console language is set to Japanese and whose Country/Region is set to Japan. Buyers who purchase an eligible PS5 and apply by March 31, 2027 get a manufacturer warranty extended from one year to two years.
5d ago
352 Interactive announced SCREW IT! for Steam on October 10. The 4-8 player voice chat party game sets players as contestants on a late-1980s betting quiz show, where they bid on how many answers they can give to prompts such as naming capital cities in 30 seconds. Release is scheduled for Q4 2026 with a Japanese interface and subtitles.
5d ago
FlashLabs has begun offering OrcaCyber Zero 1.5, a cybersecurity-specialized frontier model, on OrcaRouter, the AI inference gateway developed by Continuum AI and provided by FlashLabs for the Japanese market. According to the developer, the model scored 95.8% on CVE-Bench and 100% on Cybench under unconstrained agent execution, and it supports a 1 million token context window.
6d ago
Tamiya is reissuing its 1/20 scale Toyota Celica LB Turbo Gr.5 kit as Grand Prix Collection No.72, scheduled for release on Saturday, November 14, 2026. The Group 5 car was built for the 1977 German Racing Championship, based on the Celica Liftback 2000GT with a body modified beyond its original form and a 560-horsepower engine. The kit includes two car numbers and Cartograf decals.
6d ago
BEAMS is releasing a special BE@RBRICK with the BEAMS logo built into its body to mark the brand's 50th anniversary. It comes in two sizes: a 100% figure at roughly 7 cm for 4,400 yen, and a 400% figure at roughly 28 cm for 27,500 yen, which includes a light-up unit. Both are scheduled for October 2026 and pre-orders are open on the BEAMS official online shop.
Oct 10
A collaboration cafe tied to the Nagoya venue of the Wind Breaker 5th Anniversary Exhibition runs from Friday, October 9 to Sunday, November 1, 2026 at Collabo_Index Nagoya PARCO on the South Building's fifth floor. Food, sweets, and drink items are built around scenes from the work. Customers who order a collaboration menu item receive a limited-edition coaster, with 24 kinds in total.
Oct 10
ODORIJI will sell Mizusawa 15 UDON ALE, a 5.0% craft beer brewed with offcuts from Mizusawa udon production, on its EC site from October 10, 2026. The test run is 350ml cans limited to 480 units, with sales planned at restaurants, cafes, and retail stores along Mizusawa Udon Kaido and in Ikaho Onsen. Sakazuki Brewing handles brewing.
Oct 10
Initial D THE ARCADE is holding a Persona 5 The Royal collaboration event starting Thursday, October 8, 2026. Items themed after Joker, Panther, and Queen appear, including acrylic stands, meters, BGM, vinyl stickers, avatars, avatar backgrounds, chat stamps, and titles. Players obtain them through play stamps earned by playing the game and TT events competed in time trials. A collaboration special movie is also being released.
Oct 9
The first wave of merchandise for "Horimiya 15th POP UP SHOP" has been announced ahead of its Friday, December 4, 2026 opening at Yurakucho Marui and other venues. The lineup includes acrylic stand keychains with newly drawn strawberry-motif illustrations, hand-signed reproduction original art by HERO and Daisuke Hagiwara, and Hori and Miyamura plush mascots designed by HERO. The event runs at four venues in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Aichi, and Osaka, with a separate cafe event starting October 14.
Oct 9
BANDAI SPIRITS announced new Macross products. From Macross Delta, the Chuck Mustang and Arad Melders versions of the VF-31AX Kairos Plus are confirmed for release in the DX Chogokin line, which features internal mechanical reproduction and sound gimmicks. A Hayate Immelman version is in planning as a Macross Delta 10th anniversary edition. From Macross Frontier, a new completed VF-25 Messiah Valkyrie line was announced.
Oct 9
Tom Cruise and director Alejandro G. Iñárritu visited MAPPA EXPO 15th Anniversary at YURAKUCHO MUSEUM in Tokyo while promoting their film DIGGER. They toured the Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man areas, viewed The Rumbling exhibit from Attack on Titan The Final Season, and held a roundtable with animator Yoshihisa Hiramatsu, who gave them a new illustration of Cruise's character Digger Rockwell.
Oct 8
AnyPS5 is an open-source tool that converts PlayStation 5 game executables into native Linux and Windows programs. It has no emulator: a relinker translates executables into the target system's format, and system PRX libraries handle dynamic linking. The shader recompiler generates SPIR-V. In the project's compatibility list, Dreaming Sarah runs stably at 60fps on a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with an Intel Core i5-7500.
Oct 8
GKIDS will screen the live-action film of Makoto Shinkai's 5 Centimeters per Second in North American theaters starting October 23. The company streamed an English-subtitled trailer and says home video details will come later this year. The film opened in Japan in October 2025, sold 278,000 tickets and earned 420 million yen (about US$2.78 million) in its first three days, and ranked at #2 in its opening weekend.
Oct 8
Dospara is selling two GALLERIA gaming desktops tied to Thirdwave's three wins at AMD PARTNER ADVANCE 2026 JAPAN: Outstanding Growth Partner Award, Ryzen Channel Champion of the Year, and Radeon Channel Champion of the Year. The GALLERIA FDR7A-R57-W pairs a Ryzen 7 7800X3D with a GeForce RTX 5070 12GB, 32GB DDR5 memory, a 2TB Gen4 SSD, and a 360mm MSI liquid cooler. Base price is 399,980 yen.
Oct 8
A jailbreak tool called PS5 Relapse Exploit supports PlayStation 5 firmware versions 7.00 to 13.60, which includes version 13.60 released in July 2026. That range covers consoles currently on the market as long as updates are not applied. A second tool, PS5CEMU-HAR, runs Wii U and 3DS software on the PS5, with reports of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild running there. Both are published on GitHub.
Oct 8
At The Tenth Mosaic, a game culture festival at the Institut francais du Japon in Tokyo, Katsura Hashino, Shigenori Soejima, and Shoji Meguro spoke on September 22, 2026 about Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5. Hashino said Atlus handed the halted series to the team with the warning that it might be the last one, a do-or-die situation that shaped Persona 3.
Oct 8
TVS REGZA will show the RM-27G5SR at TOKYO Gaming-PC STREET 9, an ASCII-run event at LIFORK AKIHABARA II on October 10 from 1 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. The 27-inch gaming monitor has a white chassis, a thin stand, WQHD resolution at up to 200Hz, 1ms GTG response, a Fast IPS panel and VESA DisplayHDR 400.
Oct 8
D3 Publisher released Earth Defense Force 5 for Nintendo Switch 2 on October 8, priced at 3,980 yen for the standard package and download versions, 4,980 yen for the Deluxe Edition, and 6,480 yen for the D3P WEB SHOP Limited Pack. Two additional mission packs are planned: Extra Challenge on November 12 and Super Challenge on December 10, each 500 yen, with 10 or more missions and 35 or more weapons in the first.
Oct 8
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026, the Haiku tier's first update in a year. It scores higher than Claude Haiku 4.5 on benchmarks and surpasses GPT-6 Luna. Artificial Analysis measured its Intelligence Index v4.3.2 score at 43, up from 17 for Haiku 4.5. It is available on all plans, including free, and via API.
Oct 8
505 Games and KUNOS Simulazioni announced a new Free Roam mode for Assetto Corsa EVO on October 8, 2026. The mode recreates real roads, villages and landmarks in part of Germany's Eifel region at 1:1 scale, starting with the area around the Nürburgring. It includes the 20.8km Nordschleife and can be played solo or with other players. A playable demo appears at Sim Racing Expo in Frankfurt from October 16 to 18.
Oct 7
Sega Fave will run a Persona 5 Royal collaboration in Initial D THE ARCADE from October 8, 2026. The event adds items based on Joker, Panther, and Queen: acrylic stands, avatars, avatar backgrounds, chat stamps, titles, vinyl stickers, and meters drawn from Persona 5 Royal's interface. Three BGM tracks, including "Life Will Change" and "Last Surprise," are part of the lineup. Three play stamps and three TT events run during the period, with details to be announced later.
Oct 7
ASCII is showing the GALLERIA EPC7I-R57T-B, a roughly 19-liter gaming PC, at its TOKYO Gaming-PC STREET 9 event on October 10 at LIFORK Akihabara II. The machine pairs an Intel Core Ultra 7 265F with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB, a 240mm liquid CPU cooler and six Noctua case fans. It comes in black and white.
Oct 7
Level-5 CEO Akihiro Hino and indie developer Takahiro Miyazawa are the guests at Yoshi-P Radio and Yoshi-P Night, held October 24 at the Shibuya creator hub 404 Not Found and hosted by Shuhei Yoshida and Masahiko Murakami. Miyazawa discusses solo development and the ideas behind his special controllers, while Hino looks back on his creative journey and the trial and error of creating new IP.
Oct 7
Piranha Games released the Ashes & Ascension DLC for MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries on October 7, 2026, for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, and Xbox One. The paid expansion adds an 18-mission story campaign set in the Inner Sphere between 3058 and 3060, 13 new Clan mechs, new Inner Sphere OmniMechs and variants, 11 weapon systems, five Career Mode starting factions, and an updated faction map. Free updates rework pilot traits and the interface.
Oct 7
Greg Lui, 38, CEO of Earthmade Computer, was arrested on a three-count federal indictment. He is accused of conspiring with five others to ship export-controlled servers carrying NVIDIA A100, H100, GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs to customers in China without U.S. Commerce Department licenses, routing goods through Malaysia and Singapore. Prosecutors put the total value above $300 million.
Oct 6
Toy Story 5 will arrive on Blu-ray + DVD, 4K UHD + Blu-ray, and DVD on Wednesday, December 23, 2026, per a product listing. The 4K UHD + Blu-ray set costs 7,590 yen and holds two discs; the DVD costs 4,070 yen and holds one. Extras include a blooper reel, unreleased scenes, and featurettes such as "The Toys Return" and "Phantom Toys."
Oct 6
An original art exhibition marking the 15th anniversary of Natsumi Eguchi's manga Hozuki's Coolheadedness is set for WHAT CAFE at Terrada Warehouse, running February 4 to February 23, 2027. The event is titled "Hozuki's Coolheadedness 15th Anniversary Original Art Exhibition ~Even Hell's Judgment Depends on You~." A key visual newly drawn by Eguchi was revealed with the announcement. Plans include displays of original art and a corner covering the serialization's history.
Oct 6
The 2016 compilation film Assassination Classroom: 365 Days' Time is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, U-NEXT, d Anime Store and FOD, all as subscription titles. DMM TV and TELASA carry it as a rental, and TSUTAYA DISCAS offers it as a DVD home rental. No streaming availability was confirmed on Lemino, Hulu, Netflix, Disney+ or TVer. The film runs 1 hour 32 minutes and adds an original episode set seven years after graduation.
Oct 6
A Lupin III 55th anniversary collaboration pop-up shop with ZOZOTOWN opened at Laforet Harajuku on October 6 and runs through October 18. The venue at MAKE THE STAGE on the fifth floor sells 12 item types: seven using new anniversary illustrations and famous scenes, plus five with artwork by JUN INAGAWA. Online sales on ZOZOTOWN start October 23 and end November 16, with some items also planned for TMS Shop.
Oct 6
D3 Publisher will release Earth Defense Force 5 for Nintendo Switch 2 on October 8, 2026. The port of the 2017 game from developer Sandlot keeps the premise: the player joins the EDF and fights an alien invasion that arrives without warning. Missions are cleared by wiping out every enemy or destroying a target, across four classes (Ranger, Wing Diver, Air Raider, Fencer) with distinct weapons and handling. The Switch 2 build unifies its basic systems and UI with Earth Defense Force 6, the sequel set for January 28, 2027. Local wireless play and two-player split-screen co-op are included, and gyro controls are new for handheld mode, adjustable from the options menu. Hands-on play reports fast loading and steady performance in mid and late stages, with button layouts configurable per class and gyro working on the Switch 2 Pro Controller.
Oct 6
A GitHub project called OpenDLSS-NR reimplements NVIDIA's DLSS 5 neural rendering network in Vulkan. It runs the same 71-block Swin/ViT network as DLSS-NR build 310.8.0 using FP8 on Tensor Cores, and the output is described as bit-for-bit identical to the original, with all 75 block boundaries matching byte-for-byte. It requires Windows, an NVIDIA Ada Lovelace or later GPU, and the user's own DLSS 5 model. The project states it is unrelated to NVIDIA.
Oct 6
Premium Bandai opened a second preorder round for the HG 1/35 Lancelot on October 2 at 11:00, part of the Code Geass 20th anniversary. The kit is priced at 4,950 yen including tax, with the second batch scheduled to ship in March 2027. It includes MVS x2, VARIS, Blaze Luminous, and Slash Harken deployment parts, plus a plamo original gimmick that lets it combine with the separately sold Zi-Artemis.
Oct 6
A Persona 5 Royal collaboration with fashion brand beautiful people goes on sale from October 2 at beautiful people Aoyama Store, beautiful people Online Shop, SEGA STORE TOKYO, SEGA STORE OSAKA, SEGA STORE SHANGHAI, and Atlus D Shop. The collection marks the Persona series' 30th anniversary and uses the brand's DOUBLE-END and FLIP design methods. Four items are listed, and each purchase includes original can badges and stickers.
Oct 6
Bandai will release Niformation Kamen Rider Series Seal Wafer vol. 5 on November 2 at confectionery sections of mass retailers nationwide. The set has 36 types, including two secret types. It adds a ZECT Rare tied to Kamen Rider Kabuto's 20th anniversary, a 5th Rare marking Niformation's 5th anniversary, and UR cards with gold or silver foil stamping. Kamen Rider BLACK joins the lineup. Each pack costs 154 yen including tax.
Oct 5
Ratalaika Games and Shinyuden plan to bring the 1992 Mega Drive robot SRPG Vixen 357 to PC via Steam in 2026. The port keeps the original's turn-based grid combat, 16 maps, free pilot and unit composition, and permadeath, while adding a gallery, rewind, speed-up, save anywhere, screen filters, and cheats. The store page lists Japanese support.
Oct 5
Tokyo Game Show 2026 ran from September 17 to 21 at Makuhari Messe in Chiba, with the September 21 session canceled as a typhoon approached. Business days were September 17 and 18, public days September 19 and 20. More than 250,000 visitors attended across the four days, and 1,138 companies and organizations from 53 countries and regions exhibited. A photo roundup collects eight cosplayers, among them Ann Takamaki from Persona 5, Tifa Lockhart from Final Fantasy VII, Aigis from Persona 3, and Yasmine from Street Fighter 6.
Oct 5
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked select domestic companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, to report how many NVIDIA RTX Pro 5500 GPUs they want and what they will be used for, and plans to approve the purchases, The Information reports. The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation GPU NVIDIA announced in September 2026 for large-scale AI models and simulations.
Oct 5
Level-5 published a Tokyo Game Show 2026 event report and released demo play videos for four titles: Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, Holy Horror Mansion, Snack World RELOADED, and DecaPolice. The booth, the company's largest, showed playable demos of all four and drew visitors from Japan and overseas, with original goods as bonuses. The Layton demo runs to Professor Layton and Luke meeting inventor Egg Muffin.
Oct 5
Tencent released a preview version of Hy Image3.5, an image model that handles text-to-image and image-to-image generation in one system with a maximum output size of 2K. Tencent says human evaluations rated its professional-grade accuracy 30 percent better than Hy Image3.0. It can also edit images. Access runs through the Tencent Cloud API at $0.024 per generated image, with referencing images free.
Oct 5
A first-person report on GameBusiness.jp timed an RTX 5090 running MiniMax H3 locally. One 5-second i2v clip went from 193.5 seconds to 31.6 seconds in 41 days, a 6.12x gain, using a 20-step baseline, the official Turbo 8-step LoRA, Hao AI Lab's FastH3 4-step, a community-converted TaoMate 3-step LoRA, INT8 attention, and sparse attention. H3 Max weights have not been released 28 days after fal said on X that it would publish them. Cloud H3 Max Turbo ran at 1.49 seconds on different hardware.