Takahashi in Games: The Census
Three series, three decades of Japanese hardware, and almost nothing released in the West under its own name: the combined census.
Read together, the three series map the whole licensed-game economy of their era. Urusei Yatsura begins it with a 1982 Bandai handheld and ends it, as a console property, on the Nintendo DS in 2005. Ranma ½ produced the census’s most famous artifact: a fighter America received only in disguise. Inuyasha, arriving in the PlayStation 2 era, is the exception line, the one whose games were built with English releases, and in one case English first, in mind. Each series’ own page carries its full census.
THE THREE LINES
1982–2007Urusei Yatsura · 1982–2005
Handheld to DS by way of Famicom, PC Engine CD and Mega-CD. Every title Japan-only; the franchise’s longest-running format turned out to be pachinko (2001–19).
Ranma ½ · 17 Games
Three Super Famicom fighters anchor the line; two were adapted for the West, one of them unrecognizable. RPG, puzzle, Game Boy and PlayStation titles fill out the count.
Inuyasha · 2001–07
WonderSwan to DS in six years, with original player characters as the house device, and an English-only RPG as the line’s strangest artifact.
The Crossover
Sunday vs Magazine: Shuketsu! Chojo Daikessen put Inuyasha into a shared fighting roster with the heroes of two rival anthologies: the census’s one meeting point.