Kataban Blog
Sega never released Sylvan Tale outside Japan, and its cartridge carries two product codes — the one in Sega’s own records finds nothing in a shop. It is also the cheapest complete cartridge in this series, and its music is by the composer of Panzer Dragoon Saga.
Sega CS2 built one of the Game Gear’s few original RPGs in 1992 and gave it an autosave. It reviewed well, charted for four months and never got a sequel. The Japanese cartridge is G-3404 — and the English title finds nothing in either Japanese shop, which want different spellings.
On Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS the Kataban catalog stores product codes such as AGB-A2CJ-JPN-1 and NTR-ACVJ-JPN-2. Four of the five return HTTP 404 and zero listings as written; cutting the -JPN suffix turns them into working queries, and Buyee will not answer either code at all.
Aspect built the only handheld Golden Axe for Sega in 1991: a top-view quest with random encounters that becomes a brawler mid-fight. Sega’s own list prints the wrong catalogue number — the cartridge is G-3304 — and the marketplace is far cheaper than the shop’s own copy.
SNK's first Fatal Fury came home in Japan on the Neo Geo (NGH-033), Super Famicom (SHVC-GN), Mega Drive (G-4100) and Neo Geo CD (NGCD-033). Which one is cheapest to own, and why the Takara cartridge's code finds it faster than its title does.
Sega’s 2000 sky-pirate RPG, known in the West as Skies of Arcadia, code HDR-0076. How to tell its three Japanese Dreamcast editions apart, why the cheap @barai disc can no longer be finished, and why a producer who wanted a sequel never got to make one.
Atlus’s 1999 Dreamcast sword game, code T-14401M, from the Persona team. Why the sequel its producer mentioned in 1999 never came, why the PS2 Maken Shao is a remake, and how to tell the Dreamcast disc from its three PlayStation 2 editions by product code.
Sega’s 1999 Dreamcast survival action game, code HDR-0003, sold badly in Japan and well in America. Why Sega’s call for a sequel came too late, what happened to the Xbox Premium Cut, and why searching the English title alone finds discs from the wrong region.
Sega's ETERNAL ARCADIA, the Japanese Skies of Arcadia, and the horror game ILLBLEED are Japanese Dreamcast discs. On Japanese auctions the code HDR-0076 finds Eternal Arcadia better than its title does; ILLBLEED has no code in Kataban's catalog.
Symphony of the Night carries two Japanese PlayStation product codes, SLPM86023 (1997) and SLPM86073 (1998), and the Japanese title alone returns six listings across three editions. Neither of Konami's two 1999 Nintendo 64 codes is indexed by the shop at all.
Palsoft shipped Quest's cute shooter on 15 November 1991 in small numbers and it sold out the same day. What the Hu-Card is, why the reprint came from a magazine instead of the publisher, what the bankruptcy story gets wrong, and how the code PL91001 finds it.
Street Fighter 6's Modern controls broke a rule the series' own creators say they never could have. A generational handoff at Capcom rewrote three decades of fighting-game orthodoxy.
Type a Western title. Get the Japanese name, the cartridge code printed on the spine, and links to the shops that have it.
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