Getting a dōjin soft (Japanese indie game) to run

Question

I'm running Windows 7 Professional and I'm trying to play Another Bound Neo, a Metroid Prime style game.

It's dōjin soft (Japanese independent game). Normally that isn't a problem, but whenever I launch this game it pops up an error that looks like this:

I'm not sure but I think it might want some sort of Japanese language support installed. A forum post affirmed this suspicion.

I did a quick look around Google, but all that turned up was that Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate had patches to add language support.

Am I out of luck here?

Answer 1

As Grace Note says above, try running the game in Japanese Locale. On Windows 7:

1. Open Control Panel
2. Go to Region and Language
3. Switch to the administrative tab
4. Go to System Locale and choose Japanese (Japan) from the drop-down in the window that pops up.

This will not change your computer so that everything displays in Japanese; it will only allow your computer to interpret Japanese characters. Most windows will still be in English.

Try that and see if it works; I know most Japanese games I've tried, such as the Umineko visual novels, have required it.

Answer 2

You don't necessarily have to change your locale to Japanese to play, although you should still have the Japanese language pack installed regardless of whether you change your locale or not. There's an applet by Microsoft called AppLocale, and while they don't support it for Vista or Windows 7, it works just fine on those platforms.

Again, you'll need language support already installed, but that'll be the case for locale switching anyway. In fact, since only Enterprise and Ultimate allow installing language packs willy-nilly, you might have to change locale, reboot, and then change it back before installing AppLocale. But if leaving your system on Japanese locale is a problem for you, try out AppLocale and run your games through that.