VR JAPAN Reviews

Absolutely stunning. These environments are made impeccably and accurately reflect what you would expect to see in Japan

The realism is astonishing, the attention to details, light effect.. really worth the price, can't wait to see more room in the futur !

VR exploration app with photorealistic visuals but very short length(~10-30 minutes) and lack of details. Worth it when on sale. There are only 4 locations with unexpected dream-like transitions between them. They look great with high definition textures, sharp models and amazing static lighting. But the environments are almost empty(except for the market and cafe), they feel uninhabited. Works on Reverb G2 with custom controller mapping

For the asking price, this is a fair experience, it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to see it all. I really enjoyed how detailed everything is, and how the mood and ambient sounds change depending on the time of day, I wish there was far more of this

You can enjoy the atmosphere of Japan reproduced minutely. I would like to use it to introduce Japan to my foreign friends. It is very short time game with 3 to 10 minutes as mentioned in the description. Sounds of people are there but NPC are not there then you might feel strange like horror games. Don't worry to go to Japan. You don't need to pass through Pub to go to station in reality.

It's a nice little meditative experience, the little environments are really well designed. It's maybe hard to justify the price for what it is (short, as described), but given the pandemic it's a nice little escape.

This is one of the finest "experiences" I have discovered in VR. It is not a game. It is a series of architectural models through which you can walk on a limited, single path (you can wander off a bit, but there's only one way through). So don't expect game. Expect... magic. Expect to be transported to another country. The quality of modelling here is extraordinarily fine. You start out looking at a narrow door which lets you into a back alley somewhere in some Japanese city, looks like it might be 1950 or maybe it's just yesterday... it's night-time, shops are lit, the alley's a bit grimy but cheerful with paper lanterns. You can see the many patches on the shoji blinds outlined by the lights inside. And one of the doors is slid open just a bit... Yes, you can go through the door and into a wonderful little sushi bar, You can wander around behind the counter and check out the kitchen equipment and stare at the food (looking at it made me hungry!). And when you've seen enough you can slip out the back door into... whoa, not the alley, but a hallway in the subway system! So now you're getting the picture. The navigation between scenes is done Narnia style, by slipping through a narrow doorway or (on one occasion) into a cupboard! The enviroments are so beautifully rendered that I feel I did indeed make a little trip to Japan. They elicited "wow" and "whoa" and big grins from me every minute or two. Lighting, ambient sound, textures are all high quality and very immersive. There are not that many scenes (I only wish there were tons more!) -- the alley, the subway, a Tokugawa-era stately home (big traditional Japanese mansion with many tatami rooms, central garden, etc), a temple room, another temple room, and that's it. But I know I'm going to revisit this magical VR travel experience whenever I want a peaceful and beautiful break from... well, everything. Covid lockdown. Cabin fever. Too much news. I could just sit down in any of these spaces and enjoy being there. At the end of the experience is a "museum" scene in which all the scenes you've visited are displayed at table height and diorama size, so you can go and peer into "dollhouses" that you've already explored. Because they are the same models (just scaled) they are identical in every detail to the ones you have walked through at full scale, which adds a layer of delight. It's fun to stick your head through walls and peer at the miniature-world version of things you stared up at in awe on the first walk through. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED and huge props to the modelling team. My only complaint is that locomotion is teleport-only; I'd prefer to glide gently because then I would see more. The jolting leaps of teleportation mean you sometimes catapult past stuff that you'd like to look at more slowly.

Video version of review with gameplay: https://youtu.be/hs72Nygk8N4 Well I Love Japan, in fact a lot of people into video games do. Which makes Japan a fantastic theme for Virtual Reality applications. So of course with a name like VR Japan I was instantly curious what this actually was. VR Japan is collection of 5 high resolution areas connected to each other showcasing well Japan, we've got a street, a restaurant, a subway station, someones house... I think, and some statues that I guess I would call a shrine or something. You cant pick up anything so yeah you can see your hands but they don't do anything. Movement is done entirely with teleportation, and believe me this should have had full locomotion movement, and turning yeah its snap turning. The Audio sounds nice but makes the subway areas where there are long hallways feel extremely creepy as if you should see people all around you and just don't. The one place this app does shine, the visuals. VR Japan has very realistic looking graphics and its the one saving grace for the application, the restaurant especially the food looks like its right there and I'll be honest instantly that area specifically just made me want to watch anime and eat ramen. But while I feel I am more then fair to smaller VR games and applications This experience costs $10 and hardly goes beyond what environments in SteamVR's Home application offer and there is no way I could ever recommend it. Unless you want to sit in these places by yourself to relax there just isn't any value here that justifies even one 10th of what it costs. Looking further into it and you can find on the unity asset store that these environments are being sold so that tells me this release is entirely just a repackaged asset cash grab. So while I hate putting down the small guys. VR Japan sits as a prime example of the type of garbage that arrives in the VR section of Steam every week and I don't think I can recommend it at any cost. There are tons of free alternatives to this type of experience do not waste your money.

First of all, I like this app and the environments are fantastics. But there should be more... There should be more environments: walking a few alleys, where you can enter every little shops, visiting some famous districts like Shinjuku, Akihabra, Shibuya, parks, etc. There should have more interaction: taking some objects in hands (the chopsticks, some food, glasses, beer bottle, etc.), having the fabric signs move when you touch them or when you walk trough them, etc. It would be nice to have rooms where you meet with your friends and talk. There should be some AI people sitting or walking around. In resume, it should be a real VR world you can visit and interact with. It could be a way to practice japanese by reading the signs, and a way to prepare a futur trip.

Beautifully done, but not at all worth $10 for how short it is. I could maybe justify it if it included smooth locomotion and something to do other than just walk, but as is it just feels like an expensive demo.