kitsunebi

This issue hit around the time of the PS4 launch, making the weekly sales chart look a little lopsided:

That's the PS4 standing alone on top with 322,083 units sold, with the next best selling system being the 3DS with 30,284 units sold.  Congrats to the Xbox360, which managed to outsell the last-gen Wii with a whopping 239 units sold.  It's not often you see a Microsoft system anywhere but dead last in Japan, so thank goodness 148 people bought a 7 1/2-year-old Wii that week, giving the poor 360 a chance to have an edge over something.
As an aside, I just flipped through an issue of the UK's GamesTM mag lately, and it had the results of a reader poll where the 360 was voted the best console OF ALL TIME.
Cultural differences make the world interesting.

This scan was made for everyone, so please download it, share it with your friends and enjoy! If you share this scan elsewhere, please say that the file came from Retromags, where anyone can download it for free. Magazine preservation is for everyone. Thank you!

This issue includes a Dark Souls II supplement book, which I've appended to the end of the archive.
Ah, supplements...I've been guilty of it myself once or twice in the past, but releasing supplements separately from the magazines they belong to is a practice I'll no longer be a part of, unless of course, I have a supplement but for some reason DON'T have the mag it came from (as was the case with many of the supplements I scanned, which were thrown in as part of a donation years ago.)  I like to adhere to the primary definition of the word.
supplement /sŭp′lə-mənt/ noun Something added to complete a thing, make up for a deficiency, or extend or strengthen the whole. So please enjoy this magazine, complete with supplement. 🙂
260pgs

*kitsunebi edition*
This is the place where I usually wow you with comparison shots with the older scan available here, showing off some of the two page spreads.  I can't do that this time, because...THERE AREN'T ANY!  Nope, just single pages the whole way through. 
So this is what this download will get you:
Higher resolution - this scan is 3200px high, while the other is 2200. Whiter pages This mag was debound with a heat gun in order to get an edge to edge scan, while the other was debound with a guillotine cutter, cropping part of every page.  However, as I mentioned before, there are no two-page spreads, so the cropping on the other scan is barely noticeable since it was mostly just white space on the gutter side that was cropped away.  So the improvements to this scan in this regard are of minimal importance. To anyone who previously downloaded my scan from OGM or the Internet Archive, this version has been remastered/improved and those sites will be updated with this version once I'm able to do so. Unlike some of the other scans I've done my own updated version of, there isn't anything flawed about the older scan available here.  Which you prefer may be a matter of taste, but this new scan is still noticeably different enough that I feel it's justified offering it here for anyone interested.
This scan is on the LEFT, the older scan is on the right.


Oh, and WOW.  While I was comparing my scan to the other just now, I noticed that one of the pages is completely different.  Page 122 of my scan is again on the left, while page 122 of the older scan is on the right.  Perhaps there were regional variants?  Or maybe my copy of the mag was sold at Toys R Us stores?  Who knows, but the fact that there's an unexplainable and confusing variant of a Game Player's magazine shouldn't be too surprising to anyone familiar with their first several years of publications.  At any rate, now you know you need to download BOTH scans of this mag if you want your copy to be 100% complete BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!
page 122:

The highest rated game this issue is a tie between girlfriend simulator Love Plus + and the latest Hatsune Miku game (she who is also known as The Vocaloid Who Married A Real Boy™), both of which got the exceptional Platinum scores of 10 9 9 9.  But don't worry, there are also a few romance games aimed at women in their teens and twenties which are well reviewed, so digital romancing is an equal opportunity endeavor.  And for the older gentleman who just doesn't give a $%^# about trying to please the opposite sex anymore, there's the latest game in the Winning Post horse racing sim series, which also nabbed a Platinum score and allows you to focus on romance of the equine variety, playing matchmaker in order to breed a champion money-maker.  Anyone looking for a game with guns 'n' 'splosions is reading the wrong mag - Famitsu only covers games released in Japan, and those types of game are few and far between.
 
Confessions of love, Japanese style

They're all proposing to the rich old man who breeds the champion race horses, of course.

Complete with both supplements.  First being a Kantai Collection (KanKore) manga, and the second being a double-sided B3 poster for Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F 2nd.  If you don't know who Hatsune Miku is, she's the vocaloid software/singer on the cover of this issue, star of many Sega video games, and the happily married for 6-years wife of this completely normal and well-adjusted Japanese man:

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2508555/japanese-man-celebrates-six-years-with-cartoon-bride
What is this place I live in...

There's a Ranma 1/2 remake anime that just began airing about a month ago.  It's a trip seeing kids in my schools doodling the same characters that were my gateway into manga over 30 years ago.

Scanned by the Great J of Oz and debound, donated & edited by the fair to middling me.
Lots of DS9 love this issue with interviews with Sisko, Kira, & Odo.  Well, the actors.  But I don't trust y'all to know their names.

Scanned by the great J of Oz.  Debound, donated & edited by the not so great but OK I guess me.  Downloaded and enjoyed by people who are awesome.  More than happy to be ignored by any "SF fans" who would rather be watching the SW prequels. 😜
 

This issue's cover is by Tony Taka, a famous artist and character designer known just as well for his work in mainstream games like Sega's Shining series as he is for numerous adult manga and eroge.  In stark contrast to America, Japan is more like Europe in this way - having some of their most famous and successful comics artists known for producing adult material. 
This cover features Kirika Towa Alma, one of Taka's characters from Shining Resonance for the PS3.  According to the Shining Wiki, "she is an elf who learns the song of magic which allows her to freely change the power of nature. However, she is a better healer than a damage dealer. She may seem withdrawn at first, but she is generally known to be a kind person."

 
But more importantly,

Tony Taka, ladies and gentlemen.👏

*kitsunebi edition*
Here's the part where I let you know what's different about this file from the previous one available here in case you don't want to download them both to compare:
The images in this scan are 3200px high.  (The other scan is 2200) This scan was debound with a heat gun so that the entirety of the pages could be scanned from edge to edge.  (The other scan was debound with a guillotine cutter, cutting off part of the gutter side of the paper from each page) This scan was edited with the two-page viewing option in mind, so facing pages with connected images or backgrounds have been more carefully joined. Pages are whiter, colors less saturated.  Which version you prefer may be a matter of taste. I didn't scan the subscription card inserts (maybe I didn't even have them, I can't remember.)  So if you want to try your luck at printing out and sending in the postcard to subscribe to Game Player's Sports for Kids, you can get them from the other scan offered here.  Incidentally, the subscription cards in the other scan were placed EXACTLY where they appeared in the original mag, which actually interrupts one of the only two-page-spread ads in the mag, making it impossible to see both pages of the ad side by side, so if you DO want those cards, I suggest moving them to the end of the archive. For anyone who may have downloaded this mag from my Internet Archive account, I've "remastered" the pages somewhat from that release, so I'd recommend replacing it with this one (the file at IA will be updated with this one whenever they allow uploads again) There honestly aren't very many two-page spreads in this issue, so on most pages you won't even notice that the older scan has had each page slightly cropped, but for those who care, this scan should offer a more satisfactory viewing experience in two-page mode.
Examples of color/center join differences:
This scan is shown first (on the top).  Older scan is shown second (below).
 

It's been a couple of days since the Dodgers won the World Series and Japan couldn't be happier.  We even got to watch the end of game 5 during lunch at school.  You know, kind of like how we got to watch space shuttle launches in American schools.  It's that important, what with Shohei Ohtani being a national hero, and all.  A lot of people may think he's so beloved because he's such a great baseball player.  Others may think he's respected because he's so successful - the highest paid baseball player, EVER.
They're wrong, of course.  The reason Ohtani is a hero is because he's somehow managed to overcome the crippling clumsiness that normally afflicts all Japanese males from puberty onward.  The entire nation beams with pride as they watch him walk in a straight line without even once tripping and falling onto a female in a compromising position

or stumbling face first into the crotch of the nearest female wearing a short skirt

or accidentally taking a tumble and saving himself from falling by reaching out and grabbing two handfulls of boobs and clinging on for all he's worth BUT HE TOTALLY DIDN'T MEAN TO THO.

Yeah, he knows what I'm talking about.
                   

This here's a magazine 'bout PlayStation games.  I reckon some of 'em you heard of, and some of 'em you ain't.  Either way you got near two hunnerd'n fifty pages full of purty pictures and lots of them squiggles they call writin' in Japan.  Get it while the gettin's good, y'all.

ADULTS ONLY
I always give my mags a last look-see in two-page mode before releasing them to make sure everything is up to snuff.  I don't know why, but it really struck me how I hope everyone else takes the occasion to do the same thing at least once, using a CBR reader that was actually MADE for CBRs, not some P.O.S. PDF reader like Sumatra that inserts a break between facing pages.  Something about the big characters in the two-page ads filling up the entire screen just looks really nice, but not when a page break dispels the illusion (created through hard work in the editing stage) that you're looking at a single image.
This is how mags should look on your screen.  One image.  Not two halves of a whole.  (These are just screenshots of my 1080 monitor display - the colored side borders are automatically created by my CBR reader based on the color profile of the adjacent image, in case anyone is wondering)

 

One of the games in this issue is Revolutionary Girl Utena for the Saturn.  Any fans of the anime out there?  I haven't really watched any anime in the past 20 or so years, so my memory is pretty vague, but I remember liking it.

Interesting how the cover article on Bloodborne starts immediately on page 2 (the inside front cover.)  That space is usually reserved for what I assume are the most expensive ads (in addition to the cover, the first several pages of Famitsu are printed on thicker, glossier paper than the rest of the mag), so I'm guessing Sony paid a %#$!load of cash to get Famitsu to give that space up for the feature on Bloodborne.
214 pages

256 pages
Don't get too excited about the included supplement.  Despite being trumpeted on the cover, it's just an "illustration card."  What's that?  Good question.  It's basically a regular-page-sized poster printed on cardstock.  What purpose it serves is a mystery.  But hey, you're still getting a mag two and a half times the length and several bucks cheaper than any of the English-language mags published at the time, so what are you complaining about?

In what is probably a first for Famitsu, only a single game is reviewed this issue: Yokai Watch 2.  I don't think Yokai Watch ever made much of a splash overseas, but I remember how intensely popular it was here for a time, so I wouldn't be surprised if all the other publishers shied away from releasing anything else that same week, since nothing would have been able to compete.
And speaking of things whose popularity ain't what it used to be, if you were wondering who those garishly dressed girls on the cover were, good luck figuring out how THIS got 17 million views:
 

According to Sony's ad, there are two types of games.  "Octopus games" are so addictive you get calluses on your fingers from playing so much.

Then there are "eggplant games" which are silly but addictive.  Like eggplants.  Apparently.

 
Well, I mean, that's what they SAY...
Octopus shmoctopus...what I'm really seeing here is "a Japanese game with tentacles will give you calluses from playing with "it" too much." 
And do we even need to address the symbolism of the eggplant???  😬 yyyyeeeaaahhhh....

 
 

ATTENTION: This mag is printed Japanese-style, and must be read from right to left.  When viewing in two-page/book mode, you MUST set your CBR reader to Japanese/manga mode in order for facing pages to be oriented correctly.
This magazine...WILL SURPRISE YOU.  LOL, seriously you'll know exactly what I mean when you get there.  You'll be flipping along through RPG coverage...do-do-do-do-do...Dragon Quest...mmhm...Final Fantasy...yep...Lunar...uh-huh...BAM!!!!  Uh.....I did not expect THAT....
This mag also is yet another example of why I hate posters.  There was a great big double-sided Dead Or Alive poster which I meticulously cut into pieces so it could be scanned and then reassembled flawlessly in Photoshop.  But the end result when viewing it in a CBR is of course just a couple of images that look no more impressive than if they had been single A4 pages to begin with.  A lot of effort for something that the end user will never appreciate. 😭

I've been living in Japan for 16 years but I'm always reminded that I'll never truly fit in with the locals.  Case in point, I've never owned a full-body waifu pillow or a boob-rest mousepad.

236 pgs
Idol Pikachu chooses YOU!

The included supplement is for Bandai's Net Carddass cards (unfortunate name...) which are trading cards bought in packs that are used to play online games.  A meeting of the physical and digital worlds, and something I don't think ever caught on outside of Japan, though I could be wrong.
Today's trivia: The very first Pokemon cards, before the TCG existed, were produced by Carddass.
252 pages

Another joint collaboration with the wonderful J of Oz (he of over 1,000 scans at OGM) who helped me out with these UK mags which are too wide to fit in my A4 scanner.
I bought it, debound it, and shipped it.  He scanned it.  I edited it.  You're gonna download it.

 
Extensive restoration work was done to ensure this mag can still be enjoyed in the 23rd century and beyond.
 

I've scanned so many issues of Dengeki PlayStation with some Gundam game or other on the cover that I had to check to make sure I hadn't already uploaded this one.  But nope, this is 252 pages of not-uploaded-here-before material LOL.  I'm old enough to look through this mag and think "oh yeah, I own a lot of these games" without thinking of them as "retro."  Grandia and Incredible Crisis were two favorites reviewed this ish...