#1 Metal Wolf Chaos
It’s a game for the original Xbox where you play the President of the United States and has full English voice acting. So why can’t you get it outside Japan?
Well, we left out the part where the president, who is deposed in a coup by his VP, gets into a giant Gundam-style mecha and proceeds to rain chaos on anything that looks remotely more complex than a pile of two bricks while shouting stuff like “SUCK ON MY MISSILE.” Yes, Metal Wolf Chaos is pants-on-head bananas in a way that only an America-by-way-of-Japan game can be.
Add to that the fact that it came out in 2004, when the political climate in the U.S. was still a bit, uh, volatile, and you can probably see why Microsoft was perhaps a little hesitant to bring such a hilariously ludicrous game to its home turf.
The story has a happy ending though. Around the same time that the developer, From Software, finished work on Metal Wolf Chaos, they hired a 29-year-old programmer named Hidetaka Miyazaki. He wound up making a couple pretty good video games that made quite a splash in the west.
