Kokuga was delisted years ago for some reason, but it did get a physical version in Japan if anyone really wants to hunt one down. Hiroshi Iuchi hasn’t made any brand-new games since but he has put his hands on a few things, like the arrange mode of 3D Afterburner 2 (which was delisted a few weeks ago, as was the third Sega 3D Fukkoku Archives collection) and Legend of Dark Witch 3 (for which M2 handled production, with Iuchi as director, not that you’d particularly know it without reading the credits).
Pocket Card Jockey is still best on 3DS, as far as I know—I haven’t played the Apple Arcade version but my understanding is that Game Freak took the old, years-dead Japanese f2p version and non-f2p’d it for global release, but without sufficiently altering the rate of progression, so you hit a lot of roadblocks that used to be paywalls but are now just the game arbitrarily not letting you win despite playing perfect games with optimal stats.
Code Name S.T.E.A.M. had nothing to do with Miyamoto, it was all IntSys—specifically, the director was a European dude who’d been there for a decade or so, and all the core folk were from the Advance Wars crew. The thinking behind that game was “the average western fan doesn’t like tactics games (because Advance Wars plateaued ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ) so let’s make a tactics game that reads like a TPS and trojan-horse them into liking it” but putting aside the faulty premise, the game’s just not that interesting and the whole “steampunk fairytale cthulu Lincoln mecha” thing is both on-the-nose and really dull.
The mobile version of DQVII, based on the 3DS port, never left Japan AFAIK, but I think it’s an otherwise competent port (as opposed to, say, DQVIII, which is distinct from both the PS2 and 3DS versions and not that great). The 3DS version came out way, way earlier in Japan but came out worldwide right next to the much later DQVIII remake, which did neither game any favours.
My big problem with the Dillon games is that the tower defense stuff just isn’t that interesting, and Dead Heat Breakers in particular bums me out because the devs straight-up said they tried moving away from tower defense but when it was decided that they were going to be releasing at retail, they realised they needed more Content and put all the tower defense stuff back in. It’s not offensively bad or anything but I don’t think I’m alone when I say the gameplay is not the draw. (I have zero idea what makes Tim think they’re “MOMA games”, except that Vanpool made them and he likes other stuff they’ve done.)
