Hero art for Eikan Nine Crossroad video game with Pawapuro-kun as a high school manager featured in the middle and several players surrounding him in action poses

Friday Starter – How to download Japanese iOS games

The road to downloading Eikan Nine Crossroad

From Kang Gang’s YouTube, this is a guide for making a Japanese Apple account in order to download games like the new Eikan Nine Crossroad. His channel also has some translations for certain Success Modes in different Pawapuro games, if you’re interested.

I followed through these steps and there are a few extra things I ran into:

  • If you’re on a phone with an existing iCloud account already signed in, you do have to sign out to sign into this new account. Make sure you have all your stuff backed up to iCloud anyway just in case, but this is all made to look scarier than it really is. Everything local to your phone stays right where it is. Sign into the JPN account, download whatever you want to download, then you’re all set to sign out and sign back in with your regular account. The games you downloaded on the JPN account are now playable on your regular account.
  • The first time I downloaded an app with the new account, I had to agree to terms and conditions then enter my phonetic first and last name. These fields are asking for a hiragana or katakana spelling for your name. I don’t think the values you enter for these are important, but just mentioning the extra step here.

Eikan Nine Crossroad will be coming to consoles also, but we don’t have a release date for that yet. Waiting patiently, Konami.

I’m still slowly looking for the best way to record off of iOS, which has tons of baseball games I haven’t covered at all yet. It’s especially strong on Korean games, something I’m always on the lookout for but tends to exist on platforms that are pretty tough to crack, like smartphones and region- or credit card-locked PC MMOs.

Bluesky

If you hang out in Twitch chats enough you’ll eventually come across a Bluesky invite. I snagged one and have earned the right to spend twice as much time posting on social media. (I don’t have any invite codes to share yet). Come on by and say hello if you’re on there.

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