Edge began its 2003 visit to Famitsu with an admission: “Famitsu is the world’s biggest-selling weekly videogame magazine. Edge puts its jealousy to one side to meet the company’s leading lights.” Its Japanese correspondent, Christophe Kagotani, remembered how he met the magazine. He was growing up in France, cut off from the games his friends in Japan were excited about, when an uncle who “knew nothing about videogames” walked into a Japanese bookshop and asked for a games magazine. He “was advised that there was only one to consider”: Famicom Tsūshin. For Kagotani, it became “the only link left with the Japanese videogame kingdom”. Outside Japan, Famitsu is best known for one feature, the Cross Review, in which four reviewers each mark a game out of ten. A perfect 40 has been rare enough to make news around the world.
Fast facts
- Began: February 1985, as Famicom Tsūshin, a games section of ASCII’s computer magazine LOGIN.
- First issue of its own: June 1986, published fortnightly.
- Weekly: from July 1991.
- Renamed: Weekly Famitsu (Shūkan Famitsū), at the turn of 1996.
- Publishers: ASCII; Enterbrain from April 2000; part of Kadokawa since 2013.
- Reviews: the Cross Review, four reviewers each marking out of ten, for a total out of 40.
- First 40 out of 40: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, 1998.
- Perfect scores: 34 by the 40th-anniversary issue, number 1950, dated 18 June 2026.
From LOGIN to a weekly
Famitsu grew out of ASCII, the Tokyo publisher founded around the magazine Monthly ASCII. Hirokazu Hamamura, by 2003 president of Enterbrain and head of the Famitsu editorial board, told Edge that ASCII’s founder, Kazuhiko Nishi, gave his staff a free hand: “He had no interest in entertainment but let us do it.” The games coverage started small. “We began as a corner inside a monthly magazine called LOGIN,” Hamamura said, “so by the time we decided to make Famicom Tsushin a separate magazine we were quite late.”
The section had started in February 1985, covering Nintendo’s Famicom. In June 1986 it became a fortnightly magazine of its own. Hamamura credited half of what followed to “our hard work and our decisions” and the other half to “the failure of our competitors”. When Famicom owners began buying a PC Engine or a Mega Drive as a second machine, rival publishers launched a separate magazine for each format. Famicom Tsūshin kept every format in one magazine, even though covering other consoles in a magazine named after Nintendo’s “would sound rather strange”. “Our competitors split their sales across many magazines,” he said, “whereas we kept ours in a single publication.”
Demand took the magazine weekly in July 1991. The name followed its readers. “When we saw the PlayStation coming we noticed people were calling our magazine not Famicom Tsushin but Famitsu,” Hamamura said. “So we abbreviated our name to its current form.” Edge dates the new title, Weekly Famitsu, to 1996; Japanese sources place the change in the issue of 22 December 1995.
In April 2000 the magazine side of ASCII became a separate company, Enterbrain. By the end of 2003 it employed more than 500 people and published sister magazines for single formats, including Famitsu PS2, Famitsu Xbox and Famitsu Cube + Advance. Edge put the weekly’s readership at around 800,000. One of the Enterbrain editors told Edge that half the readers were secondary and high school students, and about one in ten was female. Hamamura had been one of the weekly’s chief editors when Edge watched him co-host a creators’ conference at the 1997 Tokyo Game Show; in 2003 he still wrote a column at the back of the magazine and did “a few cross reviews sometimes”.
The Cross Review
Each game in the Cross Review is played by four editors, and each gives it a mark out of ten and a few lines of comment, for a total out of 40. Japanese sources date the first Cross Review to the issue of 17 October 1986. The comments are short. Lupin Kojima, writing in Edge in 2002 as a former Famitsu reviewer, explained that “since the space for comments next to the score is limited, reviewers for Weekly Famitsu must use their words in a very precise way”. He had just given Rare’s Star Fox Adventures seven out of ten, and said it filled him “with a great deal of sadness”: “a seven may seem quite high, but for a title developed by Rare and published by Nintendo it is very disappointing.”
High totals earn a place in the magazine’s Hall of Fame. Famitsu itself sets out the bands: Silver for 30 or 31 points, Gold for 32 to 34, and Platinum for 35 to 40. Developers noticed. Goichi Suda told Edge in 2006 that the overseas praise for his Killer 7 had changed how the Japanese press treated his studio: “without Killer 7, I don’t think Famitsu would give us the attention they do now.” The game had earned a Platinum award.
Western magazines quoted the marks as a guide to games their readers could only import. SuperPlay reported in 1996 that Gun Hazard “picked up scores of six and seven out of ten in top Nipponese mag Famicom Tsushin, so somebody must have liked it”. In 1999 Arcade noted Final Fantasy VIII’s 37 out of 40 from “weekly Famitsu, Japan’s largest games mag”.
Forty out of forty
The first perfect score went to Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, released in November 1998. The second, a year later, went to Namco’s Dreamcast version of Soul Calibur. Dreamcast Monthly reported that it had received “an amazing 40 out of 40 in Famitsu Weekly, the bible for the Japanese gamer”, and had gone straight to number one in the Japanese all-formats chart. Square’s Vagrant Story (2000) was, according to Retro Gamer, the first PlayStation game to receive a 40.
Perfect scores have stayed rare. For the magazine’s 40th anniversary, issue 1950 of 18 June 2026 carried an 80-page history of the magazine and the games it had covered since 1986, and a catalogue reprinting the original reviews of every game that had scored 40. There were 34 of them.
Sources
- Edge issue 131, Christmas 2003, pp. 78–81: “Famitsu Forever” (the world’s biggest-selling weekly; Christophe Kagotani; the LOGIN section from February 1985; the fortnightly from June 1986; weekly from July 1991; Weekly Famitsu in 1996; Enterbrain from April 2000, its staff, magazines and readership; interview with Hirokazu Hamamura). The following “Cross interviews” with four Enterbrain editors: readership.
- Edge issue 51, November 1997, p. 15: Tokyo Game Show report (Hamamura and Masaaki Tsukada, “chief editors of Dengeki-oh and Weekly Famitsu”, hosting the creators’ conference).
- Edge issue 117, December 2002, p. 28: Lupin Kojima, sub editor-in-chief of Game Wave DVD (“part of the Famitsu publishing portfolio”), on reviewing Star Fox Adventures in the Cross Review.
- Edge issue 162, May 2006: studio profile of Grasshopper Manufacture (Goichi Suda; Killer 7’s Platinum award).
- SuperPlay issue 43, May 1996: Gun Hazard’s Famicom Tsushin scores.
- Arcade issue 6, May 1999: Final Fantasy VIII review (37 out of 40 in Weekly Famitsu).
- Dreamcast Monthly issue 2, October 1999: news, Soul Calibur’s 40 out of 40.
- Retro Gamer issue 55, 2008: “The Making of Soul Calibur” (the second perfect 40 in Weekly Famitsu).
- Retro, volume 2 (Imagine Publishing, 2008): Vagrant Story, “the first PSone game to receive a perfect 40 from Famitsu magazine”.
- Famitsu, “週刊ファミ通2020年2月20日号”, famitsu.com, 5 February 2020 (web, secondary): the Cross Review’s four reviewers and the Silver, Gold and Platinum Hall of Fame bands. https://www.famitsu.com/news/202002/05191835.html
- Yuichi Mase, “『ゼルダの伝説 時のオカリナ』はなぜ愛され続けるのか”, Real Sound, 16 June 2026 (web, secondary): Ocarina of Time the first 40 in the Cross Review. https://realsound.jp/tech/2026/06/post-2429764.html
- “40年でわずか34作! ファミ通名物「クロスレビュー40点満点」の歴史を振り返る傑作カタログが必見”, Real Sound, June 2026 (web, secondary): the 40th-anniversary issue (number 1950, 18 June 2026), its 80-page history and the catalogue of 34 perfect scores. https://realsound.jp/book/2026/06/post-2427538.html
- Wikipedia, “Famitsu”, and Japanese Wikipedia, “週刊ファミ通” (web, secondary): the first issue of 6 June 1986; the renaming in the issue of 22 December 1995; the first Cross Review in the issue of 17 October 1986; the publishers since 2000; Ocarina of Time as the first perfect score. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famitsu and https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/週刊ファミ通