Square Enix is taking manga into the VR space with a newly launched title called Tales of Wedding Rings VR, its first but likely not last virtual reality manga that lets readers “step inside the story” and essentially live the moments happening on the pages. For fans of the original manga, Tales of Wedding Rings VR brings a whole new experience to the story with some features that are only achievable in virtual reality, like the LiveWindow View feature which takes each panel of the manga and slits it apart into its own 3D view that you can explore thanks to the multiple viewing angles.
The entire world of the manga is completely 3D so as to immerse the reader into everything going on and Square Enix used real voice actors to cast the voices of the characters, then produced those voices into 3D sound to help give off the effect that you’re actually in the manga itself. If you read manga and watch anime it should feel like you’re watching an anime, or rather living one, than reading a manga.
Tales of Wedding Rings VR supports both English and Japanese for the languages, it’ll cost $20, and aside from requiring the Oculus Rift headset and a compatible PC to power it, you’ll also need the Oculus Touch controllers to move through the pages of the manga. Naturally, Square Enix wanted to make sure things were as familiar as possible so everything was recreated in a monochrome style with black and white pages. Right now this is only available on the Rift headset so although Oculus powers the software experience on Gear VR and its own Oculus Go, neither of those will be able to access Tales of Wedding Rings VR. That said there’s always the possibility that Square Enix could launch the content on other platforms down the line.