Is there any reason to spend 4000 Yen each on the separate Japanese releases? Any differences in content to the collection disc released in other regions?
Price gouging. #1 rule for shoppers of new game releases: lowest MSRP in USA. At the worst rare exceptional cases it can border on unspeakable. AFAIK Sony's terribly late "official" Brazil PS2 launch was over 400% the then-current US price.
It seems game companies have a tendency to release games that were sold as compilations in other counties as separate games in Japan. Example: Metroid Prime Trilogy was released as 3 separate games in Japan (well, really 2 as one of them was already out), whereas it was all on one disc in the US. The oppposite seems to happen sometimes too; Sega released a compilation of Sega Ages games for the PS2 called "Sega Classics Collection." There are more cases of this, but that's all I can think of for now. As a side note, I'm really looking forward to that game. Ico is one of my favorite games of all time, and SotC is pretty high up there too.
There is dialogue actually (in Ico at least, I can't remember if SotC has any); it's just in a fictional language. There are subtitles. So if you want to know what they're saying, the region you buy does matter. There isn't much dialogue, though, if memory serves me correctly - and you probably wouldn't be missing much without it.
I have the HK release of SotC (PS2) which features Japanese, English and Chinese subtitles. I would expect the compilation (in any region) to be multi-language as well.
After I posted that, I realized that was a bad way of putting it. Perhaps "no discernible dialogue" would have been better.
