Strangest Japanese Videogame Genres Discussed

Thanks to GameSpy for their column discussing a number of videogame genres that are popular in Japan, but not in the West. Picks include the more obvious such as dating sims ("Players look through the eyes of a young man and try to woo a variety of girls by making the proper dialogue choices"), pet raising sims ("where you raise and, uh, feed an everyday hamster... or a rhinoceros beetle"), and even voyeurism-based titles such as Primal Image, where "...poorly constructed 3D women with frightening facial features played brief animated sequences while you took pictures before the time limit ran out." Have Japanese-only genres such as dating got the capacity to take off in the States?

Comments

Re: GameSpy sucks. *sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm willing to bet dating sims will take off in America sooner than later.

Perhaps - but, as your parent suggests, they'll need to be Americanised first.

The problem is that these games are written by Japanese, in Japanese, for Japanese. Let's be frank - most Americans would be hard pressed to point to Tokyo on a map of Japan. How are they going to react to a game which relies on them knowing about, oh, Japanese Valentine conventions, to pick an example which crops up in a lot of dating sims? You can get some way by providing notes - explain what all the foods are, what the national holidays are, and so on. But that will only help for those Americans who want to learn about Japan.

So you Americanise your games. You set them in small-town America; you replace the clothes with American school uniforms, the chopsticks with knives and forks, the shrines with churches or whatever. You don't even bother to translate the tens of thousands of words of text, because it's easier and cheaper to write your own script from scratch. And you end up with a game that fans of the genre will hate, because it isn't Japanese, but American gamers will also hate, because it doesn't have guns and state-of-the-art 3D.