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Setting Sun - On Final Fantasy And Western Design Philosophies
Thanks to 1UP for its feature discussing the still-declining state of the Japanese videogame industry, despite recent figures showing a small increase in sales for the first half of 2004. Nevertheless, it seems that "Japanese hardware and software revenues [were] down 11% in 2003 and nearly 40% since the peak of the PlayStation generation in 1997". The piece muses on reasons for the decline: "Complex, lengthy, story-driven [Japanese] games demand an awful lot of care and feeding these days, and often offer paradoxically little replay value... [whereas Western developer] DMA Design hit on a formula with Grand Theft Auto III that... offers activities suited to both long stretches of gameplay and short sittings of cruising or random action." In a similar vein, a OPM-reprinted column from Andrew Vestal suggests a solution: "One possible catalyst [for design change] is the upcoming Final Fantasy XII. In an interview, character designer Akihiko Yoshida readily admits that 'many team members are huge fans of non-Japanese games,' and... the game disposes of large parts of console-RPG design expectations." He concludes: "It's possible the game will act as a Trojan horse, introducing Western design philosophies to a wide swath of Japanese gamers and designers."
I think this formula would sell alot of games: Decent graphics/music, Simple concepts/control, High replay value. EA knows this and it shows in their sports series.
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Sure, the Japanese companies' big-name RPGs are (de-)evolving to embrace the Western design styles. Makes me fear for Dragon Warrior 8. On the other hand, there's some new faces coming into the RPG arena. Namco just brought out Tales of Symphonia(Which I havent played yet), and they'd had the old PSX "Tales of Destiny" series, which had a nice, old-school feel to it. Personally, I was done with FF when X-2 came out. Hopefully the expanding field makes up for it.
Don't you think Super Mario Bros. or even Pac-Man is original? Or, in the later games, Rez, ICO, Katamari Damacy or Vib-Ribbon? Your talk of innate creativity of the Westerners is BS, IMO. GTA3 was good, because Rockstar was a good house. Not the Westerner (which is even divided, for example the Eastern Europe area has many capable PC-game developers with different concepts from the Americans and others, I believe).
As a big-RPG buff, personally, I don't see where the problem is. Maybe it's that the genere is becoming less popular, whatever. I don't think it is personally.
Is the genre getting old? No, of course not. On both fronts, better things are coming out all the time. Domestically, games like KOTOR are coming out that are probably more ambitious than ever before. I don't particularly like those games, they're too much hack and slash for my taste, but whatever.
On the Japaneese side, there's all the whining..yes whining, about how "linear" they are, no replayablity, whatever. They don't get it. What a JRPG, Final Fantasy style mostly is, it's a new form of book. It gives a story the length of an epic novel, but a graphical representation of that. There was no more replayability in the old days, there never was. Not that there IS no replayability, it's just what you make out of it.
Are the stories getting worse? Not really. Actually, to my mind they're getting more ambitious. The bar keeps rising. Of course, there's the throw away stuff, but then again, there's the great stuff.
For my mind, the whole epic of FFX and FFX-2 (Which is NOT a light happy throw-away game. If they did it without the "light" style, the game would have been too dark. As it is it straddles the line..) is one of the best stories I've ever experienced. Sure the game is linear. But it's supposed to be that way. It's a story to experience wrapped up in an entertaining combat mode.
If you don't like it, fine. But it's always been that way.
because the Japanese game market was crapflooded a lot more than the US game market? If you ever have a chance to go to Japan(which I recommend, beautiful country) walk into any used game store. I was just stunned that even in the little Tokyo suburb I was living in, the huge number of games for dreamcast, and ps1, ps2, and hell, they even had a huge rack of famicom games.
There probably are a few gems in there, but my guess is that most of the games are probably total crap. Maybe this just turned a lot of people off of video games. Look at the US market, whenever the market got hot, it was usually followed by a crapflood of games(Atari ET anyone?) and then usually followed by a downturn.
The piece muses on reasons for the decline: "Complex, lengthy, story-driven [Japanese] games demand an awful lot of care and feeding these days, and often offer paradoxically little replay value... [whereas Western developer] DMA Design hit on a formula with Grand Theft Auto III that... offers activities suited to both long stretches of gameplay and short sittings of cruising or random action."
Let me guess - this guy's new around here.
Seriously, the guy is going to compare a series that has sold somewhere around 22 million copies in Japan with a series that has sold somewhere around 300,000 copies in Japan and conclude that the latter formula works better? This makes no sense.
The Final Fantasy series is one of the most successful of all time. It has always been successful, and it continues to be successful. FFX sold 1.4 million copies in Japan, FFX-2 sold 1.2 million. FFXI is an online game - doesn't count. But let me tell you, a lot of people are nervous about the changes being made to FFXII - it's one thing to tweak the formula (nobody wants a series to get stale), it's another to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The fact is the FF series is one of the few bright spots in the Japanese game market and it's the absolute wrong series to hold up as a poster child for what's wrong with the industry there.
Thinking Japanese tastes are the same as ours is a rookie mistake. Rockstar is an American company (Rockstar North is based in Scotland, but their ownership was American prior to GTA3) making games for western tastes. GTA3 was #1 in Japan for a week or two, as was Vice City, but neither was a phenomenon and neither sold nearly as well as even the worst-selling Final Fantasy title. This is just a really dumb comparison.
Now, that out of the way, I'll at least concur with the obvious; Japanese game developers have got some problems. If you ask me, though, it's exactly the opposite of what's said in the quote above that's at issue - many Japanese publishers are shunning their home audience in favor of the larger western market, creating games specifically tailored to Europe and the United States that end up not selling well at all in Japan. Metroid Prime, the DOA series, Ninja Gaiden, Dead to Rights, Kill.Switch, SOCOM, etc.... all games from Japanese publishers and/or developers made specifically for a western audience that did not/do not sell well in Japan.
This is a new phenomenon - remember that the Japanese did not even sell consoles in the US until 1985, and it wasn't until the mid-90's that they really even consciously began developing games designed to appeal to both western and Japanese audiences. The primary audience has been slowly shifting from East to West ever since and it's now gone beyond the tipping point.
This has become a vicious cycle that's in danger of reaching the point of no return. Publishers in Japan commission games for a western audience because the overseas markets are larger, which leads to disinterested Japanese at home, which leads to further shrinking of the market and in turn more development specifically for the west.
The danger, of course, is that there are plenty of western publishers out there that know western tastes better than Japanese publishers do. So if you look at a company like Namco, their games have really not been selling well at all lately in either market, despite their focus on the west. If you ask me, the best thing to do would be for publishers like Namco to refocus on what got them where they are in the first place - plenty of Japanese games have sold well in this country without pandering to a western sense of style (practically the entire NES/SNES catalog, for example, along with most of the PSX and early PS2 catalogs), and they obviously sold well in their home country too. Japanese publishers have simply lost their focus over the years, and lost their way.