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."

Comments

Eastern vs. Western design

[MilenCent]

Japanese developers tend to be more willing to try weird (sometimes, really weird) things, but overall tend to be less creative than their western counterparts.

In the West however, we have a long tradition of incredibly original games (most of the arcade stuff Atari created, SimCity, Civ, Grand Theft Auto, etc.) that gets drowned by the sea of depressingly ordinary work. The industry has systematically weaned itself away from our legacy of originality (partly by punishing creativity: push away your brightest developers, and soon all you have left are the know-nothing fanboys who think Lara Croft's breast size is a design feature), so even though we *do* have many brilliant developers, many of them find it difficult to do work they'd be proud of.

To me it seems like a case of each market possessing something the other lacks, something important.