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Land of the Rising Fun
I very patiently waited all week before linking to 1up's multi-part Land of the Rising Fun feature. It details several very good, very Japanese titles they've had the pleasure of playing lately. A lot of them are for the DS (no surprise), with Chulip, Odama, and Contact particularly appealing. From the piece: "I've loved Japanese games ever since Pac-Man rocked my childhood. Unfortunately, as the medium matures, its seems more and more Americans take issue with Japan's willingness to defy logic in the name of entertainment. Are the frequently goofy aesthetics of Japanese games a dangerous creative rut? Maybe not. Goofiness is making a comeback, thanks in no small part to the Nintendo DS, which is reaching new audiences with experiences that emphasize creativity above anything so mundane as mere realism."
Japan and North America are two different markets. Japan is a very interesting testing ground for new concepts and ideas. North America relies on a more tried-and-tested methodology. In the end this leaves North American and even European gamers is a stagnant rut of the same-old concepts continually rehashed and re-released.
Japan is what is keeping creativity in the industry, because companies know that whatever they make will sell to some success over there as long as its not foreign. Foreign meaning Microsoft, mostly. In North America, we see games made for our market fail miserably (Mark Ecko's Getting Up, for example) when some new ideas and brought forth.
It's not an end-all equation, but the people wearing suits in the game industry want to make money and Americans will buy the same thing repeatedly again and again. Sell them what sells, you'll do fine. Or will you? The American market is now so saturated with the same ideas that without any fresh ideas and concepts the market may crash. That's only speculation, though.
Viva la Revolution.
Electric Pickle Online - gaming news, etc.
If I had a nickle for every Japanese girl I have seen running around with a cutesy little keychain doll given to them for free by their cell-phone company attached to their $300 Louis Vuitton handbag, I could probably buy one myself.
The Japanese sense of style is completely bizarre, and what little translates in the American does so more as a joke than literally.
My girlfriend: That hat is not stylish. Why are you wearing it?
Me: Because it is a warm hat, and it is very cold out today
My girlfriend: but it is not stylish. Take it off!
Me: Uhhh.....no
My gloveless hatless skirt-wearing girlfriend (in Japanese): I'm cold...
I will never understand Japanese...
There are several reasons why we don't have games like this in US or Europe, but the main ones I believe are the cultural difference and, yes, a lack of open-mindedness and imagination in the West, both from creators and consumers.
The most popular games here are all the same, look at the UK charts, it's almost tragic: shooting, popular licences, sports, racing, always the same genres, always the most uncreative of the bunch. You serve them the same sport game every year and they buy it ! The public is not even curious towards different games, on the contrary, their difference is the best reason to dismiss them. It's almost an allergy to imagination and it's a feeling perceptible towards art in general too.
There is, to some extent, the same thing happening in Japan, some genres perform better than some others and some licences are more popular than ever, but the major difference is that imagination always has a place in Japan; so once in a while you see an unsual game ranking high in the charts, because the Japanese gamers have the open-mindedness to look into it and sometimes accept its singularity. The other difference also, is that game makers in Japan are willing to take riskes, their approach to game making is, I suspect, radically different than here in the West.
They have a passion for creating new games, even within established genres, like the shooting games that keep coming on Dreamcast. No one in the West would be brave enough support a dead console ! They don't think "how am I going to please the public ?", in the West that would be by giving them their fodder, thrill and violence, but they try fore and foremost to make interesting concepts come alive, concepts that they find appealing, amusing. They think as gamers, not as marketers.
Shinji Mikami, from Capcom, once said the public is stupid. I'm quite sure the same thought must cross many minds in the industry. But in the West, even knowing this, we still give them what they want while in the East they fight to impose their ideas. It is the definition of an auteur, like in the film industry, and that's the key difference perhaps: in Japan they have many auteurs (which has nothing to do with being famous), here we only have a few.
Japan anyway has always been a creative leading force in the world, from their traditional art which deeply influenced European art to the unique style of their animation; it's perhaps because they never completely forgot their past and traditions, which are still felt strongly in every aspect of their contemporary culture, as films like Chihiro and games like Okami suggest.