Slashdot Mirror
Lost Odyssey And Japan's Western Gaming Success
Gamasutra has on offer today an extremely honest interview with Feelplus president Ray Nakazato, a veteran of Capcom and Microsoft and an expert on the Japanese gaming market. Nakazato discusses a variety of topics with obvious candor, including struggle that western game companies have in Japan, the state of various in-development game titles (such as Lost Odyssey), and the history of the Japanese game market. "In the early days of the games market, Japanese games were pretty interesting back then, while many games from overseas were seen as being bad. Now, you'll find a lot of interesting and fun games coming from North America and Europe, but because of that experience that we have from the early 1990s, people tend to stay away from Western games.""
But not because they were Japanese. It was because they were good games taht people like to play. We hear this argument all the time with xbox. As if the Japanese somehow "owe" "us" because we like their game systems. You know, I'm from America and I don't like xbox. Maybe if we start making games that a large number of players over there will like and want to play they'll actually buy them.
It might take a while, given how long we've tried to just shove American-style games down their throats without any consideration of their tastes or sensibilities. To start I'd recommend making every male lead look like Meg Ryan.
Japan is hostile to foreign games to begin with. For example you don't actually hear World of Warcraft talking about how they do in Japan even though they seem to own the rest of the world, because Japanese prefer FF11 over that. But even if that's not the case, there's no reason to assume one culture has to like the games from another culture. It is probably safe to say that the USA will never be into dating sims line the way Japanese are. This doesn't inherently say anything about the quality of the said games, but merely a reflection of the culture.
I found some of the insight into the Japanese gaming industry to be interesting. Particularly how they develop games out there. It explains why interfaces in Japanese games, and electronics in general, tend to be so convoluted and controls in some cases unnecessarily complex. Its would help explain why Japanese consoles tend to be harder to develop for.
I also find it interesting that Nakazato finds Japan game developers tend to be behind in terms of technology and innovation. I guess it depends on what is defined as innovation. Many argue a unique controller is innovative. Others argue that more sophisticated, realistic gameplay supported by advanced graphics is innovation. Both are valid in their own right.
I could argue that many Wii and some DS games are glorified, repackaged flash games. I could also argue that advanced graphics add nothing at all to gameplay and in fact draw away resources that could be used to produce a better game. But that isn't always true in either case. Both have their place.
But I do agree than in general Western games, well PC games in particular, have always been sophisticated, at least on the back-end. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that those games are move fun. And Americans generally only have access to the best Japanese games, so we don't see all the drivel flooding the Japanese market.