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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.""
The thing to keep in mind, though, is that Metroid isn't a very popular series in Japan. It's very much a franchise that Nintendo has kept around for its North American fans and tailored it with a Western audience in mind.
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.