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Mega Man Designer Explains Japan's Waning Video Game Influence
eldavojohn writes "As one of the creators of Mega Man, Keiji Inafune remembers the days when Japan redefined video games. He believes those days are long gone as he reveals much in his criticisms of Japan's ailing game economy. Inafune says Japan is five years behind — still making games for older consoles with 'no diversity, no originality.' When asked why, he responds, 'A lot of designers, if they find a genre that works for them, they stick with it. A lot of designers just stick to a set formula. That doesn't work any more. You can't just tweak the graphics, work just on image quality. You can't compete on that. The business side is not keeping up with investment. You need to be prepared to invest 4 billion yen or more on a game, and then spend 2 billion yen more to promote it. But Japanese companies can't do that. So we're losing out to the West in terms of investment in games. It's a vicious cycle, a deflationary spiral. Because you don't invest, you can't sell games, and because you don't sell games, you can't invest.' He compares making games for Japan and the US to Sushi and basketball — two popular things but each done in distinctly different ways by the two nations."
"You can't just tweak the graphics, work just on image quality."
In general, that is what has been plaguing the entire gaming industry since the late 90s: graphics over gameplay. That being said, the rise of casual games these past few years has been a welcome change over shiny 3D graphics with dull repetitive gameplay formulae.
http://twitter.com/object404
Seriously.
If anything, the vast budgets of U.S. game makers are what's killing creativity and innovation in game design -- it's way too expensive for them to take much risk these days, and pretty much everything coming out of the U.S. these days is the same old tired formulas with better anti-aliasing and more accurate physics...
If Japan's economy is ailing, then that might kill off some developers (which is bad), but on the other hand, it might also mean that the focus shifts to lower-priced and lower-budget games. Even if such small-budget games tend to often be formulaic as well, the simple fact that they're much faster to develop and involve much less risk means there's actually a lot more room for experimentation. If you actually look at the selection of games available in Japan, I'd say this is true: despite a few "whales" like FFXIII, there's a vast range of quirky and interesting games for the DS, wii, etc. -- and these are what actually get the most shelf space, and seem to account for the majority of traffic in the store (well, judging by "where people are standing looking at games," anyway), even if the big monitor at the front of the store (paid for by Sony of course) is showing off the latest whale-of-the-month.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
If anything, the vast budgets of U.S. game makers are what's killing creativity and innovation in game design -- it's way too expensive for them to take much risk these days, and pretty much everything coming out of the U.S. these days is the same old tired formulas with better anti-aliasing and more accurate physics...
I've been a PC gamer since the early 80's, and people have been making that kind of claim for almost that long. I prefer the same kind of games now that I did back then; long, immersive (western) RPGs--and they have gotten better and better as the industry has matured and spent more developing them.
In reality, I can really only think of a handful of "good" American studios, Bungie, Valve, Blizzard and BioWare. On the other hand, I can think of a lot of good Japanese studios which consistently make quality games, Namco, Square-Enix, Nintendo, Sony, etc.
I'm not a huge gamer, but I can easily add a few to that list: Bethesda, Obsidian, Epic, id, Infinity Ward. Some of these developers have waned a little recently or been acquired by some parent company, but they still produce some good games. Even going by a list on Wikipedia, there are only a few other Japanese companies I recognize (such as Konami and Capcom).
These days, I don't see a reason that Japan would be greatly superior at game development than any other country. Originally they had something of a head start in the industry (many consoles have been developed there), but any more there are many talented and experienced people all over the world. Any country which comes up with something new will initially be on top, but things will inevitably level out sooner or later.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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"Bethesda, Obsidian, Epic, id, Infinity Ward."
Holy shit are you a fucking piece of garbage. What a fucking embarrassment to real gamers.
It's a school night - shouldn't you be in bed?
#DeleteChrome
I get tired of the "Get off my lawn, the past was so much better." No, not the case actually. Games are great these days. You can have graphics AND gameplay and indeed there are games that do. Name the kind of game you like, I can give you a few examples of ones that do it really well. There's more crap out there too, of course, as you get a bigger market you get more of everything. However if you don't think there are any good new games it is only because you are walking around with your hands over your eyes.
In reality, there are a few things at play:
1) We remember the past through rose coloured glasses. This is just a human condition. You remember the good and forget the bad. Psychologists think it is part of our coping mechanism. So you remember some of those games as being a hell of a lot better than they were. Go back and play them some time. Whip out an emulator and try them out. You'll discover many were not nearly as good as you think. Like Final Fantasy 2 (in the US, FF4 in reality). Loved that game as a kid, and it was hard. My friends and I would sit around and play it together to figure things out. Story was really good too... Well, not so much. I've played it now as an adult. The story is pretty cheesy when you get down to it and difficult? Shit I can knock it out no problem. The enemies are so simplistic, easy for me to figure out. I can practically play it with the turbo speed button in the emulator held down all the time. It can't hold a candle story or gameplay wise to the new RPGs.
2) You remember the good games better because you spent more time on them. You probably bought mostly games you liked, and if you got one you didn't, you didn't play it much. As such you don't remember all the pure shit out there. Consider that there were almost 900 NES games released in the US. You really think they were all good? Did you ever play the Barbie Sports game? How about Bible Games (a religious 3-pack game)? There are bunches of crap games out there, you just didn't play them much if at all so they didn't leave an impression. The good ones you played a lot.
3) General curmudgeon/hardass syndrome. For some reason, people get all tough guy about the past. "Oh games back then had shit graphics but they were REAL GAMES. We didn't NEED graphics, they were so good!" It is silly, so don't do it.
4) When videogames were brand new, it was easier to be "innovative" because nothing had been done. In reality most weren't, they were just doing things in games that had been done in other mediums, but it was still a "game first." Well when something matures, it is harder to do something truly unique that has never been done at all before.
So seriously, don't be a stick in the mud, open your eyes, and discover that there are many, many good games being made these days.
Now if you'll excuse me, I want to go play Dragon Age, which is a really good game.
BS - it's the "westernization" of games (and movies and so on) that is at least partially to blame for making people not interested. When they watch an Asian movie with a terrible English dub, that's all they think about - turns it into a joke. Same thing with games if they do a ham-fisted "westernization" - even just a bad dub, again, can ruin it completely.
There are games that are essentially just translated from the original Japanese, and they're plenty popular. The parent's example of the Katamari series is an excellent one (if you've played any of them, you'll know they're chock-full of Japanese cultural stuff, most of which makes no sense to anyone else, but the games are still fun), and there's the Dead or Alive series (they leave in the Japanese dialog as an option, presumably because they realize the English dialog is so terrible), Fatal Frame series (again lots of cultural stuff) and more...