Pretty good article. It's well written and makes some good points.
Zeal said:
this entire article is fucking garbage.
they're right, it's not that japan's games have changed, that's the root of the problem. they haven't changed and the west continues to evolve and get better and better. at this point, we are so much better, the japanese game industry has no one to blame but themselves.
This is pretty much true, and the article said it as well. Japan has failed to pay attention to Western games, or the innovations Western games have made, and Japanese gamers usually don't play Wetern games, so they keep falling farther and farther behind without even realizing it...
so let japan to be stubborn and refuse to change, that seems to be the only thing they're good at. and i am especially proud of the fact that western countries refuse to accept this fucking 'moe' or lolishit. call it whatever you want, but it is borderline pedophilia in disguise.
This is certainly not true though. Sure, there are some bad aspects to otaku culture, but you go way too far there... and as the article says, moe ald loli are not the same.
cosmicblizzard said:
When the JRPG fan's defense against games that actually try something different often is something like "I don't like change, keep it the same", I think that on the former point he's right...
Jin34 said:
It's more like PC devs brought to consoles the things they had been doing for years and a lot of people think that's new because they ignored PC gaming.
This is absolutely true. As a '90s PC gaming fan I think that the Western shift to consoles has brought as much bad as it has good -- I too mourn the loss of genres like flight and space combat sims, approachable general-market wargames, turn-based 4X strategy games that aren't Civilization, and more -- but at least it's improved the quality of Western console games a good bit, thanks to all of those great developers (and the best Western developers mostly used to be PC developers) moving over to consoles. That is the reason why Western console games are so much better now than they used to be, and it's an important one... while Japanese games go off in a completely different direction, failing to incorporate many of the improvements Western games have made. And when Japanese games are mostly for handhelds while Western games are for consoles, that makes the differences even bigger, and the gap between them even harder to bridge. Budgets, team sizes, design elements like control schemes, use of middleware, art styles, etc, there's a big gap now. So, many Japanese studios now don't even try to bridge it, and just make handheld games. That's a fine decision for games designed only for the Japanese market, but with how Japanese games used to be popular worldwide, just giving up on all of that because of market changes does seem to be a downgrade. As for Western developers, the worldwide marketplace is much bigger than the Japanese one, so while being unsuccessful there might be annoying, it's not as big of a deal as it is for Japanese publishers.
Overall I like both Japanese and Western games a lot, though, so it is too bad that Japanese games falling farther and farther behind over the course of the last generation.
alr1ghtstart said:
Wow, there really is almost zero western games on that best seller list. The US list is probably mostly US devs, but I'm sure RE, MGS, DMC games are sprinkled about.
Yup, quite true.