Keiji Inafune sounds like a lone Horseman of the Apocalypse for the Japanese gaming industry if you've followed his press over the past year. He might sound entirely like a pessimist at best, or a crackpot at worst, if not for other Japanese developers who express similar sentiments. Jun Takeuchi, the producer of Lost Planet 2 and Resident Evil 5, has said that the Japanese gaming industry doesn't have a "hope in hell" unless it keeps up with Western development. Tomonobu Itagaki, the creator of Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive, blames the state of the Japanese gaming industry not on a failure to innovate, but rather a failure of Japan to "understand the lessons of capitalism." While I can't speak to Japanese macroeconomics, I think that Itagaki is correct in that the root of the problem may lie in Japanese developers' collective inability to adapt to the worldwide gaming market, and the worldwide gamer. Put bluntly, Japanese games may be too Japanese.
It feels difficult to accept that the Japanese gaming industry is "dying" when we purely look at the numbers, because they arent universally bad. Nintendo may be down and currently suffering stock value losses due to the inability to release the 3DS for the holiday season, and Inafune's attitude (at least lately) is certainly informed by Capcom taking hits. Sony may not be turning profits even though hardware sales are up, but Sega has been posting profits and Square Enix has posted exceptional financial results this year. The data seems to indicate that the Japanese games market is slowly shrinking, not dying, and factors like the Japanese obsession with handhelds as a regional market surely plays into this. Inafune and Itagaki can reasonably be said to have their fingers on the pulse of their industry better than any outsider might, however, so it's reasonable to assume they are on to something, and to ask ourselves why Japanese developers might be in trouble.
In the 1990’s, it seemed like everyone was into anime and manga in my geek circles. I grew up watching Robotech and Akira in the 1980’s, but in the ‘90’s I discovered Mobile Suit Gundam, Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, and Cowboy Bebop. Eventually I moved into headier fare such as Grave of the Fireflies, and Hayao Miyazaki’s epic films, such that I had a pretty wide breadth of experience in the genre, certainly enough to recognize its tropes and recurring themes.
Project Sylpheed was one of the last Japanese-developed games I purchased for the Xbox 360, and I was struck by how all the characters seemed right out of a lesser-quality anime with spiky, pastel-colored hair, vapid female idiots, and the villain-who-isn’t-really-a-villain-but-who-turns-out-to-be-good. That was when it struck me: the game was silly. I couldn’t take it seriously as a video game, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this problem feels pandemic to almost all the modern games which I could readily identify as "Japanese-developed."
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition had ludicrous anime-trope characters and Lost Planet 2 was criticized by Inafune as being "too Japanese." The anime-esque characters in Final Fantasy XIII and other JRPG’s are too preposterous to take seriously. The fact that we even have a genre called "JRPG's" may be indicative of the problem. When I played the demo for Vanguish, I couldn’t help but groan at the stilted, forced dialogue during the tutorial, the over-the-top gameplay, and the story of Russian robots attacking the United States is absurd. When I ran across Dead Rising: Case Zero’s homicidal mechanic I wasn’t surprised anymore with how wacky he was, rather I just yawned with the boring predictability of running into him.
There's no foul if Japanese developers are making games for Japanese gamers, but Japanese gaming companies are part of a world market, which means if they want to sell strongly outside of their home territory, they need to produce games which aren’t “Japanese,” but which are "just games.” The Tokyo Game Show just took place, and the news coming out of what is meant to be a major event in gaming culture didn't feel like such. Rather, it felt like a window into the Japanese gaming market, just another signpost in the division between the worldwide gaming market and Japan. Yakuza: Of The End? Are you serious?
Ubisoft is a French company, but they don’t make “French games.” Funcom is a Norwegian company. Would anyone call Age of Conan or Anarchy Online “Norwegian games?" France and Norway are still Western cultures, so it's reasonable to argue that neither of them are a perfect metaphor for Japan, but they do have unique cultures compared to the United States, and I don't hear American gamers taking any notice whatsoever of the national origins of these titles.
Nintendo is one of the most iconic Japanese game developers in the world, but I never feel that their titles are “Japanese-developed.” When I’m playing titles like Zelda and Mario Brothers, they feel like regular-old video games. Part of the reason that Metroid: Other M is catching critical flak may be that it turns Samus into a woman who requires male approval or permission to act strongly, which is very much a Japanese cultural stereotype, and it did not serve the game well.
This is not about the superiority or inferiority of a culture, or a people. Rather, this is about video game culture as a distinct entity in and of itself which has its own trends and expectations. The division isn't between Eastern and Western games, but rather between Japanese games and "video games." If Japanese video game companies want to compete on a world market, they need to address breaking these barriers down. This doesn't mean that Japanese developers shouldn't continue to make quirky Japanese titles, and there are plenty of Western gamers who like those titles precisely because they are quirky and Japanese. It means that Japanese developers need to add to their lexicon and take efforts to make other kinds of games, as well. We're seeing baby steps in this direction with the Devil May Cry reboot being developed with English studio Ninja Theory.
News Editor AJ Glasser over at GamePro wrote an editorial last month where she seemed to confirm the root of this problem nicely. "The PlayStation 3's Valkyria Chronicles is one of my favorite games of all time — but I don't love the sequel nearly as much. My reason? It's too Japanese," she said. The developers she spoke to may wish that games could just be considered outside of the nationality of the people who developed them, and Glasser may feel that "an RPG is an RPG whether it comes from Japan or India," but to many of us this isn't how the reality of Japanese-developed games plays out. Certainly personal aesthetics play a huge role in this – what one person considers ridiculous or silly, someone else may consider imaginative or quirky – but the fact remains that these divisions are still too easy to make if we look for them. Glasser may point out the solution to Japan's gaming industry problem when she brings up fighting games:
"With the exception of Mortal Kombat, all the great fighting games come from Japan — Tekken, Dead or Alive, Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom. Yet you'll never hear anybody describe a fighting game as a Japanese fighting game or an American fighting game. It's not because fighting games somehow transcend culture, but rather because fighting games make it a point to include all cultures." In other words, fighting games aren't Japanese games, but just games.
Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, MA. He has written for The Escapist, and maintains a blog at punchingsnakes.com.