Japanese Video Games Should Stay Japanese
Why pandering to the West doesn't work and why it will fail again.
Video games are the largest entertainment industry at the world, being valued at nearly $400 billion. They are a permanent fixture of modern culture, with many younger generations increasingly shifting away from interest in movies and television toward this medium of interactive entertainment.
While many lament the general decline of Hollywood and the continual failure of once great media franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, 2023 was a generally strong year for video games with some of the best titles coming out of Japan. It’s abundantly clear by now that Western players strongly resonate with the likes of Dark Souls, Yakuza, and Persona, but for whatever reason, some Japanese developers appear to be in a crisis.
On Jan. 25, The Japan Times ran an article that took social media by storm. While ostensibly about the translation of Japanese video games into other languages, the real controversy arose from Western localizers being quoted as stating that they influenced the decisions made by the original developers.
Yakuza series executive producer Masayoshi Yokoyama additionally said that “We ask our teams in the United States and Europe to read the game's script, and they tell us if they see things that wouldn't be acceptable in their country.” The replies to the original tweet which posted the article give a good idea of how negatively these statements were received by fans. The general consensus is clear: Japanese developers shouldn’t change what they have already been doing for years.
Western fans additionally have little desire to see Japanese video games pandering to the political or social issues which are afflicting discourse in countries like the United States. There’s already enough domestic media that covers those topics, while Japanese media has often been viewed as a form of escapism away from all of that. As someone who has long loathed this current era of overcorrection and oversensitivity we live in, it’s a sentiment I’m fully on board with.
But is all hope lost and are Japanese video games really “going woke?” While it’s easy to fall into doomerism around this topic, I aim to be the one optimistic voice arguing for why things aren’t actually as bad as they seem with a little history lesson. There may be a brief period of some video games from major Japanese studios attempting to cater to what they (mistakenly) view as Western tastes, but past precedent shows this strategy doesn’t work.
Japanese Developers Have Tried Pandering Before
Let me take you back to the seventh generation of video game consoles. It’s the late 2000s going into the early 2010s and the big kids on the block are the Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii. A nostalgic time for most of my gamer readers I’m sure, but fond memories aside, there were plenty of problems behind the scenes for Japanese developers.
The Xbox 360 is notorious for having sold poorly in Japan, but its early years in the country resulted in RPGs like Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon, and Star Ocean: The Last Hope which remain beloved cult classics to this day. Why? Because the Japanese devs behind them continued the same mentality which made their projects in previous eras so well-received. While this brief period showed promise, Japanese support for the Xbox 360 essentially ended when Microsoft began promoting the console as a machine for U.S.-centric games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.
There is more crossover now in what gamers worldwide play, but consumer tastes between East and West back then were noticeably distinct. Japanese gamers generally preferred RPGs and anime aesthetics, while Western gamers were greater fans of first-person shooter games and more realistic graphics. This is of course a broad generalization, but the sales data of what sold in each region respectively tended to reflect that.
On the other hand, there was always a small, but vocal demographic of Western gamers that sought out Japanese titles because they were so culturally and aesthetically distinct from everything else they were playing. Series such as Xenoblade and Ys especially became popular during this period, with overseas fans even starting massive online petitions demanding that Japan-exclusive titles be given official North American releases. Such campaigns are less necessary today given that most games leave Japan, but the landscape of what could be commercially viable was not always so clear then.
Unfortunately, this caused some Japanese developers to essentially panic and make what in retrospect were the wrong decisions. As reported by the BBC, Japanese video games accounted for 50% of the global market in 2002, only to shrink to 10% by 2010. The most notable person to comment on this trend was Keiji Inafune, one of the creators behind the Mega Man series and the then Global Head of Production at Capcom. Quoted as saying that Japanese games were “at least five years behind,” he also stated:
“I don't think that Japanese games can't ever be popular overseas again. But they won't be popular any more in their pure state. It's like sushi. Everyone loves sushi in the West, but you can't just serve sushi over there like it is in Japan.”
The benefit of hindsight has proven Inafune wrong, but it’s somewhat understandable why he and other developers would feel that way. Even Fez creator Phil Fish infamously told a Japanese game designer to his face, “Your games just suck” around this time. This lead to international headlines, and while Fish would later apologize for his untactful remark, such sentiments influenced Japanese creators to think more about what could appeal to global audiences. Sound familiar?
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