http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYpMxMPZ-Mk

I hope not to offend someone, but I just watch this video of the cast of Indie the movie and both Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow gave there feeling toward Japanese games and to a point, I agree. I wouldn't go as far to say "Japanese games suck", but Phil and Jonathan may be on to something, or at least describe issues I been having with Japanese games lately. They are a bit formulatic, not to say most American games are formulatic themselves, *cough* Shooters, but Japanese games tend to have to odd parttern with them, where the tutorial tend to drag on and on through the game and become to self-centered through the game design where it sort of take half the fun out of the game. For example, Skyward Sword (even though it's still one of my favorite games of the series) I felt the game sort of lack adventure. This probably explain why Nintendo never tend to barely catch alot attention in America compare to Japan. Not only Nintendo don't have much American devs to work with, let's talk about Luigi Mansion: Dark Moon. This is where Jonathan Blow  got me here when he was describing his fusteration with modern Japanese games, Luigi Mansion have a bit of tutorial in it, but it isn't all in your face, I like it how it put you in a mansion and you do your own exploration, trying to figure out how to get pass this room. Their some puzzles in this game that had me stuck for quite a while, lots of small hidden areas that felt satisfying to fine. 

I hope Japanese game developers are breaking through the stagnation. However, the reality isn’t as good as I want it to be. I see they’re starting to be aware of the problem and that they have to do something.

They know they have to learn more from western games and create games that’ll sell more in the western market. However, they don’t know what to do or how to do it.

Even worse, their pride gets in the way, preventing them from learning from overseas developers. As a result, they end up staying in the domestic market rather than going global.

Some developers are saying [the] Japanese game industry is still doing fine, but that’s wishful thinking. Words are not enough, we must act and prove it. Unless at least a few titles from Japan make it to the top 10 games of the year worldwide, we won’t prove it.

I re-live all the latest Japanese games I play in my head and I came to think, maybe it's not Nintendo that's the only one that's stuck in the 90's, but Japanese devs as a whole or most of them. Not all Japanese devs have this issue, there are some great devs in Japan that make my favorite games and I still plan to pick up KH3 and FFXV, though to be honest, the Kingdom Hearts series is atarting to bored me a bit, they story in that franchise is starting to get ridiculous. I'm recently playing Kindom Hearts 3D, though the combat is fun, the story ...... is sort of crap. I bought Ni No Kuni and the design in that game is almost flawless, the real time/ turnbase battle system feels great, it put up a challenge keeping you on your toes and the writer is uniqne. I also look forward to Monolith Soft new project "X" as well. 

That's pretty much my thought, sort of got lazy on the second paragraph, running out of things to say.

what irony. the western market is dominated by violence, guns, fps, post apocalyptic games. in my opinion the western market stinks big. Graphics and cutscenes aren't everything

blow fish hahahaha.
Japanese people eat these - figures they would have a grudge

Sorry if the topic post is a bit mess up, something must have went wrong. I never wanted it to look like that, at least its readable.

Well, too many developers seem to be used to pump out games of proven franchises. That's not just a japanese phenomenon, but some popular japanese franchises are among the titles that show the lowest amount of improvements/changes for their sequals - the biggest offenders of this have for a long time been sports games though.

Another problem is that japanese devs seem to lag behind western devs in using the new tech and in creating content with that at a decent pace, which is why several projects seem to have lost a lot of their brilliance in level design and story design, because resources had to be used to get the visuals up to par with western productions.

This is old. Probably by like a year.

Western Market is nothing but smoke and mirrors sold on everything else but being a game. Game design wise they are immensely unsatisfying.

Also gotta love these Indy One Hit wonders. Getting one smash hit that was mostly inspired by japanese games and then acting like dev gods. Freaking Fish.

I don't even know what to say after watching this.

I thought the hate towards them was not justified but now I realize they're just downright stupid.

Honestly it's borderline [cultural] racism to make such gross generalization.

Phil Fish overestimates both his importance and talent. I'm glad he's gone. Even if I didn't think Fez was overrated, any developer worth his salt would actually make multiple hit titles before having the gall to spout off his opinion. What's even more crazy is that his game borrows heavily from the very developer's he's criticizing.

Of course that's Phil Fish. He'll complain about childish name calling while participating in childish name calling. He's decry all the attention he gets while doing things that draw attention to himself. He'll leave the game industry because of negativity, despite constantly spewing negativity himself. I think he needs some sort of counseling to gain some sense of self awareness.

too much of a generalization. japanese devs simply do not put so much effort into creating AAA console titles anymore. and you really can't blame them because the console market became less important during the last generation. for example console jrpgs pretty much vanished compared to the ps1 or ps2 era. but i think that could change next gen because right now you can see that story driven games with somewhat interesting characters become more important.