| kain_kusanagi said: If you only publish games that appeal to a tiny island then you will only sell games to the people that fit on that tiny island. This is only good if you are Japanese or a part of the niche that loves Japanese gameplay. The rest of the world would love to play games with that Japanese style, but they want the gameplay that the West polished. That means RPGs with action and shooting instead of random battles and turned based fighting. The rest of the world likes spiky haired teenagers saving the world from crystal wielding clowns as much as the Japanese, but unlike the Japanese the rest of the world doesn't want to grind for hours and days and weeks. The times have changed and the Japanese gameplay has competition that it didn't have during the rise of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. The limitation of those early systems didn't allow for anything better, but now they are tropes and cliches and we deserve better. Japanese developers should most definitely give their games the style that makes them Japanese, but they need to learn how to make complex gameplay without relying on the 30+ year old turn based combat system. |
Not how it works. The West loves Japanese games for their Japanese-ness, which includes all the grinding and turn-based things that you seem to hate.
Just look at the numbers; the best-selling Japanese game in the West is Mario, which is basically simplistic, uncomplex gameplay, not the kind of game you're suggesting. If you want to limit yourself to RPGs, then we can look at Pokemon, with its lovable grinding and turn-based battles, being the most popular of JRPGs in the West.
Fact of the matter is, Japanese games sell for their Japanese gameplay, even out of Japan. If you want to argue that Japanese games have declined in prominence lately in the West, proving that the Western market is rejecting them because of gameplay, you may want to consider the fact that all major Japanese franchises that have declined in the West have also declined in Japan itself. This means not that these games are too tailored for Japan, but that they're simply not appealing to anyone. To become more appealing, they don't have to become more Western, but rather more like the games that are known to be very appealing.
For Japanese games, that means we're pretty much circling back to Mario and Pokemon.
“These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others.” – Groucho Marx
