Michael Pachter: ‘I Don’t Get Japanese Developers’

[NightDragon83]

Ostro said:

NightDragon83 said: 

I agree with most of what you said in your post, but lets not pretend that Japanese developers are the only ones pursuing innovation in the industry while Western devs are just looking for the next big Hollywood blockbuster-like cash grab.  Besides Nintendo's Wii and its success in fully realizing motion controls and introducing new audiences to gaming, what innovative stuff have Japanese companies and developers done in the last decade or so?  Indroduce movie-playback capabilities to videogame consoles?

Eh, when a country is ruled by a party it's the whole country, not just the ones who voted for them. Same goes here. MOST western developers go the Hollywood way and MOST Japanese don't. People always shorten things like this to general statements (actually not saying "all").

If you haven't noticed any innovations in the past 10 years besides motion control (not just Nintendo's) and movie playback, you missed a lot of gaming. That's the point where people start to think you only play those big games with big names that are famous in all media. Look around and you can find a lot more variety, innovation, crazy stuff, interesting stuff. It's the same with movies, music, books, etc. There's more than what's in the media every day. Of course, it's not cool because people don't talk about it that much and it's not as shiny and in your face.

Now who's generalizing?  I was talking specifically about the Japanese market when I said there haven't been that many innovations over the past decade in gaming aside from the Wii (and DS/3DS arguably), and you somehow turn that into "well you must only play those big AAA yearly release games that everyone's heard of".  There are plenty of innovative games I've enjoyed over the past generation or so that weren't AAA Hollywood blockbusters, such as Portal 1 & 2, Braid, Minecraft, Scribblenauts, etc.

Of course many of these games recieved praise and attention from mainstream media outlets, therefore I guess that means they're not very innovative, right?  But on the other hand, some weird hybrid puzzle/dating sim game like Catherine or the 10 millionth JRPG that tries to be different by featuring a slight twist on a rusty old battle system is innovative, right?  Sorry, but niche =/= innovative.  A game can be a huge mega hit and still be innovative to the industry.  Hell, COD4 is the biggest example of this...as much as everyone loves to rag on the series now, COD4 introduced an INNOVATIVE multiplayer system that has spawed dozens upon dozens of copies and is still popular to this day.

What have the latest FF releases brought to the table for example?  Or even the latest Mario, or Zelda?  How come no developers are rushing out to copy them these days?  This is why Japanese developers have been falling out of favor with many gamers lately... because they and many of their franchises are stuck in the past.