Addressing The Argument That Japanese Developers Are Not As Good As Western

[DevilRising]

It's a shallow argument at best, and obviously something painted by a person's personal tastes, nothing more.

To me, personally, I think Japanese developers still make some of the better games in the industry.

While it's true that companies like Capcom, Namco, Konami, and Square, all of whom once upon a time made games that were almost always golden, have now all fallen by the wayside and are shadows of their former selves (which is very sad), and the same thing could also be argued about Sega. That does not however mean that ALL Japanese developers are falling by the wayside. Nintendo, for example, is still inarguably one of the best game developers in the world, and they still manage to pump out interesting and creative, and most importantly fun games on a yearly basis.

But beyond big developers, the point many are missing here, is that a lot of smaller developers, such as Team Pixel, such as Nigoro, such as Good-Feel, and Vanillaware, and Team Ico, and Platinum Games, and Grasshopper Manufacture, and HAL Laboratories, and Monolith Soft, and Atlus, and Treasure, and Camelot, Intelligent Systems, and skip LTD, and Mistwalker, and Dimps, etc. etc. etc., all still make anywhere from good to great software, and to my mind, much of it is vastly superior, at least in the "interesting and fun to play" category, than a lot of western software.

That isn't to say there isn't great western games too. But this notion that somehow Japanese gaming has been "redundant and inferior", is both ridiculous and disingenuous.