Xenobla Chronicles X director, Takahashi Tetsuya, talked to TIME about his preference for things West, specially videogames, against the current Japanese videogame offerings.
- on Japanese videogames being very particular and tailored for the specific demographic and western games' performance in Japan, he said:
“Japanese tastes are unique compared to those in the West, so if you focus solely on gamers within Japan, you’ll always find yourself running into this problem. (I think this is easy to see when you notice that FPS-style games sell only around 100,000 copies or so in Japan, as opposed to 10 million worldwide."
- on his preference of Western things, including videogames, over current games made in his country:
"This may be a surprise to hear, but I don’t have very much interest in “current” Japanese anime and games, and I don’t play them, either. (I do get hands-on with them for future reference, though, and I still love older games that came out 30 or so years ago.) Most of the movies, TV dramas, novels, and games I pick up are made in the West. I don’t do this deliberately; that just turned out to be the kind of thing I like. As a result, I’ve come to the realization that it’s best to try and organically make the kind of things I like, or want.”
- on the rise of mobile games in Japan and how videogames for dedicated gaming platforms fit in all of it he said:
“We’re also seeing mobile games flourish in Japan while the console market declines, but the type of audience playing mobile games in Japan now has never bought my games, not since even before mobile existed. I consider the entire world to be my main field of battle, so I don’t worry about that at all. I also think that other companies’ RPGs, those with the potential to fight it out on the world market, aren’t going to be threatened by the state of mobile within Japan. That’s the kind of thought process that led to the completion of Xenoblade Chronicles X, and I hope that people will be willing to give it a try.”
- He also said that Monolith Soft’s next project will look and feel “pretty different from this one”
http://time.com/4149809/xenoblade-chronicles-x-director-tetsuya-takahashi/
1) Do you find his preference for games made in the West surprising?
2) What do you think on the Japanese games vs Western games appreciation situation?
3) For those who've played XCX, did you see any instance where the game could have revealed that someone who appreciates western games was in charge? Like adding an element from western games in the JRPG mix?
Nintendo is selling their IPs to Microsoft and this is true because:
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=221391&page=1
