Japanese games are showing Western devs HOW IT'S DONE!

[Jaicee]

Two things:

1) In my opinion, most Japanese video games are not good. AND...

2) In my opinion, most good games released this year to date are from Japan.

Both of those things can be and are true at the same time. Taking this year, I haven't bought so many new games from Japan in such a short span of time in seven years. The major winners out of Japan this year for my taste include Persona 5, NieR: Automata, Tales of Berseria, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. And although for me these occupy a different tier, I also enjoyed Resident Evil 7, Gravity Rush 2, and am currently playing through Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with great enjoyment. You can say that they're all sequels, but frankly so are almost all hit Western games. Also very much interested in Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers, ARMS, Sonic Mania, and Splatoon 2 for this summer. I haven't tried Nioh yet, though it does look interesting to me as well.

What I think a lot of video game developers, and many Japanese developers especially, have found this last year that they were missing before is a measure of balance in design philosophy. In my observation, over the course of this century, broadly speaking, video games have shifted toward a one-sided action focus. Let's take a single franchise as an illustration: Sonic the Hedgehog. We all know Sonic. And we all know how the classic Sonic games on the Genesis (or Mega Drive, as applicable) were a careful balancing act of speed and platforming in essence, where the newer ones strongly tend toward the speed side of that equation. Well in comes a retro title like Sonic Mania to revive the classic formula. That, together with the retro aesthetics themselves, makes it more exciting for fans than your average new Sonic game. Fans tend to favor the classics precisely because of their better game play balance. Same with Resident Evil. Since Resident Evil 4, we've seen the franchise move away from a balancing act of atmosphere, puzzle-solving, and action-combat in a way that one-sidedly favors action-combat at the expense of the other ingredients that made the franchise a success. But now, with RE7, we see things moving back toward the classic balance.

We could say something similar of Japanese RPGs. Japanese RPGs have had a lot of distinguishing hallmarks over time (some good and some bad), but perhaps the most distinguishing of them all has been their tendency to have strong stories and turn-based combat, where Western RPGs moved toward open worlds and action-combat earlier on. Since Xenoblade Chronicles came out, Japanese RPGs have gradually moved toward the Western formula. But now you're starting to see some push back. Lots of Japanese RPGs out this year have strong stories, some (like Tales of Berseria) use pretty linear world design to make sure their stories are good, and the most successful entry, Persona 5, also uses a turn-based battle system.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild revisits that franchise's roots in many ways as well. And how? By scaling back on the action focus and scaling up the franchise's original exploration and puzzle-solving elements (while also, notably, as a new innovation, introducing survival elements, which are quite awesome).

In short, this has been a year where Japanese developers have moved back toward classic, more balanced types of game design, and people are eating it up. That's because, broadly speaking, older games were often less one-sided in design terms. (Sorry kids! Maybe it's my age bias speaking, but that's just the way I feel about it.) That's what's working for a number of Japanese developers right now, I think.

I hate to put it a certain way, but overall, gamers are aging. Many of us don't have the reflexes we once did. Classic, more balanced game design is something that I suspect many of the older among us can remember and enjoy better at this stage of life. It's not just about calling up nostalgic aesthetics (although that doesn't hurt). It's also to do with just where our skill sets lie as we grow older. Maybe it just took the world's oldest population to figure that out.

It needn't be an ethnic or national thing though. We could say something similar of Uncharted 4, for example, which also succeeded by moving the franchise away from an action focus and toward a more balanced design approach. That may not be classic design for the Uncharted franchise, but it is for video games writ large. Maybe, seeing all this, more major Western developers (not just indie game makers) will catch on to the phenomenon I'm trying to point to here.