Japan Studio was awesome. The part I hated the most about their closure was that it happened so quietly like it wasn't even worth announcing...
Other studio closures are usually accompanied by acknowledgment of developers talent and contribution, but not in this case. They silently murdered them behind the scenes, and kept their brightest kid (Asobi). Things went south when Fumito Ueda left, and it was all but over when Keiichiro Toyama left. It felt like a smaller version of my dear Konami's fall into irrelevance...
I understand the closure though. As brilliant as they were, their output deteriorated over the years, and they didn't produce enough million sellers, let alone mega popular titles. Their most relevant internally developed games before Astro Bot were Ape Escape and Shadow of the Colossus. The biggest title they were involved with is Bloodborne.
As far as I'm concerned, SotC and Bloodborne are in the "top 10 of all time" tier.
