The Japanese will rise again next gen,mark my words.

Lol a pezus' avatar, bro fist to m-b-p.

Now, I will say I hope this troublemaker fattyDingDong is permabanned here soon as he spreads ideas that all Americans are arrogant assholes.

That being said, I do believe almost every Japanese game I have played this gen was inferior to most Western games I have played. There were a few hits in Metal Gear and Valkyrie Chronicles, Mario Kart, but otherwise they were bad.

Finally, American games often suck too, finally got gears 3 and so far it is easy and generic and I will write my full views on my wall as usual.

irrelevant enough to start a thread about it?

You know that's wrong ;) the Wii-series (Wii Sports, Play, Fit etc) outsold everything! According to Wikipedia the Wii-series has sold over 190m copies, exclusivly to the Wii. CoD has sold (according to VGC) 130m copies - and to several platforms under a longer time.

And to say that the japanese's franchises are declining is to disregard the sales of NSMB to DS and Wii, Zelda TP and Mario Kart.

Yes, all the above exemples are from Nintendo - but Nintendo are from Japan ;)

read the sentence between the ones you highlighted. Nintendo is the only big japanese developer left.

I'm going to paste something i posted on a different site. It's pretty much about the exact same topic.

"I blame Microsoft and the 360. The 360 was heavily marketed in NA and became popular due to the year head start and cheaper price tag. Then factor in that a lot of the AAA titles were strictly western i.e Halo and Gears of War. Not to mention the fact that the original Xbox was always focused on delivering PC games (western rpgs) on a console. This gen has made gaming less of a cliche hobby and more of a mainstream activity. So with there being more People in NA than Japan, Most people found themselves with the "popular" choice. Xbox 360.

Now that a bunch of new people have entered the market, and most of those people are used to/expect Western games, Japanese developers decided to try to capture a piece of this new market by trying to make their games appeal to Westerners more. But by doing this they make bastardized versions of certain games which ultimately fail to impress Western audiences while at the same time disappointing fans of Japanese games.

Basically more people have entered the market, and unfortunately they only want what they think is "cool" i.e Cod/Halo/Gears (because i could argue that most people who play Xbox are casual gamers, at least that's what my experiences in real life had led me to believe). Which at the moment are Western developed games.

If it sounds like i have a bias against Microsoft. Mabey I do, because it's my belief that they add nothing of importance or value to the gaming industry while at the same time they are changing the market and taking away focus on the games that I like (Japanese ones).

Just my opinion though, I don't think my opinion is stronger or better than anyone else's and I don't mean to offend anybody, feel free to disagree.

EDIT: Let me just say that while I do like fps/tps games, (I do like Gears too, so i'm not hating on it :p) the amount of attention on them this gen is ridiculous. Also, Western rpgs are the most dull,uncreative,and boring games I have ever played. "

I just want to add that I have friends who have 360's and they are definitely not casual gamers. I'm not saying the 360 is for casuals or everyone who plays it must only be playing it to be "cool". There are a lot of people who prefer the 360 for various reason and i respect their opinion. However, at least in my experiences, a TON of people who play 360 are the type of people i described. The "huh? oh is that game cool? Is everyone else playing it? Then I must get it and play the game too!" type of people.

Haha yeah, guess I got carried away! And I agree with your statement about Nintendo and the Japanese gaming scene in genereal as not as important any longer.

Diffrence between this gen and last gen is that western developers have moved from PC to consoles and that has created the illusion that western devs have somehow become better this gen. It's just that majority of todays gamers have always played with consoles so they ignored PC market in the past that had those awesome western games that they are playing now. At the same time Japanese publishers dominated the console industry. Not to mention that Japanese developers have moved to handhelds and western markets are not as adaptive for handheld software as Japan and because of that many of those great games are ignored here. I would say that Japanese games are just as good as always.

Figures that I had to read through this entire thread and the last post in it contains the point I was going to make.

Western developers have been making more different, advanced games than the Japanese for 15 years now... they were simply on PC until last generation (mostly). Once those games started bleeding into the console market, people went western-game crazy.

In time, people will burn out from playing the same Mass Effect clone for the umpteenth time, just as people burned out on the stagnated JRPG genre. It's bound to happen to shooters any day now, there's no way the market can continue churning out the same games with these kind of sales numbers.

Will the Japanese developers return with fresh ideas to fill the coming void? Hard to say. I don't see any indication of it but I don't see many interesting trends happening in western gaming, either.

PS. Referring to western games as "American" is completely fucking stupid. A large chunk of the best developers come from Canada, Europe, and Australia. While America plays a huge role in western games, they are far from the only ones contributing.