So Japanese devs need to greydark it up and increase budgets?

No. Clearly Moe games are a cancer on the Japanese industry, but Japan works best when they're not trying to do anything in particular. Gravity Rush is a good example. It's not grimdark or faux-western, but it's not "Hatsune Miku x Ikamusume boin boin 3," either.

Japan needs to stop scared of being Japanese.

Too bad nobody can top Nintendo in sales. Sounds like he is speaking purely from personal opinion... Oh wait he is...

"But personally, 80% of the games I play at the moment are not Japanese."

The day this happens I will drop playing games like watching movies. I rarely watch movies of hollywood "quality" and rarely play western "AAA" games.
If people would notice how much is put into some Japanese games through easter eggs and unspoken story, they wouldn't have to think about copying the West.

What about variety btw? Why does every media go West? Oh well, I have enough games to choose from the last decades that I haven't played yet. So no real loss for me.

I'm confused as to why he is even including handhelds into his argument. Isn't Japan dominating the handheld industry on all fronts? Why would Japanese developers for handhelds need to start worrying if they mostly make bank in their home country?

Agreed. We need this side of the Industry not to fall for the garbage the western markets participate in. We need this Industry to continue to create Video Game's. If Japan ever crossed over to western game design model...

I like both Western and Japanese games. It's probably 60-40 in favour of Western games for me, but 40% from a single country is still a lot, whereas my Western games come from different countries. USA, Canada, UK, France...

If Japanese games were made more 'Western' it would be a huge loss for me.

I can easily tell Japan has less of a budget in every Japanese game I played this gen except ff XIII. Part of the reason I usually dislike them. They should heed this man's words.

Double post- Site is running at a crawl pace lately so horrible.

NO. NO. NO. Keep your Hollywood out of my games. I prefer my Mario and Pokemon and Okami the way they are thank you very much :P