See my mention of Star Ocean 4 above. I think I stopped play when some random over stereotype military woman was laughing with awful voice acting and sound in general. Character interaction was sometimes dire in that game.What changed though, JRPGs have always had a certain amount of 'comic relief/cute' characters but are our attitudes changing or are they jsut more noticeable as games 'improve'?

I was saying to someone the other day (in real life!!) that a character like Steiner in modern FF games would never work. It's kinda sad, he is a fantastic character.

Edge Magazine reviews might be a good example, they have given 9 tens this generation, more than the last 2 gens combined (are games getting that much better?) but out of those 9 four were japanese made. That's good, although 2 were Mario Galaxy (1 and 2). GTA5 will get another 10 based on their recent obsession with giving high marks.

On the subject, here is an example of my idea that studios/publishers are abandoning known franchises. http://www.animenewsnetwork.co.uk/interest/2013-04-06/producer/new-star-ocean-valkyrie-profile-romancing-saga-not-being-made-now

Sad as I'd love to see a new Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile. I just hope Drakengard 3 gets localised.

The reason I think Western games are leaps and bounds better is not graphics and online. It's everything. Story, characters, setting, gameplay, music, graphics, art style, etc etc. And please, western games cap out at 8 hours? Bullshit. Just this year Ive put in over 50 hours each into Far Cry 3, Skyrim, Red Dead. Sure, maybe CoD is shorter campaign wise but you already know that's not the point of the game, online competition is.

If you can use GTA, why not use Zelda?  Started top down on the NES, turned fully 3D on the N64, motion controls (and I would add more if I played the game) on the Wii, and there may be yet another one of these innovations for the series in the one for Wii U.

I wouldn't call Japanese games better at story. They just tend to fall back on a different set of tropes (again and again) and are more likely to be text-based so you don't have to put up with terrible voice acting so much.

What I do think Japanese developers are better at is art design and polish. The art design tends to be cleaner and more unique, while western developers tend to choose from only a handful of styles and embellish an absurd amount of detail in a misguided effort to demonstrates how sophisticated their graphics are. And Japanese devs are far less likely to be seduced by the idea that glitches in the game are acceptable and can be fixed post-release.

The thing is... oddly most JAPANESE developers seem to agree too. Or at least the more renowned ones.

If I had to guess why, i'd say that it has nothing to do with graphics... they say that because Western Game Development has changed vastly while Japanese games... while still good. are basically the same The designs mostly are the same they've always been.

Back when JRPGs copied Ultima.

I would agree with you on some of that. As I stated myself, many companies I used to love, like Capcom, like Konami, like Squaresoft, they used to put out games that were almost always guaranteed to be good, if not outright amazing. A long time ago. But within the last 15+ years, they're really all gone progressively downhill, further and further. To the point now that Capcom and Konami both seem fairly incapable of actually making anything by themselves, except for RE and MGS. They farm out their other franchises, or at least the ones they even bother with anymore, to outside developers, and now even Western developers. Look what a western dev did, for example, to Castlevania. Not a fan of that at all, personally, even though I hadn't been a fan of what Konami themselves had been trying to do with 3D CV for a long time. They at least used to make solid-to-good 2D CV games for portables. Now they don't even do that. And Final Fantasy has been in the shitter for a long time as well.

But the one area that I disagree with Blow, is in acting like these bigger publishers are all that matter. As if they're the only example of modern Japanese development. A lot of the developers I've previous mentioned, like Good-Feel, like Vanillaware, like Pixel, and Nigoro, and Team Ico, and Platinum, etc., I feel they're some of the very best development houses in the industry right now. And in general, I just felt it was really snobbish of Fish and Blow, etc., to take that stance publicly, and basically dress down that poor Japanese guy, as if they were experts on great gaming and could "Teach the Japanese a thing or two"....it was just really arrogant.

Just keep in mind that that is your personal taste and opinions talking. Just as mine are. It certainlty isn't a "fact" that western devs are "better". It all boils down to peope's personal preferences in gaming styles.

the whole west vs east argument is dependent on generalizations