Why is there this perception that Japanese is better in the gaming world?

I'm tired of these Sonycels and Nintendocels thinking their JRPGs are of a higher quality. I'm tired of these weebs acting like they've got a higher taste.

Where did this perception come from? And why is there an obsession with anime/little cartoon characters? Seems a little suss to me.

Anyone who says that is a bro of mine.

It would be awesome if you elaborate a little more.

Where did you get that idea? They're garbage.

While I certainly enjoy me my fair share of “Western style“ of gaming like:

• Halo
• Forza
• Gears of War
• Mass Effect
• Dragon Age

my gaming preferences greatly lean towards games developed in Japan. A vast majority of my all time favourite games come from franchises such as:

• The Legend of Zelda
• Super Mario Bros.
• Metroid
• Final Fantasy
• Dragon Quest
• Chrono Trigger/Cross
• Ninja Gaiden
• Devil May Cry
• Contra
• Castlevania
• Bayonetta
• Street Fighter
• Final Fight
• Sparkster
• Legend of the Mystical Ninja
• Resident Evil
• The King of Fighters
• Blazblue
• Dragon Ball Fighter Z
• Soul Calibur
• Gradius
• Metal Gear Solid
• Breath of Fire
• Suikoden
• Mega Man

I could quite easily go on and on. 😅

I find most Japanese games to be a chore to play. They double down on awful storytelling and bad pacing. I am amazed how much favorable bias their games receive.

Why do you care? Just enjoy whatever you want.

It's not. I like a bunch of Japanese games because I find in a lot if them the art style is amazing. I've always enjoyed anime, so seeing those kind of art style and visuals in games had always made me happy.

However sometimes I do get uncomfortable with the metro sexual themes. The main character in SMTV for example is a guy with hair down to his knees, and curves suggesting he's a female. Oh yeah, he's s pretty boy too. I try to ignore it, because the game is good, but I feel it would have been a better game if the main character wasn't so ambiguous in gender. Honestly I would have preferred a more manly character like joker in p5. It's very common thing for Japanese devs to use this gender mixup in a bunch of games like final fantasy.

Let me say that if smt wasn't an atlas game, I would have stayed far away from it.

I don't know if I see or hear of them as being "better" than non-Japanese games, but I am generally surprised at how many people enjoy them, and to the extent they hold them dear.

They're all flash and no substance in my experience. Terrible plots and writing, dated visuals for the most part, and so on. Don't like the art direction in most of the games, either.

Japanese games to me are like those movies that are so bad they're good. Movies you watch ironically. Only the people that like them actually think they're good.

All of this just my opinion, of course 🤔

I'm still on the lookout for a good Japanese game. I want to be proven wrong, they obviously bring a lot of joy to a lot of people for some reason. So if you know any games that might be good for a guy that hates Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Dark Souls, Metal Gear Solid, and Vanquish then let me know.

This is generally how I feel.

Zelda is best rpg ever made. That’s probably why.

Japanese games have lost their footing since games became HD.

There's a lot of good things coming from Japan. But JRPGs in general, from the terrible story telling and pathetic characters to the heavy grind that turn a 10 hour game into an 100 hour nightmare, I just can't take it. But whatever, there's way too many games. If people like them let them have their fun. Marvel movies tend to be utter garbage and many love them too.

Blame Atari and Nintendo. It was Atari who fucked up E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and triggered the 1983 video game crash. It was Nintendo who then moved in and made every confused parent call every video game console "Nintendos." It was also Nintendo who got pissy when co-developing a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES with Sony, thus spawning the PlayStation.

So yeah, that's how Japan came to dominate gaming: Atari fucking up, and Nintendo being pissy.

Japanese games used to be the gold standard and they can still be quite good.

Ex. The best fighting games are still Japanese. Nintendo is still making bangers. Every game that borrows Souls-type gameplay mechanics is influenced by a Japanese game. etc

There's a shitload of good japanese games. I think that could be why.

Same. But that's also how I feel about most western games.

If you look at the top 100 best games of all time, I bet at least 51 of them are Japanese.

@blaznwiipspman1: was it a culture shock to see metrosexuality in some Japanese-developed games? We need to realize that the Japanese concept of gender identity is different than we Western gamers are familiar with.

^

Because they used to be top-notch and cutting edge until the PS2 era, so I would say it's mostly due to nostalgia and that pedigree. They have fallen in pretty much everything since then apart from Fighters, Hack n Slash and whatever Nintendo makes. In general however Japanese games still are better than their western counterparts in terms of game design but the issue is vast majority of Japanese games are JRPGs still stuck in the PS2 era which shadows other genres.

The perception changes every generation. Up until Gen 6, the common perception was Japanese devs were better. But then in Gen 7, the common perception was that Western devs are better. And then in Gen 8, Japanese devs had a Renaissance and that shifted the perception yet again. Currently, I'd say Western and Japanese developers are about even as far as perception goes.

Did somebody get a lump of coal this year?

@fpsgod: Answer: They're not? The top 3 best selling games of all time are from Sweden, USA, and Russia (respectively).

Nintendo games sell really, really well - half of the 20 best selling games of all time are Nintendo titles or sold exclusively on Nintendo consoles.

It didn't help Atari that the 5200 was craptastic, as well. And, while they were still releasing home versions of coin-op games, Nintendo came along with Super Mario Bros, Metroid, and Zelda. Who wants to play an updated version of Asteroids or Gravitar when you can play those?

@dabear:

Yeah, the 1983 crash was far more than just one game; ET was merely the straw that broke the camel's back. The American video game market as a whole was in a right sorry state at the time, which opened the way for Nintendo to come in and replace them.

Always a fascinating moment of alternate history: what if Atari hadn't fucked up, and opened up the American market to Japanese takeover? What would video game culture have been like, if America had at least one viable competitor through the 80s and 90s, and whether Microsoft would even bother entering the market in 2001?

True. One of the best things Nintendo did was learning from Atari's mistakes. They only allowed 3rd party games on the NES that were "Approved by Nintendo" - this solved the problem of horrible, broken games to be released for the NES; which plagued Atari the first few years of the 80s (which lead to the crash).

I remember playing a game on my 2600 that would seize every time if you killed the boss ship and a protector ship at the same time (it had some dumb name like starships or something) because there was a software bug; even when it worked it was complete garbage.

First I have heard of this.

Isn't that most games lol?

@Juub1990: I find more options with Western games but you are correct.

Different strokes for different folks, someone on System Wars should understand even that.

@lamprey263: No,no,NO! Metacritic tells us what we should and should not like. Stop with this nonsense of personal opinions.🤬

😂

This board seems to be a eccho chamber of bigot focused narrow minded PC gamers who live and die by pretending that first person shooters are the only games that exist.

It's funny many people in here who question the quality of Japanese games have already acknowledged in other threads that ELDEN RING (A JAPANESE GAME) will be the gold standard for open world games. lol make it make sense.

Triggered much?

Speaking of coin-ops... While many often pin-point the arrival of the NES as the turning point, the transition was already happening years before the NES. The transition began with the arrival of Taito's Space Invaders, which became a cultural phenomenon in the late '70s and kickstarted the arcade golden age. There was a gradual transition during that period, with Japanese developers eventually dominating the arcade industry in the early '80s.

This had a knock-on effect for consoles. The Atari 2600 port of Space Invaders became a killer app, boosting Atari 2600 sales. Over time, the Atari 2600 was starting to be dominated by Japanese arcade ports. Among the top five best-selling Atari 2600 games, four of them were Japanese arcade ports: Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Frogger. So the 2600 was already starting to become dependent on Japanese games, i.e. the opposite of how PlayStation today is dependent on Western games.

Before Atari went out of business in 1984, they were in talks with Nintendo to bring over the Famicom (NES) to the US. But after Atari went bankrupt, the plans fell through. So in this alternate reality, the Famicom/NES would still probably end up being released in the US, but by Atari rather than Nintendo.

Japan makes Excellent Arcadey games. Hence anything from Platinum and Nintendo.

They are not very strong on simulation aspects.

@mrbojangles25 Really hard to give you suggestions, since from my experience you prefer more Sim-like experiences and strategy games. Most strategy games from Japan, are RPGs, but there are a few strategy games without RPG stuff. Advance Wars, Military Madness and of course Shogi come to mind.

As for SRPGs Valkyria Chronicles, there is no pacing issue as every encounter is relevant to the plot and offers a unique experience. Fire Emblem typically follows a similar no filler structure, in fact, enemies (and thus exp and gold) are in a finite ammount.

Also, the writing of Dark Souls is really solid, but it is told through the environment. If you have access to a PS2, you could try Shadow of the Colossus too.

This kinda describes how I enjoy my Japanese games :)

Japanese devs haven't been relevant for a while. They are absolute terrible at making PC games on top of it.

Yeah, I would agree with the folks who say this point of view fell out of favor in gen 7. But to this day there are certain genres that each region tends to be netter at. West does is the top for FPSs and sims, Japan makes the best fighters and action games.

Good racism.

@Gatygun:Define relevant.

Because Japan dominates the Fighting game genre, and arguably the most relevant game from the AAA scene in the past 5 years was a japanese game (Animal Crossing). The rising star in the MMO genre is also Japanese and overall the Japanese gaming industry is making a comeback.

The fact is, 2 japanese games now have been met with so much success they had to stop selling the game for a while. WHich would be the Elden Ring preorders and FF14 (first it sold so fast they ran out of keys, then they stopped selling to slow down server congestion).

I would argue that Japan does Melee based Action games, Fighting Games, Platformers, RPGs and Arcade Games better than the west.

And yes, since Gen 8, jRPGs > wRPGs.

It's not so hard to understand when you consider the fact that most millennial gamers grew up playing Japanese games, whether it was on consoles, or in the arcades, or on handhelds. So you can partly attribute it to nostalgia.

In terms of modern gaming, Japanese devs generally approach game design differently from Western devs. In Japan, they still have that old-school arcadey game design where gameplay is king and everything else is secondary. Whereas the dominant paradigm in Western AAA game design is that the plot and visuals are king while the gameplay is secondary. This is why the biggest complaint you usually see against Western AAA games is terrible gameplay.

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, like Western indie games which typically lean more towards Japanese-style game design (e.g. platformers, Metroidvania, Soulslike, beat 'em up, etc.) or Japanese visual novels which focus almost entirely on story above all else.

I have no clue what kind of games or genres you're into, so it's hard to make any recommendations. But for what it's worth, I'd recommend checking out Maroxad's recommendations above. I remember him not really liking Japanese games much years ago, so he'll probably have a better idea of how to get into Japanese games from the perspective of someone who wasn't really that into them.

I wouldn't say I am a bigot, just extremely opinionated 😉

@Jag85: That's the weird part, I'm a Nintendo kid. I grew up on NES, SNES. I never had one, but my friends and I would always sleep over at our friend's house that always had the consoles. NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, etc...

I have an original Gameboy that still works and I play Tetris and Mario on it. I respect the shit out of Nintendo's hardware.

But in the past 20 years or so I just don't see many games for me. Maybe it's because I game on PC and I just drifted away from the Japanese games. I know there are Japanese games on PC, they just don't seem to thrive.

While I agree with the second paragraph... There's no real correlation between liking/disliking Japanese games and bigotry. You'd be surprised how many white supremacists are Japanophiles... including the Fuhrer himself, Adolf Hitler.

@Jag85 you gots to chill with the oriental supremacy, brother. It's a myth that Japanese is better.

That kind of just proves my point about how most millennials grew up playing Japanese games. Many have continued playing Japanese games to this day (like myself), while others (like yourself) grew out of Japanese games and moved onto Western games (or other Asian games).

I was more of a Sega kid and then jumped to PlayStation (like most UK millennials), so didn't really like Nintendo much as a kid. Ironically, I didn't really get into Nintendo much until I got a GameCube, and that's when I really started getting into Nintendo games.

For the last decade or so, I've mainly been playing on PC as well. There's so many Japanese games on Steam nowadays that PC no longer feels like a Western-dominated gaming platform like it used to be. PC is a platform for all kinds of gamers nowadays.

What kind of genres are you into though? I presume PC-style genres like strategy or simulation games? (Like Maroxad mentioned above.)

@Archangel3371 said:

@jaydan said:

Did somebody get a lump of coal this year?

Lmao!