So I was chatting with Pat a couple days ago and while everyone else was drooling over Bioshock, I was hammering through Persona 3. I’m salivating for Warriors Orochi which, as the tenth or so iteration of a last-gen title, I’m probably the only one in the U.S. dying for it. It was at that point, as I set Pat straight on the differences between Warriors Orochi and the in-development Dynasty Warriors 6, that I had a rather startling realization: I don’t care about “Western” games.
It wasn’t intentional or anything… I didn’t wake up one morning and say, “Hey, friends and co-workers: F’ You!”. But, like it or not, just looking at both the games I’m anticipating and the games that I’ve played in the last two years,I’ve really only gotten into a grand total of two games not developed in Japan: One from North America (Oblivion) and one from Europe (Overlord). I average about 20 games a year so we’re talking almost twenty to one!
Of course it’s not like I go out of my way to avoid Western games, I just pick up whatever strikes my fancy. Now part of this, I’m sure, is because I’m an RPG fan and they’re certainly light out of the West. Add in the fact that I’m pretty “meh” about Mass Effect. (I used to love Bioware; Baldur’s Gate II holds my crown as best RPG ever, but they really seem to be going downhill, slowly, ever since they moved to consoles. I hope Mass Effect will mark a return to glory… but it’s just not grabbing me yet.)
But it’s gotta be more than just a simple formula, RPG = Japan… This all started out when I was talking about Warriors Orochi, which isn’t an RPG after all. I dug Odin Sphere which is the last game I beat and definitely not an RPG, and my favorite game of last year (and probably the last five years) was Okami, which, guess what, also wasn’t an RPG. I’m also currently pretty psyched about the latest Soul Calibur coming back to a console that it will actually run decently on as well. So obviously I enjoy plenty of non-RPG titles.
Persona 3, Lost Odyssey, Odin Sphere, and OkamiLooking ahead, I’m anxiously awaiting the aforementioned
Warriors Orochi,
Eternal Sonota,
Lost Odyssey,
Soul Calibur 4, and, kinda oddly,
Naruto: Rise of the Ninja. Naruto is the only title in that group made in the West (by Ubi up in Montreal) … but it’s based on what was, at least for awhile (I have no idea now), the #1 television show in Japan… so I’m not really sure what that says about its pedigree… I think it would be safer for all our brains if we just ignore it for the moment. Now lets look at the other side of the coin: what about big Western titles?
GTA IV? Nope, don’t care…
Halo 3? They can keep it…
Half-Life 2: Orange Box? Never liked HL2, sorry…
Rock Band or
Guitar Hero? I played
Guitar Freaks and I didn’t care then…
Call of Duty 4? I’ll just head to Canada, thanks…
God of War 2? Ok, if it hadn’t come out during a crunch, I’d probably have gotten this one, but it got squeezed out by
Rogue Galaxy in the end, I think…
Bioshock? Can I have a new
Thief instead? (Pretty please with sugar on top? I’ll send cookies!)
Bio-shock, CoD4, Guitar Hero, GTA 4So what gives? Why, when I go down a list of recently played games or those on the horizon that I am excited about, am I attracted to titles from the East and unimpressed by those from the West? It can’t be a coincidence. I’m pondering this heavily right now… and I’d ask everyone who reads this to take a moment and consider the question for yourself: What sort of games attract you? Why? Keep in mind this is very personal. I’m not for a second saying any the GTAs and Halos of the world are bad games. That’s preposterous. But let’s say you’re drooling over the shots of
Team Fortress 2 but could give a rat’s ass about
Soul Calibur 4: Ask yourself why. I will do the same and be back with part 2 in a few days. But who knows, enough commentary and maybe I’ll make a reader submitted part 3.-Rick out.
[Ed: Check out Rick’s followup article here.]
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September 18th, 2007 at 10:25 am
You got me thinking about what sort of games I tend to play, and I realized that I tend to play mostly Western games. It’s not that I inherently enjoy them more (Zelda:OOT is my favorite game of all time); I think a big part of the reason is that I am primarily a PC gamer. How many Eastern games are developed for the PC?
Korea has some, but mainly MMOs, which I don’t play much. I can’t think of a single Japan-made game which was developed first and foremost for the PC (I’m sure there’s some out there, I just don’t know what they are). Certainly there are a number of ports to the PC (I played MGS2 on the PC).
Look at some of the most anticipated PC games for 2007: Bioshock, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Supreme Commander, Crysis, Half Life 2: The Orange Box, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars… Kinda seems like Eastern games are underrepresented, doesn’t it?
September 18th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
This post got me thinking. So I made a list of games that I liked.
Eastern Games I love:
* Final Fantasy VII, X, XI, XII, Tactics Advance
* Chrono Trigger / Cross
* Dynasty / Samurai Warriors
* Dragon Quest VIII
* Pokemon Ruby, Diamond
* Mario Kart
Western Games I love:
* Unreal Tournament
* Psychonauts
* Diablo 1, 2
* Starcraft
* Warcraft 2
* Warcraft 3 (D.O.T.A. Only, Not a big fan of the regular multi / single player experience)
* World of Warcraft (1-60, didn’t care for the whole raiding experience)
So what makes a game enjoyable to me:
* Setting: I tend to enjoy fanciful settings in my games.
* Importance: The actions my character makes in the game need to have some weight of importance to them.
* Consequences: The decisions made by my character, regardless if I actually get a say in them need to have a consequence - good or bad.
* Details: Little touches that add to the immersion - be it the creepy child’s laughter in the background of Diablo or the movie theater in FFX that allows you to go back and watch your cut scenes without having 300 game saves.
* Controls: If a games controls are frustrating or cumbersome it really deters me from continuing with the game.
There is of course a lot more that determines if a game is good or not. But for the sake of the size of this comment we will leave it at that.
Now to be fair I should look at some games I did not like and why.
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Ok, I really wanted this game to be good. But for some reason I just couldn’t get into it. Sure you can be / do whatever you want to do, sorta. You can customize your class to fit your combat style. You can completely ignore the main story line - just going around pillaging and invading dungeons and caves and whatnot. However, there were no consequences for any of your actions. There was nothing really compelling you to take any action in the game. I would load it up and walk around for a bit and then quit playing because I couldn’t figure out what my purpose in the world was, well besides being an errand boy for a dead king. Over all, this game felt like a shadow of what it could have been. And why can’t I be a blacksmith?
Quake 4:
Now this game was good for like 20-25 minutes - depending on how long it took you to get to where you are modified. After this point, the game is like a completely different game experience. The beginning of this game is filled with wonderfully scripted events and quad based play. After this the game just seams to fall apart. I think it is due to the isolation that your squad members give you after you get your modifications. This isolation in turn affected the game play as you were no longer involved in quad based combat. Now I didn’t play all the way through so things may have improved later on. But from talking to others it didn’t sound like it.
Final Fantasy X2:
This is one of the few Japanese RPGs that I have played that I actually hated from the beginning. It didn’t have the same epic urgency that most Final Fantasy games have. Awful story aside, the combat felt watered down. It felt like my party make up didn’t really matter because I could just change any character’s class at whim in the middle of combat. By allowing this they took out some of the strategic elements that we were used to in a final fantasy game – elements that made the games enjoyable.
September 18th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Awesome guys. This is a topic deeply imbedded in personal opinions and tastes there’s really as many approaches to it as there are people. Still, I think that just because there aren’t easy answers that doesn’t mean we should take a stab and answering the question!
Keep ‘em coming and I’ll be back with part 2 in a few days. If there’s a few more responses to draw from I’ll see what I can do to put together a reader response part 3.
-Rick
Off-topic PS: While it’s one of the Western games I’ve gotten into I’m mostly with you on Oblivion, Jeremy. I hit on it a bit in the last article but basically I think Morrowind is far more compelling than Oblivion because there are consequences to your actions.
September 18th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
I’ve been trying to isolate what draws me into a given game for a little while now as well. Unfortunately, I can no longer pretend that I’m a carefree kid with time to burn. No, I’ve managed to grow up, hold a job or two and even get married and buy a house. Unfortunately, that means that my time and resources are severely limited. I can no longer stay up for days and play a game that doesn’t deserve my time, and I can no longer walk into a game store and buy one of everything knowing full well that I’m committing to a month-long diet of Top-Ramen bricks. No, as an adult, I need to be selective.
Off the top of my head, my favorite games are: (in no particular order)
+ Wasteland (old school, represent!)
+ The Fallouts
+ Deus Ex
+ Baldur’s Gate 2
There seem to be a few dominant attributes here:
+ RPG elements
+ Western
+ Single-player
So lets examine this a little.
RPG Elements: I like a good RPG-style character- and item-progression in a game. In my non-designer opinion, it provides another axis of variance that a game can leverage to make the game more interesting.
Western: Not like John Wayne western, but in the sense that Rick is talking about in the original post. I’m really stuck on this point. I really want to like more Japanese games. I also want to like Anime. Unfortunately, for every example that I can get into, there seems to be an innumerable set of examples that just make me cringe.
I said I wanted to like Anime. I really like the idea of Anime actually. I want to watch serious (not-silly) animation that’s well-made, but far too often anime throws in robots with squeaky schoolgirl voices or some other embarrassing genre cliché that completely turns me off.
Single(ish)-player: This is a big one for me. I’m all for co-op modes, and I love to geek out with actual friends on a LAN, but playing against strangers isn’t for me. I played a ton of Quake 1 (and other online games) back in the day, so I’m not unfamiliar with playing against real human strangers, but I don’t enjoy it as much. Simply put: people aren’t nice. I rarely ever played against someone was able to win or lose gracefully. Even when I managed to win, it still felt empty.
I suppose I’d be remiss without mentioning MMOs along with the single-player item. I don’t like MMOs for two reasons. They’re generally predicated on the idea that everyone is a hero, and I don’t think heroics as an activity scales up. If everyone is the hero, then everyone is average. That doesn’t work for me. I don’t want to wait in line to save the world. Why can’t this be done in a simply-multiplayer world? Why does it have to be massively multiplayer? It doesn’t.
The other anti-MMO reason is just as fundamental to the genre. Remember when I said I don’t have the gaming time that I used to? I definitely don’t have time to dedicate to a game that is designed specifically so that it can’t be won. MMOs never end until everyone stops playing and the server gets unplugged. I get satisfaction out of playing a game to completion and then getting on to the next one. MMOs simply don’t provide that.
So, uh, there you have it.
-Jason
September 19th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
“…while everyone else was drooling over Bioshock, I was hammering through Persona 3.” This line here grabbed my attention right off the bat, because that is exactly what I’ve been doing as well.
I have a rather small ratio of non-Japanese games to Japanese ones as well (and to be honest, Surreal games make up the majority of ones that are not) and never really asked “why” until now. I’ve just always been happy that I never had to be one the poor sods standing in line in the rain waiting for Halo 2.
First of all, I’m an RPG lover, but I’ve always enjoyed other games as well, such as Metal Gear Solid, Odin Sphere, Silent Hill, Devil May Cry, among others, but still always Japanese titles.
One thing I’ve noticed about these games in comparison to a lot of North American games I’ve played is a very heavy focus on the story itself. While a lot of Western games may have good plot outlines, I find that I would play them for hours and see little to no story progression. 90% action, 10% story, whereas Japanese titles such as Metal Gear Solid, are quite literally about 50/50.
September 28th, 2007 at 5:54 am
Come to think of it, most of the games I’ve bought are just games that had nice shiny covers with pretty pictures on.
I also like books, and confused Morrowind with a book, mayhaps the happiest mistake of my life.
Hope that helps.
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:51 pm
I am a universal gamer. I am Asian. I don’t like RPG (beside MMOs), I am more of a Action/Adventure, RTS and Tactical FPS person.
For the East. Most of the Eastern games have better story, and take things nice and slow.
I like Zelda. I like metriod prime (does it count as West or East?). I also like MGS, but I haven’t played it yet. I want to, but don’t have the system to. I want to play Okami, can’t wait for Wii version. RE4, and SSB. I also like some lesser know games like GunZ and Granado Espada
For the West. Most have much better graphics and more action pack.
I like Halo, StarCraft, Counter Strike, Splinter Cell, GRAW (haven’t played). I am hyped about End War. I love sims games. I want the Orange Box.
For me, it really on Story, Graphic, and Game Play. Some people just like RPG for story. Some like FPS just for the Graphic. But I am very picky, but most of the time I pick on story. I like story of Halo and Spliter cell.
I think I would give games from other places of the planet if there are more. If they have good games from Mid-East or Africa, I might try. But they ain’t got any.
Think global!! experiment with new things. KEEP AN OPEN MIND!!!!!