With that stupid remark said, allow me to explain: it seems that the groups that brainstorm something insanely genius tends to make people wary whether it can be worth playing or not. When Thief came out, I remember telling people all about it trying to convince them the genius of an FPS that really didn’t emphasize it, and they were uncertain if it made sense. I’ll even admit to being a fool by thinking that Deus Ex may not have been worth buying if I did not hear that the man god Warren Spector was behind it.

The fact is that if you want to try something new, you need to build the brand so casual gamers will recognize it. There are very few game companies in the West that have a strong brand name and are still alive. Those that are have a tendency to disband or crumple up, perhaps due to the scale of their operations, or their resident genius went off to do other things. Whereas most game companies work on a handful of projects over here at the most, overseas it feels like they’re always pushing stuff out the door.

By the way, the character designs and storylines for Eastern games are definitely watered down to the point of exhaustion. As much as people may praise the story of Xenosaga, I’ve found myself skipping much of it for soap opera lines, characters that don’t seem interested/ing, and being downright slow without reason. Give me Half-Life’s Stephen King-like style over that Star Wars-esque way Xenosaga ran anyday.

But don’t get me wrong, either, I know the East is equivalent of novelty too; Katamari Damacy is a good example of why I’ll even touch a console.

First off, let me say that I am a well-seasoned video gamer who enjoys games from both “West” and “East.” I lean toward Japanese games mainly because I am a student of that culture, and I have been enamored with the Japanese aesthetic since I was very young.

That being said, let me clear up some misconceptions many posters seem to have about the idea of “feminine” or “effeminate” males in many Japanese games. It did not start with Visual Kei (what some people were calling J-rock) phenomena — that was something influenced by the West’s own “Glam Rock” era if anything, though the Japanese have always had pretty young men singing and dancing on stage for a very long time. The idea that the Japanese seem to market toward women more may be true in the very modern day, but when one looks back through history, it is easy to see that the idea of pretty boys (called “Bishounen” in Japanese) was primarily for male enjoyment, because male love, or male depictions of beauty and eroticism were considered the highest form of erotic love. By no means is that a Japanese-only thing. We in the West also have threads of that very “male” culture. The Greeks, the Romans and the Egyptians also thought the same way, and male-male love occupied a high place in those cultures as well. (Arguably, those three are the cornerstones of modern “Western” culture today) The advent of Christianity subverted and suppressed many of those views later on (and that is by no means a denigration of Christianity — I’m a Christian myself) but it still survives in Western culture in the “drag” and transvestite scene that is largely lumped under “gay culture” in the West. In Japan, that old style male-male loving culture was kept alive because of Japan’s insular policies that barred all outsiders from the country for 400 years. Because of this, the “beautiful male” aesthetic survived, and has been incorporated in games and anime since the very beginning. Representations of pretty men may have been sub par in games because of graphical limitations, but pretty guys were always there, trust me. Only NOW (and by that I mean the last 10-20 years) has there been any real scholarly and marketing research on how much women enjoy playing as, and looking at pretty men, and in modern Japan (and the West too) stories, fan-fiction, comics and art about male-male love has been the craft of women, but the those ideas were started, and largely cultivated by men. So the next time you see a “pretty boy” in a Japanese game and wince, remember that there was probably a man behind that idea. So go ahead and enjoy, if that helps at all!

~David Minor

I’m too busy playing World of Warcraft.

Games like Lost Planet and MGS4 are showing that Japanese developers can make shooters too. They differ in that you can see your character on the screen. American FPS games don’t show the character because American’s would rather believe that THEY are the character. Even with Master Chief and Samus, you’re still faceless and could be anyone in that suit. In the event that you can see your character, it’s often the case that you can create them to look however you want. Individualism all the way.

Japanese players prefer to have a character created for them that they can play as. MGS and Lost Planet both have the character displayed on screen. They have back stories and/or interesting personalities. This is why so many memorable video game characters come from Japan.

I call out some of these differences in this followup post.

Then, you bash Bully, a game with an innovative subject mater, in favor of a game that has your fighting demons. Because no video game has ever been about fighting demons before…

Oh, what would good ol' Eddie Said say? From Sexy Videogameland comes a rather interesting discussion…

Oh, what would good ol’ Eddie Said say? From Sexy Videogameland comes a rather interesting discussion by Rick Luebbers of Midway’s Surreal Software on differences in Japanese and Western game design and gaming preferences. Some (most) of the general…