File under: Gaming Ground Zero. And thanks again to author David V. Stewart for sliding this item across my desk.
We’ve covered the descent of JRPGs from their peak in the 90s.
Recently, legendary Final Fantasy director Hironobu Sakaguchi explained how Western RPGs dethroned Japanese game devs from their place atop the industry in the aughts.
I think that one of the main reasons for that is the fact that consoles like the NES and PlayStation were very specific hardware. This made it easier for Japanese developers to master the hardware, as we could ask Nintendo or Sony directly in Japanese. This is why – I realize it might be impolite to say this – Japanese games were of a higher quality at the time. As a result, Japanese games were regarded as more fun, but when hardware became easier to develop for, things quickly changed.
Sakaguchi is being modest. JRPGs dominated the 80s and 90s, not because people regarded them as more fun than Western offerings. They were more fun.
This video brings the receipts. Check it out:
Enter Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi:
Japanese developers had been developing skills specifically for console games, but in North America and Europe, there was a long history of PC culture. By the time there was no longer a big difference between developing for console and for PC, Japanese developers could no longer rely on their specialty as console developers, and had to master PC development.
We’re now so far removed from a time when gaming consoles boasted significantly different hardware that remembering it qualifies as a GenY touchstone.
Ys can still tell a SNES game from a Genesis game solely by sound.
People who grew up before Ground Zero remember game devs squeezing impressive performance from end-of-life-cycle hardware they’d had years to master.
A lot of those late NES and Sega games are now cherished as rare gems that fell by the wayside at release.
Now that we’re on our third decade of consoles just being prefab PCs, whole dimensions of fun have vanished from the hobby.
Back to Sakaguchi …
Many Western gamers grew up playing Japanese games. When games by Western studios started to improve, they felt new and fresh when compared with the Japanese games those players were more familiar with. I believe that in entertainment, freshness is extremely important.
It’s refreshing to see him drop the false modesty.
Dude made the best video games of all time.
He earned the right to flex.
The torch-passing dynamic he brings up comes with its own problems, though.
It’s the same crisis we see in the movie industry, where big brand IPs are falling into the hands of film makers who consumed them as kids. But they’ve rejected the cultural patrimony that inspired and provide needed context for those IPs. So they’re churning out licensed fanfic.
Just look at the output from BioWare and Bethesda since the late aughts.
They don’t deserve your time or your money.
Learn how to stop giving both to them here:
