You responded to my comment but I think it's sitting awaiting moderation or something because it doesn't show up when you're not logged in. Is that something you can sort out, or do we need to call a mod?

I don't know whether there's anything like that DCS Black Shark in the East Asian market, because I'm not a vehicle geek at all.

I know they do have Densha De Go! as a massive geek train simulator, but I have no idea how in depth the controls are aside from they sell train controller accessories that cost a fortune. It is true you certainly can't wander off wherever you like when driving a train.

FF12 is just pretending to be an MMORPG, which do allow freedom to wander about anywhere you like, and get you arse kicked.

If you ever get a chance to play a copy, look up the Way Of The Samurai games for PS2. What happens in those is you are a samurai (I think that's the beginning and end of your backstory), something is going to happen in a few days time, play the game and change the events. You can wander off wherever, and walk into story events which end up being missions, and through multiple playthroughs and depending on where you go and what you do, you end up getting a different story.

There are still swords to power up, gauges to fill, special moves to collect and learn... but I do think that these games might just be the happy medium of exploration and dynamic story you are seeking.

The limitation is that in order to make this kind of game, the story has to be really short.

You started off talking about Chromehounds, which I haven't actually played (it's sitting on my shelf), but I do know it's by FROM SOFTWARE, and their games are quite often competently bilingual - aside from stats in English in the Armored Core games, Metal Wolf Chaos was completely in English (Japanese release only), Ninja Blade is dual language throughout - the characters speak English and Japanese whenever they like, and Demon's Souls is famously already dual language by default (that's one reason it's big on the PS3 imports scene). It's good English too. So, maybe they are a good company to bridge the gap?

I don't know much about Demon's Souls other than a lot of notable people are raving about it, including those who normally hate Japanese games. It looks like a really creepy and misery-filled Monster Hunter to me, so I haven't been paying attention even though some people are going "it really isn't! it's great! you should buy a copy!" It is open ended, you get to customise your character, I do know that. You may want to look into it as your next action RPG.

I've been thinking about some games I've played recently, and in Western games I think of the promise of freedom but being delivered linearity. Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy), you have a strong story and strong characters, extreme limitation as to what you can do, the game appears to change depending on what you do, how well you perform, and you're offered choices which appear to change things but it ends up being really really linear anyway. Mirror's Edge is all about people who are the only free people in the oppressed Big Brother type city... yet you never get to wander about at your will. In Fable 2, you can choose between being good and being evil (but it's stupid, you can kill people and atone for it by eating tofu) but apparently the story and end choices are identical no matter what. I heard the same of Infamous.

I suppose one reason I really liked GTA IV was because when I was playing as Niko Bellic, I never for a moment felt that I was Niko Bellic, which is great because his life sucks. :/ It was funny, it had a good story, it let you wander about but not too much, missions unlock each other, you can only get to other parts of the map when you've cleared certain missions, and the city felt like a real city, it had notably different districts, different people living in different parts of town depending on the price, and the choices you could make were personal. It never gave you false hopes as a player, yes some as Niko but it's the storyline and he's very cynical anyway.

Overall, I find that more satisfying. You can put me in a box and give me some toys and I don't mind, but if you put me in a box and tell me I can go to wonderful places and it turns out you've lied to me, I feel bad about it.

Come to think about it, Fahrenheit, Mirror's Edge, Fable 2, and GTA IV all have scripts written by European people. I wonder if that's significant... oh well...

While I agree in the whole that games do reflect the culture of the people who made them, and that on the whole goals are more ego driven in games from America and more story-following in Japan, and you get more random well-here's-fun-stuff-our-physics-engine-can-do toys in Western games, I can't help but think...

What about the "A-Train" train network management simulation games? Why is the "Densha De Go!" series so popular in Japan, when it's a deathly boring realistic simulation? What about "Tokyo Bus Guide"?

One of Konami's biggest franchises is the "Winning Eleven" series, known as "Pro Evolution Soccer" here in Europe, and they sell by the ton. There's also their Jikkyo Power Pro Baseball series of games.

They are realistic sims, they are widely known, they have been popular enough to be long franchises, they don't use special power ups or anything, and they are from Japan.

There are other realistic simulations from Japan in the realms of driving games, fishing games, radio controlled helicopters, safari photography and other wildlife observation games, running small businesses, producing a TV show, etc.

Whether the player is permitted free reign over the simulation varies from game to game.

I think partly the distinction between "East and West" is made all the clearer by the games industry itself. There's the idea in America that Japan=WACKYLAND and the people who generally like Japanese things are into escapism. So, you don't get many realistic sims localised for America. Similarly, there is the attitude from Japan that all Western games are Hollywood explosions and macho man FPS. The players reflect this too, and the stereotypes loop round and feed back on themselves endlessy.

Plus, on either side, text heavy realistic management simulations with a lot of technical jargon must be a real pain to localise. There are a lot of Japanese management sims, though. I see them regularly when browsing on ebay. You would expect it from the way that RPGs are statistic-crazy, yeah?

When Sim City was new, we did get Sim Tower localised from Japanese, followed by Yoot Tower (Ironbear has a thread about the game on the videogame forum at the moment). It's a fully fledged business management sim, you're free to make or break things as you would like.

I don't play FPS often because they tend to give me simulator sickness. Due to that I have read a paper that cited some US Army research into simulator sickness that mentioned that the condition is more common in Asians than other ethnic groups. That doesn't explain it all away, because you also hear stories of Korean players who are exceptionally good at FPS and menacing other players.

You don't get realistic war sims from Japan, but the last time Japan was in a war was in WW2 where they were quite notably really-super-bad-guys. Since then, their army got renamed to the Self Defense Force and they aren't allowed to do military things in other countries. I think expecting realistic war sims from Japan would be... unrealistic.

You don't seem to get space trading type games either. I mean, *at all*, now I think about it. That seems strange to me, but I suppose they never had the greatness which is Elite.

JRPGs with a lot of exploration... I think this kind of got phased out after a while. It's funny to see so many kids in recent months complaining when playing old rereleases of JRPGs, complaining that they aren't linear enough. They don't know what to do next! They are used to modern games where your hand is held all the way through the game. That's true of all types of games, it's considered bad game design if the player is not told what to do next. The same way people today are disgusted if they have to thumb through a manual instead of being led through a tutorial.

You do still get wide open exploration and total freedom in East-Asian MMORPGs, where you are often just "dropped in at the deep end" and left to find everything for yourself. They tend to be either Korean or Chinese, though.

The Legend Of Zelda games have really always been kind of "sandbox", right from the start. "Windwaker" especially gives you a lot of world to explore at your whim.

Oh, one last thing, I do think that the ideas of "levelling up" and stat building and special moves pre-date video games and televised sentai shows. If you have a look at old black and white samurai or ninja films from the 1960s and before, you often see themes of "the more suffering a man can endure, the more he grows, the greater his power becomes" central to the discipline. In these stories, the more pain a man goes through, the better he will be as a fighter, until he is invincible. The structure is the same as experience gathering, stat building, levelling up. I think this is so engrained in their culture that it does not seem like an abstraction, but as a visual / statistical representation of their beliefs.

Your blog post gave me a lot of things to think about, so I've managed to state my thoughts but I'm sorry they are a bit jumbled...

Nice post.

I remember reading something on the Internet about a Japanese game developer saying how he believed that the Western game developers have surpassed the Japanese developers.the Article

I think the reason Japanese games are as they are is because of a lack of PC games. Games like Ultima, The Sims, Civilization, System Shock 2, Battlezone and most flight and war sims came out on the PC. The Japanese PC games market on the other hand is more niche (there's an article on RPS about it, I'll try to find it..

This probably sounds like elitism or something but I've always found that PC gaming seems to be haven for innovation, as opposed to the console market (the dominant form of gaming in Japan).

I'm probably just talking out of my PC gaming arse though.

thats true because japanese are some 'a the most stressed out people in the world so of course it makes sense for there games to be like an escape more then american games.

Very interesting post which has illuminated my view on some things. I can finally quantify what I used to refer to as "an American game" and "a Japanese game", which used to be intuitive notions, but I can now see the clear differences that characterize the two. It always bugged me I could never put the difference into words.

I do have a few questions, though I don't mind if you can't answer:

- On what do you base this assessment? While I agree with just about all of it, I'm curious to know how you came to make it.

- Why are Western and Japanese games the way they are? I know you referred to Hollywood and Kabuki theatre, but how does this explain the difference in tastes from both cultures? Sure, Westerners love JRPG's as much as anyone, but I'm also aware that the Japanese do not like the FPS genre.

- If the Japanese educational system were to emphasize critical thinking as the American system does, would we see a shift in the kind of games Japan produces? Meaning, does this game preference stem from deeper roots, or are they the product of how they were brought up?

Finally, I must say I'm impressed with the amount of thought that went into your post, which are things I should have thought about myself, but never could quite grasp. Kudos. Would read more.

great post
I was watching a MGS4 stream and had to constantly remind myself "this" is what japanese gamers want

and by "this" I mean MGS's blend of 2 minutes of action for every 15-minute cutscene

good point about 1st-person vs 3rd-person view, I had not noticed that.

as an aside I find menu-based rpgs reaaaaaaaaally boring.

wow, well said and well thought out. I agree with you completely.