Recently picked up this article by Rick Luebbers of Midway's Surreal Software, at the group's Surreal Game Design blog, that attempts to explain the rather common phenomenon of American gamers who vastly prefer Japanese games to Western titles. It is an interesting issue -- everyone knows someone, or maybe you are someone, who skews very distinctly in gaming preferences to one cultural sphere or the other. For me, it took having to pay attention to the industry enough to cover it when I became a writer to subvert my own favoritism of Japanese titles, and while I now have a more balanced appreciation, I've always been curious -- it's easy to pick out, for example, differences both subtle and overt between Eastern and Western culture, but how those cultural qualities translate into game design is a bit harder to pinpoint.
Luebbers theorizes he plays one American game for every ten Japanese titles he enjoys, so for him, the disparity's huge. The first reason he cites? He's not interested in online multiplayer.
I've said something similar before; neither am I, a large reason why Halo, which thrives on its multiplayer gameplay, has never appealed to me much. I like a certain privacy of mind when I play, with a few exceptions. But why is it, exactly, that online multiplayer should be a differentiating factor between American and Japanese games? After all, MMOs are an even bigger deal in the Eastern market than they are here -- though I'm mainly aware of the market in China and Korea, and confess I don't know what it's like in Japan specifically.
Next, Luebbers makes a pretty stark assertion: Western storytelling is stale. He blames Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Half Life and their ilk for this, and while he notes that an epidemic of Halo clones is characteristic of the top, and not all, Western titles, I believe what he's indicating is in fact a genre preference in general; Luebbers' view seems to be that fantasy titles are less derivative and more interesting -- he goes on to say that he prefers Persona 3 to Bully because the fantasy element makes it more fresh. Though I, too, lament the current FPS oversaturation in the market and am in general disinterested in war games (despite my favorite series being Metal Gear), and, while I also tend to prefer fantasy titles, one could just as conversely express similar fatigue with the repetitious Japanese RPG format. If a glut of war campaigns is evidence of staleness, then a parade of heroic summoner children is equally mossy. Persona 3 is fresh, and also very Japanese -- but I have discussed at length what I found interesting about Persona 3, and I'm pretty sure that it's not due to the relationship of one to the other.
Most of Luebber's arguments as to why Japanese games are more pleasing to him than American ones could just as equally been delivered in reverse, indicating that his "differences" are more subjective, based in his preferences, than factual. He does add that Japanese games reflect more polished design, which I'm not sure I can speak to, and that he's noticed that Japanese games tend to focus on hand-to-hand combat, which he prefers, while Western games tend to feature ranged combat. Perhaps that's true -- though 20-foot swords and magical spells seem pretty ranged to me, now that I think about it.
Is it safe to say, though, that Japanese games are more fantastic while Western games are more realistic? What would a realistic Japanese game look like? Moreover, is Western fantasy doomed forever to Tolkien derivatives? If you prefer one to the other, what does that indicate about your personal taste?
