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by Steve Watts, Mar 08, 2012 9:15am PSTFormer Capcom designer Keiji Inafune has been vocal about Japanese game development for quite a while. The creator of Mega Man left Capcom amid sharp criticism that the Japanese games industry was creatively stagnating. Inafune's talk at this year's Game Developers Conference, titled "The Future of Japanese Games," was no less critical of his home turf.
"Back in the day our Japanese games were used to winning and achieved major success," he said, according to a report from Gamasutra. "By not accepting that fact we have arrived at the tragic state of Japanese games. The Japanese game industry has become very closed-minded."
Inafune said that people in Japan were critical of his comments, but these days they are "beginning to run out of steam" and see some merit to his prediction. He claims he wanted to "light a fire under the Japanese game industry before it was too late."
"I am ashamed to admit it but when I travel overseas I feel as if Japanese games are becoming a blast from the past," he said. "They have become great memories and little more. But there is a limit to how much business you can do trading on past glories. We rarely see new creations from Japan. So we stick to our memories and we ship an HD version."
He suggests that the Japanese industry should create new brands and foster talent that will be interested in creative control. "Thanks to [our predecessors], here we are today. But leaders of the Japanese game industry must think about developing and rebuilding the brands, not simply maintaining or sustaining the brands."
Inafune is getting back into original game creation himself, having announced Kaio King of Pirates and the social mobile game The Island of Dr. Momo.
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Keiji Inafune gives a GDC talk on Japanese game development, suggesting that it needs to build new brands rather than relying on the old ones.
Keiji Inafune gives a GDC talk on Japanese game development, suggesting that it needs to build new brands rather than relying on the old ones. : Shacknews
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Final Fantasy is an example where they really haven't innovated enough or in the right way. Yes there's a new combat system. There's always a new combat system. But otherwise they have constantly gotten trapped in similar methods that have seen JRPGs as a genre practically disappear outside Japan. It wasn't long ago (PS2 era) that that was a vibrant, blockbuster genre and not only because of the FF franchise. Now their most recent entries are getting panned by critics and the rest have faded away (remember the push for JRPGs on 360 early this generation? then it turned out that genre simply isn't producing on any platform anymore).
Ninja Gaiden did a great reimagining of the franchise last generation. Since then? Rehash, rehash, rehash. After an initial flurry people are no longer excited for new ones because all they've done is kept released NG 2 6 Sigma HD Remix or whatever the fuck and seemingly getting worse except with the graphics. Compare that to the God of War franchise. What happened to Devil May Cry? Bayonetta was a good effort but sp ridiculously Japanese they lost out on a lot of mainstream appeal.
You mention MGS but like GT and Team Ico who were consistent performers last generation (each getting 2 titles done in a reasonable time frame after the PS2 launch) they've struggled to maintain mindshare now. It's crazy how forgotten the MGS franchise is when people talk about exclusives.
One you didn't mention was Resident Evil. With 4 they managed to stay true to their roots in a lot of ways and find that global appeal to get a huge seller. Then 5 felt like a cash in and 6's anticipation seems muted as a result. The 3DS version got mediocre reviews as it tried to just rehash the console games into a control scheme that didn't fit. I think that's where Inafune and co are wondering what's going on. There's clearly opportunity for some of these shops to do great work, and some of them are delivering, but a lot only in the context of existing IP. Ninja Gaiden has plenty of appeal at a conceptual level. Is it that hard to take it somewhere new with less awful 1990 era Japanese story telling? Resident Evil got off the tank controls and it worked. So isn't there a new IP you could try to build with some of those ideas and escape the shackles of existing RE tropes? Likewise for JRPGs, they're all so locked in to building the same type of game as always and when they tried to understand what it was that was missing and making western RPGs more successful they failed to understand.
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