2000's Push Against Japan

[XoPachi]

(Cross posting from a server I'm in. I brought this topic up in there yesterday but I think a forum is a better place for this and you guys are the best about this kind of thing.)

I know there was a sizeable slant against Japanese games waaay back in the 00's from Western outlets. I was young at the time still playing a lot of Japanese stuff but, as I got a bit older, I definitely started seeing remnants of it.

When did this generally start? How frequent was it really? Are there any compilations of examples or articles that talk about this in detail? And what were the lasting ramifications of it (whether they're still felt or not)?

I'm really curious because I feel like it's pretty set in stone that this was a thing to some extent but, it seems like a niche topic. I don't think I've ever seen a real, sourced, reputable talk about it. Just spatters of it from annoyed gamers in pockets online over the years. I'd be immensely interested in doing some long form reading or watching on the subject.

[ExitPlanetDust]

It can probably mostly be attributed to the high price and late release of the PS3. The 360 captured the generation early and this created a paradigm shift where Japanese developers would struggle to adapt to the growing HD market for years. The Japanese gaming market rejection of the 360 (and in turn lack of sales to drive development) left a vacuum that was filled by western developers’ move to the console market through Microsoft’s box. With that came wider online multiplayer adoption in the console space and the success of genres like military FPSs.

Sony would continue to struggle as the market changed and Japanese studios folded left and right. The newer generation of gamer were raised on a steady diet of Call of Duty and dudebro culture. What your parents thought was cool is now lame. Anime wasn’t cool anymore, JRPGs weren’t cool anymore, Japanese games weren’t cool anymore. And there was an army of counter-culture obsessed (hipster) journalists who were all too eager to dunk on Japanese games and report that games were now art, pushing the cinematic gaming experience in front of everything else while proclaiming that things like difficulty were antiquated. This probably all came to a head with Phil Fish’s quip about Japanese games sucking at a conference.

It’s wild how anti-Japan or anti-anime the space was back then. Even in the fighting game scene people were eager to trash anime fighters and make sure everyone knew that their game of choice wasn’t one.

You can almost mark the month where things turned around and it was OK to like Japanese games and anime again. Nier Automata and Breath of the Wild released, were beloved by journalists and game players alike, and it was like the previous 10 years never occurred.

I’ve greatly condensed what I viewed through my late gen-x lens during the era and there were other contributing factors. But I still mostly credit Sony’s arrogance in overpricing the PS3 for the almost instant evaporation of the Japanese presence, appreciation, and influence in video games at the time.

[BulletMagnet]

What your parents thought was cool is now lame. Anime wasn’t cool anymore, JRPGs weren’t cool anymore, Japanese games weren’t cool anymore.

I'd be inclined to add that Japanese influence on (U.S., at least) pop culture at large reached its saturation point around that time as well; every trash-tier manga was getting localized and taking up shelf space at Barnes & Noble, every new cartoon on TV and every t-shirt you saw on the street was a (usually) poorly-executed attempt to cash in on the "anime style" before people inevitably got sick of the fad. I kind of wonder if South Korean properties are in for a similar bout of whiplash before too long, especially considering the reasons the country's been in the news of late.

[BryanM]

I'm not sure what you mean exactly. The video game scene in the USA was revived by Nintendo and SEGA; if you hated Japanese people and didn't play any of their video games you didn't play any games at all except for whatever crumbs you could get from the PC. (It was... mostly terrible, with some gems, up until Blizzard.)

I guess that was a divide and where some of the dudebro PC master race guys come from, the types who'd use 'weeb' as a derogatory slur word. It is true some grognards used to/still think jRPG's were trash for children.

Everyone likes what they like and our brains like things they already know. 'Familiarity is a heuristic for understanding'.

You could go back to the DeathSmiles release thread and see all the guys disgusted at the girls in the game. It wasn't like Ketsui, a game starring a yandere yaoi psycho. A manly man's game.

I think a lot sometimes about how tabletop dungeon-crawly RPG's all have to have a dark grungy 80's aesthetic going on. It's great, it really really is, but does every game have to have the same vibe? It's nice that the zoomies have so many more options in the tabletop scene now, but it still feels like all hack and slash games are like that.

Anyway, as for the general public, aka normies, back then Japan might as well have been satanic. They were all old people and terrified of new things. Church people loathed children being seduced away from the light by the Pokemons. They know you have to brainwash people when they're dumb kids who'll believe anything, before their brains solidify as adults.

I think the Pokemon anime and other Saturday children's cartoons that followed it after it was a big success were the first exposure to Japanese animation for like 98% of the normos in the late 90's, and probably most of what you mean. (You can't hate something if you don't even know it exists.) Something completely alien and 'soulless' to your regular person at the time. ('Soulless' is somehow a time-proven way to say 'I don't like this new thing and it scares me'. Chimneys. Food grown using a tractor. AI art. It never ends how much we struggle against change, despite change being the only thing guaranteed in the entire world.) It brings to mind of how my mother said she HATED watching Sesame Street with me and my brother.

.... When I was a kid, I used to wish they'd make some super hero movies. When X-Men came out, it wasn't great but I was excited and optimistic about what might come. One of the biggest monkey's paws moments of my life... "I didn't say all movies should be about this!" Like most things, I blame Star Wars. Star Wars broke nerd culture into the normie bubble. Star Wars was the blueprint for all these Superhero movies.

Anyway, when horrors against the pale (at least from our current perspective) begin to unravel everything you once held sacred, ridiculous things like the human race going extinct from breeding with robots in like ~30 years, try not to be too much of a closed-minded old person. Just remember this old Futurama quote, it's gotten me through many hard times:

"Leela, there's nothing wrong with anything."

[ExitPlanetDust]

What your parents thought was cool is now lame. Anime wasn’t cool anymore, JRPGs weren’t cool anymore, Japanese games weren’t cool anymore.

I'd be inclined to add that Japanese influence on (U.S., at least) pop culture at large reached its saturation point around that time as well; every trash-tier manga was getting localized and taking up shelf space at Barnes & Noble, every new cartoon on TV and every t-shirt you saw on the street was a (usually) poorly-executed attempt to cash in on the "anime style" before people inevitably got sick of the fad.

Definitely. That saturation added to the perfect storm that made the Japanese gaming and anime aesthetic uncool. Anime in Japan had always been diverse with countless genres, but the mecha, ninja, and space war themes had been falling out of fashion since the end of the Cold War. Western audiences didn't seem to be as enthusiastic about the harem and slice of life shows and manga that came to dominate the medium during the 2Ks and 2K10s.

[BulletMagnet]

You could go back to the DeathSmiles release thread and see all the guys disgusted at the girls in the game.

The best part was seeing a not-insignificant percentage of the people who in real time decried Deathsmiles, Pink Sweets, etc. as "creepy" and "pandering" and "gross", within a few short years, suddenly start lionizing Cave et al as The Last Sentinels of Artistic Integrity within the medium.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

It can probably mostly be attributed to the high price and late release of the PS3. The 360 captured the generation early and this created a paradigm shift where Japanese developers would struggle to adapt to the growing HD market for years. The Japanese gaming market rejection of the 360 (and in turn lack of sales to drive development) left a vacuum that was filled by western developers’ move to the console market through Microsoft’s box. With that came wider online multiplayer adoption in the console space and the success of genres like military FPSs.

Sony would continue to struggle as the market changed and Japanese studios folded left and right. The newer generation of gamer were raised on a steady diet of Call of Duty and dudebro culture. What your parents thought was cool is now lame. Anime wasn’t cool anymore, JRPGs weren’t cool anymore, Japanese games weren’t cool anymore. And there was an army of counter-culture obsessed (hipster) journalists who were all too eager to dunk on Japanese games and report that games were now art, pushing the cinematic gaming experience in front of everything else while proclaiming that things like difficulty were antiquated. This probably all came to a head with Phil Fish’s quip about Japanese games sucking at a conference.

It’s wild how anti-Japan or anti-anime the space was back then. Even in the fighting game scene people were eager to trash anime fighters and make sure everyone knew that their game of choice wasn’t one.

You can almost mark the month where things turned around and it was OK to like Japanese games and anime again. Nier Automata and Breath of the Wild released, were beloved by journalists and game players alike, and it was like the previous 10 years never occurred.

I’ve greatly condensed what I viewed through my late gen-x lens during the era and there were other contributing factors. But I still mostly credit Sony’s arrogance in overpricing the PS3 for the almost instant evaporation of the Japanese presence, appreciation, and influence in video games at the time.

The "real" reason why SCEI charged a whopping $599.99 usd for the 1st-gen PS3 back in November of 2006 was, there was a shortage of various components that comprised of each console -- therefore, Sony didn't make very many PS3 consoles to begin with during it's initial American launch debut (hence the insanely sky-high MSRP to sell them at a huge financial loss -- not to mention the time, money and resources spent on R&D costs associated with developing the PS3 from inception to fully-realized hardware and trying to recoup some of those expenses -- it's "business as usual" within the video game industry) according to Game Informer magazine (when they were still around -- before Gamestop ceased publication and disbanded the entire GI staff as well).

If you went to your local Blockbuster Video joint just to rent a new PS3 game back in February of 2007, the guy at the front counter said he needed "a valid credit card & would charge a $60.00 "placeholder fee" on it and would need to physically retain it on hand" -- I said that I didn't have one. So it was "no dice" that particular day -- went to my local Target store afterwards and saw that they had a lone brand new copy of PS3 Ridge Racer 7 left in stock for a mere $39.99 usd -- ended up snagging it at that cheaper attractive price-point (this was the game that I originally wanted to rent from BV earlier that day). I never did rent PS3 games from BV ever since that day (and it was just easier just to buy them at retail and not having to deal with "rental shenanigans" in the first place).

I sure learned an important lesson in dealing with BV and it's "eye-raising and unsavory business practices" when it came to renting the newest video games back in early 2007. Fast forward to 2012 and 2013 when many local BV franchises were shutting down left and right -- the end of BV's reign/dominance in the "high & almighty movie rental space/sector." So be it.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[To Far Away Times]

It was really noticeable right around the time the Xbox 360 came out. To be fair though, a lot of Japanese developers struggled to adapt to HD game development for whatever reason.

Two former Japanese prestige studios, Konami and Square, both struggled pretty hard during this era. Neither has really fully recovered to this day.

Sega still had a few good years post Dreamcast, but by 2006 the company was really putting out a lot of stinkers. Capped off by the infamously terrible Sonic 06, which became the go to punch line for bad games.

It really didn’t help that right around the same time FFXIII shat the bed and ended Square’s prestige image, Oblivion was blowing up as the first really big must play Western RPG on consoles.

And Sony’s then juggernaut Gran Turismo series had a particularly bad outing, with GT5’s low effort mix of PS1, PS2, and PS3 car models racing side by side, with some cars having first person view cockpits, and some without. It just felt super half assed. The series was pretty easily eclipsed by the Western developed Forza, which had much better and consistent production values.

Gears of War was also kind of the standard bearer back then. It was the first time I can remember a Western developed action game having really sublime gameplay, then you add in the seamless drop in/drop out online co-op, plus the online multiplayer death match mode, plus the huge graphical leap, and it just felt like things were going to be different going forward.

COD4 with its then revolutionary online multiplayer progression system was a huge hit, and the rest is history.

Western developers also seemed to adapt to HD development much easier, perhaps because of their PC game dev experience, or because so many of them were coalescing around Unreal Engine, making it easier for employees to transfer knowledge even if they moved to different companies, instead of starting from the ground up each time.

Players still showed up for great Japanese games though. Street Fighter IV gave the franchise, and the whole fighting game genre really, a massive resurgence. Street Fighter IV is the reason you can walk into a US game store and buy a high quality arcade stick with all Sanwa parts. That Street Fighter IV arcade stick with the Sanwa JLF and 8 Sanwa buttons is pretty much the foundation and button layout that all other home arcade sticks are built upon.

[Wata123]

Surprised no one mentioned the GWOT-induced cultural ambiance. Americans are macho, we like guns and explosions. No time for those gay, emo, pretty boy games.

[hazys]

I agree with everything ExitPlanetDust said, that was pretty much my experience of the "dark age" circa 2008-2016. It's crazy to think that fans had to petition for something like Xenoblade Chronicles to be localized.

From the anime end of the spectrum I think it's also worth mentioning that the 2000s was the decade where the "adult otaku" audience sort of captured the anime market in Japan and this was reflected in the type of shows coming out and, to a lesser degree, the type of games. A lot of stuff that is now taken as "par for the course" by Western anime fans was deemed embarrassing or disturbing in the late-2000s, in part because Western developers had entered the console market in full force and shown a lot of the more casual console gamers an aesthetic alternative that was far more aligned with their tastes and cultural preferences.

This is a bit tangential but a good way to track this era is to look at SuperBestFriends, who did let's plays of mostly-Japanese games and were clearly huge fans of 90s/early 00s Japanese entertainment, struggling to play through dark-and-gritty console adaptations of Japanese series and the generally-faltering quality of games being localized. Or, if you look at E3 presentations from around that time, you'll start to lose count of all the grey-brown FPS games being showcased.

It also felt like some Japan-dominated game genres basically collapsed, most famously fighting games at least until the release of SFIV, and the mid-budget market for Japanese games also began to shrink during the seventh generation. Compare the amount of JRPGs on PS2 vs PS3 vs PS4. Quirky JP series that found some footing overseas, like Katamari or Elite Beat Agents for example, fizzled away all the same.

There was also a massive pushback against the concept of "linearity" in games which was sort of the calling card of Japanese adventures and JRPGs, the PC "your choices have consequences" philosophy of game design bled into the console sphere and the JRPG formula was almost-immediately deemed outdated or juvenile. Japanese character design was also lambasted for its "girly boys" and so on.