Why do you think games like Gears only do so-so in Japan?

[JC48573]

There is a small fanbase in Japan that love gory games like Gears, but developers say that normally a game like this won't sell well in Japan just as some Japanese games don't do so well in the West. There was an article out there saying that Japanese developers feel there are a lot of bad developers in the West just as much as there are bad ones in Japan, but they don't understand why Japan seems to get so much hate for this generation just because one developer did so terribly while West gets all the high praise for only a few Western developers.

[pankakes123]

It's really pretty simple, just a big difference in culture. Japan loves stuff like anime, futile Japan, samurais, etc.

America is much bigger into gritty war heroes.

There isn't much else to it. Same reason why Football is big in America and Soccer is big in Europe and Asia, just a cultural difference.

[JC48573]

so what Western games would they prefer playing? There's gotta be some. Japanese people are into Western films as well.

[BoneSnapDeez]

WRPGs are popular in Japan. Check out all the Wizardry Gaiden games on Game Boy, plus the Ultima console ports that didn't make it to the States.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

The more realistic Western racing games must have a fanbase.

[Menegrothx]

Even though many 1990s Western games were ported to Japanese home computers, as far as I know for the most part Japanese gamers have missed out a huge amount of the best that American/Western gaming has to offer, while Western gamers have always had access to a much, much larger percentage of what Japanese gaming has to offer (even if many great games stay as NTSC-J exclusives or are printed in very small amounts in the west). Breetai probably knows more about this, but as far as I know most American PC games never really are published in Japan. USA=PC Gaming, Japan=Console gaming. (Practically 99% of the best console games of all time were made by Japanese developers, almost all of the best American games of all time are PC games if you're not counting arcade/pre-NES era)

If most of Japanese gamers never had the chance to play through many of the Western "golden era" games, and were only recently introduced to Western gaming by Xbox games, then they probably have a warped view of American games (ie they're all bad and brainless)

WRPGs are popular in Japan. Check out all the Wizardry Gaiden games on Game Boy, plus the Ultima console ports that didn't make it to the States.

Weren't most of the console ports of Ultima games very lousy though? Lacked tons of content and so on? SMS U IV is the only good console Ultima that I know of. Also Underworld was faithfully ported to PS1 and FM Towns Marty in Japan if I'm not mistaken.

[MrPopo]

Yeah, the console ports of Ultima were bad, but the PC ports of Ultima were what spurred Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.

[Gamerforlife]

Games like Gears have their roots in PC gaming, as do all shooters. Japan has never cared for PC gaming. So there's probably never been a cultural appreciation for shooters on any level, even before they got big on consoles here in the West

There was an article out there saying that Japanese developers feel there are a lot of bad developers in the West just as much as there are bad ones in Japan, but they don't understand why Japan seems to get so much hate for this generation just because one developer did so terribly while West gets all the high praise for only a few Western developers.

I very much agree with this sentiment. There's tons of non-Japanese crap that gets released regularly and it is a bit irritating all the hate towards Japanese games this gen. It seems mostly because the big franchises have lost some of their quality (Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Ninja Gaiden, etc.) but every GOOD Japanese game that's come out this gen(Valkyria Chronicles, Bayonetta, etc.) kind of gets ignored when people are putting down Japanese games

Personally, I'm glad games like Gears aren't successful in Japan. I don't want Japanese developers mimicking American games. There's already enough of that going on which leads to crap like Resident Evil 5 and Ninja Gaiden 3. We already fifty billion first person shooters, third person shooters, Grand Theft Auto clones, etc. as it is without Japan getting in on it. Let Japanese gaming retain its uniqueness

[Cronozilla]

I heard an explanation once that had a lot of resonance and made some sense. Their culture has a different view on weapons, specifically the gun. It's not a universal thing, but could explain why the mainstream audience doesn't find it appealing. As Americans, we see the gun as a tool of liberation. It's in our constitution that we can have them. It's a source of power. In Japan, it's usually represented as an extension of the body.

You can see this sort of sentiment reflected in random statements you see by Japanese developers too. Kojima, when asked if he'd like to see an American developer work on MGR if Platinum games hadn't been interested and he said, they'd probably change the Katana to a machine gun with a chainsaw on it and that'd be missing the point. While there is a very strong sense of superior-ism in the statement, it gives some reflection on how American (and potentially most western) culture is perceived in the entertainment industry. I'm paraphrasing a bit, but this is all anecdotal anyway.

Chances are we're only seeing style being reflected at all because western media has saturated the globe for a generation or more. Which ... isn't really the case with video games.

And Japanese gamers have been playing on dedicated computers for awhile now. Most of the initial Japanese consoles were computer systems. They just didn't adopt the x86 PC platform.

[AppleQueso]

Games like Gears have their roots in PC gaming, as do all shooters. Japan has never cared for PC gaming. So there's probably never been a cultural appreciation for shooters on any level, even before they got big on consoles here in the West

The PC98, MSX, etc were all pretty popular. They were playing PC games, just different games on completely different PCs.

As for the main topic, I'm sure it's likely related to how japan prefers light gun rail shooters to FPS games.