Are Japanese Developers In Trouble?

During last Fall’s Tokyo Game Show, Dead Rising and Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune famously proclaimed that the Japanese game industry was “finished.” It was a sentiment he more or less repeated at this year’s TGS, despite the numerous new IPs from leading J-publishers that made their debut at press conferences and on the show floor.

Inafune, who, by the way, used to hold the title of Global Head of Production at arguably one of the most powerful Japanese companies in business today, feels that developers in Japan have effectively killed their own industry with a serious lack of innovation. And judging from the sheer amount of cookie-cutter design and ideas that seem to be coming out of the East on the day-to-day, I would have to say he has a point.

But it isn’t just tired game design that’s plaguing Japanese developers. One can only look at the Westernized bastardization of Resident Evil 5 or the glut of ultra niche cookie-cutter RPGs such as Cross Edge being pumped out and blame them for so many problems. Ask anyone that’s played a Japanese game in the past five years if they can remember the plot and almost invariably they’ll give the same response: No.

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Now, I’m not going to get into any involved sociological theories about how anime culture and Japanese Westernization during the Meijii Restoration has contributed to a pop-cultural climate in Japan that’s overrun with stereotypes, shallow-yet-identifiable characters and easy-to-digest plot devices; that’s another article for another time. The fact of the matter is that this kind of narrative laziness usually has a presence in damn near any Japanese game with any semblance of actual story, and even in cases when story is largely unnecessary, like combo-action games.

The issue here is surprisingly one of accessibility. Most gamers are familiar with the Japanese heavy hitters, and if we don’t know these companies intimately, we’re at least aware of them. The problem is that placating gamers with plot devices and tropes that would have worked in the past (and are still prevalent in a lot of Otaku culture) may no longer work. As Inafune put it, Japan seems to be five years behind in terms of development, and that in turn has the nasty side effect of relegating the scope and popularity of a lot of Japanese series to a niche that’s arguably no broader than anime.

To use an example that’s still popular today, take the original Final Fantasy VII. To this day, FF fanatics ardently defend the game’s place as what they feel is the most superior title in the series, getting into rabid flame wars over its deserved standing in Final Fantasy canon. Cloud is one of the most beloved protagonists from any Japanese game, right up there next to Link and Samus.

Most of us probably thought Cloud was a total badass when we first popped the game in 13 years ago—the brooding persona, the spiky hair, the giant sword and motorcycle. Hell, I know I did. It was intriguing that Cloud didn’t remember being a part of Shin-Ra’s SOLDIER program; after all, it’s easy to think you’re getting affected by game’s plot, which, years later you’ll realize is actually shallow, when you’re only 15.

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Now amnesia — not to mention Tetsuya Nomura-style character designs — is practically a staple for Japanese game developers. Cloud has, in effect, become a stereotype himself. The phenomenal success of FFVII eventually sent Square spiraling out spin-off after spin-off. This, in turn, resulted in a lot of surface-level fan service, with surface-level being the key word. After awhile, I just kind of started to gloss over what they were doing, since it had lost all sense of meaning or interest.

The FFVII phenomenon is endemic of how Japanese developers seem to treat narrative as a whole: Most games seem content to float by on their own marginality, tied together with tropes that either worked in previous games or simply tow the line in terms of literary standards. From that point of view, even the biggest games cease to have titles. They all become “some anime-style game,” since chances are you’ve already seen or played it all before in something else.

If it seems like I’m generalizing a lot, that’s because it is how a lot of people—Keiji Inafune included—seem to view the Japanese game industry these days. And while my points are largely focused on narrative, it’s part and parcel to what Inafune is talking about. It’s as if the genres are coded with certain trait templates: Japanese role-playing games have teen heroes, amnesia, chosen one syndrome; action games receive simple revenge stories and overly-convoluted power structure plots, survival horror gets bland, predictable mysteries to uncover; and the list goes on.

There are still exceptions to these “rules,” however. Two games that stand out in recent memory are Deadly Premonition and Nier, both of which take elements of standard plot devices and subvert them in one way or another.

Nier, for its part, seems to employ stereotypical character types, though the developers seem entirely aware of this, taking measures to either make fun of such tropes or using humor to acknowledge their identity within the characters (the game does a great job of skirting the fourth wall); Deadly Premonition takes what could be a run-of-the-mill survival horror story and creates a unique player/protagonist dynamic through the split personality of the game’s main character, York. (The developers also use humor to create offbeat scenarios that provide the game a Suda 51-style sense of humor, livening up any sense of generic narrative.)

Even Atlus’ Persona series has in recent years taken some major strides forward, tackling some mildly heavy, and subsequently interesting, subject matter for a game about a bunch of high school students with the ability to befriend demons. My point is, all of these cases take familiar narrative or character ideas and do something original with them—something that more Japanese developers should work on if they can’t fully commit to original ideas themselves.

Few Japanese games stand out to me for their stories — the political intrigue of Final Fantasy Tactics and most of the Front Mission series, the Shakespearean pulp of Vagrant Story, Metal Gear’s philosophical meta-narrative style and Silent Hill 2’s psychological horror come to mind, to name a few.

That isn’t to say that other Japanese games are boring, or that there’s no place for so-called genre studies in games. There certainly is. But just sticking to one idea and simply reshaping it over and over isn’t going to cut it. Even cases like Nier and Deadly Premonition were good as one-offs, but they would probably be hard-pressed to do it again and maintain the same level of interest (which, incidentally, is why No More Heroes 2 is a bit of a letdown compared to Suda’s other games).

There’s no doubt that Japanese companies can produce quality writing. It just doesn’t seem to happen often. Time will tell if they can commit to a next evolutionary step, or if the Japanese game industry simply ceases to be.