Japan Lost Me
Posted by brandon in Editorial on Feb 13th, 2012 | 0 comments
It’s been a long, slow process, but Japanese games finally lost me as a fan. Not that I don’t like any Japanese games, but on the whole, most of what I consume (game-wise) is developed in the West. I was a huge fan of Japanese games. It was largely what got me interested in learning Japanese in the first place. It started when I got an HDTV in the fall of 2010. Suddenly, I wanted everything to be HD. My Wii and PS2 look awful on my 46″ TV and I just stuck with my PS3 (and later 360 as well). Then, I changed jobs and my previously long commute was halved, I got a Kindle and playing games on the train became less appealing. So, now that I wasn’t playing portable games (where most Japanese games are developed for), and because Japan’s console offerings are pretty paltry past PS2, the only source of HD gaming I had was Western games. And it turns out, Western games hit the sweet spot for me now the way Japanese games used to. Huge RPGs like Mass Effect gave me a whole universe to explore and after years of shying away from shooters (because I had difficulty with them) I gave the Gears of War games a run through and even finished a couple first-person shooters as well. Turns out, I’m not as bad at them as I thought, and online co-op helps with the difficulty (and it most cases, allows me to play at higher difficulty levels without getting frustrated with the game.)
The one shining hope Japan had (for me, at least) was the Ryu Ga Gotoku (Yakuza) series. I loved the series all the way through 4, but 2011′s Of The End finally lost me. The engine was never good with guns, and they made the combat in the game all about guns. The exploration and side-questing that made the previous games so much fun became annoying because no matter where you went hordes of zombies followed you and the terrible shooting mechanics made it a pain in the ass to fight them off. They did everything they could to ruin that game. They are going to be putting out a Ryu Ga Gotoku 5 someday (2013, I’d imagine) and I’m glad they’re taking some time off from the series. Three consecutive yearly releases finally ruined the quality of the series. (Assassin’s Creed, I’m looking at you too. But AC: Revelations was nowhere near as bad as Of The End.)
So what’s the Ryu Ga Gotoku team’s answer to a poorly made zombie shooter? Another crappy shooter. Binary Domain isn’t what the gaming press would call “AAA”. It’s barely a “B”. I played Binary Domain at TGS 2011, and while it handles better than Of The End, Gears of War it ain’t. It’s a third person shooter where Japanese stereotypes of foreigners run around Tokyo in the future killing robots (because shooting people or even aliens would be too violent for delicate Japanese sensibilities.) Also, Binary Domain is a squad-based shooter and while they included 4-player online co-op, the co-op exists only for separate non-story missions. Because like most Japanese game companies, every step forward has to come with another step backwards.
