A friend of mine named ATLien Seeko made a very compelling argument today about Japanese gaming and I thought it would be a great discussion piece for the site.

If you were a gamer in the 90′s, you know how badass Japan was in the video game industry. Some of the best game studios, games and gaming systems were out of Japan and they pretty much had a killer app for every genre out. If you wanted a good adventure game, you looked for Super Mario, Super Metroid, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mega Man, etc. There’s no question that Squaresoft (SquareEnix) was the go to studio for a good solid RPG with games like the Final Fantasy series, Xenogears, Parasite Eve, etc. Street Fighter was king of the arcade for a long time until the new challenger, aka Mortal Kombat, arrived.

They had a really solid run until around the turn of the new millennium. That’s when everything seemed to go downhill for Japans gaming industry. In 1999, SEGA launched the Dreamcast. A successful, unsuccessful console that had an excellent library of good games and was ahead of its time with being online capable straight out the box. It was short lived and fizzled out int he mist of Sony’s Playstation 2, then Microsofts debute XBOX.

Fastforward to today, and almost all the companies that were heavyweights back in the 90′s and early 2000′s are embarrassments now. Square struggles to crate a good Final Fantasy, or any RPG for that sake. Nintendo makes gimmick hardware and recycles the same characters generation after generation like an old Buggs Bunny cartoon… SEGA is out of the hardware game and rarely creates anything worth mentioning. Sony is the last company from Japan that is really standing it’s ground, but even they recently went through hard time with the exposure of their weak Playstation Network security and having it’s online gaming community offline for an entire month. What’s their future?

The biggest games are coming from American companies like Rockstar, THQ, EA, Blizzard, Microsoft, Infinity Ward, Activision, etc, and Japan is looking like a joke to the majority with the exception of a few gems like Gran Turismo 5, Street Fighter 4 and Metal Gear Solid 4. If Apple enters the gaming market, I couldn’t see Sony and Nintendo competing with giants like Microsoft and Apple. It’s sort of depressing to see all the cool Eastern stuff like mechs, weird and obscure Japanese characters and stories disappear from the scene slowly, but honestly, the material they’re putting out is sub par to the standards of the average gamer today. What’s with the decline in quality gaming material coming from the East?

Do you think they’ll ever make a comeback, or is it safe to say we can expect a few quality titles from Japan each year with the American market dominating? What about the Japanese market, will American franchises and companies takeover there as well? What’s your opinion.

We at DigitalDpad would like to hear what the readers have to say!

Tristan Hill | Barack Odrama X(360) | DiddyKong1906 (PSN)

There has been a casting call set for the upcoming project, but not much more information was released other than a criteria for the casting call.

Judging from the “palm trees” in the picture, it would seem the next game will take place either in Vice City or San Andreas. I HOPE IT IS ANOTHER SAN ANDREAS TITLE!

Tristan Hill|Barack Odrama X (360) | DiddyKong1906 (PSN)