I don't Qare for Qore.

I'm trying to Qope.

Sony's monthly PS3 showthing rubs me the wrong way. Here are some reasons.

1) Veronica Belmont is too damn Qute. I can see the wheels turning in their funny little marketing noggins as they blow hard in the completely wrong direction. Sony knows most gamers are male, late twenties, early thirties, and what do males in that demographic like? Pretty, sassy, bubbly, young little chicas, and so they got the best they could find, stole her from C/Net or where ever she was, and stuck her in the show. Personally, I resent that. I would rather watch a balding old game journalist. It's nothing against Miss Belmont directly; she's a perfectly talented broadcaster. It's against Sony. Don't insult me by pandering to my carnal lust. A pretty girl won't get me to pay $3.00, watch your ads, and hear about games I would normally have no interest in. That doesn't work. I won't buy your show (you can't take a fart without gassing off on a code for a "free!!" episode anyway), and I still don't care about The Incredible Hulk or whatever you're trying to pander this month. It's a useless tactic.

"I'm Qute! Watch Qore!"

Um, unless you're Soul Calibur IV, in which case, appealing to my carnal lust, and incorporating decent gameplay, got me. Boob physics. What can I say.

I don't feel as guilty objectifying digital women. Plus, Taki here makes a more convincing paranormal investigator than Belmont makes a convincing games journalist.

2) Veronica Belmont is obviously not part of the Belmont Qlan. Yeah, I get their plan. I see your scheme again, Sony. You want me to think, gee, a Belmont! If her legendary ancestors can slay vampires, surely that lends credibility to their descendant! Well, sorry, unless she can brandish a whip and/or take on Upside-Down Castle as well as Alucard, she's no Belmont of mine.

Now this is a Belmont! Though, I admit, I can see a family resemblance. Is it the boots? The twig-thighs?

3) It bodes poorly for the health of our industry. It pains me to see Sony make the same mistakes every single console generation. So far, amazingly, it's panned out for them, but as they learn lessons, they happily throw any useful knowledge right out the window when it's time for a new machine, and this time, it's been worse than ever. Qore feels like another bid to convince the public that the PS3 is some fantastic multi-media machine. That may have worked when the PS3 was the cheapest, or at least a competitively priced, Blu-ray player, but these days, it just ends up looking like an expensive game machine without enough games and plenty of useless little doo-dads. The first-party titles have shaped up nicely, but the fact remains that Sony needs more robust third-party backing. The multiplatform releases, which should be better on PS3, usually still end up inferior to the versions on competing platforms, the third-party exclusives are absent (can you blame them?), and there just isn't enough interesting software coming from Japan, which was a huge strength for the PSone and PS2.

Even as a medical Qonsultant, she can't heal our ailments.

4) Qompletely overpriced. $3 a month? $25 a year? So you can advertise to me and give me journalism way below the bar of what I could get elsewhere for free? Are you kidding me?

"Quick, bird! Whisper something insightful about video games that I can 'parrot' back! I got nothing!"

5) Veronica called Aquanaut's Holiday "boring". "That's fine," you might be saying. "Everyone's entitled to an opinion." Sure, but has she played it? Of course not. A game journalist would should at least recognize the title, must be familiar with its history and well-versed in the Japanese games available for Sony's system, as it's one of the platform's main strengths historically, but she didn't even know what it was, picking it up off the shelf of a Japanese game store, making her pronouncement, and tossing it back. And they aired it, right in the segment! Sony to their own foot: "Hello there! Ready to be shot again?" Oh, that Veronica. Isn't she adorable? Now when Sony, or some kind, risk-taking third-party, decides to localize Aquanaut's Holiday, she can interview them about it and pretend it never happened. "I meant it was a shame it wasn't getting a US release when I said it was... Qoring! I said Qoring! Like HardQore!"

"Boring"?? There's some Qold water to the face.

6) Qan't focus. But, in reality, Qore would never cover a game like Aquanaut's Holiday, or something the likes of brilliant Valkyria Chronicles that so desperately needs the marketing boost. Sony completely undervalues interesting, unique third-party software, which is, again, a huge part of what powered the PSone and PS2. Somehow it's always turned around later (uncomfortably later) in their systems' lifecycles, but here, when we need it most, they blither on about games that are already getting advertisement elsewhere. Why not champion some lesser-known titles and show what a far reach the PS3 could really have across the user base?

Qome on. The best Japanese RPG so far this generation, and it sells 30,000 copies? What is wrong with you people?

In the end, Qore is symbolic of Sony's mistakes and problems this generation, and if stuff doesn't turn around quickly, it's only going to get worse, and that's no good for anyone who loves this industry, whether you like Sony or not.

Take heart, though, Veronica; at least you're not Jessica Chobot.

Chobot gets her tongue stuck in the UMD drive every time it freezes.

Jesse Dylan Watson is platform agnostic; they can release on Super NES for all it matters to him.

Star Capcom producer voices fears for Japanese market

It sounds like I'm not the only one worried about the state of the gaming industry, particularly as related to Japanese games. Joystick reports via Develop, who in turn is writing (good Lord, what a chain--did I leave anyone out?) on an interview published in a recent issue of the behemoth weekly Japanese gaming magazine, Famitsu. While I won't insult your intelligence by quoting verbatim what you can read elsewhere, the main gist seems to be that Resident Evil 5 producer Jun Takeuchi (with a production record including other games in the RE series and Lost Planet) has concerns about what sells and does not sell in Japan. Mainly, he thinks it's a sad, sad world when Japanese can't make games that other Japanese will buy.

I agree with him, to a huge extent. Strangely, though, he might be missing the point a little; it isn't as if Japanese games aren't selling in Japan. Monster Hunter and its iterations tear up the PSP charts, and of course the Wii is just as big there as it is here. I can't even imagine when their forces combine with Monster Hunter Tri. Japan will probably lift right out of the ocean and ascend to Heaven in a great monster hunting orgy of joy and ganbatte. What he should really be concerned about is the lack of a home in Japan for games like The World Ends with You, which sold piteously few units in its native territory yet sold so well in the States that Square Enix had to reprint it beyond their modest first run, even at the exorbitant $39.99 pricepoint.

Instead, the main undercurrent of Takeuchi's statement is his anxiety for a future where Western games swoop in and take over the Japanese game charts. He says Japan is "the last big marketplace" for Western publishers, implying (maybe correctly) that it's their goal.

He doesn't mention how Japan continues to trump up Westernization in its game design in order to appeal to a Western audience (he doesn't mind Japanese games selling in the West, but he doesn't like Western games selling in Japan?), which appears a bigger problem to me. Historically, Japan has had great success in adopting other cultural traditions and making them wholly their own. The Meiji Restoration was all about Westernizing, which we also saw after WWII (forced or not), and millenia before that, they borrowed extensively from China (art, architecture, food, even a writing system) to marvelous effect. I sometimes wonder if it's the same with video games, though; I've always enjoyed distinctly Japanese games most (though, again, their original foundation may have come from the Western Atari craze), and their absence this generation is what bothers me more than the thought of Western developers dominating the diet of Japanese gamers. Frankly, that's comfortingly unlikely, and if it's Takeuchi's only worry, I can mentally send him a confident pat on the shoulder (and he can mentally send me back an awkward, horrified expression).

He has some encouragement for Japanese fans, saying that Capcom has yet to really announce its plans for 2009 and hopes to surprise us soon. Fingers (and toes) crossed that the surprise is awesome Japanese games and not Capcom farming their franchises out to more Western developers as they're doing with the Wii installment of Dead Rising, which looks, frankly, abysmal. "You don't need to buy Western games, Japan, because Japan is now making Western-style games! Surprise!" That's not a quote from the interview, just a quote from the Takeuchi of my nightmares.

Jesse Dylan Watson is scared to finish Persona 4 because he's not sure how long it'll be until another great Japanese game is released here, and his backlog is full of... gulp... western games.

Persona 4 and the westernization of Japanese game design, or lack thereof

After all the glowing reviews, the praise, the decent (though I'd hoped for more!) sales, the fanboyery and joyful time sinkery, much ado has been made of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. What could I possibly have to say about it that hasn't already been said? As it turns out, quite a lot.

In a year of AAA holiday releases, Persona 4 stands out, not just because of its high quality and enormous Metacritic rating, but because it is, ostensibly, a B game. Gasp, what? It's possible for a game to be great and not be AAA? Not a Final Fantasy or a Fable II or a Fallout 3 (drop a few more F's and we'll be on HBO) yet still compelling enough to get absurdly high scores? Despite how we enjoy calling games like Infinite Undiscovery and The Last Remnant "B-games", the fact of the matter is that they are not "B-games" at all. They were designed as high-budget, AAA titles, their goal being worldwide sales, but when they went wrong, at least in the US and Europe, we decided they weren't so triple-A after all. But let's not confuse excellence with budget or marketing clout. Let's not diminish lower-budget games by misconstruing development cost as playability. It's entirely possible for a game to cost plenty of time and money and come out disappointingly; it's also possible for a comparatively quick, cheap game to become one of the most laudable RPG releases of an entire year, and on a previous-generation system.

Of course, we already knew from the heading that I was talking about Persona 4, right?, and, to an extent, its predecessor, Persona 3. Here, we see games produced on a fairly low budget, at least compared to something staggering like Gears of War 2, or even upcoming Resident Evil 5; as for the length of time in development, it's not a fraction of Final Fantasy XIII. And there are no pretensions of making a big, multi-regional blockbuster. Persona 4 was designed with the Japanese market in mind, not much of a thought given to what Westerners may or may not care for; perhaps Persona 3's relative success made them feel secure in ignoring the American sensibilities that are so popular to keep under consideration elsewhere (Capcom and Square Enix, for two), but I get the impression more that it wasn't much of a consideration at all. The localization was probably a given from the get go, certainly, but what I'm saying is that its appeal to the Western gaming population was not part of the design. It was not trumpeted about beforehand, I doubt they had meetings discussing techniques, and no Western game engine was used (poorly or not) in the process.

Persona 4, in fact, should be even more bewildering to a Western audience than Persona 3, probably; it takes place in a rural Japanese setting, not the fascinating, Tokyoic megalopolis of the previous title. Would foreign gamers have the same nostalgic sense for Inaba that Japanese gamers should? Would those who enjoyed the big, technological, Japanese city want to move into a small one? Further, more of the original Japanese language is retained this time in the English version. We're deluged with plenty of "-chan", "-san", "-kun" and "sensei", so much so that when we do, for whatever reason, see a "mister" thrown in there, it feels jarring.

Yet, somehow, Persona 4 garners such universal praise, far from the shores of Japan, that any score below a 9 seems almost shocking.

My point, if I've been too obtuse to make it clear, is that the current trend of thinking, where Japanese game development has fallen hopelessly behind and needs to westernize, is erroneous, and I'm using Persona 4, from among a few others which I could have chosen, as what I think is a shining example. While The Last Remnant came to us unfocused (and others would argue unfinished), trying to appeal to a worldwide audience, Persona 4 simply did its thing, never straining too hard to become more than a niche production. While the former had a huge budget and an enormous team of developers, artists and fancy localizers, the latter was staffed by a core group of talented individuals.
If we look at the Japanese games that have made a splash in the West, they've never been trying to impress anyone but their own little public. I have a hard time imagining something like Super Mario Bros. was ever pondered from the perspective of "How can we wow foreign territories?", yet it, and so many other Japanese games, totally revolutionized what we'd eventually come to expect from console entertainment. There were no board meetings during the pre-development of Pokemon to decide how best to craft it to appeal to the West. Tamagotchi wasn't created with the United States in mind. Katamari Damacy is too inherently, bizarrely Japanese to have ever come from anywhere else, actually most Japanese successes have that in common, yet all of these and more were phenomenons internationally to differing degrees and groups.

And thus the gigantic, triple-A release fell depressingly flat (The Last Remnant was frankly the game I was most looking forward to in 2008), achieving few, if any, of its international goals, and the plucky little B-game more than exceeded anyone's expectations. Yet, we still have people saying how they hope Persona 5 will appear on PS3 rather than PS2 (they'll probably get their wish, as I don't think we'll see another installment even enter development for at least a few years), never realizing that the platform Persona 4 released upon was a huge part of its success, allowing it to dodge the crippling development costs of the current generation, a problem more responsible for Japanese game design's apparent lackluster than anything inherently outdated in concept.
Still, it's an odd state of affairs when exceptional products like The World Ends with You (certainly not designed with anyone but a Japanese audience in mind) and No More Heroes sell well outside of Japan and flop in their native country, making it obvious this is a console generation unlike any other. But maybe this just lends more credence to the notion that, in order for Japan to recapture the honor of the position it once held, maybe even emerge again as the savior of the industry (though in a different capacity than it did in the late '80s), it certainly doesn't need to Westernize its game creation methods to sell in the West (though what it needs to do to sell in Japan, I can't say). They need only keep doing what they've always done, and I feel confident that we'll push through the current Japanese glut of mobile and "casual" games and enter a new era, if not now than when, finally, development costs are lower and fantastic B-games again get the attention they deserve, this time on current-generation systems. Hopefully, Sony is to be believed when they say the PS3 has at least a 10-year lifecycle, and hopefully Microsoft isn't just posturing when they say they're committed to the 360 for "...one day longer than Sony supports the PS3".

Not everything has to be a multi-million dollar, multi-national endeavor to succeed; in fact, such aspirations can lead to utter downfall.
Comments? Suggestions? Please feel free. And does anyone know how I can do a cut/break after the first paragraph (like Kotaku and others do) so folks aren't bombarded with the full post until they click "more"?