Atlus announces Tokyo Beatdown for Nintendo DS

Who do you reckon is more under-dressed, T-shirt Tommy or Boobs-out Betty? (Note: not real character names--I wish!)

Beatdown? Beat Down? beatdown? Beaten down?

Let's walk left-to-right as we break things/people in Tokyo Beatdown!

Whatever the grammar, Atlus continues to impress me by announcing what looks to be the sort of beat'em up I always wanted as a kid. Tokyo Beatdown promises multiple characters, multiple paths for each character, and multiple endings on top of all that. Whew! Is one of the characters a kitchen sink?

I miss Sega Saturn games like Guardian Heroes.

There were a few sidescrolling action-brawlers in the Final Fight style that flirted with the open-ended, path-branching sort of thing, but I don't recall any of them ever succeeding. What they did interestingly was usually weighed down conversely by poor play mechanics, and the ones that did the play mechanics correctly were usually pretty straight-forward, Double Dragon style, starting on the left-hand side of the map and scrolling right, beating the hell out of people through a set amount of levels until you hit the end or ran out of continues. Not even River City Ransom (below), brilliant as it was, had much non-linearity or path-branching, and for all its fun RPG elements, it certainly didn't have multiple endings. Probably the closest we ever came to seeing a non-linear, side-scrolling fighter (these genre decriptions are becoming increasingly unwieldy) was Treasure's Guardian Heroes (above), but as it was a Sega Saturn game, sadly, no one played it, and the recent Game Boy Advance version did not meet with the same critical acclaim.

If I had a dime for every time I made someone puke all over my foot in River City Ransom...

And so, a new glimmer of hope arises for those who fondly remember sauntering left to right, glibly jabbing A, A, A, A, A, B, jumping from time to time, and using as weapons whatever odd knobs happened to drop upon the street. Tokyo Beatdown looks to include the best of all of the above.

Or, if you're my mom, get hit without defeating these fiendish evil-doers!

As much as I'd like to do some research and report on how Famitsu or some such scored the Japanese version of the game, I'm having trouble coming across what it's Japanese title was. Without knowing its progeny, it's tough to get any glimpse at its relative quality. We'll just have to wait until faithful journos get a grip on some playable code or an import copy.

Really? My uncle's just a pervert who touches me in funny places and wears a trucker hat. Still wanna hang out?

The distinctive Japanese setting and goofy attitude look like they'll be just as much fun as the gameplay, assuming they nailed the whole "break things/people while moving left-to-right" concept. Don't disappoint me, game!

The "beat me (down!) to the punch, but at least I can gank their undersized JPEGs" award: Kotaku

The "I can't link you to the secret e-mail they sent me, but here's the official site" award: Atlus USA

UPDATE: Chris Kohler put up a story about the game and mentioned, in passing, its Japanese title. I did a Google search and came up with this article, which lists its Famitsu scores as three 6's and a 4. Ouch. While numbers aren't everything, and Famitsu isn't necessarily the most reliable (though they usually overrate, not underrate), with a rank that low, it leads me to wonder, as I did with Operation Darkness, why Atlus USA would bother localizing it at all.

Jesse Dylan Watson wonders where Kunio-kun has been lately.

1UP.com acquired by Hearst, EGM closes, staff laid off

It's a sad day for gamers everywhere, particularly me, and I hate to make it about me, but, well, it is my birthday, and to wake up to a news story posted on my favorite video game web site saying they'd been purchased by Hearst Publications (who run UGO.com) was not the most celebratory thing. However, I'd heard rumors, figured it was coming, and when I read the surprisingly pleasant text, it didn't seem so bad. Comments left by other perusers, though, left me confused. They were angry, talking about closures and staff lay-offs. Where was this in the article?, I wondered, left a pissy remark to that effect, and blasted someone else for making a rude statement about my pal Jeremy Parish. I read the article twice, saw no mention of any, well, change, shrugged, and moved on, all the while wondering why I still felt so upset.

But alas, I ran into some other posts, particularly this one at Chris Kohler's Game Life. If Chris says it, it dawned on me it had to be true. A magazine with a 20-year run, and one of the last great gaming publications, Electronic Gaming Monthly, has been shut down. Not only was the January 2009 issue, which I'd already devoured, going to be the last, but February's, which is already completed and I've been checking my mailbox daily for, is never going to be delivered.

I'd heard rumors to the effect that EGM was closing. I was prepared for it. UGO doesn't want a print publication, I know. They just want 1UP.com, and who wouldn't? Ziff-Davis (the parent company) wants to sell, they want to buy, and after Games for Windows magazine (which was a reboot of extremely long-running Computer Gaming World, another I'd read in my youth) stopped printing, it seemed likely. I was prepared for EGM to close, but it still stings. I was up late last night re-reading the August 2008 issue, actually, and I'd just renewed my subscription in December.

What I wasn't prepared for is a supposedly authoritative list from Joystiq.com of folks who are now being laid off. That's some unexpectedly cold water to the face. I immediately scanned it up and down, like a mother looking for the name of her son on a list of casualties. My son (Garnett Lee--okay, bad analogy) was not on the list, and I'm glad, but so many of my son's friends (okay, yeah, really bad analogy) show up, longtime staffers who I've been reading for years upon years, idolized, and been inspired by, names I'd seen in print and on the internet constantly, and some younger newcomers of whom I've become extremely fond.

It would be difficult to write each name that's had an impact upon me, because I'd (truly) be re-typing almost the entire set, and to single out just a few would be unjust. Still, maybe one wouldn't hurt. Most depressing is that Shane Bettenhausen, someone I've looked up to as an outstanding journalist and whose inspiration (along with Garnett Lee's and others) is in no small part responsible for this blog, has been apparently given the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere.

Shane (at left) with a fan at PAX 2007

Yet, with all the bad news, there is hope. Many of my favorites were not on the list of casualties, and Sam Kennedy has been pretty optimistic (although it's his job to be) in unofficial posts (as reported again by Joystiq) since. He believes Hearst/UGO stepped in when no one else would to "save" 1UP. They were losing money, and if not for them, Ziff might have just shut down 1UP entirely. He also believes that, in the near future, staff members who were let go will be re-hired at 1UP. I certainly hope that's the case. I, personally, think that individuals of such outstanding talent will have no problem finding work elsewhere; I would just prefer for them to all be in one place. Oh, how we humans despise change.

This whole thing is especially personal to me. I've been reading EGM since I was a child (10? 11?), and I can still remember their huge, blowout issues when I was in grade school. I'd sling those things around in my backpack everyday and read them at recess. I've also harbored fantasies for a long time about working at 1UP, but now, if I'm ever given that awesome chance, how many of my heroes will still be there? Maybe I'll never get the opportunity to say, "Hey, your work really meant something to me." Maybe 1UP won't even be there anymore. While Sam Kennedy is hopeful, he almost has to be. Jeff Green, on the other hand, another hero of mine, is not so happy at all.

Maybe this really is the end.

I'd actually planned a rather large article for today about localization versus translation of Japanese games, but to write about anything besides 1UP would be misplaced and disloyal, not to mention it would have been an extreme effort to muster. This is a day of mourning. Happy birthday to me, happy... whatever day it is... to 1UP. :( If you're really gone, there are no words to describe the huge loss to the industry and your readers.

Hideo Kojima joins the vague discourse on western games

Today, it's Metal Gear Solid director Hideo Kojima commenting upon the state of Japanese game design as compares to the West. Who will it be tomorrow, George Lucas? Or will I finally be able to write about something else?

This time, it's Edge's news section I'm sourcing, and they're, again, via Develop, and so we find out what Kojima thinks about the whole situation. Like yesterday's Jun Takeuchi, Kojima intends for Japanese games to "westernize," particularly his games. He says that making games is expensive business (something I eluded to yesterday), and therefore in order to be profitable, one market isn't enough; Japanese games must sell in foreign territories, and therefore they must appeal to a broader audience.

He says, “I've come to understand that the way we've made games up until now won't translate globally, and I've come to think that I need to make Kojima Productions a team that can compete alongside the rest of the world.” Funny, that, since the Metal Gear Solid games seem to have always sold a little better in the west than in Japan.

In his comments, we see two seperate trends I've been commentating about. First, this (probably erroneous--see previous posts) notion that Japanese games need to westernize to compete, and second, due to the first, games on the current-generation systems are just too damn expensive for even some larger developers to remain solvent with. After spending so much money on Metal Gear Solid 4 and seeing decent but not blockbuster sales worldwide, Konami obviously thinks it needs a bigger piece of the pie. How will Kojima do it? Well, rumor has it he's working on a first-person shooter, and we westerners (myself excluded) love our FPSes, ever since Wolfenstein (which is getting another reboot in 2009).

So everyone wants a bite of the global pizza. Takeuchi is worried western publishers are going to take over Japan while Kojima himself is obviously heavily targeting western territories with his next design. Again, we see that it's okay, maybe a "must," for Japan to sell in the West, but we uncover resentment when it comes to the West selling in Japan.

And are western developers really trying to sell in Japan? How? Does this mean they're attempting to make games the Japanese public at large will enjoy (Dragon Quest West? Final Fantasy from Florence?) rather than just a small segment? Wouldn't that alienate the home territory, the West that Japan seemingly wants so desperately to recapture?

I think there's a lot of paranoia and misconception in the industry right now fueling this sort of conundrum.

Oh, it's an odd, odd console generation, and I still wonder if this kind of thing is not doomed to failure. I don't know if Kojima can really make an FPS to compete with the likes of Gears of War 3 in holiday season 2010. Why would he want to? People are going to buy Gears and Halo here, not Hideo Kojima's Shoot for the Skull. Even something like Resistance 2 seemed to have difficulty competing. Development costs have spiraled out of control, and the genres and games I've always loved the most are what suffer, as brilliant titles like Folklore and Valkyria Chronicles get overlooked, selling poorly in the United States and Europe, and, shockingly, even more poorly in their home territory of Japan, and developers from the homeland of such games decide they need to "westernize" to be profitable.

Whatever "westernizing" actually means. Kojima never really says. "I've thought a lot about how Western games have been winning, looking [at] it from a global perspective, and there are things that I've noticed." What, that people like to blow stuff up? That gory headshots are popular with kids? That cutscenes lasting longer than 10 seconds make us reach for the "skip" button so fast we create a small tsunami off the coast of Thailand? I wonder what would happen if Japanese developers started to look at what made Japanese games great all these years instead of attempting to distill what about western games is supposedly so fabulous. I have a fear they're going to import the bathwater with the baby.

Jesse Dylan Watson is behind the curve. Here the fad is westernization, and he's been trying, all these years, to easternize! Maybe he'll start sitting in chairs again.

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"?