Xbox 360 soon to be best seller in Japan?

It’s true, JRPGs haven’t ‘advanced’ as a genre - they’ve split off into different directions, each game slapping it’s own gimmicks onto a loose framework. I feel weird saying this, because it’s not a very me thing to say, but: ‘progression’ seems to be more of a western thing, and alternately mixing things up and sticking rigorously to boringass tradition are more Japanese things. Roughly speaking, if you make a game in the west in an established genre - RPG, RTS, FPS, whatever - there are a bunch of features your game is expected to have and to improve upon - decent AI, physics, graphics, interface. Japanese games either seem to take no chances whatsoever or make a point of standing out and carving a niche of their own. So there tends to be way more diversity and way less ‘progression’.

Uh huh. There’s no point in reinventing an interface just for the sake of it and in all of the ways that interfaces should evolve, they have. As for AI, that is something not a lot of Japanese developers are interested in focusing on and I think it’s just something that separates the different design approaches.

And you cannot simply say categorize any changes into different subgenres and then call that no advances, then all you’ll get is some loose and weird idea that any advance isn’t a true advance, it’s just another splinter.

People will simply call something a gimmick as an all-encompassing easy word and way out when they don’t like what a new game is doing, or the approach its taking.

It’s true that Japanese developers respect tradition more, in turn, it would be good if more Western developers realized that just because it’s old and tried doesn’t mean we should abandon it – then maybe they wouldn’t have killed the mainstream market for turn-based titles. Going realtime for everything is not necessarily an advancement. I think it would to their merit to try and offer mainstream roguelikes, or smaller 2D titles and not just resignedly sigh like it can be nothing else but niche.

Why give up the beautiful look of sprite-based 2D graphics just to claim your advancing graphics? That’s insane and stupid.

Things like random battles should stay around in titles where they are appropriate to the design because they are fundamentally good ideas that can never be obsolete; they carry certain advantages that make them a good design choice depending on the game.

I especially like how when Knights of the Old Republic and Fable and Morrowind came out people claimed they during new things for console RPGs, when nearly every feature has been present in one console RPG or another for years before their release.

It’s just a myopic point of view and nothing else.

-Kitsune

Holy shit, that is the gayest in-game scene collection ever.

Even more amazing is that the main character appears to be an openly (flaming) gay adventurer travelling with his life partner.

It’s certainly a refreshing change from angsty pre-teen.

I’m guessing the soft jazz sound track and lisping voice work may be from a third party.

Microsoft should abandon Japan. If you look at what they did to try and promote the Xbox there, and look at what they have already done for the 360. And then look at the results, you might conclude that they could give the hardware away for free and it still wouldnt matter.

Bah! JP support efforts have given us ninja gaiden and dead rising. Do you REALLY want to give those up?

Your mistake is thinking those games wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the xbox and the 360.

Also, I would be highly suprised if we didn’t see a tweaked/improved version or a straight port of Dead Rising on the PS3. This is capcom we are talking about.

I’m pretty sure both Dead Rising and Lost Planet are going to be 360 exclusives. Their sequels, however…who knows?

Definitely true that the 360 hasn’t had enough good games in Japan that people care about. A quality translation of Oblivion might help. Dead Rising’s release might help (when is the release on that in Japan, anyway?). I think Blue Dragon is the first game to have a chance of really boosting Japanese sales.

I personally don’t think it would be wise for Microsoft to give up on Japan. Many of our best games in NA and Europe are made by Japanese devs, and even though they sell very well in those regions, I don’t know that your Capcoms and Konamis and Tecmos of the world would make games like Dead Rising or Resident Evil for the 360 if Microsoft didn’t show the country strong commitment.

Back on topic - I’m not sure, because I can’t find the real press release (not looking too hard), but I think the Winning Eleven exclusivity applies only to next-gen consoles. I think it’s still coming out for the PS2, PSP, and DS as well.

One of the dev leads on Lost Planet just commented on it. I’m sure someone can pull the actual quote, but the gist is that while he personally would like to keep Lost Planet 360 exclusive, market factors may cause Capcom to port it to the PS3.

That Enchanted Arms video was… uh… well, it was different.

It made me laugh. I wasn’t sure I wanted to bother with this; now I’m thinking it might be worthwhile for the incidental humor value.

FWIW, it looks like there was a major miscommunication in the MS press conference on this, at least as it pertains to Winning Eleven. According to Konami, Winning Eleven is only exclusive to the 360 for this year, not twelve months like initially stated.

From a Game Informer interview:

Aki Saito: Sorry, but I have to say one thing about the Microsoft presentation. The presentation was misleading. We never said exclusive for one year for the next generation. We said this year. We were agreed that it was this year.

Q: So up until January 1?

Saito: Yes. In a sense. If we’re going to release PES 7 next year during this time, yes it may be one year. But we never agreed that we were going to say that officially. It was kind of misleading and a misunderstanding. What we meant or agreed with Microsoft was this winter or this season for PES 6 – this is exclusive.

And also in the interview, they had no plans to release it for the PS3 this year - they hadn’t started development on it at E3 this year - so it’s an exclusive by default.