I’ve been ranting on the decline of Japanese gaming for a while now. Where are all the good JRPGs? Heck where are all the good Japanese action games? I’ll tell you where, nowhere. The American market has surged forward with advances in the FPS and open-ended RPG genre, and for some reason it just doesn’t appear as if the Japanese market is keeping up. We are seeing fewer and fewer imports from Japan and more and more exports from America to Japan, and while that is good for us in the grand old US of A, it doesn’t do much for the gamers out there that enjoy spiky haired protagonists killing god with a sword bigger than their entire body.

Square Enix Executive Producer Akitoshi Kawazu, known for his work on Final Fantasy as well as many other iconic Squaresoft classics, has his own opinion on the situation, and he recently voiced it in an interview with Nintendo Power:

Aside from a few well-known titles, games from Japan are receiving less and less attention, regardless of if it’s an RPG or not. I feel that it has something to do with the marketing abilities of Japanese publishers, as well as the games themselves.

The technology is not on par with Western games, and it also seems like developers are losing their passion to stick with their vision because they are being overwhelmed by costs or market trends. It’s necessary for each individual developer to constantly be up to date with the latest computer and game technologies. It is also important for development teams and groups as a whole to support technological advancement. It is impossible for one person to keep up with all the skills necessary for game development on his own. On top of this, developers need to take on a project with the confidence and strength to stick with their vision. Everything I mentioned here applies to me personally, as well, and they are all things I would like to bring to fruition with my next project.

So the big failings are in technology and vision. I can get behind that. JRPGs haven’t really evolved in the past few years. Heck, most of us remember out best JRPG experiences from the SNES era, or at most the Playstation era. Did the games become too formulaic, or have American audiences simply decided that they would rather hear stories about grizzled space marines? It does feel as if American games keep pushing the boundaries of our current state of technology while Japanese developers seem to rest on their basic gameplay and horrible over-dubs. Maybe if Japanese developers started taking some risks we would see a renaissance for Japanese games. Until then we can only sit here and bitch about all the Japanese releases we simply won’t see here stateside. Perhaps Akitoshi Kawazu’s next project will change all that.

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