Hello, and welcome to The Back Page A Video games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined, as ever, by Matthew Castle. Hello. Hello, Matthew. I’d like to ask you about the wedding you’ve been to and baking in the sun while wearing a suit, but we have a special guest on this episode, so I’ll come back to that another time. Yeah. So on this week’s episode, we’re joined by Jay Baylis once again, one of the developers of Bitten Studio, to discuss the recent history of japanese games, particularly how they’ve been perceived and discussed over the past two decades. So Jay is one of our longest time guests. I think you were first on the podcast in 2021, Jay. It’s been a long time. So you’re a veteran. How’s it going? It’s going well, thanks. Yeah. I’m enjoying the last of the Brighton summer, before the weather transitions into more of a dark Gothic vibe, a bit more Robert Eggs’ Lighthouse, rather than Brighton festival, as things tend to go in this country. Indeed. That’s my memory of living in Brighton for four months. It was just constant overcast skies. It was one sunny day and then constant overcast skies. So it’s like basically a different city in the summer. So I actually missed it a little bit. When I came down to see you, I realized I did miss parts of it. So that was good, at least, after complaining about it a lot when I lived there and went for coffees with you. Yeah. Develop conference happens in the peak of the summer. So lots of people come down and are mistaken into believing that there’s a fun part of England that is always very bright and sociable and that’s the vibe all year round. But I think there’s a three-month window where that’s the case and then the rest of it is business as usual. Yeah. That one bar area in that one hotel at develop feels like it feels like most of the business gets done there. Like it powers the industry to me or anything that’s not done in Zoom calls is probably done in that room after three points. So yes, I learned a lot from my first develop this year and I caught COVID. So like a double whammy really. So Jay, you’ve talked to me about how Cassette Beasts, your studio’s second game that released last year, is one of those low key successful games. So it’s definitely not a leading question, but it’s interesting to see how engaged your players are. So I did want to check in and see how things were going with the game. What’s it like having people latch on to your characters and universe in that way, and generally just how it’s all been going with it since you launched last year. It’s good. I mean, it’s interesting that you say that because I think audiences latching on and mass appeal and things. these are all things that I’ve got thoughts and notes on when it comes to the main course of today’s discussion. But I think for me, I mean, when you say, you know, I’ve said it’s a low-key successful game. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging. I think it’s more that, you know, you get the big indie hits, you know, you get your, you know, Balatros and Vampire Survivors, the thing that kind of bust super into the mainstream. I think Cassette Beasts sits cosily in a place where it’s done well and people have heard of it. We’re not breaking, you know, the space we’re in, but people are aware of us and we have our own, you know, community of fans and it’s been amazing, really. It’s really cool. I couldn’t really ask for anything more than that, especially because, you know, we’re such a small studio. There’s three of us at this point in time. Yeah. And it’s, yeah, it’s just cool. We get to, you know, work on our little universe that we have and people, like, respond really well to it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was, I believe I was at a pretend Blackjack table with your entire studio at Devolop. I had a great time playing pretend Blackjack at the Devolop Awards. It really got me thinking about the real thing. It’s, you know, pretty, pretty moreish. I could really get into that. Yeah, you were definitely, that was definitely your takeaway. Like, oh, gambling is quite fun, actually. I can see why this has taken off. I could really get into this, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Jay, what sort of pop culture have you been absorbing of late? I’m always keen to hear about what you’re watching and reading, because sometimes I have that Homer Simpson, I’m intrigued by your ideas, and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter reaction where you tell me about things. So how’s Black Myth Wukong treating you? What else have you been up to? I’m enjoying Black Myth Wukong. I think it’s a really interesting game. We’ve never really had this big budget, chinese produced mass media game product like this. We’re so used to these big AAA game hitters coming out from like the same three countries. But really, this is kind of a really unique point in time. We’re getting, you know, the chinese game industry has made this very particular kind of, you know, souls like action, big budget, big production values game. I kind of wish there was more discussion around that aspect of it, you know, just to kind of see this big product with this, you know, totally new cultural perspective, kind of diving, guns blazing. If you haven’t played it and you’re interested, I think a good sell is if you liked Elden Ring, but you don’t want something that will take you like a whole year to beat. That’s kind of how I’m selling it to myself, because I’m like, great, this could be done in 20 hours or less. Nothing’s more appealing to me now than hearing that about a game. Like when I read Star Wars Outlaws was under 20 hours long, I was like, stick another point on that score, baby. That’s it. I’m all in. Absolutely. Rubbing my hands on the thought of it. Other than that, we’ve had a real string of three out of five movies at the cinema. I saw Alien Romulus. That was a real solid three out of five. Long Legs, three out of five. Deadpool. I wouldn’t give Deadpool and Wolverine something as high as a three out of five. I also started playing Emeo the Smiling Man last night. I don’t know if either of you have delved into this. yes. It did strike me as a Matthew game. I kind of admire that Nintendo is going all out on web advertising campaigns and seeing adverts everywhere for what is essentially a japanese point-and-click visual novel. It kind of shows you how cosmically successful the whole Switch brand is at this point. They’re like, yeah, we’ll throw a marketing campaign behind this. We can do anything at this point. Yeah. Matthew, do you want to tease a bit about how you feel about that game in response to Jay’s comments there? I found the remakes of the first two to be quite creaky, and you could see that they were things from the late 1980s. And I think they still honor those designs in this one, so it’s still a little bit creaky. The thing I was intrigued by is that it’s a first-party Nintendo game that’s an 18-peggy rating, and I was kind of curious about what that would look like. Like, what does violent, adult, in-house Nintendo look like? And it’s actually really tame, and then it goes incredibly hard at the end. And I was like, oh, OK, I get it. Yeah, one of the characters said, shit, and I was like, oh, can you say that? Are you allowed to do that? Yeah, it’s… Yeah, I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s a pretty good hang, and they’ve definitely ironed out some of the problems with the first one. You never really get stuck in it or lost in its kind of command menus, which you could in the first one. And it looks amazing. It’s just like a visual novel with a massive budget behind it. And I think it’s mages who make it, who did Steins Gate and things like that. And it’s just wowed by the production values of it, really. Who I am anyway. And again, I admire them saying, this is £40 sterling for this visual novel. We’re going to throw the adverts out everywhere. And people will respond to it. And in a good way. So all the power to them, you know. Intriguing. Well, Matthew, I look forward to delving into that in more detail next week on our What Have We Been Playing episode. Are you going to play it? Me? I don’t think so. Only because. It’s a no from me, dog. Well, no, it’s not because I’m, I mean, I quite like the art for it and the whole smiling man concept. That’s all a bit, you know, not quite Fincher level, but slightly Fincher-y and like a bit spooky. And I’m like, well, kind of intrigued by that. But I’ve got so much visual novel homework from having done this podcast for four years, that it’s just, that’s not anywhere near the top of the pile of like Matthew Castle sort of top mystery slash detective games. At least I don’t think it’s going to be, you know what I mean? Probably not. Yeah. I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got at least seven mysteries of Honjo to get through before I get to like the one mystery of the smiling man. So yeah, I do admire. There does seem to be kind of like a long running culture of obviously, there’s a like a huge audience for japanese detective fiction within Japan. And there’s kind of games, there’s like a kind of like a steady stream of these games that kind of come out and have these cool audiences. I did at some point by the Centennial Case. Oh yeah. PlayStation. And I got through the first case on that. It was a very enjoyable game, but I didn’t find myself jumping back into it. But I always admire those games and it’s, hopefully I’ll actually finish this one. But I do like to kind of support it in theory. Thank you for being one of the supporters of the Centennial Case. All six of us. Yeah. Yeah. I think you make a good point there, Jay, about how the Switch’s success has just led to this slightly unusual last couple of years of software where things that would just never have been remastered during the Wii U generation, for example. I mean, it was only like three or four years, but still, it’s like there was no prospect of them ever getting to the kind of stuff they’re getting to now, like another code being excavated, for example, or like another Famicom Detective Club game being made. It’s true, but I really like that. I guess we’re probably still another year away from the Switch 2 by the way Nintendo’s made it sound. So who knows what kind of obscure delights await us in the next 12 months. We’re in unprecedented levels of Nintendo victory lap that they’ve gone back and delved into like Famicom Detective Club. Something I was only ever aware because it had like two trophies. Smash Bros. Melee. That’s the only presence that existed in my kind of like sphere. But that is literally the development process now is they’re just flicking through the trophies on Smash Bros. Have we not remade any of these? What’s this like ball with eyes that will do? We’ll just stick that on there. Yeah, Cube of Orz coming back. Is that one of those? Custom Robo can return. Anything is possible. Yeah, it’s when Doshin the Giant, when you break the Doshin seal, that’s when like all bets are off. That could be like the kind of Icarus’s wings melting in the sun situation. Doshin the Giant, you know, sells 13 copies. Yeah, the Switch 2 gets delayed another year and like, yeah, we just get to the, what’s it, Adama, the GameCube microphone game. Yeah. It’ll be a launch title, yeah. Okay, good stuff. So Jay, to kick us off in general, I guess like this episode, why we came up with this episode, you and I, I think you’ve talked to me, that makes it sound like you’ve been talking at me, but it’s definitely been a two-way conversation about how, I think you’re interested in the way in which japanese games have been succeeding lately, while I guess succeeding on their own terms, while the perception of them has like flipped in the west, from I guess like a different place during the HD 360 era to where we are now, where they just seem to be at a kind of like creative and commercial peak. And at the same time, obviously, it’s quite a turbulent time in the west for games as well. So, I’m sort of like, I guess like, should we talk about that side of things? What was the kind of origin point of us wanting to do this episode? Yeah, I mean, so it is something that we’ve like talked about together, and it’s just kind of an interesting point in time. And naturally, when you talk about something that’s interesting, you say to each other, let’s make a podcast about this. We are blokes, after all. We have no other power, you know? Yeah, so I think, so as someone who’s kind of in the game industry, I think one thing I try and do is try and understand kind of the medium that we’re in, and also how the audience that we as game developers serve, how those audiences have needs that kind of shift and evolve over time, and how that kind of ties very much into the kind of financial and business side of the industry. So Cassette Beasts, the game that I work on, is something that very much kind of pulls from a lineage of japanese game design. I’ve said this a few times before, but you know, I grew up on Nintendo games. My kind of point of reference and interest comes from, you know, Pokemon and Zelda and Mario, and it’s very much something that kind of we inject into the games that we make. And Cassette Beasts is very much in its own way kind of a western made JRPG from a design point of view. So kind of understanding the cultural and business attitudes towards JRPGs and japanese games in general has always been something I found kind of just personally interesting in. And it is this kind of interesting time, isn’t it, that we’ve talked about. You see the game industry shift so much when you’re kind of coming out of the SD era, you know, we’re going into the HD era. Once you get from the kind of PS2 time period towards the 360, everything in the industry changes maybe more dramatically than it ever has, except maybe like kind of the jump to 3D innately. But there is this kind of point in time when everyone’s priorities and how they think about games shift dramatically across the board. And just that time period is something that it’s kind of interesting to kind of figure out and kind of pick it apart and see what happened then and what was changing to kind of create this kind of perceived decline in interest in japanese games. And then, okay, if that was the case, if there was a decline in interest in the kind of 360 HD era, what’s now come about to make things kind of flip back around again? And that’s kind of the point at which we’ve kind of discussed is like this interesting changing point in history. Yeah, I think we’re keen to dig into the idea to find out where it’s an audience perspective change versus an actual change in how the games were made or which games were made. I think that’s because I think both play a part. So yeah, we’ll definitely unpick that. And yeah, it’s true. That’s one thing I hadn’t really, a dimension I hadn’t really considered in my notes too much. But you’re right. I mean, this is maybe the peak of japanese games’ influence on the types of Indie games that are being made. Right. And very much so. Yeah. Yeah. Not just Metroidvanias. But like you say, you know, RPGs like Sea of Stars last year was a major 2D RPG in the japanese RPG mold. So, yeah, there’s a lot to dig into. So I think it’s going to be interesting. Matthew, as someone who I’ve kind of like, I’ve pulled you into the vortex of this idea. This is very much your area, too. What do you kind of like make of this whole episode premise? Yeah, it’s an interesting one, because obviously during this period, I was quite insulated from it because I was on, this is at the meat of my time on Nintendo magazines, and Nintendo are kind of in a weird bubble, kind of impervious to what’s going on with everything else because of the Wii and the DS. And I remember this is a period of reading lots of doom and gloom stories, and it seemed that every other week fucking Keiji Inafune was saying Japan games industry was dead. But I’m sure we’ll get to him. Whereas obviously we were dealing with the japanese success stories and not just Nintendo, some of their partners and some of the people were making like a serious bank and were basically growing and emerging at this time. So as someone who was playing non-Nintendo games in this time, more than sort of analyzing them or thinking too deeply on like industry trends, yeah, I think it’s an interesting area of discussion. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess to set the scene of what we’re going to discuss or at the point in time where we start, I suppose. So this is slightly before where the point where we’ll probably discuss this in more detail, but at the end of the PS2 era, so mid noughties, it’s probably late noughties really. It’s probably fair to say that western games are starting to set the agenda ever so slightly more than they had in the previous generation. Just a little bit, there’s still loads of mega-selling japanese games on PS2 obviously, but you had Xbox launched during that period in the early noughties and was built on the success of Halo and all of its developers were based in Europe or America, although they did have strong ties with japanese developers too, like Tecmo. And so Nintendo was a little bit diminished after the GameCube flopped before the Wii launched, as Matthew pointed out there, before the DS launched. And GTA was the best-selling series of the generation, so that was significant as well because that was not even really on the radar of anyone but British players during the PS1 era with GTA and GTA 2. So what happened to japanese games at the start of the 360 era? It’s quite interesting because you have Sega experiencing quite a lot of turbulence. They make Sonic 2006, which is a notorious dud. They have a few bumpy years and then some mass layoffs in 2009 where they cancel a bunch of projects. Capcom is successful at this time. They team up with Xbox to great results with Dead Rising and Lost Planet. I would say that that represents a slight move towards more global focused games. Those games are rather different to the things that they were making on PS2 and GameCube, where they notably had a big presence, obviously. Konami started making weird Silent Hill games. The team that made Silent Hill, Team Silent, had essentially dispersed and gone off to make Siren. Some of them did anyway. You had MGS4 as well, which we’ve talked about. We covered that as a strange object on this podcast, but it’s almost like the last of its kind in some ways. If you think about the difference between MGS4 and MGS5, it feels like there’s a much more global approach, like an international audience may be kept in mind with how MGS5 is positioned towards third-person shooter fans. MGS4 is purely in that lineage of MGS1, 2, and 3. Nintendo has the Wii, obviously, a huge success like Matthew says. Microsoft actually gets Sakaguchi to make games for them, so the father of Final Fantasy to make a Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, so they’re still trying to hit that japanese audience at that time. Let’s talk about that period. I was curious, is that a fair assessment, Jay, of where things are at in the early 360 era? Is there a little bit of a sense of japanese developers and publishers trying to figure out where to go next or where the audience was? Yeah, absolutely. So I think obviously one thing that I’ll kind of dive into in a bit is that as technology increases, budgets of games increase, which means that you have to make back more money. So you kind of see a gradual shift, especially for the jump to the HD era, towards everyone starts making games for as big an audience as possible or as much of an audience as they think they can get. And I think also at the same time, you have this kind of big obvious cultural aspect to it, which is we’re talking about the early to mid 2000s, we’re talking about going from the peak of the PS2 era in like 2000, 2001, straight through to the late 2000s. You’re also describing the birth of essentially what is like the modern internet. And I think how that impacts things and how that shapes discussion and shapes game discoverability is important here and then definitely comes back into importance further down the timeline. I think around this time as well, you get this kind of, there’s an undeniable kind of huge aspect of kind of xenophobia around things, but the japanese, I’m sure you’ve got some notes on that as well, you know. We’re talking again alongside the birth of the kind of early modern internet about the boom of kind of anime fandom as well and the kind of backlash that kind of comes in response to that. I think often you see online, which is still quite universal, this kind of when a subculture kind of breaks from going, this being obscure to kind of becoming mainstream, there’s always kind of like a backlash towards that. I think you can kind of see that in the reactions to certain things at the time. You’re kind of in this interesting point in time, aren’t you? You’re kind of going from… I found some interviews with developers from that time who were saying that kind of in the PS2 era, there was broadly the sense that, from the japanese point of view, that the japanese games were the best in the industry, and the shift from then was that the turning point into the HD era was that the west then dominated, had the biggest commercial products, and the japanese game industry suddenly become second fiddle in this industry, it kind of started. That’s definitely true. I think part of a thing that contributes to that as well, is that even though Nintendo platforms sell really well during that period, the home, the kind of like, I guess like the PlayStation brand diminishes during the PS3 era. It doesn’t sell as many as the PS2 does. So, the home console market starts to disappear a bit in Japan. And even though the handheld market is extremely strong, throughout that time and up until present day, when you look at the Switch sales, pretty much every week coming out of Japan, it’s still extremely strong. The actual, what was the kind of like baked in, people will always buy two and a half million copies of a Final Fantasy game on day. Actually, maybe that’s more Dragon quest numbers, but definitely like a million plus Final Fantasy sales on week one. That was starting to fade a little bit. Maybe by necessity, japanese developers had to look to the west for that audience growth, because while the PS3 was in slightly dire straits, it just wasn’t at its strongest, the home console market. Also, you’re talking about Final Fantasy there. Back on the PlayStation 1 era, they were knocking those Final Fantasy games out. Every year or every two years, there was another one because the pipeline was a lot more modest. It was a lot easier to produce and a lot less expensive. Then suddenly, when you jump to the HD era, you start spending a lot more time to make one game, which means that one game has to be more of a sure thing. Obviously, this snowballs and snowballs to where we are today. But I think one of the big parts of this is, obviously, there’s a huge cultural aspect. But I think often when it comes to games, games is such an interesting medium because as much as they are in our form, they’re also very much about product design. You know, entertainment products more than art are the ones that are expected to kind of improve and develop based on audience demand. And I think you see the problems that kind of come into play around the HD era. One thing I find is that one kind of crucial aspect of this is that HD asset creation, you know, when you’re talking about making models, character models, you know, environments, that just becomes exponentially more expensive in this time. So one example I like, I kind of like pulled up is that TimeSplitters 2, you know, PS2, took twice as many developers to develop than GoldenEye, which is the generation before that. But then the entire, you know, number of staff it took to develop all of TimeSplitters 2 was about just as big as the art team for Halo 3. You know, we’re not just talking about, you know, textures getting better, you start to talk about things like, you know, normal maps and bump maps and all the little kind of passes and things on assets that you make that make them, you know, shine differently in lighting, because the lighting suddenly becomes more expensive. It’s not like a doubling of effort. It’s kind of like 10 times as hard to make the same scene in HD than it would have been in standard definition, which kind of impacts the whole business pipeline of things. You’re kind of chasing this graphical advancement that doesn’t have any gameplay benefits, and I think you’re also in this time when western developers are very much being influenced by the fast advancing CG blockbusters of the time. You’re talking about the time you’ve gone from the Matrix in the late 90s, and suddenly you’re getting things like films like pirates of the Caribbean, the Transformers films in the mid 2000s. There’s this sense of wanting to mirror the spectacle of western cinema at the time that the western developers are chasing. I think that was very expensive, and I think that a huge part of this is that the japanese industry struggled to keep up with the blossoming expense of all of this. Again, a huge part of this as well is that a lot of studios historically were working on their own tech and their own engines, and as this workload gets exponentially more expensive, the less viable these house engines were, the sooner they start switching to things like Unreal Engine, and the difficulties of that are kind of evident. The struggles in making games that were as polished for the new standard as they were the generation before becomes very difficult. Yeah. It’s true about the demands of the HD era was, there’s definitely a manpower and budget element to that. There’s also just a time element to that, where if you just think about how quickly the three Devil May Cry games on PS2 came out, and then there was one this generation from Japan, from Capcom, and then there was one from the UK, from Ninja Theory, and otherwise, that was all that there was to show for that generation, and those are both great games, but it’s just series that used to come out every year or every two years, started coming out every three or four years, and that was a bit of a measure of the challenges. Matthew, what do you make of this, and what do you remember about that time? I’m curious what you think of Jay’s point there about there being a certain amount of prejudice towards japanese genres or content, because I remember it as a bit of a case-by-case thing, where I had some colleagues who didn’t really take japanese RPG seriously but really fucking love Street Fighter. But then you obviously get to now, and people have a really high, not tolerance, but active interest in the types of games that maybe were not as hot to journalists back in the day. I don’t know, is that reductive? What do you think? It’s tricky. I always struggle with this particular topic, because whenever the nature of japanese genres or modern conversations about how japanese games were doing in this period, there’s always a couple of clips that get served up, video shows from the time, of American journalists sneeringly talking about japanese games, as if that’s indicative of the time. I can’t remember whatever the American show was. X-Play, was it? X-Play. Yeah, there’s this one clip of someone talking about something and it always gets served up as like, oh, this is what all journalists were like. We’re actually- Not true. Not true, definitely not in our office. Again, we really were, this period, you’re so insulated in that little office with other games journalists who were all quite open-minded and interested in good games wherever they came from. I do wonder if some of it is tied to this coinciding with just people having a better idea of where their games were coming from. I don’t know if we- When we were kids, I don’t think we necessarily talked about them as japanese games necessarily. You probably had an idea that Nintendo were based in Japan and Capcom based in Japan, but they were just video games. Then all of a sudden, we have such a wealth of information about everything. I don’t know if that just enables a bad element or an element who would- It’s more of an American thing. The rise of certain American franchises and Xbox being quite an American brand. I don’t know if there’s just a little bit of USA about it. I do think there is something in that. I do think that one thing if you look at the games that were popular and the content of them, but not just the games as well, but the media of the time. I do think that for western gamers, like the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, kind of sets a massive shift in the tone of American produced media, especially primarily aimed at men and boys. I said transformers before, and that’s this hugely militant take on this cartoon that was made in Japan, but then changed. You know, I mean, it’s like this, you look at things like Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, the kind of militant kind of us versus them tone of the media, and that was kind of massively impacted games like Gears of War and Halo. I think that’s just kind of where, it’s particularly the American kind of interest was. You know, there’s always, the theme shifted towards a kind of certain kind of like militant masculinity, you know, characters were kind of morally dubious. There’s a sense of like, you know, doing the job, even if you shouldn’t be doing it. I think that was just kind of in the kind of cultural subconscious at the time, which might have, I think also, you know, games from Japan wouldn’t have been making them with that kind of audience and with that kind of mentality in mind. And things that kind of drifted from that, which would have been comparatively kind of more alien or less in the, what was in the zeitgeist of the American public. It’s interesting, though, because you do see some japanese games absorb that slightly more militaristic idea. So if you look at resident Evil 5 and compare it to resident Evil 4, for example, resident Evil 4 is like, you know, is a game where Leon S. Kennedy is shooting lots of Spanish villagers who have gone wrong in the head, for sure. But like, just to kind of be ultra reductive about what that game is. But resident Evil 5 has you fighting like army dudes and stuff. It’s a very different kind of attitude. It definitely feels like it’s a kind of post post Gears of War, maybe slightly yet American audience in mind mentality to how the game is designed. So, yeah, I think that I think there is something in that. While also thinking that, obviously, I don’t necessarily think that those games bear any responsibility for carrying the politics of the time on their shoulders, because in their own right, they’re very good and very entertaining. The other thing that happens, I think, creatively that impacts the way people talk about this, is this is something we talked about when we did an RPG episode with Jeremy last year, is that developers who were looking to the castle on PC, start moving to console, and so you suddenly have the likes of Oblivion or Gears of War. Halo had already existed, but you’re just starting to see a shift from those kinds of developers moving to console and thriving on there and doing really well. I think that starts creating a bit of a comparison in people’s heads. When you have, let’s take RPG specifically, you have Oblivion, kind of like Fallout on one side, and then you have Final Fantasy on the other. People start weighing up one versus the other in this way that I don’t think ever really happened before, because there was quite a remove between like Cotor, Baldur’s Gate, and like, and the Final fantasies at the time. People didn’t even really think of them as the same genre, I don’t think. And then I think that gets starts getting used as a stick to beat games with as well. Yeah, I think it’s definitely also something driven by the audience, because I think comparatively the developers, I remember reading interviews of the developers of Baldur’s Gate 2 back in Bioware, talking about how they were influenced by Final Fantasy VII. So I think on the developer side of things, historically it’s always been much more of a symbiotic relationship, both when it comes to Eastern and western JRPGs. I think the history of the RPG is its own rabbit hole of fascinating history you could jump into. That, you know, earliest JRPGs are heavily inspired by trying to recreate games like Wizardry and Ultima, which then in turn influence, you know, western RPG developers. So on the development side, I think things are a lot more kind of cross-pollinated than the consumers at the time would have realized. But I think it would have been very easy on the consumer side to instead pit these games against each other rather than existing in the same conversation. And that’s why I think so much of this is about, that’s why I think like 70% of this is how people were talking about them at the time and perception versus like 30% reality. Because you get to this year and no one’s saying that like Final, no one’s saying, why do we need Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth in a world with The Witcher 3 in it? But that was the kind of thing. I feel like people were saying more on the internet back in the late noughties. And it’s obviously preposterous. But yeah, okay, like an interesting relic of this time then, I think this is a good kind of framework to talk about this stuff as well. So Keiji Inafune said, Japan is over in 2009, a very doom and gloom proclamation about where game development was in that country. He would repeat it. As Matthew said, it felt like every other month he was saying that. But it came up a few times up until about 2012. He was talking about that. You later got, I don’t want to put this on his shoulders at all, but Phil Fish saying, modern japanese games sucked. I think he just said it offhand in an interview and probably regretted it. But just to give him a bit of a benefit of the doubt there. All of this seems preposterous in retrospect because so many of the types of games that were maybe not taken as seriously in the 360 era are now kind of revered and some series that were just obscure in that era are now quite massive. But I’m curious about a few things. So was comparing japanese games to western games a fair way to discuss games at that time? And was there a grain of truth to anything Inafune said? Or was this just pandering to the consensus turning against japanese games a little in the late noughties? What do you think, Jay? And then I’ll come to you, Matthew. I think it’s an interesting question. I think again, it’s reflecting more of the business anxieties than it was like the cultural anxieties of the time. As you said, the cultural discussion was what people were talking about, you know, the kind of combative attitudes of the internet at the time and the kind of discourse at the time of, you know, pitting these things against each other rather than the reality that they all existed in the same kind of conversation. But I think there was a genuine anxiety at the time in the industry for, you know, many publishers that they wouldn’t be able to keep up, you know. An interesting fact I found when looking, like researching for this one, is that Unreal Engine 3 didn’t actually have any japanese documentation when it launched. So, you know, Gears of War was being used on this engine that you couldn’t get any information about how to use that if you were in Japan trying to keep up. It kind of shows just kind of where the industry was at. And again, to my earlier point then of, you know, these japanese studios were starting to look at how to shift from the in-house engines that they had worked on for 15 years to new engines that could keep up with the kind of advanced technology at the time. I mean, Epic games only actually opened its first japanese office in 2009, and Unreal Engine 4 launches with japanese language documentation, which again, we can talk about further, kind of shifts how the industry in turn responds to that. But I think it comes back to, as games become exponentially more expensive, it’s so hard to fathom how small the teams were that were making the AAA games of the late 90s compared to how big the same teams had to be 10 years later. I think there was just a sense that there was no way to keep up with the west, and especially where the conversation was with things, being so combative, it’s America vs. Japan, there’s no sense that these things can cohabit. I could see from my perspective now, I could see where that anxiety came from. That’s really interesting about Unreal Engine. I didn’t know that, but that makes perfect sense, I guess, because now you see japanese games using Unreal Engine in a way they just simply didn’t in a 360 era, and so you’d read a lot about how Final Fantasy XIII’s crystal tools just sounded like they’re a massive pain in the ass to use, and like you say, all this kind of proprietary tech from different developers. And then like you say, it becomes this arms race of money, people and time, and it’s sort of like, things were shifting so quickly in a way that it probably won’t ever shift that quickly again now, because we’re kind of at the peak of where, what you can really do graphically with games to like without spending, well, game budgets are where they are, and they just simply cannot keep rising really. But also, yeah, it was just, the transition points were just so rapid at that time. So I think that’s true too. I think there’s a grain of truth in there, but I think that also in Afono’s take on it, it was just super reductive and headline grabbing. And like you say, reflecting business anxieties more than reality. What do you think, Matthew? The Inafune stuff, people forget that every time he was saying japanese games are dead, it was always paired with, apart from that Capcom who is doing this, it was just a marketing line rather than a doom and gloom. Also, you could argue that when Keiji Inafune finally left Capcom is when they kind of enter their modern golden era. So maybe actually it was just him as a key kind of influencer at that company at the time. And what he’s done since doesn’t fill you with too much inspiration. As for the Phil Fish thing, they weren’t talking specifically about indie games, but I think the interview was after an airing of the indie video game, the movie or whatever it was called. And arguably at the time Japan was much further behind. It’s only recently that you feel a much bigger indie scene emerging, certainly on the world stage, one that’s talked about and has much more coverage. So as individual lines, I think you can sort of understand where the people were coming from. But yeah, I thought what Jay’s take on it really nailed this one. Spot on, really. I think my personal theory around this is you have a few key series that weren’t excelling this generation, or their sequels are taking ages to come out. And this created a bit of a perception battle too. Like this isn’t true for all japanese game developers, but those operating in the super high end blockbuster space, I think there is some truth there. So MGS4 takes a long time to come out. It’s the most anticipated PS3 game from basically the moment the console exists in 2005 onwards. So there’s that. The resident Evil 5 takes about as long as resident Evil 4 did, but resident Evil 4’s development was rebooted like three times, or four times, I think. So it just took longer to make this HD co-op monster of a resi game. Final Fantasy XIII, like I say, that takes a long, long time to come out in this generation, and Final Fantasy in general, this is the only main line entry in that series that launches this generation. Previous generation, they’d launched, well, I suppose technically 14 launches this generation on PS3, but it’s kind of a disaster. Previous generation, they had 10 and 12 and 11 as well. So I think it just feels like things are moving a little bit more slowly. Kingdom Hearts 3 just straight up skips this generation, comes out on PS4. So by the time that that series continues without minus the spin-offs launching on handhelds, it’s like its audience are graying and slightly overweight like me, basically, whereas they were teenagers when they were first playing this stuff. There’s a hot minute where those series feel a little bit diminished in a world that has like Gears of War, Halo 3, Oblivion, Orange Box, just like a lot going on. The Uncharted series, those things just become super hot and exciting to press and players at the time. And so there’s a little bit of a, there’s also a little bit of a creative identity crisis happening at the same time with some of those games. FF13 really sticks to its guns. MGS4 tries to meet Gears of War halfway a little bit with its controls, but doesn’t quite feel like it’s playing in the same space. And yeah, as mentioned, Rezzy 5 has you fighting like army dudes and the tone of the game feels like it’s bending around an international audience in a way. So that’s my take on it. It lacks a bit of precision, but is that a fair assessment of where maybe this perception battle comes from? Jay, what do you think of that? I think it’s just, again, it’s another example of the jump to the asset production needed just to create essentially the same game, but it’s shinier. None of these games were dramatically more technically advanced than the generation before, but they all looked a lot shinier, and that was a priority for the western audience. So in order to meet that expectation, you have to develop these things with new pipelines and new engines. It makes sense, you can see, just from these are all the franchises that would rely on international western success as much as local success. To be successful products. So you can see how we need to chase what the west wants out of its games as much as what the japanese audience wants from its games. And you can see how the end result was, hey, these are all taking a long time to make, and they are kind of trying to serve too many audiences at once. Or an audience, too many audiences that have two different priorities. That makes sense. Okay, interesting stuff. All right, I think we’re kind of like, we’re nearing the end of the discussion around the context of like this particular moment, and that kind of like the perception element of this. The one last thing I want to dig into before we get into the more recent past and the present is another side of this, obviously, is that japanese publishers start outsourcing their series to western developers. So examples of this, there’s a front mission game that was made in the west. There was numerous Silent Hill games. Shattered memories is the more successful one, but the rest all had a pretty mixed response. You had Lost Planet 3, for example. You had DMC, Devil May Cry, which is probably the peak of the whole lot, an excellent game, but you had that too generated a backlash. You had Operation Raccoon City as well, like a co-op shooter thing that felt very misguided at the time. It was a weird one because I think that people who were invested in japanese developers and publishers, and I count myself among those, were just wary of the fact that the exact influences on those designers is why I like those games. I had no desire to really see them put through a western lens because I didn’t think that was going to add anything to them, and in most cases thought it was going to take away. Now, that generalizes maybe a bit too much because like I say, I think a few of those games are pretty good and I actually think that the audiences distaste for western developers making entries in japanese series was at its lowest when DMC Devil May Cry launched and that they caught really the biggest backlash off the back of that, even though they really deserve the most support because they made the best game. I was curious what you remember about that period, Jay, and that whole exercise and what you think ultimately led to that stopping. I think an interesting part of this, maybe we haven’t discussed as much, is that the philosophy of the game design themselves, for japanese and western audiences then, and to an extent today, were very different in that a lot of western game design of this time was very much about harnessing the kind of same, like a kind of a broader universal control system. So if you play TimeSplitters, you could play Halo, but Halo would finesse those controls in some way. You know what I mean? So there was kind of like a shared control experience with a lot of these western games. A lot of the kind of design principles of the studios making these kind of AAA, kind of third person, first person, action shooter games was about taking that universally expected control set and kind of harnessing it and finessing it in some way. Whereas japanese games historically tended around this time to be a bit more experimental and kind of figuring out new ways to use the controls, new ways to kind of like interact with the interface with the worlds you were interfacing with using the same set of controls. So I can see that at this time you know you are having a franchise like resident Evil and you’re seeing that these western studios are kind of iterating on the same broad category of third-person shooter. This plays similar to the third-person shooter but we’ve finessed it in some way or the other. Or hey, we’re a studio that can pull off a Gears of War style gameplay but with a smaller budget. And conversely, the japanese studios themselves weren’t operating in this space. They weren’t really making these like high-end first-person or third-person shooters at all. So it would make sense in that scenario to be like, well, these guys over the sea, they can do a good third-person shooter. Why don’t they make a resident Evil instead? Because that’s what the audience wants. They want third-person shooter style games. Give it to those guys and let’s see how they do and stuff like that. And to an extent, I think there was a difficulty with matching the tonal content, that militaristic content, that never felt authentic coming out of Japan, but came a lot more natural to American developers. So you look at these developers who can just naturally pull off this vibe and you say, okay, you guys have a go of it. But at the same time, I think you’re right, Samuel, in that if you’re a fan of those japanese franchises, you want that japanese tone and that japanese mindset with the thematic presentation, the innovation on the design side of things. You’re there for the things that make them different to the western games. So you end up with these games that in the moment they’re in, don’t really serve anybody, but you can see exactly why they were made. It’s interesting. What do you think of that, Matthew? Yeah, I agree with that. Through all that, I was thinking of how Dead Rising is kind of the perfect sort of series to illustrate all of this in that, you know, it’s a game that first arrives, made in Japan, with a lot of friction involved and a lot of strangeness and oddness, stuff that you bounce off, and then it’s rest of its journey, which is, and it’s in the, in, is it Capcom Vancouver for the rest of it? Yeah, and, and it is just a journey towards flavorless mulch, with each entry losing more and more of that character and just becoming, you know, missing the point of it really, becoming just, oh, it’s that guy just hits, hits loads of zombies with weird objects rather than any of the kind of idiosyncrasies or pressures from that first game. And I think that kind of perfectly illustrates it. resident Evil 6 is a weird one in all of this, because it’s like made in Japan. They throw like basically everyone they’ve got at it. And I think one of the reasons I love it is that it is a fucked up translation of a western action game. And it’s full of like really broken stuff and weird stuff that would never have made the cart. But that is why I love it. But then I’m super into that stuff. So, you know, I’m bound to. Well, I think that is interesting because I think that game, this is a personal theory, but I think like if you look at where Capcom is now, it sort of makes sense is that I think that game is a move towards the Capcom of today, where you have basically like two or three like monolith sized games a year, as opposed to like this big scattershot library of weird stuff launching, like they have in like the PS2 era. Like that kind of Capcom is basically gone by the time the PS4 launches, and everything they make is kind of like, they kind of make two games a year, right? But they’re all or nothing games, they generally have a super high quality, and even though resi 6 doesn’t have the right creative direction, the sort of like the undertaking of making it, that feels like a step towards the Capcom of now, where they feel like huge endeavors, but they’re also really good. That’s like their version of like modern game development, I think is, they are throwing everything they’ve got at it, but the direction is a bit more successful than it was for resi 6 in particular. Yeah, I think that is true. It’s a thing as well, where it’s not to really denigrate the western developers having a go at this. It’s more like, it kind of felt like for a time that you were getting this stuff instead of those games. So when Lost Planet 3 launched, for example, Lost Planet dies after that. That’s the end of that series, but people really like those first two. The second one was kind of like a weird Monster Hunter sort of like co-op hybrid thing. But again, quite idiosyncratic and strange. And then, yeah, like it. And then 3 is just this quite bland single player game that doesn’t really, yeah, that doesn’t take off at the end of the 360 PS3 era. So, yeah, I just think I’m, I just didn’t, I didn’t want those, the specific feeling and DNA of those games to be blotted out by games that were made for people who, you know, who just, who like first person shooters at the time. So, yeah. But it does happen, like, it can happen in the west too. Like there are a great series that have been sunk by leaning into sort of the sort of homogenous design that Jay’s kind of referencing, you know, like Dead Space, for example. Right, right. You know, two very games that really know themselves. And then a third game, which is kind of trend chasing, which is like the thing that will ultimately kill so many games. That’s a really good point actually. Yeah. I hadn’t really thought about that. And that there are a few different examples of that. Yeah. But Dead Space is probably the strongest one. One, I think one, when you say it was happening in the west, I think one last point of interest that has maybe been overlooked as well is that I don’t think it’s, it’s not solely that Japan suffered from the jump to HD. I think when we’re talking really locally, I think if you look at the spate of game studios that existed in the 90s in the UK, and then how many of them dropped off and closed around the jump specifically to HD. It also kind of mirrors that kind of same difficulty, period of difficulty. A great example, I think, if you look at the Wipeout series, which was made originally by Studio Liverpool, which used to be Cynosis. They knocked out all these Wipeout games from the mid-90s, straight up till about 2007, and then there’s like a couple of HD Wipeouts, one collection and then the studio closes. I think there’s a lot of similar studio struggles, just because I think when you jump to HD, everyone who is or not able to produce a AAA game of a certain bar of kind of like, this can be justified at a $50 price point, suddenly can’t keep up. It’s almost like you have this big kind of culling of the industry on how you can either figure out a way to kind of adapt your studio, either you expand, you switch into kind of becoming like a support studio for bigger fish, or you switch kind of to a more niche audience. But there’s a big moment there, isn’t there, in like that kind of 2005 to 2007 period where a lot of studios had this reckoning point. And it does happen obviously to the japanese game industry, but not exclusively. That’s true, actually. So yeah, as you were saying that, I was thinking like Free Radical, for example, or Pandemic, which is a weird name to say these days. We’d never got a HD time splitters. We had this successful trilogy on the PS2 that I’m very fond of and then just drops off Never Appears Again. Yeah, so Free Radical is a good one. Pandemic, who did get a couple of HD era games out, but they were a little bit, well, but I thought mercenaries 2 was pretty good. Saboteur, bit of an oddball kind of game. That feels like a bit of a PS2 era game that happened to be a HD era game. So they were gone as well. But yeah, it’s true that not everyone in the west survives that too. So it’s true that everyone faces that same reckoning. Is there anything on this particular time period you want, anything else you wanted to say about this particular time period, Jay, before we move on to the recent past? I think one thing we can maybe go into in a bit is kind of where Nintendo’s at at this time. We did touch on it, but I think it is very interesting to see how the studio that has existed for a longer period than most, saw the writing on the wall and kind of shifted how they think about games. I think that’s an interesting one because it kind of persists even to this day. That’s interesting. The Nintendo thing is a huge element of this as well. So yeah, I think what we’ll do after the break is we’ll talk about who were still cooking during this time, who were still making the things that were great or did or evolved in a way that made sense and just and then really start to thrive. So after that doom and gloom, we will come back with lots of nice things to say about the japanese games that we love during this time and that led to some of the games that we love now, and the massive success of multiple japanese series in the modern age. So take a quick break and come back. Welcome back to the podcast. So we’ve covered the 360 era and the kind of like the challenges that japanese game developers faced at that time in terms of the realities of game development, but also audience perception. So I feel like we ticked that box quite well. We explained that not all western games journalists were racist towards japanese games, which is important to point out. That’s the main takeaway. But if you take away anything from this episode, let it be that you’re okay in the UK. Okay. So I’m keen to discuss which series defied this narrative and will continuously successful, either creatively or commercially during this time, or sow the seeds of later success during the late noughties and early 2010s. Who keeps cooking? First of all, wanted to talk about Persona. Really interesting because the Persona series somehow dodges HD games until Persona 5, basically becomes a huge success in the latter part of the PS2 generation, where basically no other PS2 games are coming out. But Persona 3, I think, does all right in the US, but then I think Persona 4 is a genuine success in the US. Then obviously, those games also moved to handheld for a little while. So both Persona 3 is ported to PSP as are 1 and 2, and then Persona 4 Golden on PS Vita is arguably one of the only really successful PS Vita games. It was just always number one in the charts on there for a while. Jay, do you want to talk about this side of things? Because I know it’s a series that is close to your heart. Yeah, I find Persona really interesting. Maybe we’re jumping ahead a bit too much into why I think certain franchises have had a modern day revival. I think to an extent, things like Persona and series like Yakuza or Like a Dragon Now, they kept cooking because they kept the budgets low. When you look at Persona 4, it doesn’t strike you as an expensive game. It’s just a well-crafted example of what it’s going for. You can see why it captured the, again, we’re talking about the time, the early evolution of the anime fandom becoming mainstreamized and discussions of that online becoming really big. I think in general, the Internet has changed how people talk about games. I think Persona is an example of a series where you had a lot of people who will ride or die for it in a cult way. It wasn’t a mainstream huge success, but if you knew someone who was into Persona, they were really into it. I think as you go down the timeline, having less fans who are really into your game, rather than have a broad audience who are like, it’s all right, turns out to be the big thing that keeps franchises alive. I think Persona is a really great example of something that was positioned from early on to have this cult appeal and then snowball that into a big hit when Persona 5 comes out later down the line. Yeah, absolutely. They wait so long to take that into the HD era that when they do, they’re so ready for it and there’s just no compromises to the way the game feels. Like you say, they were biding their time that it’s primed to just really explode in this very specific way and now there’s no real looking back for Persona. It’s just kind of an annual franchise now, which is wild. That never would have seemed possible 10 years ago, but yeah. Matthew, Xenoblade chronicles, why do those games… That feels to me like a studio being like we’re going to make something a really good version of something quite trad and then also happen to be on a platform where there’s not much competition for the same kind of thing. Is that why that series is, why that first game is succeeds on the Wii and then later on other platforms? Largely, yes. I mean, I think the fact that they’re making graphically a PS2 era RPG, also bankrolled by Nintendo who have more money than anyone at this moment, that’s got to help. The thing that wows in Xenoblade chronicles and is like a key part of its DNA now, is like the size of the world, just the mammoth nature of the environments you’re exploring and from a resource perspective, I just don’t think you could be doing that on the HD era consoles at this time. And it’s a series which, while beautiful and has such quality, it has always been a generation behind because it is on Nintendo hardware and I feel like that’s really what unlocks it and enables it, because otherwise it has to be so big. People are looking at the sales figures for Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth incredibly nervously, despite them being pretty massive by most people’s standards. It’s because those games cost so much, but you get the impression, I mean, Nintendo never talk about budgets, but you get the impression that you could probably get all the xenoblades for one of those games probably. Also Speed, they’ve been able to make them at a rate. Monolith are working at a rate that we still love from these older studios and that goes to what you’re saying about Persona and Yakuza. these are nice paced games. They come out, keep their fandoms engaged, because there’s always one never more than two years away. Xenoblade chronicles has been able to do that with DLCs, which are as substantial as some standalone JRPGs. It is that model. To me, it just feels like the sixth generation playbook powered by the hardware that it’s on, which is a good thing. Yeah, absolutely. I hope that they can stay in that realm, even if there’s a significant amount of extra grunts to what the Switch 2 can do. Yeah, like probably like 2022 kind of mobile chipset. Yeah. Yeah. I think one thing that’s interesting, actually, is going, if you go back to like when Nintendo were at, when it came to HD era, they obviously, they took a long time to kind of, they were essentially a generation behind. They weren’t in a HD era when everyone else was for some time. And I think they’ve kind of figured out the playbook for how to handle HD for their own games. So, one thing I’ve noticed in recent years is, you’ll see a screenshot of like Pikmin 3 and be like, wow, look at these like photorealistic graphics on the Pikmin game. And then you’ll see like a big open game like Xenoblade 3 or Breath of the Wild and be like, wow, look how open it is. But it’s never the combination of the two. Nintendo never put out a game that’s wow, it’s photorealistic and it’s big and open. I think they’ve realized at some point down the line that you kind of have to pick and choose where you do that. So every game that they release that has an impressive scale is always very stylized, simpler textures, simpler character models, anime style often. Then you get games like Metroid Prime Remastered and Pikmin 3 where they look gorgeous and have amazing detailed realistic models and textures. But they’re all set in essentially big rooms. I don’t think the Nintendo will ever do both of those at once. I think they’ve realized the playbook to staying alive is just to pick your battles with where you spend the money, and where you have the impressive big open games, and where you have those small contained but visually advanced games. Yeah. I think they stacked it nicely as well. The audience understands there are different tiers of games that will maybe cost the same, but they serve different purposes or the scale is deliberately drawn in a way where it’s meant to be like not. For example, like the upcoming echoes of Wisdom, Zelda game compared to Tears of the Kingdom. Now, Tears of the Kingdom was a bit more expensive than that by about 10, 15 quid. But they’re both entries in the Zelda series, but they are, I imagine that the, you know, to guess that echoes of Wisdom probably cost a fraction of what Tears of the Kingdom cost to make. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. But that’s good. The audience expectation is in check. So not every single game Nintendo makes has to be of like, you know, of like a Mario Odyssey or Tears of the Kingdom scale because they very much kept, they’ve kind of kept, yeah, they’ve kept expectations in check by having some series that are graphically intensive and some that are not. And yeah, and it’s just led to a great mix of software. So yeah, an interesting one. They’re unique in that they’re one of the few publishers who can be like, okay, we’re putting out the biggest game you’ve ever seen with like Tears of the Kingdom. And then be like, here’s a breather game that’s deliberately very small budget. And fans will be like, finally, a smaller game. You know, I think for some of these western titles, there’s such a focus on grand scale and grand ambition that Nintendo has, I think, I think they’ve figured out now, better than they did in the Wii and Wii U era, but they were learning the whole time, like how to interface with their own audiences and kind of prime them for things like, hey, here’s the small Zelda and here is the big Zelda and you should be excited for both of them in different ways. yes, super interesting. I don’t want to talk about Pokemon too much, but that keeps being successful during this period, probably tied to the DS’s success as well, I would imagine. Then Pokemon as well, it’s just a global series in this very specific way that doesn’t really have many points of comparison. Platinum games, more in our wheelhouse, has no real commercial success, Platinum games, Bayonetta does not. Bayonetta is the most successful game they have, still not really a monster hit, but is also an amazing display of what that particular set of developers can do with this hack and slash beats them up, a paradigm that Kamiya helped create with Devil May Cry, and just a really great version of it. So that game does really well. Mikami looks at Gears of War, goes, I can make a better version of that, and then does with Vanquish, which is again quite a flex, but a great game. Then Mad World, not so successful, and Infinite Space, which Matthew likes. And that’s again like a beloved game. So they’re a really interesting bellwether of how things are going in this generation, I think, for japanese developers. So that’s interesting. And From Software, who create the most significant game of the generation, arguably, in terms of what it would influence. And even though they’re not really my types of games, I am glad this happened, because I do think it influences the future of games in quite a healthy way. It’s like a hardcore game at a time where maybe the edges have been sanded off for some games. They’re a little bit simpler. If you compare playing an Assassin’s Creed game from this time to playing Dark Souls, they are night and day, and one would end up influencing the other, and maybe in a way around that you wouldn’t have expected at the time. So what about From during this period, Jay? What do you think they represent in this overall continuum? I mean, speaking of priming your audience, I remember when the trailers were coming out for Elden Ring, and people were like, oh my god, the mouths move when characters talk. This is so good. I think From Software are really interesting, because I think Dark Souls was the right kind of game for the right time, because it tapped into very much this, you know that feeling when you’re a kid, in games of these like haunted boxes of unknown quantity. There’s never a sense that you know the full scope of these kind of mysterious games on the SNES. And I think why Dark Souls captured people’s imaginations, other than being very good, is that there was this sense of like, we don’t know what is in this, you know? We don’t know the full extent of what this game holds. It comes out of nowhere. I mean, well, okay, Demon’s Souls comes out and gets like a lot of success and then they iterate on that. But Dark Souls has this kind of like challenging spooky kind of game to kind of jump into. I think just captured the imagination of where, you know, streaming culture was and YouTube culture was, and, you know, the backlash to the kind of broadening horizons of, okay, as games get more expensive, they have to get more broad audiences, they have to be easier. And then here is this very strange, difficult RPG series from Japan. And it’s just this kind of fascinating artifact. I think it was just, there’s just a lot of things going on in it that really captured the moment and the time. And I can see why it took off when it did. What do you think, Matthew, of the from kind of like success in this generation? Because I do think it seems a little bit unlikely in retrospect. Again, I’ve got a skewed perspective on this, but, you know, it felt led by kind of tastemakers who were kind of open to it and amplified by that. Again, because I worked around those people and it felt like I was surrounded by cheerleaders for it. And that would tie into what you were saying about, you know, how much of this stuff is like reality and how much of its audience perception in that this is a genre and a company that has like enough cheerleaders to make it a thing. And those cheerleaders have only kind of grown in size and amplified to the point where, you know, it is now the mainstream. Is this the game that unlocks like a generation of writers and cheerleaders who want something a bit more idiosyncratic? Like can you pin it to individual game? Probably not, but certainly around this time is when you begin to hear more diverse range of games celebrated, I think, towards the end of, you know, the later half of that seventh generation. Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. I suppose like this is where I want to ask a little bit about the audience because I think that’s a good segue there. So there’s a few things to this, but I was curious how much the rise of some of these japanese games or series in recent years is about the changing audience for games and a younger audience that has japanese culture at the center of their lives in a way that older millennials didn’t, kind of like coming into having money and spending money on games. How much of it is about that and how much of it is about maybe like some of these series found their grooves better than they did during the PS3, 360 era? How much of it is audience versus the games being better or is it both? I think that something interesting happens around this time, is that the way people consume games becomes very different, especially when you break into the 2010s, in that there is now a younger generation of fledgling gamers who are growing up in a time when there’s a much grander bank of existing games that have existed before their time. Every year, someone gets into video games, there is more and more games they’ll never get to play. I think you see this in line with the rise of YouTube. Dark Souls is a franchise that did really well because it was like perfect material for YouTube content. People could discuss the lore, they could stream themselves finding a secret no one’s seen before. It created a community effort out of the fandom around games of playing it. You didn’t even have to play it to be interested with it. That’s something that’s uniquely new, I think, around this time. I think it was just perfectly aligned to be in that point when the rise of the video essay as a piece of way to consume games. Also, it’s uniquely a series that’s, it’s got that video essay appeal, but it’s happening now in the moment. Comparatively, I think something like Silent Hill is a great example of a series that was really huge in the PS1 and PS2 era, dropped off massively around the HD era, and then had a second wind as YouTube content as a way to consume games, takes off. There’s more Silent Hill 2 fans now that haven’t played it than there are that have, I almost feel. I think it’s really interesting that Silent Hill 2, specifically, is the one being remade, because that’s the game that has had this second wind of collector interest. It’s the game that’s much more expensive to buy second hand now because it’s had this reappraisal via the format of people consuming games solely through YouTube. You can see the full extent of this with something like Five Nights at Freddy’s which is something even after my time. It’s a series that has taken off, it’s got a movie, it’s got the whole multimedia franchise, and it’s primarily through people consuming it via YouTube Let’s Plays versus actually playing it themselves, because it’s aimed at such a young audience. I think this culture around games, the shift towards this culture has impacted FromSoft very well. these games are really difficult to play, which makes them very fun to stream. They’ve got all this weird arcane lore which makes them very fun to discuss. And they’re very fun, so it’s just fun to play. So it kind of hits all the beats. And also has this… I think up until Elden Ring there was still to an extent a sense that it was like a pseudo cult game series, or a cult developer almost. And I said before that I think what’s shifted now is having more cult cheerleaders is more valuable than having a much broader audience of people who are like mildly into your game. And I think From Software is the perfect example of a developer that builds that cult audience, builds that cult audience, and then suddenly Elden Ring is primed to have the maximum amount of people yelling at you to play it and to turn it into an event. That’s really interesting. I hadn’t even really considered the way we engage with games. Changing is a dimension to this, but that makes perfect sense. And yeah, like the Silent Hill 2 point in particular, so rabid an audience that is haunting modern Konami trying to move this series forward in different ways because the specter of their game is almost like mythical now and all-consuming. And I’m no doubt quite hard to maneuver around. So yeah, that’s… I also think it’s also not just hitting, it’s kind of retroactively reappraising everything from that HD era. So yeah, which out of like Lost Odyssey and Haze, which is the one that has the video essays that delve into the themes and the plot of the game, all these games that were kind of like too weird and too japanese and a bit too idiosyncratic for their time, are now getting that kind of second revival of like, okay, let’s look back and see if these games are cool. Oh, they were really interesting, especially compared to everything else at the time. It kind of came in an era when Conforming was much more commercially viable option and now in retrospect, in terms of the discussion, it’s much more interesting to talk about the things that stood out in that era. Yeah, it’s interesting. western games from the early HD era were a very knowable quantity. I feel like people just know what gears, and they’re great games, Gears, Halo. They know them inside out. Yeah, you’re right, idiosyncrasies of these games definitely enhances their appeal in that respect. It is interesting to see how much perceptions change by the time you get to the PS4 generation. So western developers still dominate the list of best-selling games on PS4, for example. You don’t have to go far down the list to find Bloodborne, Monster Hunter, Nier Automata, Final Fantasy. I do think that maybe the reception on arrival of those games is a little bit different to how it would have been from a press perspective, but also, I guess, like you say, that there is no real content creators, YouTubers don’t really exist in the time of the PS3 and 360 generation in the same way. So Nier Automata is a good case study, I think, of like, if that game released during the PS3 era, I think it would have been seen as much more of a curio than it is. Instead, it’s launched in the modern age. It’s a seven-year-old game now, but it’s a monster hit of a game. It sold, I think, seven or eight million copies, something like that, huge game. But that’s where I think there’s a difference in audience for this stuff versus how the original Nier was perceived. Now, the original Nier was not nearly as good as Automata. It was a much rougher diamond, but I think it’s just a good measuring stick of how different the era is. I was curious what you thought, Matthew, about this audience side of things and how that’s changed. I definitely agree with what Jay was saying about this retroactive appraisal of this era. And you were saying earlier, all eyes were on a handful of series which were often used as a barometer for the health of Japan, like Metal Gear, Final Fantasy and whatnot. And suddenly in this era, it seemed that there were lots of fans of other series which were in decent health during that period but would have been dismissed. All of a sudden you have a generation of people who are like, oh, actually I’m really into Dynasty Warriors. And you’re like, really? Like the stuff that games magazines would have shrugged off the classic, give it to a freelancer for 150 words. And then it turns out actually there is a fan base for these things. Whether that’s like a retroactive fan base and people make liking these kind of games a kind of cornerstone of their personality and kind of go back and discover them that way, or whether there was a generation of… It’s a bit like when they talk about shy tories, if there’s like a load of shy Dynasty Warriors fans. But like Yakuza is probably a great example. You know, there are people who are just quietly chipping away at that series at a time when everyone’s going, nothing’s good coming. They’re like, well, I really like this thing. And then it explodes and then suddenly it becomes cool to like it. You know, those people definitely existed. I’d say that kind of points towards more like audience shifting. Certain series now, which seem to be massive, which are being either ported for the first time that were originally made then, or, you know, are on their like 15th sequel, so are kind of quietly being made in the background of that generation, but ignored. I don’t know whether or not that fandom started when these games originally happened, is what I’m saying. But, you know, for whatever reason, people feel confident to sort of out themselves as likers of them now, which would point towards it being an audience thing. Yeah. Vanilla Ware is an interesting example of that, I think, where they have only ever really kind of stuck to their guns of making their own sort of like 2D art, you know, idiosyncratic games that really just cross genres. They’re just not, they’re like an RPG genre, an RPG developer at their core, but the actual like shape of the games has changed quite a lot. But now I think people, you know, like Unicorn Overlord, it felt like more people had eyes on that game than they did when like, you know, Grim Grimoire or Odin Sphere launched on PS2, for example. Those were like end of the generation curios really. So I think that sort of thing speaks to that shift too. Jay, I don’t know if you’ve got anything else to add on the audience side of things. You’ve got good thoughts on this. So I thought I’d just ask once more. I think as well, one thing that can’t be underestimated is that more people are playing games than have ever been playing games before. You look at the amount of younger players now getting into the Switch and how Nintendo is so good at kind of like producing the line of games that kind of advance you from the kid games to playing like adult games, quote unquote. I think now there’s just so many more entry points to get into games for different reasons. Things like games, you know, there’s just think games that have, you know, you know, story appeal and, you know, gameplay appeal and there’s different avenues now. I think the way that people get into games has shifted so that the way these audiences, you know, grow and change has just changed in the past 15 years even. So I just think as well it’s interesting to think when you say about how well something like Nier Automata sells by targeting a cult audience. But if it did well enough, it can sell, you know, six to eight million copies. And I think that might have outsold Uncharted 3. But then you think about how much those games probably cost, you know, respectively to make. It almost feels like the industry is shifting towards understanding that, you know, these kind of personality driven weird games can, if you pull it off correctly, be more profitable overall than something that’s very broad. Yeah. I think that’s a huge thing to kind of factor into where we are. Like, if we’re jumping ahead to where we are today, we’re at a point now where budgets are so elevated and so exponentially huge that producing these high-end spectacle AAA games kind of becomes too unwieldy for its own good. It costs like $300 million to make a really good Spider-Man game now. Is that inflating with the audience? Or is it just the case of, this is the endpoint of where we are with the kind of spectacle driven AAA game? But also as a side point of that, if it’s okay, say you spend $300 million on your Spider-Man game, that Spider-Man game has to be very, very safe. It has to look amazing and has to hit all the beats that you expect in a Spider-Man story. It can’t be too difficult or too challenging, so you can’t have too much of a ramp up in gameplay complexity. We’re never going to see an MGS2 style bait and switch of what the actual game is. We’re never going to see a Spider-Man 3 where you’re playing as, I don’t know, like Mary Jane for the latter half of the game. You know, something ridiculous. It’s hard to take a big swing when your product costs like the GDP of a whole country. Like, this is such an extreme end of things that the kind of games produced on that end have to be of a very particular identity, which means there is an audience for games of the opposite side of things, you know? OK, one thing I did want to ask about this before, I kind of ask a couple of wrap up questions. Matthew, is there anything more to say about the Nintendo component of this? Because I do think they almost exist in a slightly parallel timeline to the rest of HD era as we talked about. But do you think there’s an era divide between the Nintendo that makes Skyward Sword versus the one that makes Breath of the Wild? Are they reacting to something when they radically shake up Zelda like that? They would say no, and they’re so secretive. If you read all the interviews from the time, to take this specific example, Breath of the Wild is a reaction to Skyward Sword specifically as a design philosophy rather than any trend. But they would never say, we’re inspired by the popularity of Assassin’s Creed, so we decided to make an open world game. It’s not how they talk about things. If there is a culture change, the shift away from what happens in the Wii U generation where they kind of lose their grip on that, being kind of a gateway drug to gaming with the Wii and the DS, and double down on playing the hits, but just in a really elegant, skillful way. It’s tricky because I don’t think anyone could have predicted what happened with the Switch. And I’d say like, oh, the Switch kind of, I don’t know if it vindicated the approach they were taking or it just sort of supported them. And they were, you know, I don’t really know if they, they know why these things are successful. They’re just making games sort of following their traditional Nintendo values. And that happens to really resonate. The fact that it is on a console which has sold so well and the fact that there is this generation of gamers willing to kind of gobble everything up, who just identifies Nintendo fans. I don’t think it’s as clean to say like, we in DS created, you know, and sort of primed that generation to absolutely devour the Switch. Certainly like opened up gaming to a lot of people, but, you know, not the series that have been doing well. I mean, you know, they’re almost completely different. What’s doing that? What’s doing well now? What did well on Wii and DS? So I find it harder to kind of make that connection. I do think they’ve just benefited from us living in a more gaming, literate time and whoever’s responsible for that, you know, I just don’t think you can pin that on any one thing. You know, they’ve just reached the point in pop culture where they just are. And, you know, if you make the better versions of those things, people will be there for it, which is kind of what Nintendo’s benefited from. But maybe there is some genius master plan, which is unknown to us, but hard to see. Okay, so here’s a spicy one. As a result of, you know, this kind of like revival in reputation of japanese developers and the games they make to some degree, or at least like an audience shift, do attitudes towards western games change too as part of this? Are audiences more hostile towards some of the same types of games they’re excited about during the 360 era? And do audiences still put japanese developers on a pedestal in a way we don’t with western developers? And is that okay? What do you think, Jay? I think both are true. I think to an extent, one kind of framing device, I like to think around games and the marketing of games and the audience response to games in the modern era, is that every game gets one online narrative. And the job of these publishers is to try and shape that one narrative as much as possible. And what Nintendo has learned from its Wii U and DS errors, coming into the Switch eras, is how to dominate the narrative around their own games. Because, if another studio puts something out like, echoes of wisdom, then if they didn’t have control of the narrative, the narrative could shift into like, oh, the studio is being cheap or they’re like, trying to rip us off with a lower quality product. But Nintendo is so good at shaping the narrative around their own games, that they can kind of prime their audience to be like, great, a smaller scale game to kind of pad us out to the next big feast. And I think the way the internet shifts now is that the… It’s very difficult to control the narratives over a AAA game. Otherwise, looking back when Assassin’s Creed started, it was a lot more impressive to put out a series of similar Assassin’s Creed games with increasingly impressive visuals and budgets, and kind of control the narrative around this big Hollywood-style blockbuster series, compared to now, where it’s a bit harder to grapple with people being let down or not liking the kind of gameplay shifts in the series. I think where Nintendo has succeeded in comparison is just their ability to be the ones who dictate everything said around their games. I think as well, people like, I think trends shift around so much. People want new experiences. People want a game that says, hey, when you play this game, there’ll be something new that you’ve never seen in a game like this. I think I bought Emeo the Smiling Man, because I think the Nintendo Life Review said, the climax of this game does something I’ve never seen in a game before. And the single line pitch of this game does something you’ve never seen before, is enough to make me buy something because I go, okay, that sounds interesting. And so few games now, I guess, especially on a AAA level, promise something I’ve never seen. So when I look at something like Star Wars Outlaws, I’m not rushing to buy that day one, because it seems like a full distillation of things that I’ve personally seen and experienced before, and I have a good understanding of what I’ll experience playing that. But then compare that to when 13 Sentinels was popping off online, and the discussion was this like, don’t look it up, just play it, you’ll understand. And that cell of like, hey, this will do something that you’ve never seen before. It doesn’t have to be visual spectacle, it doesn’t have to look like the most impressive game before, but just you’ll experience something new playing this is a really compelling cell to me. And I think that’s more and more difficult now with AAA games, and it’s a lot easier in the indie space, for example. I think Minecraft was as successful as it was because it’s like, hey, here’s something you’ve never seen, and it’s something you can understand immediately. It’s Lego, but you play in it, go nuts. That’s a great cell, and it’s something I hadn’t played before. And I think japanese games especially having a lot more focus on kind of like the kind of unusual or the strange or the experimental when it comes to game design specifically, primes them well to kind of have the attention of the audience who are interested in a thing that’s like, hey, here’s something slightly new. I think that’s a good point. I think as well there’s a, there’s like an apathy towards scale from the way that some western games are discussed online. So it’s true that Outlaws is launching into a kind of like, not another Ubisoft game, but no one will ever say that about this third Yakuza game that launches in a year, or like a Dragon game that launches in a year. And it’s true that they’re offering something very different, but they are also launching these things at a similar clip, you know, like in terms of like the number of them. But yeah, it just strikes me as like there’s a, there’s like a, I don’t think people would ever talk about the developers of like a Dragon, like they talk about Ubisoft, you know, no matter how, no matter if they, even if they put out a couple of DUD games a year. I think that people just feel like, feel they can talk about western developers in a way they can’t necessarily with japanese developers. And it’s sort of like, it’s a, I’m not saying it necessarily they shouldn’t, but it’s just, it’s a bit, it’s just so, it’s such a different landscape to what it felt like during the PS3, 360 era, you know, just sort of like the way people talked about, like Cliffy B for example, during that time. And now I just feel like there’s just, people have just soured on a lot of the things they liked at that time. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that Matthew, am I just feeling around in the dark there? I don’t know if it goes both ways though. I think there’s people who definitely put them on a pedestal, but I think there’s a lot of people who just don’t think of them at all. Right, right. It’s not like, oh, I don’t like Yakuza, they just don’t even consider it an option still. And they’re upset because for whatever reason, they’ve boxed themselves in like, these are the companies who make games for me, and they’re not doing what I want at the moment. So I am specifically upset at EA, Ubisoft, whatever. You know, maybe it is a hangover from that period of like, these were the people who were feeding me best back then, and they’re not feeding me exactly what I want now. So there’s nothing for me, whereas opposed you’ve got an audience with a much broader appetite who’s like, well, if this thing here isn’t doing it for me, you know, I also like, you know, Strange Dish B from this other place. And it kind of works out like that. I mean, any kind of like mass negative opinion, I think you always have to look at the kind of internet of it all and what it actually means and what it’s really rooted in. There’s a lot of people talking down one thing, but they’re not necessarily talking up something else in its place. unless it’s like a Korean action game with like massive breasts everywhere. But I don’t know if that’s entirely in good faith. I’m not sure. Well, it’s also interesting as well that the criteria of what makes a successful Like a Dragon game or a Persona game is quite different to what makes a successful Ubisoft open world game, right? Those games are designed to sell 10 million copies and Yakuza or Like a Dragon is designed to sell one or two, right? It’s the difference of scale that Jay was talking about. So yeah, I think you’re right. Maybe the audience you’re hearing from there are people who would never even consider playing the last two Like a Dragon games. interesting. Okay. So I guess to wrap up, what’s the prognosis for major japanese games publishers going forward? It seems like everyone’s cooking. Sega is making loads of new entries in Dormant series. Obviously, MetaFall is about to come out. That’s probably going to be a game of the year contender. Persona rumors that the entire series is being remade for modern platforms. That’s really cool. The remake of 3 is a really nice way to experience that game. Yeah, Like A Dragon doing really well. Capcom makes two or three games a year and they’re all great. They’re remastering seemingly their entire back catalog. Power Stone is coming back, Matthew. Are we going to play Power Stone 2 again? Will they remaster that at your house? Is that going to happen? What do you think? No. Okay. But they’re even remastering Ace Attorney spin-offs that you and probably 10,000 very devoted people have played or like. Even Konami came back, which we weren’t sure if that was ever going to happen after hearing rumblings about it a few years ago. Jay, what do you think? I guess, where do you think things are at? I mean, as you said, things seem pretty positive on this front. I think crucially, these things are not expensive. It does not cost a lot of money to make a persona remake. It’s an easier sell to put out a persona remake that can sell 6 million copies, than it can be to make an open-world third-person motion capture spectacle that costs 200 million to make, that might also sell 6 million copies, but might only sell 2 million. I think the economics of it all is just kind of at the core of shifting what gets made and what gets prioritized. I think the japanese industry and a lot of these core series that we’ve talked about are really primed to weather the storms of an exponential ballooning of budgets that is very unsustainable. And I kind of wonder if we’re gonna see something shift in a lot of these AAA western studios, where they kind of shift to a more sustainable development in order to kind of try and hit that same level. Because it just, as things get more and more financially uncertain for the industry, they’re gonna have to kind of re-evaluate and reassess how we think about these big budget games. I think there’s some truth in that. I think it will end up getting to a point where you get like maybe five to ten mega blockbusters a year. And then everything else will just be in a different bracket. So yeah, I hope that is the case. What about you Matthew? What do you think things are at with this? As someone who’s always been into these games, I’m glad that they seem more popular than ever before. I do wonder if part of it is tied to the fact that console generations don’t feel quite clear current and as important as they used to. It’s not like, oh, you have this massive jump or it seems like, if you look at Yakuza for example, they’ve clearly settled into the kind of pipeline that people had settled into towards the end of PS2 or PS1 when you can make three Final fantasies, one every year. I wonder if that’s just, we’re at a point where people are, like you say, people sort of understand that you can do more, but what we’ve got is enough, and you can kind of be comfortable in the kind of tech space we have. A combination of people being able to make these things, and there being enough people who are happy with the standard, you know, like I think Like A Dragon looks like an amazing game. Is it the most cutting edge thing compared to like a $300 million Spider-Man 2? Probably not, but it’s enough. And you know, it’s like, how long can we exist in this space where enough is enough, you know? That’s a good way of putting it, I think. Okay, I’ve enjoyed this. Enjoyed this gentle topic back and forth discussion. That’s been good. Jay, do you have any closing thoughts you wanted to add in here? I know you’ve made a lot of notes. I want to make sure that you get through all your notes before we wrap up the episode because I think, yeah. I think my takeaway is we need to do a British Yakuza series. Just a very ill-advised British Yakuza series. Yeah. Then they could do the holiday one, where they go to the tropical theme sequel, but they go to Benidorm or something. Center parks. Oh, yeah. That sounds good. Our supermassive horror games, the Yakuza of the British games industry. Because they make them quite frequently. They make loads of those things, and they look pretty glossy. Whatever they’re doing, they’ve got their formula down. Yeah, that’s true. That is true in terms of the actual means of production, it seems like. But yeah, I guess like Jay is alluding to a more specific, have a fight in a town square in Plymouth. Oh yeah, absolutely. Then ten of those games come out in like eight years. Once like a historical version where it’s like, I don’t know, it’s like the era of Henry VIII, but your main character looks exactly the same for no reason. That sort of thing. We could also have this constant fascination with the idea of, what if they just said like, all right, you guys didn’t buy Final Fantasy XVI enough. Final Fantasy XVII has PS1 graphics and it cost us $400,000 to make and we made it in eight months. But it’s really well written and everyone would kind of be confused enough about what’s going on that it would probably make its money back instantly. I just have this fascination with what if these studios just gave up and went back to like Nintendo 64 graphics, but it plays like really well, you know? It will never happen, but… I have less that and more like I would like to see what if Square Enix like redrew the canvas so it was a little bit smaller or like it was, it didn’t have to be like the most graphically beautiful sort of like series necessarily because it feels like Dragon quest has done fine just kind of like not necessarily having that same heft and the game is probably costing a lot less to make. Yeah, I almost wish they could turn down the heat a little bit and lower the stakes to themselves because maybe like maybe 20 million people never will buy a Final Fantasy game but the five to ten million people who love Final Fantasy will always buy those games so maybe those games should be scaled appropriately based on that you know as opposed to trying to go after the audience that plays Assassin’s Creed or whatever so yeah these are the things that cross my mind. I just want them all to to be okay basically just keep keep making stuff I like and that’s why I think that the The Like A Dragon and Persona examples are so good because they are they have clearly found their groove they are almost like the model of like how you perfectly do this or arguably Capcom are because Capcom have had even even greater success with their series like Rezzy is still still huge but they are they are making linear first and third person games and like no one else can really get away with that now but you can still get away with that under Rezzy and yeah so yeah those are some closing thoughts I guess. Okay well good stuff and thanks so much for joining us Jay. Where can people find you on social media these days? You can follow our studio at twitter.com/bittinstudio with a Y. I guess it’s not twitter.com it’s x.com now. doesn’t matter doesn’t matter this might be outdated. It might be shut down by the time this goes live. It is in Brazil so they won’t find you on there. Yeah apologies to all your Brazilian listeners. We have many so yeah. Okay cool and you’re also Samuri Ferret. Yeah it’s kind of an embarrassing handle so I don’t like saying it out loud. So that’s why I tend to go via the studio instead. Well you may be got you’ve got a nice cap these days. You’ve got great memes. I think following you is well worth it. I think it all it repays the investment personally. I appreciate the approval of my content. Matthew where can people get you on social media? I am at MrBazzill Underscore pesto on Twitter and at MrBazzill pesto on Blue Sky, but I’m never there so I don’t even bother. Cool. I’m Samuel W Roberts on both those platforms. BackpagePod if you’d like to follow us, patreon.com/backpagepod if you’d like two additional podcasts a month. The Excel tier is your destination, but either way thank you for your support. And yep, we’re done. Goodbye. Goodbye.