Cep said:
I am seeing less of a backlash against Japanese games and more of one against the much decreased volume of good Japanese games.
I mean, right now, western games are the metric by which Japanese games are currently being measured, and quite honestly, they do not hold up. I hardly think that this is a western bias thing. I mean, how many JRPGs of this gen can you honestly look at their metacritic score, and not see where the reviewers were coming from (even if the score is 'wrong')?
The problem with this logic is that it's a matter of freshness, where the reviewer thinks he can get a job, and occasionally console loyalty, not a matter of the actual gameplay systems.
We've heard tons in this thread about Nier's "incomprehensible" fishing (which apparently works exactly like the fishing in a major MMO, and in any case gives you a free pass after a few tries), but how many reviewers bailed on the RC plane missions in GTA? Someone's even suggested Monster Hunter fishing as far better, when Monster Hunter has a completely unexplained bait mechanic that will make you fail its first fishing mission.
Killing a single slime more than you naturally encounter on your path through a dungeon is grinding; hell, having slimes to kill in dungeons is called grinding half the time, and if they pop out of nowhere, that's archaic random encounters. Replace the dungeon with a generic Middle Eastern city, the slimes with Arabs, and sudden unpreventable ambushes by infinite numbers of them is now "best FPS ever" rather than "game design that was obsoleted by Chrono Trigger". Make doing it online to earn experience a feature, and the mechanical, repetitive slaughter of thousands for that next level-up is a new wind in the genre rather than broken, grindy game design.
Top-down shooters are universally considered too short and too difficult to bother with; take the same hail of bullets, the same need for a near-instinctual feel of where the next shot will be, and the same rotation of six or seven five-minute maps, put the camera in the player's helmet and complicate aiming, and you've got the top genre for the past half-decade.
In a lot of ways, it's less that Metacritic ranks some games low than other games high. I don't think it's actually a regional tastes thing; as much as Amirox likes to beat his "wacky jappy" drum and feel enlightened, don't kid yourselves, anyone writing about games now is a 20-35 console kiddy that grew up on almost the exact same titles that Famitsu's current reviewers did and considers them his baseline of normal.
I think it's a matter of chasing that fresh coat of paint; being naturally disposed to favor the studios that let you in on junkets, leak info in a language you speak, and might hire you someday; and the subtle leaning and ad buys that make a 7.8 a 9.0 and the same subtle leaning and ad buys that make a Famitsu 31 a 35 being the priorities of different publishers.
And that just deals with console output. The single biggest reason you're seeing fewer "good" Japanese games is that media outlets in the US barely even care to cover DS games and have completely abandoned the PSP, while they're consistently the most popular platforms in Japan. And this has less to do with gaming tastes and more to do with geography.