Most criticism leveled at the Japanese game industry over the past few years is typically in regards to its increasingly insular focus -- making games that are "too Japanese-y" and thus have more difficulty than ever before appealing to a global audience. Several notable Japanese devs, such as Keiji Inafune and Hideo Kojima, have urged their countrymen to take lessons from the West and apply them towards future developments. Of course, those times that a Japanese company does make something Western-oriented, the results are rarely pretty. At that point, they retreat further into isolation, hoping to at least keep their small slice of the world happy.

Namco Bandai's Hideo Baba, producer of the Tales series, believes the answer is to revisit what made Japanese games popular back in the day. In an interview with Shacknews, Baba believes this has already begun, saying, "I feel like a lot of Japanese developers, especially ourselves, we've really taken an effort to go back to our roots. We look at what we started with and what we're good at, and we really tried to make an effort to strengthen what our foundations are." He later states, "We feel that Western developers are good at certain things, while Japanese developers are good at other things. Rather than us trying to copy Western developers, we really try to look within ourselves and try to improve ourselves."