CocoJambo: Unfortunately, in the eyes of the Japanese business men who run these companies, inferior sales are a good enough reason to say Western developers are better.

The way they see it, they aren't meeting their sales numbers, and the reason why must be that the games simply aren't good enough.

I'm not saying it's true, but that's how they're seeing it. Western-developed games, shooters in particular, rule the gaming world. That's just how it is.

"Nice reasoning there, like Western developers don't ever make low (or even high) budget shovelware"

I think somebody decided to miss the joke?

"They need to hit it out of the park with FF13 to restore my faith in them..and I think they will.."

Exactly. However, I'm not as optimistic. After FF12, I can't even trust reviews of FF13. I really don't know how I will respond to it.

Well, the western developers have come a long way since the birth of videogames. But lets think for a second, the Japanese developers had a strangle hold on the video games industry for over 20 years. This is natural progression and in the future 'innovation' or sales will flow to another development region. Weather it be western or Japanese. Japanese games are still very good, and I'm looking forward to seeing what is coming next from the big Japanese developers.

This is just typical Japanese ultra-modesty at its best.

The humble act is bullshit. There is no way you make a character like Bayonetta and don't feel like a fucking porn star for doing so.

At the moment I'd have to agree with Platinum Games.

I love games from east and west. I've swayed from love one side to the other and now both.

The japanese are behind for a few reasons. The first is their lack of investing 3d tech from the west over the years, or better yet creating their own tech. This has left many of their games looking like PS2 product for far too long, with only the big developers like Capcom and Konami breaking the mold.

They are great game designers, but lack of creative vision can sometimes hurt their games before they get out of the gate.

Now, Dtoid might have reviewed Onechanbara, and given it an avearage to low score, which is fair enough. The amazing thing, that no one seems to mention is that Onechan is an amazing piece of low budget software, the likes of which would never see the light of day in the west (unless on PC), where only large money backed games make it. I doubt it was made by a huge team, but its nice to see it on sale. I do think in the west, beyond Valve, many in the industry do not sing the praises of the mod/homebrew developer scene enough, if at all. If we did, we'd be able to make budget games like Onechan.

The MS incursion into japan with Xbox and Xbox 360, is a fine way to bring about change and oppurtunities, for small japanese devs to reach other markets, and vice versa for western devs.

Think about this too. Japan's game design schools more than likely focus on game design and development, but probably a lot less on 3d graphics, whereas in the west things are more about 3d engines and programming. I feel for japan to strike back to the top, they need to learn more about 3d engines and how to build them, as well as other game design philosophies not taught. When their games start to look better, they'll be more inspired to break the androgenous character chains and try something superb (or so I hope). They also need to break that 8/16 bit cycle of rehashed game creation, and kudos to those that do.

There's hope out in japan though. Atlus done wonders with Persona 3 and 4, Platinum Games seem to show that perhaps smaller japanese development maybe is a better way to go, so more ideas can be tried out. The recession might bite into this though.

As for Square, they are successful like Blizzard are. many in japan want to copy their success, but seem to not want to adapt much. For Square, I hope now that they have Eidos, that they learn how to make other types of games. they are not strong at.

Obvious fact is obvious. :)