Been a little while since I've done a blog post... it's a bit overdue now. University Semester finished December 17th, then it was Christmas and New Years and then I was working on my vertical slice until it's deadline on 18th January. Now that that's over with, I thought it was time to look back at the other areas of my university course and resume progress ready for the second semester... so here we go.
This time the blog post I will talk about 2 things. The first part is about gaming assumptions, by this I mean supposed rumours and thought processes behind games designers making their games that I believe aren't true and the second part is about the annoyance that comes from being a gamer in Europe, such as release dates, prices, etc.
Gaming Assumptions
So what do I want to discuss here, well I've been looking around various gaming related articles about gaming development (in particular development in modern games compared to older games development) and something came to my attention that annoyed me - and that is that apparently the JRPG (Japanese Role-playing game) market in the west no longer exists (or Japanese games in general, but I'm an RPG player so JRPGs are what I care the most about)...
The article in question is the following one http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/114/1144363p1.html. It talks about how on current generation consoles, japanese developed games aren't faring as well in terms of sale and popularity as western games such as Modern warfare and that it's because the market has changed... but does this mean the market no longer exist and has gone *poof* and disappeared? No. It's still there but developers and writers, etc seem to assume that it has.
I am a massive JRPG fan (as should be apparent now through former blog posts, etc) but don't call for bias in this - a friend agrees with me and he's much more a western gamer. The fact of the matter is that JRPGs are some of the best selling games and game series made, Pokemon is the 2nd best selling game franchise in the world, Final Fantasy is 7th and Dragon Quest is 17th and yet writers believe that the JRPG market is dead and people much prefer western games.
This annoys me as the developers and publishers of said games are starting to take note and think that this is true and are altering their games to 'appeal to the west'. Why? You're games have sold in bucket-loads in thier current form, how can they not appeal to us? This assumption has shown itself in several ways though, some JRPGs haven't been localised for fear that we don't want them (when we do) and western ideas are being added to the games (such as the removal of random encounters and command menu driven combat in several games). Assumptions are made... just because FPS games and other western games have flourished recently doesn't mean the eastern games aren't wanted anymore...
Gaming's slight hatred of Europe
This section of my blog post comes in light of the recent announcement of the Nintendo 3DS console's price... it's £230... While this is pricey, this on it's own isn't enough to warrant hatred, what does warrant it is the fact that in America the console is going to be selling for £156 and in Japan for £189... how is that fair!? It is due to this that I started to think about how Europe generally appears to be the most hated continent for gaming, such as release dates, prices and game localisations among other things.
Release dates is my first issue, I understand that the gap is getting smaller recently between different regions' release dates but sometimes that gap is still big between Europe and the US in particular. You can understand a large gap between Japan and the rest of the world due to Japan being written in Kanji and translating can be difficult, but once the game is translated into English for the US, why does it take so long for games to reach Europe (and more specifically the UK, where no translation is necessary)? People will say things like, 'they have to translate it to French, Italian, Spanish, etc so it will take a while' but why don't they work on this from the moment the English version for the US is begun? And why is there still a delay in Western made games? I honestly don't know, there might be a legitimate reason but it still seems unfair to me...
Prices has basically been said with the 3DS so I won't go into it and ultimately this issue is restricted to only consoles themselves... so onto localisations. This ties in with gaming assumptions as this mostly occurs in Japanese developed games, but why do some games get missed out in Europe? I can understand some games that never make it out of Japan at all - sometimes the culture difference is just too apparent - but games that get released in America and not Europe... why? Namco's 'Tales' series is a classic example of this - there are 12 main games in the series, 9 have been localised to America and only 6 to Europe. This just doesn't work, if the game has been released in America, why not bring it to Europe?
Finally, as a misc issue and something that only recently came to my attention, Europe gets hated in other ways, including game speed - that's right, the game is actually made worse just because it's in Europe. As an example of what I mean see the following videos, showing differences between American games (NTSC) and European games (PAL):
Notice the speed difference of the game, the music and the black borders - this is due to poor conversions between the regions; these issues shouldn't exist as other games get localised perfectly fine... Somehow though, these few games were allowed to be released this poorly... it's things like this that makes me think gaming hates Europe...
So there you have it - my first blog post in a while to get me back on track and it's ultimately me having a moan. But in all honestly can you blame me? I love games and want to get into the industry but some things that people think and do are just stupid and unfair...
So anyway, 'til next time - that's all folks!
