Shinji Mikami on why American gamers prefer harder games than Japanese casuals
That seems like pre-zoomer era.
>>736856163was this ever true?
>>736857479no lol
>>736856163Surely he is not mixing up Yuros with US people? Anyway this is old news of someone trying to brown-nose into a market of 300 mill consomers
>>736857479In the case of Resident Evil 1, which is probably what this interview is about, the US original release is by far the hardest version and the difficulty is what defined "survival horror" in the West.
Weren't their games intentionally made more difficult in America because of the rental culture? They didn't want you beating a game over a rental because then you wouldn't buy it.
>>736856163It's the opposite now
>>736857713the japanese reading the room wrong is not indicative of americans enjoying difficult games at allamericans are tards that need yellow paint and talking protagonists to tell them where to go
>>736857648Not really, more than often global releases make game harder or swap hard with normal while removing easy mode. People still have some limit tho, shumups and games like tower of druaga don't exactly have good reputation on west.
You posted this yesterday.
aren't japanese the race that made bakraid? he's on crack.
>>736857479This was very true in the cartridge era, but quickly faded after games became cheaper on disk media.
>>736857479>>736857713Yes, localization did that to fuck over rentals.
>>736857951Shmups are trivially easy and stopped iterating in the early 80s. Tower of druaga is a retarded guide-fu game where you mash random inputs until one of your input combos reveals a hidden missable item required to beat the game.
>>736858184And bingo.
>>736857895>americans are tards that need yellow paint and talking protagonists to tell them where to gothese days sure, the jews need them stupid to fight their wars for them, but at some point the american educational system wasn't a complete joke, I assume.
>>736857716I heard the same thing, greedy fucks
>>736858184god I remember renting so many snes games and beating none of them
>>736858634>but at some point the american educational system wasn't a complete jokenobody tell him
>>736857479Not sure about difficulty but in terms of player agency and self-determination? Yes, absolutely. It's still true to this day. It's why Japan never really understood RPGs as a genre.
>>736859021name 5 hard rpgs without quicksaves
>>736857479There are some points in which the Japanese version was harder, but a lot of the time the NA versions were more difficult. They'd do things like remove difficulty settings, or even rename them. For Shinobi on the PS2 there is only normal difficulty for the NA version and then you unlock harder difficulties. For JP you get an easy and normal mode and there's no super hard difficulty. For a game like Alundra 2, the original JP version had its difficulties named normal and hard. NA renamed them to easy and normal. So right off the bat you can see how this can influence the difficulty players experience without even altering the base difficulty levels themselves. Then you had Konami games like Castlevania 3 which increased the damage enemies do to you along with some character nerfs such as Grant's basic attack doesn't throw a knife.
>>736857895Retard
>>736859056Nice reading comprehension, nigger.
MGS1 Japan has only one difficulty, the Easy mode in the US version.For the US version, Konami added a Normal mode and a Hard mode.
>>736857479no
>>736859021I don't know. I've been playing some western RPGs. Fallout was great. I also beat Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, SW:KotOR 1 and 2, and they just really don't compare to something like Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song. It's really cool to have a world that still progresses with, or without your input, even if you never knew about places or quests. I ended up taking a break from Baldur's Gate 2 because of how much the game wanted to put you at the center of the world. Constant messengers contacting you, random people frequently walking up to you for quests, it's really off putting. It's as if the world exists for you rather than you existing in the world like in Fallout 1.
>>736857479Yes and it still is.When armored core 6 released jap gamers were refunding it and reviewing it negatively on amazon because they literally could not kill the helicopter.
>>736857479Throughout the entire 90s and into the mid 2000s, Konami and Capcom specifically tuned up the difficulty in their games for NA release. But I always heard it was because of the rental market. They didn't want kids to be able to beat a game in a single weekend.Even as late as DMC3, the US release was ball-breakingly hard. The Special Edition rolled it back to the original JP difficulty. It's the same with all the Classicvanias, as well. I think Mega Man 2 is one of the few exceptions.
>>736857479In Wonderboy in Monster World III, the international versions final boss has a conveyor belt with a buzz saw that bounces to each end of the conveyor. The JP version doesn't have the buzz saw or conveyor.
>>736859739What a clusterfuck of a screen, everything about it looks wrong.
>>736859451There are exceptions, but generally, Japs think that RPGs are moviegames where you watch linear stories unfold and make numbers go up. Western RPGs are about making your own characters, setting them free into the world and overcoming obstacles on your own terms. To put it in MTG terms, Japs are Timmies while Westerners are Johnnies, and this informs the way their RPGs are designed.
>>736859021Not just RPG's, I think this is true across the board. Any game that let you tailor your experience more personally to you is received positively in the west. You don't even have to give clear instructions necessarily just a toolkit and a general goal.
>>736857479Yeah it's been standard practice since the 80's to make the American version of Japanese games harder, in the beginning it was to combat our rental market, which they didn't have over there.
>>736859064Working Designs was notorious for uping the difficulty of the games they localized, they would fudge with in game mechanics they didn't like so American versions of the games they released would end up quit different than the Japanese originals.
This feels like a case of a manufactured mentality. Japs made the US releases of NES games much harder to fight against rentals, which led to US players being acclimated to a higher level of difficulty because that became the norm.Also Japs in general are turbo casuals, most of them never play anything outside of gacha and jrpgs.
>>736860006Why do western RPGs have main stories?
>>736861372>Japs made the US releases of NES games much harder to fight against rentals, which led to US players being acclimated to a higher level of difficulty because that became the norm.The arcades already did that. Most hardcore superplayers (and the press) at that time were raised on them.
>>736861372>>736857479
>>736857479I don't know about Japan but there's a mindset some people have that prevents them from acting without guidance. Minecraft threads are a good example back when it was new. There were literally hundreds of comments saying they didn't get the point of the game and would get upset by the answers. Some people despise all open world games because they don't know where to go. There's just a type of person that wants to be told exactly what to do and where to go next.
>>736858634Going by your post I'd say the education system has been failing you for way more than that.
