Harder than Hardtype

I’ve been working my way through Final Fantasy III lately. My impressions should be up on planetgamecube.com pretty soon and a review is coming next weekend. But one thing I didn’t mention in my impressions is that the game is hard, really, really hard.
Of course since it’s a Japanese RPG, difficulty is usually a function of your characters level versus the enemy’s. But Final Fantasy III misleads the player about the nature of this relationship. At about six hours in I was exploring a dungeon. The monsters fell easily in one or two hits, even if those hits came from my white mage. But upon reaching the boss, he started killing characters in one hit. This could only mean one thing: It’s power leveling time!
I hate power leveling; it’s why my druid in World of Warcraft is currently languishing in an unused account at level thirty. It’s the reason I've given up on Final Fantasy I all six times I’ve tried to complete it. RPG designers have done a pretty good job at eliminating power leveling until the end game in most modern JRPGs. I had expected Matrix Software to tweak the balance a bit, like they’ve done with the job system. But they haven't, so I guess I’m resigned to killing monster after monster for the forseeable future..

Rocos and Chocobos

I picked up a copy of LocoRoco during my vacation. I'm taking my time with it. I find it's a game best suited for short bursts of play, and incredibly relaxing after a day of being manhandled by Japanese pre-schoolers.

The Famitsu reviews of the new DS Final Fantasy III are in, and they're all positive. Not surprising in the country that sported Final Fantasy branded energy drinks. I'll have my review copy on the 24th or so. You can find my impressions on Planetgamecube.com a few days after I get it.

My new bi-weekly collumn on etoychest.org is up.
Check it out.

Talking Cookbooks and Really Really Long Game Titles

If a foreigner lives in Japan long enough, and speaks Japanese, he better learn to talk about food. Most conversations I have in this country are about food. “What do you cook? Do you like Japanese food? Can you use chopsticks?”

The same questions fill every conversation. If you can’t talk about food here, you’re screwed. In Japan food isn’t three square meals a day, it’s a hobby. The best competitive eaters are from Japan, and there are those who spend there lives critiquing and discussing the subtle differences of all the Ramen shops in Hokkaido.

With all of this in mind, it is no wonder that the current dominator of the Japanese game sales charts isn’t a game at all; it’s a talking cookbook, Shaberu! DS oryouri nabi, or translated into English that at least makes some sense “Talking DS cooking navigator”. This little DS cartridge will talk you through the process of making anything from Shabu Shabu to Sukiyaki. It may seem like an odd product to lead sales, but as one who’s had to tell unbelieving Japanese people “Yes, I can eat sushi and yes, that means sushi made from raw fish.” one to many times, it seems a wonder that it took someone so long to make it.

This interactive cookbook isn’t the only non-game to gain popularity in Japan. On a recent vacation, I met a young woman who bough a DS Lite and DS English dictionary to help her communicate better with her boyfriend, whose Japanese ability strangely enough, through constant practice had developed so as to be best suited for talking about food. Kanji (Chinese characters) dictionaries, programs that teach languages from English to Korean, personal organizer software, and tons of other non-game cartridges fill Japanese game store shelves.

My father loves to cook, but I don’t think a talking cookbook would thrill him, even if it did speak English. Non-games like these don’t thrill western audiences in the same way the do Japanese ones. While “Director Ryutaro Kawajima of the Tohoku University Future Technology Collaborative Research Center Presents Adult Brain Training DS” or Brain Age as it’s known in the US has achieved some success, it falls more along the lines of a traditional game than a talking cookbook, in that there are goals to achieve and obstacles to overcome.

We won’t see “games” like these in the states because they’re designed to address problems and challenges that only the Japanese face. The average soccer mom does not need or want to know how to make Niku-Jaga for dinner, and nobody but students studying Japanese language and Japanese people need a Kanji dictionary, let alone one with a touch screen. It’s fine that these games stay on one side of the pacific, available only to those intrepid enough to import them. There are plenty of other games, traditional games that thankfully have stayed far away from your local best buy.

So You Want to Play Japanese Games

When I was in America and I told gamers that I was moving back to Japan, they all seemed struck dumb by jealousy. When they finally out of their stupor they would invariably talk about all the cool games I’d get to play while I lived here. American gamers view Japan as a sort of promised land, particularly those gamers who are fond of RPG’s and still don’t forgive Square for never bringing “Generic RPG Series VII: Super-Duper-Taisen-Double-Upper 64” to American shores.

What these gamers don’t realize is that most games that don’t make it to the states don’t make it for good reasons. There is the occasional exception of like fan favorites such as Mother or Oendan (which is making it finally to America in the form of Elite Beat Agents.) Most Japanese games are too steeped in Japanese culture for anybody but the Japanese to understand.

It’s not that western audiences can’t understand Japanese games. Twenty years of gaming since the Famicom have shown they can and have. And it’s not because Japanese games are too quirky or weird, Loco Roco, and Katamari Damacy, have shown that indeed westerners can be charmed a certain Japanese cartoony quirkiness. Japanese games draw upon social phenomenon, and gaming conventions that Western audiences would find obtuse or absurd.

Japan has fads and crazes like any other country. Some of those fads travel the pacific and others never do. Pokemon was one craze that both Japan and America shared. Everyone loves Pokemon, or rather loved. The ‘gotta catch em’ all’ phenomenon hit its peak Stateside around 1999 or 2000 and went downhill from there. Sure we still get Pokemon games, but it’s not quite the huge marketing force it was around the time Pokemon: Yellow came out. In Japan however this little craze never quite died down. After teaching in some twenty plus Japanese elementary school classrooms, I’ve noticed that kids here still love Pokemon. Backpacks, lunch-boxes, pencils, T-shirts, any thing where Pikachu can be Pikachu is. There’s even a Pokemon themed train on the Yamanote line in Tokyo; where LCD screens advertise Pokemon alongside a dynamic subway map.

Advertisements tell parents to buy Pokemon DVD’s with the English language track to teach their kids English. I dread the day I enter a classroom and the kids can’t speak any English, but they can do the Pokerap.

But it’s not necessarily Pokemon that Japanese kids love, it’s the ‘gotta catch em’ all’ attitude. Japanese kids actually play outside and search for monsters of their own to pit against each other. They call them ‘Kabuto-mushi’ but American’s just call them Beetles. Not your average American beetle but massive beetles with horns like a triceratops. They’ll capture them, and hold beetle fights at recess. If there was betting involved it would be like a cock fight. If they kept the beetles in little balls, it would be Pokemon incarnite.

You’d think that Japanese kids would be content to capture bugs in the real world, and have more fantastic experiences in their video games. But there are more than a handful of beetle fighting video game series. There were two beetle games (classified as RPG’s according to Yahoo! Games) on the DS released in Japan in just the past month. The genre exists on other consoles, but the DS is home the great majority of beetle titles. Then there are the Arcade games to consider. Fighting games, card games, all featuring beetles, and Japanese kids love them.

Now as much as love Japanese games I don’t give a damn about simulated beetle fights. And neither do western kids. While there are those among us who have fond memories of hunting for bugs as a child, I have a hard time imagining western audiences finding the idea of beetle fights as appealing as the Japanese do. I certainly don't see America importing invasive species of beetle from South-East Asia and then making video games about them. Americans may swallow one ‘catch em’ all’ series, but they won’t swallow fifteen, let alone half a dozen about beetles. We may like brain age, but the knock offs filling Japanese shelves would not entice an audience outside of Japan. Mahjong is for old ladies in America, but it’s a college pastime for students in Japan. That’s why there are multiple Mahjong titles for all platforms in Japan. These games are banking and aspects of Japanese culture that non-Japanese wouldn’t get. That’s fine by me. There’s enough junk to get through on American shelves without having to dig past unsold copies of “Bugtown’s Tale of the Beetle”.