interesting article for consideration from Polygon writer Kazuma Hashimoto. here’s the opening:
In February, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sat down in an interview with YouTuber SkillUp as part of a tour to promote the next installment in the Final Fantasy series. During the interview, Yoshida expressed his distaste for a term that had effectively become its own subgenre of video game, though not by choice. “For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,” he said. He stated that the first time both he and his contemporaries heard the term, they felt as though it was discriminatory, and that there was a long period of time when it was being used negatively against Japanese-developed games. That term? “JRPG.”
I noticed this in the 90s and 2000s. The Japanese perception of Western tastes was massively different than actual Western tastes. There were a lot of games that never made it here because they thought we would not like it and it later turned out to be a hit.
To be fair it wasnt just japanese. I know at least in the US there were American branches of these companies that handled the localization and advertising of their games. So it was the american hands of these companies that replaced anime fantasy art with more generic 80s fantasy book cover art, as well as the saga that was american mega man(though I still dig mega man 2’s art even if it makes no sense).
I’m curious, do you have any examples?
The Mother series was a big one
Final Fantasy III and V (The US Final Fantasy III in the US is actually Final Fantasy VI. There just wasn’t a Final Fantasy V until after Final Fantasy VII had already released and FF became more mainstream)
Mother 1 and Mother 3 (Earthbound Zero and Earthbound 2). Mother 1 was released like 30 years later in the west, Mother 3 has never been localized.
like 90% of Ganbare Goemon (Legend of the Mystical Ninjas). The first SNES game is also horribly localized and for some dumb reason they removed the internal SRAM (saving without a password). Probably rental related or somthing. And this has peeved me for my entire life because Ganbare Goemon 2 is probably one of the best Platformers on the SNES, a platform already stacked with some of the best platformers in gaming, and we got the worst version of Ganbare Goemon 1. This was also ongoing as every release after N64 (ending with the DSI) was not localized
The Original Custom Robo on the N64 (And if you’ve never played the Gamecube Custom Robo you owe it to yourself to)
Fire Emblem is a good example. They were very popular in Japan in the 90s, enough so that Smash Bros. Melee (2001) included 2 characters (Marth and Roy), yet the first Fire Emblem game to come to the US was a GBA game in 2003. Now Fire Emblem is incredibly popular in the west.
Monster Hunter also comes to mind. Before Monster Hunter World, main series Monster Hunter games were on Nintendo’s portable gaming consoles, namely the DS and 3DS, because those portable consoles were very popular in Japan. Once Capcom brought the series to the main consoles with Monster Hunter World it became a huge success.
A good example is that many of main numbered Final Fantasy games did not make it to the West until the retro releases years later. A lot of the Dragon Quest games shared the same fate.
Ryu Ga Gotoku (“Like a Dragon”, formerly “Yakuza”).
The devs feared that the game was too Japanese and would confuse and alienate Western gamers. Over the past decade they’ve been working on being less heavy-handed with localization and allowing the game to just be what it is now that they’re getting all these feedback from players that bursts their bubble.
Yeah the original dub of Yakuza 1 is very clearly trying to make it more “american” for the audience and it suffers for it. It’s also funny because Mark Hamill voices Majima, and he admits that he does not remember doing that at all.
Xenoblade Chronicles took years to come to North America. I remember seeing multiple petitions trying to get it released over here.