Dark Souls and the Problem with Japanese Gaming

The kids aren't alright, at least not the Japanese ones involved in game design. Or are they? 

Political correctness would seem to nudge us gently but insistently away from the idea of an entire nation being somehow 'less able' than others in any respect, even game design. And in terms of sales at least the numbers do not lie; Japanese games have been the highest sellers for the last ten years. Even in the midst of their supposed 'downturn' of recent years, Japanese games still occupy 4 of the top ten slots for 2011. 

However, reviews are a different story: Not a single Japanese game makes the first page of Metacritic's game results when ordered by score, and of the best games of 2011, only one is Japanese. 

There may be a decline, but is it the descent into madness IGN has been heralding, or a minor slump? As hamslayer and professional games reviewer Jim Sterling put it:

I don't think we can isolate any one market as especially worst. Japan definitely needs to shake itself up and get over its stagnant period, but the same can be said of Western development these days. Maybe people pick on Japan more because it's so much more invested in the console business, which is where a lot of the industry problems are found. http://www.destructoid.com/inafune-japanese-game-industry-is-not-fine-250765.phtml

Overall positive, but even Sterling admits a problem, unless the word 'stagnant' has changed meaning recently. If I was to look at it as a trend though, I'd say the best example of what's 'wrong' with the Japanese gaming industry is encapsulated in the game Dark Souls. 

Now let me stop the train right here and preface what follows by saying I love Dark Souls. I love the style, I love the design, and I am slowly getting to like the challenge as I learn a new and unfamiliar spec system. I will argue in defence of this game until my death, and even then I'll probably just keep come back and pick up where I left off. 

However, I will admit it's not for everyone. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's barely for anyone. The difficulty is insane, even taking into account the fact that death forms a part of the game's ongoing challenge rather than being viewed as an 'end' to the narrative in the traditional sense. There are numerous glitches and quirks you have to get over, and the level design is pretty antiquated - I can't really see many of the environments in Souls that couldn't be achieved on a PS2 (or even a PS1) with a reduced poly count. 

But the single biggest feature about the game that I feel reflects something inherent to Japanese gaming as compared to Western gaming is this: The programmers are not on your side, and they are not forgiving.

 

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It's something I realised a few years ago playing through Beautiful Katamari. For those who've never played it, it's an abstract game where you roll a giant ball around which picks things up. The more things you pick up, the bigger the ball gets, and you can pick up bigger objects. Most levels have a theme, so you get extra points for picking up 'sweet' objects and lose points for picking up 'savoury' items for example. 

At the end of each level, you are judged by your father. And when I say judged, this is not a cuddly western father sitting by the fire with a jumper on telling you to try harder next time. No, the King will routinely belittle you when you fail, and even when getting a near perfect score will still describe the resulting Katamari as fine or adequate at best. 

The king (and by extension, the feedback of the developers) is not there to make you feel better, or reward you for a job well done, or give you a little pat on the head and a cake. They begrudgingly acknowledge that you have passed their test, and may move onto the next. 

Japanese games seem to have an extra degree of harshness to them, and it's this extra challenge that can be offputting. On buying Dark Souls, I was warned by the helpful chap on the cash register that apparently only something like 1% of people have ever completed it. In reality, taking the people who achieved at least one of the end-game achievements (and counting only one per person) then cross-referencing it with stats for PSN trophies and Steam / Xbox achievements, the figure looks closer to something like 10%, and that's not factoring in people who bought the game and immediately traded it in without logging any achievements. 

But it's not just that it's hard. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's 'Favela' level was hard on the higher difficulties, but it had very forgiving checkpoints. With enough perseverance and a little patience, anyone can make it through (or at least rush the next checkpoint). Fallout 3's Broken Steel DLC has some armoured albino radscorpions that seemed to take forever to kill, and I've been flipped into the air by more than my fair share of Skyrim's giants.

 Dark Souls feels different though. From the tutorial level where you get smashed in the face by a giant rock with no warning, to a giant halberd wielding demon that attacks you after your first save point, it makes absolutely no concessions to a failing player. Or a player making normal teething mistakes. The roll function is absolutely vital to your success in avoiding enemy attacks, but there are none of Fable's invisible barriers to stop you rolling off a cliff - if you are on an exposed walkway and you mis-step or panic and roll, you die. 

I mentioned earlier that I died a lot on COD:MW2's Favela a lot. The developers knew people would die a lot - it's war, it's part of the progression. So they somehow managed to get their game engine to memorise the exact state of the character as they passed the last checkpoint, and then restore them to that point when they die without having to reload everything (after a screen fade and a brief bout of tinnitus).

It's fantastic, it's quick and convenient... and it takes all of the fear out of dying. Like I said before, anyone could complete it given enough time and patience.

 

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One Japanese game I played years ago was called Eve of Extinction, a PS2 game about a guy who's girlfriend's soul gets trapped in a sword. I'm sure Freud and Anita Sarkeesian would have a field day with it, but the point is that this game featured a lot of levels where it was possible to fall off things, like bridges or the edges of walkways. 

And when you fell off, you inevitably ended up about ten minutes away from where you were, having to slowly make a tortuous progression of jumps again. I don't think I ever completed it because I started looking at a room full of jumping puzzles, the stack of other games in front of me, and gave up. 

Immediately after, I played Prince of Persia: Warrior Within with it's instant rewind feature for when you fall to your death. No loading screen. No climbing back up. No waiting, no inconvenience, no fear of death. OK, POP is an odd example because it worked and was part of the game mechanic, but in general, I'd go with what Robert Boyd of Gamasutra said: "When failure has no penalty, tension is lost and victory becomes a matter of inevitability and loses its feeling of triumph." 

But western developers have spent years slowly trying to work out ways of removing the inconvenience to players that have died. My experience of Japanese games is that concessions made for players who have died or failed in some way tend to be absent, and nowhere is this more apparent with Dark Souls. 

There is no 'easy' difficulty. There are very few shortcuts, and they are usually just as difficult as the main path in their own way. And if you fall, you pick yourself up. Even the widely observed problem of getting 'locked' into an animation when attacking makes sense. If the attack succeeds, you did well. If it fails, well; you failed, that's not the developer's problem. 

It is something Bruce Lee also observed about the country's martial arts - Japanese arts tend to be rigid, inflexible and rely on a strict arrays of which countermove is an 'appropriate' response to each move. If you choose the wrong move, the other person wins by exploiting the resulting opening. Martial arts contests between higher level grand-masters often end up more like a mental game of chess than a physical bout. 

The trope of the harsh and disapproving Japanese father pops into my head here, along with my own worries about political correctness. But saying that Japan is a country psychologically different from western countries like the USA and the UK is a simple statement of fact. 

Japanese people are often expected to work 13 hour days, and live in a culture built heavily around the opposing ideas of shame and honour. It makes perfect sense that a nation that thinks differently designs games that reflect this difference in psychology. 

To the Japanese designers, success is all that matters; admitting defeat is shameful, so shameful they won't acknowledge it. To westerners, it's more about being fair and giving the loser a leg up. 

This might seem like I'm cherry picking examples, and maybe I am - I've played a lot of games over the years, and these are examples of something that's seemed to be more of a growing, nagging unease every time I pick up a Japanese developed game. People are looking right now for an explanation of why Japanese games tend to be so badly reviewed worldwide, and this is one difference I see between the two markets. 

Ultimately I'm not saying that one is better than the other - in some ways I feel the western approach panders too much to the gamer in the same way that pop music and action films pander to instant satisfaction and cheap thrills. 

But if you only consume pop culture, you end up missing out on some older classics which - like Dark Souls - require a little patience to unearth an amazing and long-forgotten sense of reward. 

Also I was pretty much completely unable to seamlessly work this into the rant, so here's a great piece from Destructoid about Dark Souls which I love but am frustrated with but also love so be nice in the comments.