Yeah I didn't even bother to mention it anymore haha. A lot of people blame Unreal 3 for the screen tearing, but it seems pretty consistent on PS3 across the board no matter the engine. (unless all 3 of these games were made in unreal 3 then its totally that but i dunno)
You can't really blame the devs or the engine when Sony actually admitted they made the PS3 hard to program for on purpose, www.cnet.com/news/sony-ps3-is-hard-to-develop-for-on-purpose/
The era when CGR still made reviews and had the record scratch evil squirrel intro. Good times. I remember Mark reviewing all of the games you mentioned except for Quantam Theory. The main guy looks like an ugly Guts. That kiddie pool joke was Rebel Taxi-esque dark humor lol
@@thorhighheels Hes not really dead..he just turned into an asshole who sold his soul for a New CGR show to sell on Amazon exclusively while also firing everyone else on the Team so that Mark can keep all the money himself.
Third birthday was the biggest slap in the face to hardcore Parasite Eve fans who wanted a legitimate sequel or anything other than what Third Birthday was going for.
Great stuff as always. Neverdead is pretty fun - I picked it up after seeing hikkikomori media's clip on it and was pleasantly surprised by how confidently it puts forward its ideas. It wasn't just an era of bad games, but also bad games journalism- with the shift to entertainment medium rather than product review, the focus was on getting clicketty-clacks, and nothing gets those index digits a-thumping like a scathingly negative review filled with a word salad of adjectives. As a result there's plenty of games that probably didn't get the love they deserved.
Oh yeah absolutely. I remember it starting during the late PS2 era, suddenly everything that was kinda silly or not obliquely self absorbed started getting shat on. God Hand being a good early example of this. A game like Neverdead wouldn't be able to survive in that critical climate, and clearly it didn't.
he uses a LOT from a pack called Distorted Reality by Spectrasonics. otherwise he also uses a instrument called the melotron a lot. many of the specific samples are out there tho. folks have been tracking em down and ripping sound files from the pc versions.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck how I want that so I’ve been playing Binary Domain!!!! I don’t care much for 3rd person shoot bangs but binary domain is nuts and really fun. Also Vanquish plays like an anime if that makes any sense the movement is fast and the shooting is very satisfying.
I'll try to get it out ASAP. Everything I had written down for the early script still went into this video, so I do have to start from scratch. But I'm sure I'll figure something out.
This is literally the first time I've seen anyone call any time in Japanese game development history a "Dark Age"... I mean, that would imply a time of constant garbage being developed in Japan for multiple years, right? That's never happened. You cant choose 5ish sub-par Japanese games from 7th gen consoles and say that the whole gen was bad for Japanese gaming save for a few gems. There were a lot of good Japanese games being made at the time of any game in this video. Just looking at new Japanese franchises with a western bent, the 7th gen is when we got Dead Rising and Lost Planet, which were great (Dead Rising being one of my top 100 of all time). Then there was also Bayonetta, Dark/Demons Souls, Ni no Kuni, BlazBlue, the revival of the fighting game genre in general, Dragon's Crown, Nier, Tokyo Jungle, Valkyria Chronicles, Cathrine, and not to mention some great sequels older series (some revitalizing them, taking them from Niche to popular, like Persona 3), or all the handheld stuff, or the niche gems, and how Nintendo came back and took over the world with Wii for a while after being called dead by too many people during the 6th gen with Gamecube... It wasn't one of the stronger generations for new Japanese game ideas but it was far from "Dark" just because of a few bad ideas the same as any generation has. The only gaming dark ages I know of is the one in the west between Atari's death and NES's release and the one for fighting games from 2000 to 2008 (and its still stagnant, imo, since its only been revived thanks to online play, evo, and esports, not evolution in gameplay) The only kind-of trend I've hated in Japanese game development is when publishers hand off well-established Japanese franchises to random non-Japanese developers. That's how we got that one horrendous Bomberman Zero, DmC, and the death of Castlevania games (isn't it funny two of those examples are from Konami?). Double Dragon Neon is probably the only time we got something great outta this idea. Also that 3rd person Front Mission's gameplay reminded me of Virtua On and ZoE than anything else. Kinda wanna play it.
@@ITSTAKING i finished it twice, playing binary domain is like watching popcorn movies, many aspect is lacking and the gameplay is dull, but it's fun to play
You should check out El Shaddai, Puppeteer and Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, both on the good spectrum of lower budget japanese games that came out at the tail end of the last generation, but fantastic in their own way.
Hey I know this comment is a year old but I really wanted to thank you for mentioning El Shaddai. I remember reading about a game in a playstation magazine that said you needed a degree in religion to understand it. I'm paraphrasing but that was super interesting to me when I was younger and it became one of those memory fragments I hoped to complete and I think you just helped me do that!
Vanquish is like Gears of War hopped up on cocaine with a heavy dose of Japanese stylishness, and my god is it a fun game. Lost Planet was pretty fun too, but I don't know how the sequels fared. Also I picked up Front Mission 3 for my Vita because of your last video, and goddamn is the game fun.
I played Vanquish years ago but couldn't really get into as much as I thought I would. Though apparently I was playing it wrong. Was taking too much cover and not sliding around enough.
Yeah, the cover is more of a temporary thing. You gotta powerslide all over the place, jumping over enemies and blasting them in the back while you slow down time. It's all about that CRAZY action.
lost planet 1 was early 360 game a lot folks like. Lost planet 2 went full of co-op MP like monster hunter game and Lost Planet 3 went back to its roots.
I just played Bulletstorm and the way you described Mindjack basically matches up perfectly with it, except the actual combat is unironicaly really fun. It feels like a balls to the wall arcade game written by a 2000s Newgrounds flash animator, not just the combo scoring and the "get extra points for shotgunning people into cactuses and/or sniping people in the nuts" stuff but the pacing of the whole thing feels like a 90s Sega/Namco lightgun shooter.
My big problem with Bulletstorm is that it holds onto enough modern military shooter gameplay tropes to hold it back. The skillshot system encourages you to be ultra-aggressive ala Doom 2016, but the bog standard regenerating health system encourages you to hole up and play defensively. I think the gameplay would be vastly improved if skillshots gave you health back, which would be a short-term incentive to just rush out and chain them together as much as possible (possibly with diminishing returns if you just keep spamming the same ones over and over to encourage you to mix it up as well.)
Next to Nintendo, which basically created a cultural phenomenon with the Wii after being called "dead" by some people during gen 6, yeah I'd say Sega really came back a lot stronger in Gen 7 too (but then again they started the gen with Sonic 2006). Yakuza got started in Gen 6 on the PS2 though... but it didnt really pick up steam, especially outside Japan, until Yakuza 3 on PS3.
There is also a shitload of great Japanse games from this era: Xenoblade, demon/dark souls, bayonetta, deadly premonition, monster hunter tri, dmc, nier, metal Gear 3 4 and 5,and even more, in my opinion this era was kinda shit for western games, they all looked and played alike
Those were the only interesting games during that era half the games were the same old same old shooters. I'm glad the market in Japan seems to be looking up game wise.
dill pickle Because those games were gambits against the massively popular shooter genre. We talk praise for them, after the fact, but during that era, lots of people kept within the shooter realm, because it was familiar, consistent, and inoffensive.
You say that during 7th generation Japanese and Western gaming industries had dark age, but at that very time Russian gaming industry LITERALLY DIED FOREVER. That dead dark age is remembered for utterly garbage games like Lada Racing Club, Sea Dogs 3 and Stalin vs. Martians, and since then Russia doesn't produce ANYTHING except online cash grabs and indies. (Well, there are HoMM 5 and King's Bounty games, but these are exceptions. Stalker doesn't count, it has been conceived in early 2000s and was in developement hell to that time.)
That era of Japan's game industry will forever be a dark, but fascinating time. Seeing them trying desperately to keep their head above water lead to some pretty trash tier game, but it was interesting seeing falling giants like Konami try their hand at God of War style gameplay or Techmo with Gears of War. Great video by the way, also, what were the songs used at 6:31 - 6:43?
It's a mash up remix thingy I made ages ago. The original songs are Radar Detector by Darwin Deez, and Eaten by Bloodbath. Though neither of them sound quite like how they did in the mash up, which I have uploaded here for your displeasure soundcloud.com/adolfnomura/mash-op
Yeah this was pretty dark era. Some good stuff came out of it tho, like TTT2. 5:41 Dude I miss arcade racers. I remember blur (RIP Bizarre) and Split/Second (RIP Black Rock) coming out around the time and also Driver San Francisco, which is like Mindjack but with cars, go play it. Also, Yahtzee, that guy. fedora head ass run on sentence ass skipping Gravity Rush 2's endgame out of spite ass.
There's loads of arcade racers on Steam, and quite a few in development currently. So many even that I can't think of any to write down right here, but they exist!
@@ryhanzfx1641 I blame SONY for the most part. Instead of making a streamlined, easy to program X86 based system like the Xbox 360. They had to troddle out a complicated, proprietary nightmare "Cell architecture" that programmers hated which severely crippled the console. That alone set Japanese game developers back a few years while U.S game companies enjoyed great success with the Xbox 360 for most of the 7th generation.
6th Gen was no Golden Age. No offense, it was experimental and wild, but it was the at best its Silver Age. Which arguably tends to be cooler. The silver age of comics for example brought us the Xmen in the form we know them as today.. How could you not consider the 4th Gen, including the SNES/Genesis, as the clear golden era of gaming, considering we're still, to this day, trying to replicate, remaster, recreate, reference, and reproduce everything from that era. It is the master source of gaming, that defines, the golden age.
+++ add another vote for VANQUISH and BINARY DOMAIN +++ ... These games are fantastic 3rd person shooters that are still super cheap and easily found 'in the wild' and online.
So many great character action games came out of Japan around this era- not just Platinum's work but my favorite example being Drakengard 3. Yoko Taro was and still is an absolute madman.
I'm surprised at how few people are bringing up Dead Rising. That and Lost Planet were the first game after Capcom came out and bluntly said they need to look at what the west is doing... and somehow Dead Rising one of the best games ever.
I agree! Japan was going in a bit of a originality crisis and it's one of the reasons why most Japanese gamers was so stuck to retro stuff with their modern stuff having nothing new brought to the table.
I would have to say that the PS3 era made me push away from gaming purely because of how the entire industry was in a crisis of some kind. The games coming out were unoriginal and boring and usually a carbon copy of each other. The PS4/PC era has made a comeback and I've found myself excited again and often playing games multiple times a week when before I was playing maybe a few times a month.
@@wintermute8315 I doubt it since my preferred genre was RPG's and action/adventure. Xbox has always attracted the first-person shooter developers. I will say though, that Lost Odyssey, Nier and Resonance of Fate were good.
Man, I almost forgot about this. "Japanese games have not been good these days" was such a common narrative for several years. Remember when the developer of Fez told a Japanese reporter that "his" games suck? It was just accepted that the Japanese game industry was in the pits.
So very many games of this type came out around that time, it's just depressing. They're quite simply a flaccid lot, mere shadows of the past. FFXIII is dull and lifeless, Resident Evil 6 is a frustrating mess, and Front Mission Evolved really does just make you think of Armored Core and weep bitter tears. Bomberman Act Zero though, that game actually has some TIGHT multiplayer which I will not hear slandered, despite the rest of the game. :)
Interesting continuance of gaming Japan's Lost Decade, where the economic shrinkage of the 1990s was reflected by the aesthetic of urban ruin in titles of that time, but in a different direction. I think that earlier time led to a recognisable and enduring style, whereas yeah, here they didn't really know what they were doing. What I find interesting are the wonky Japanese games only on the Xbox, like Breakdown and Dino Crisis 3, and on the 360, like Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, which indicate early templates for games the American market might favour. You sure do love that smooth MGS2 Jazz, as quite frequently does it feature in your vids. Also, I think you're my favourite channel on the youtubes.
yes MGS2 good. Also yeah, I'm slowly building a up a small collection of Japanese xbox games. It's like SEGA just dumped all of their excess Dream Cast games on there haha. I also just finished Lost Odyssey the other week. Will review soon!
Nice! I like how you give flawed games a good hearing, while keeping a critical edge in your reviews. I really enjoyed Panzer Dragoon Orta, and the unlockable original that comes with it. Will probably try to get Jet Set Radio Future too at some point.
American made games generally suck. There are very few I like...The Last of Us, Uncharted - even tho it gets old and boring pretty quickly, uhhhm oh Half-Life 2 was fun but also got old quick, Diablo 1 and 2 were cool, omg I cant thunk of any more. I've been a Jrpg fan since the 90s, but have always played what looked good. Just so happens, 90%+ of the games I like happen to come from Japan.
Quantum Theory was one of those games I saw in a magazine and occasionally recall but can't remember the name of and start questioning if it even existed or if it was just a bad fever dream.
I remember wanting to like Quantum Theory so badly but the game felt like trying to play Gears of War 2 on an old refurbished Toshiba Satellite laptop that you bought on sale at Office Max.
No, but really though Don't fucking listen to either Yahtzee or angry Joe. I trust their critical opinion about as far as I could throw them, which in angry Joe's case, probably wouldn't be very far at all
Finally someone who gets it! Subbed! MindJack is like Gears of War, but actually good. Hell, it's one of the best third person shooters of the generation. No boring walk & talks to showcase Unreal Engine 3 gray, no pretentious heart of darkness rip offs that just say "war is bad m'kay". It's just 100% non-stop action featuring mechs, gorillas, drones, all tied together with drop-in/drop-out co-op and versus in a truly unique blend of multiplayer with single player. The AI is bad sure, but the game is designed for human players to control both friendly and enemy AI across the game, and thus an empty shell when you're not being jacked on by other players. The dynamically evolving difficulty of the campaign depending on who's in your game is the most unique part of it all.
PS3 times were pretty swell for midtier hyperkinetic brawler games, though. Heavenly Sword, Lollypop Chainsaw, DmC got some good ones, and all the Platinum games... Though the genre's largely disappeared again in mainstream, so maybe none of those made the moneys back.
I like a lot of the Japanese games from this era especially the jrpgs and th then game like project diva f and f2nd, yakuza 3 and 4 plus this is the era that Japanese audio option became normal
I actually remember playing a demo for Quantum Theory. This was many years ago so I don’t remember much about the game, but I clearly remember a boss having a very prominent dick-like protrusion. The actual tower had a nice design, tho.
After some reflection, seventh gen consoles seem rather dated now. I mean, that generation started 13 years ago, but it wasn't until recently that I noticed how badly some AAA games from that generation have aged. Personally, I still think the sixth generation of consoles is my favorite due to it's wider acceptance of middle market games and lack of major streamlining to appeal to mass markets, but that's just me and my biased opinion. While the current generation isn't super amazing, there is definitely more variety out there now than there has been in a long time.
IMO not all of these games are bad they can be fun. But It did hurt japanese game company and thnakfully many are getting back on their feet and giving us games we like. Big and small in the west and hopefully we xb1 BC many older japanese games that were on the 360 could get a second life.
I cannot personally agree with your assessment of Front Mission Evolved as a, at the very least, competent entry in the Front Mission series. I think at the start of your review you mentioned that Front Mission 3 had been your only exposure to your series. I don't know how well Evolved stacks up against FM3 because I haven't played that one myself, but I have played FM1 and FM4, which were fantastic games (currently replaying FM4 and having, for the most part, a pretty good time). The story of Evolved is completely laughable. You said the characters had a bit of dynamism between them and that couldn't be far from it. For one thing Ramsay and the girl (forgot her name cuz she is completely forgettable as much as that game is) never really had much interaction together whatsoever. But suddenly there was this scene where she says she loves him, like what? There was no build up or anything that hinted at it. It was just like "There is boy, is girl too, boy and girl should love." I wouldn't even be surprised if that's as much thought that went into it. And the villains, they're just evil for the sake of being evil; that's it. FM1 and FM4 had far greater stories and competent stories and the voice acting in FM4 is excellent. I was surprised at how good it was, I didn't expect it to hold up after all this time. Furthermore there was another Front Mission entry that moved away from it's tactical identity that, unfortunately, didn't release in the US but did later on get a fan translation into English. It was Front Mission Gun Hazard for the SNES, and even with it's sometimes iffy translations the game still had a far more competent story than Evolved. And it's gameplay was pretty fantastic, despite the companion AI being a bit dull minded at times, but still managed to work well. When comparing Evolved to the FM series I tend to compare it with Gun Hazard, despite it being a 2D sidescroller, because they both strayed from the main structure of the series to a more action oriented one, and I have to say Evolved is lacking. Hell, I'd go as far to say that I'd recommend Left Alive over Evolved. I would never recommend Evolved to anyone, it was a terrible game. Anyway, that's my long winded rant over on a year old video.
Double Helix tried to be Gun Hazard in HD, not Front mission 3 though it failed just the same seeing as Gun Hazard had a lot of cool systems like the buddy NPCs that helped you, the whole RPG and proficiency system and was open ended so you could decide what you wanted to do.
Characters in Japanese games almost never look Japanese, I don't think that's a specific thing from the 7th gen. Also, DMC is better than the bland DMC 4 and much better than the awful DMC 2.
7th gen was really great for japanese games, not sure what you're talking about tbh. demon's souls/dark souls/dark souls2 armored core iv/fa/v/vd tenchu z catherine bayonetta vanquish ninja gaiden 2/3re metal gear rising metal gear solid iv deadly premonition valkyria chronicles wizardry labyrinth of lost souls dragon's crown 3d dot game heroes deception iv earth defense force 2025 sin and punishment star successor muramasa xenoblade chronicles nier yakuza 3/4/5 folklore cave shmups (deathsmiles, akai katana, dodonpachi daifukkatsu, muchi muchi pork) g rev shmups (strania, mamoru-kun, under defeat hd, senko no ronde) that's a really healthy list imiho and i'm sure i'm forgetting loads.
Just because great games still happend doesn't mean the industry wasn't suffering an identity crisis. I've covered loads of the games you've listed there, but that's not what this video's about. It's about all of the dumb confused shit, and how it in and of it's self, isn't as bad as the general zeitgeist makes it out to be. So don't go pointing fingers at me lol
oh, i don't disagree with that at all. there was definitely an identity crisis and i know you've covered a bunch of those games (i like your channel btw). i just disagree with the idea that "The 7th gen wasn't a good time for Japanese games". there was less of the batshit games that hikikomori media and you often cover, and more weird pandering to the west, but for me and my own personal taste there was still a really high amount of amazing games.
I've played 2 out of the 3 of these, front mission and Quantum Theory. I kiiiinda like Quantum theory, but I know it's heavily flawed. The combat is pretty decent stuff, but you always get this sense of roughness when playing it. there's also the really bad platforming, which you don't do a lot of the time, but it's really bad. Also Chapter 10 was a really terribly designed level in comparison with the rest of the game. One thing I do like about Quantum Theory is the art style and the sorta story it has. You basically play as a living cancer cell teaming up with a white blood cell to fight off other cancer cells. It does give the game some identity which I think was interesting. Front mission, I think you were dead on. It's not like an awful game and can be fun, but it basically kinda feels like neutered Armored core in a way. I think an action orientated FM game had potential, but Double helix didn't fully realize that. There is another action Front mission game called gun hazard, which is apparently really good, that I would like to try out. Mindjack I do own, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. It's nice to hear that it seems like one of those so bad it's good kinda games.
I never thought about the cell thing, but that does make alotta sense. That "Diablos" stuff or whatever they called it has a lot of viral themes to it as well.
This just brought to mind a vibe, half life 2 and jedi outcast come close but isnt really there maybe cause its actually quality and has more variety. Cheapish sortof cookie cutter feeling games that never really draw you in enough to forget youre playing a game, that all sounds bad but i dont mean it in a bad way and it may not even be accurate all the time, mostly xbox and ps2 games come to mind, unreal tournament, psi-ops the mindgate conspiracy, paraiah, a number of simulator games have it as well This aesthetic of muted and desaturated colors with a slight blue or green tint, sometimes of very grounded real mundane materials(lots of metal and rust and boxes and oil drums and gas canisters and concrete and metal catwalks and courugated metal and plywood and generic army gear), a certain amount of grittyness but not so much it feels that edgy while youre playing it, a soul of soullessness, they have some character but part of that character is a lack of character... and for some reason i find it curiously appealing...
front mission evolved was the most disappointing game, it had elements of all the best mech games of the era, front mission, mechwarrior and armored core were all represented, they even borrowed some stuff from the bad mech game, Shogo: MAD! It's just a shame that they only seemed willing to go 80% on any individual component so the whole game ended up playing like a flash promo web game movie tie-in instead of an actual AAA square-enix game
Silent Hill died, final fantasy made a trilogy of mental retardation, devil May cry got a edgelord reboot perfectly around the edgelord 2012 Spider-Man reboot, and resident evil turned into a genuinely fantastic comedy with RE6. A great time to love Japanese games indeed
Japanese developers fell off hard after the PlayStation 2 generation. And the extensive use of fan service and women as as sex objects top copy and paste o.t.t. flamboyant cartoon character designs makes taking their games / narrative seriously a chore ... I just can't and don't want to
The last japanese game I played was valkyria chronicles and damn son that game is cringey as hell. Its like the Shindler List would be directed by Winnie the Pooh. It is a shame, becouse the gameplay is realy good. And when I read what was going on in valkyria chronicles 4 - a game that was accused for being sexist, a JAPANESE game accused for being sexist - you know some shit has hit the fan HARD. And it was like with valkyria chronicles - good ideas covered with some cringey bullshit. And VC4 has more good ideas and MORE CRINGEY BULLSHIT! Like wtf is wrong with you Japan?! But on the other hand that what you get if you nuke a nation twice I suppose. :|
There needs to be more videos on this subject. The 7th gen was interesting for a lot of reasons. One of them was the supposed decline of the Japanese gaming industry, which convinced them to become more "westernized"
I might give Quantum Theory a shot if I can find a copy. It looks super fucking dumb, but in an interesting, anomalous sorta way. It looks like NieR gestalt but with guns.
God i forgot how much i hated this era. Japanese devs were a non presence, All American devs wanted to make where triple a grey and brown military shooters. Stylization and experimentation was basically dead, which is saying a lot considering the gens that came right before it
ThorHighHeels I got that MindJack game for $2 used in a pawnshop that game is cheeky, and kind of trashy Butt it satisfies my metal gear its the good kind of trash , you are you the true Messiah
Great video! This dark age of japanese games was, or maybe still is..hard to say if its over, something very sad. Japonese game developers were most of the time being praised for the interesting things that their minds was able to bring to the market, very unique ideas, concepts and stuff. Looking at the entire video game market, its not that hard to see that this "dark age" its kind affecting most of the devs, people are not trying to do great stuff, only stuff that sell a lot, and i belive that this is a bad way of doing basically anything. Some may argue that games are very expensive things do develop, and for that reason they has to be lucrative etc, but i would say that with the high tech from today, we should at least be doing things as good as ps1 age with a pretty decent graphic capacity (not because we need graphics, but because it can be made better, its easier with the modern tools), and they would certainly be cheaper. Games doesn't need photorealistic graphics, just something well done, there are far more important things in a game development, art direction for example, most of the time matter more than the graphic itself... lets wait for the next generation of games to come.
I feel like it's over. Tecmo went from Quantum Theory to Nioh, which just had a sequel announced that was big enough to be on the big screen at E3. To me that says a lot, and Square is now making games in Unreal 4, which is much more cost and time effective then them using their own engines. PS4 and Steam aren't hard to publish to, or develop for, and engines like Unreal and Unity are cheap/free and easy to use generally speaking. I think it says a lot that even Visual Novels have found their place on Steam, with Shibuya Scramble coming out for the first time in English soon. So honestly, while we aren't on PS2 level yet, I'd say the dark times are definitely over. Hell, even the devs behind Disaster Report are making a new game, and Platinum is making like a billion games at once haha
well, its true indeed, things are starting to head towards good stuff, hope we get as near as possible to ps2 game age, cause if you ask me, ps2 should be some sort of game ideal to aim at, in my opinion this console its almost impossible to let go, so many good games/ideas/concepts.
i like how all of these games have horrible screen tearing,the true ps3 experience
Yeah I didn't even bother to mention it anymore haha. A lot of people blame Unreal 3 for the screen tearing, but it seems pretty consistent on PS3 across the board no matter the engine. (unless all 3 of these games were made in unreal 3 then its totally that but i dunno)
You can't really blame the devs or the engine when Sony actually admitted they made the PS3 hard to program for on purpose,
www.cnet.com/news/sony-ps3-is-hard-to-develop-for-on-purpose/
Also this was a really great video,it has potential for a series
wow okay. I didn't know they just did it for the lulz.
Yeah I was pretty surprised when I first found out too
You need to hand it to Gears of War though, they basically sold a console by themselves and convinced an entire country to make third person shooters.
"gears of wars but you play as guts"
at least give him a giant slab of iron
@Wiley Cat SHAMEFUR DISPRAY
The era when CGR still made reviews and had the record scratch evil squirrel intro. Good times. I remember Mark reviewing all of the games you mentioned except for Quantam Theory. The main guy looks like an ugly Guts.
That kiddie pool joke was Rebel Taxi-esque dark humor lol
Man Mark has been around for so long haha. Dude has reviews of PS1 games old enough that they were current games at the time. Shame he ded now.
@@thorhighheels Hes not really dead..he just turned into an asshole who sold his soul for a New CGR show to sell on Amazon exclusively while also firing everyone else on the Team so that Mark can keep all the money himself.
@@DieHardjagged so that's what happened
Third birthday was the biggest slap in the face to hardcore Parasite Eve fans who wanted a legitimate sequel or anything other than what Third Birthday was going for.
Great stuff as always. Neverdead is pretty fun - I picked it up after seeing hikkikomori media's clip on it and was pleasantly surprised by how confidently it puts forward its ideas. It wasn't just an era of bad games, but also bad games journalism- with the shift to entertainment medium rather than product review, the focus was on getting clicketty-clacks, and nothing gets those index digits a-thumping like a scathingly negative review filled with a word salad of adjectives. As a result there's plenty of games that probably didn't get the love they deserved.
Oh yeah absolutely. I remember it starting during the late PS2 era, suddenly everything that was kinda silly or not obliquely self absorbed started getting shat on. God Hand being a good early example of this. A game like Neverdead wouldn't be able to survive in that critical climate, and clearly it didn't.
0:35 painfully accurate
what is the music that starts at 11:03? I'm sure I know it but I can't place it and I am going banana splits
It's a track called Party Time and is from a game called Lone Survivor.
@@thorhighheels Thank you! I love that game
If I wanted to play Guys from Berserk with guns, I'd just play Doom
I just wanna know what sample packs Akira Yamaoka uses T-T
he uses a LOT from a pack called Distorted Reality by Spectrasonics. otherwise he also uses a instrument called the melotron a lot. many of the specific samples are out there tho. folks have been tracking em down and ripping sound files from the pc versions.
2:05 goddamn everything is warframe
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck how I want that so I’ve been playing Binary Domain!!!! I don’t care much for 3rd person shoot bangs but binary domain is nuts and really fun. Also Vanquish plays like an anime if that makes any sense the movement is fast and the shooting is very satisfying.
I'll try to get it out ASAP. Everything I had written down for the early script still went into this video, so I do have to start from scratch. But I'm sure I'll figure something out.
I played quantum theory when I was like 12 or so and loved that shit
Great video as always.
This is literally the first time I've seen anyone call any time in Japanese game development history a "Dark Age"...
I mean, that would imply a time of constant garbage being developed in Japan for multiple years, right? That's never happened. You cant choose 5ish sub-par Japanese games from 7th gen consoles and say that the whole gen was bad for Japanese gaming save for a few gems. There were a lot of good Japanese games being made at the time of any game in this video.
Just looking at new Japanese franchises with a western bent, the 7th gen is when we got Dead Rising and Lost Planet, which were great (Dead Rising being one of my top 100 of all time). Then there was also Bayonetta, Dark/Demons Souls, Ni no Kuni, BlazBlue, the revival of the fighting game genre in general, Dragon's Crown, Nier, Tokyo Jungle, Valkyria Chronicles, Cathrine, and not to mention some great sequels older series (some revitalizing them, taking them from Niche to popular, like Persona 3), or all the handheld stuff, or the niche gems, and how Nintendo came back and took over the world with Wii for a while after being called dead by too many people during the 6th gen with Gamecube...
It wasn't one of the stronger generations for new Japanese game ideas but it was far from "Dark" just because of a few bad ideas the same as any generation has. The only gaming dark ages I know of is the one in the west between Atari's death and NES's release and the one for fighting games from 2000 to 2008 (and its still stagnant, imo, since its only been revived thanks to online play, evo, and esports, not evolution in gameplay)
The only kind-of trend I've hated in Japanese game development is when publishers hand off well-established Japanese franchises to random non-Japanese developers. That's how we got that one horrendous Bomberman Zero, DmC, and the death of Castlevania games (isn't it funny two of those examples are from Konami?). Double Dragon Neon is probably the only time we got something great outta this idea.
Also that 3rd person Front Mission's gameplay reminded me of Virtua On and ZoE than anything else. Kinda wanna play it.
I know that's never happened you are missing the whole point of the video u silly penis
MΞCHAS are never bad. (6:31)
Dirge of Cerberus started this fad.
5:15 music?
So you've been playing Dangan Ronpa...
one day
Isn't it still going downward and struggling?
you and i buy star maps and drive around los angeles
Glad you mentioned Binary Domain at the end. It definitely got lost among some of these games despite being a significant step up
I consider Binary Domain Japan's Spec Ops: The Line. Flawed games but the definitions of hidden gems.
@@ITSTAKING i finished it twice, playing binary domain is like watching popcorn movies, many aspect is lacking and the gameplay is dull, but it's fun to play
Sega is forever dope
You should check out El Shaddai, Puppeteer and Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, both on the good spectrum of lower budget japanese games that came out at the tail end of the last generation, but fantastic in their own way.
The demo for El Shaddai made me cry. It was so overwhelming
Hey I know this comment is a year old but I really wanted to thank you for mentioning El Shaddai. I remember reading about a game in a playstation magazine that said you needed a degree in religion to understand it. I'm paraphrasing but that was super interesting to me when I was younger and it became one of those memory fragments I hoped to complete and I think you just helped me do that!
El Shaddai is an absolutely astounding game
I have a copy of El Shaddai at the store I work at, which is weird because we don't sell games lol I guess I have to buy it now
Oh my god someone else acknowledged the existence of El Shaddai, I was honestly starting to think I might have hallucinated the whole thing.
20:05 "I don't know what is happen! The whole world is explode."
10/10 Game of the Year.
Vanquish is like Gears of War hopped up on cocaine with a heavy dose of Japanese stylishness, and my god is it a fun game. Lost Planet was pretty fun too, but I don't know how the sequels fared.
Also I picked up Front Mission 3 for my Vita because of your last video, and goddamn is the game fun.
I played Vanquish years ago but couldn't really get into as much as I thought I would. Though apparently I was playing it wrong. Was taking too much cover and not sliding around enough.
Yeah, the cover is more of a temporary thing. You gotta powerslide all over the place, jumping over enemies and blasting them in the back while you slow down time. It's all about that CRAZY action.
lost planet 1 was early 360 game a lot folks like. Lost planet 2 went full of co-op MP like monster hunter game and Lost Planet 3 went back to its roots.
Lost planet was fully western developed by its third numbered entry.
DamuEmran
What Lost Planet 3? It doesn’t exist.
I just played Bulletstorm and the way you described Mindjack basically matches up perfectly with it, except the actual combat is unironicaly really fun.
It feels like a balls to the wall arcade game written by a 2000s Newgrounds flash animator, not just the combo scoring and the "get extra points for shotgunning people into cactuses and/or sniping people in the nuts" stuff but the pacing of the whole thing feels like a 90s Sega/Namco lightgun shooter.
My big problem with Bulletstorm is that it holds onto enough modern military shooter gameplay tropes to hold it back. The skillshot system encourages you to be ultra-aggressive ala Doom 2016, but the bog standard regenerating health system encourages you to hole up and play defensively. I think the gameplay would be vastly improved if skillshots gave you health back, which would be a short-term incentive to just rush out and chain them together as much as possible (possibly with diminishing returns if you just keep spamming the same ones over and over to encourage you to mix it up as well.)
7th gen was basically Sega being the king of japan, primarily with Yakuza lol
Next to Nintendo, which basically created a cultural phenomenon with the Wii after being called "dead" by some people during gen 6, yeah I'd say Sega really came back a lot stronger in Gen 7 too (but then again they started the gen with Sonic 2006). Yakuza got started in Gen 6 on the PS2 though... but it didnt really pick up steam, especially outside Japan, until Yakuza 3 on PS3.
There is also a shitload of great Japanse games from this era:
Xenoblade, demon/dark souls, bayonetta, deadly premonition, monster hunter tri, dmc, nier, metal Gear 3 4 and 5,and even more, in my opinion this era was kinda shit for western games, they all looked and played alike
Those were the only interesting games during that era half the games were the same old same old shooters. I'm glad the market in Japan seems to be looking up game wise.
The 7th gen could best be described as when alot of smaller Publishers and Game companies either failed or abandoned the Triple A market. RIP THQ
dill pickle Because those games were gambits against the massively popular shooter genre. We talk praise for them, after the fact, but during that era, lots of people kept within the shooter realm, because it was familiar, consistent, and inoffensive.
You say that during 7th generation Japanese and Western gaming industries had dark age, but at that very time Russian gaming industry LITERALLY DIED FOREVER. That dead dark age is remembered for utterly garbage games like Lada Racing Club, Sea Dogs 3 and Stalin vs. Martians, and since then Russia doesn't produce ANYTHING except online cash grabs and indies. (Well, there are HoMM 5 and King's Bounty games, but these are exceptions. Stalker doesn't count, it has been conceived in early 2000s and was in developement hell to that time.)
That era of Japan's game industry will forever be a dark, but fascinating time. Seeing them trying desperately to keep their head above water lead to some pretty trash tier game, but it was interesting seeing falling giants like Konami try their hand at God of War style gameplay or Techmo with Gears of War. Great video by the way, also, what were the songs used at 6:31 - 6:43?
It's a mash up remix thingy I made ages ago. The original songs are Radar Detector by Darwin Deez, and Eaten by Bloodbath. Though neither of them sound quite like how they did in the mash up, which I have uploaded here for your displeasure soundcloud.com/adolfnomura/mash-op
Yeah this was pretty dark era. Some good stuff came out of it tho, like TTT2.
5:41 Dude I miss arcade racers. I remember blur (RIP Bizarre) and Split/Second (RIP Black Rock) coming out around the time and also Driver San Francisco, which is like Mindjack but with cars, go play it.
Also, Yahtzee, that guy. fedora head ass run on sentence ass skipping Gravity Rush 2's endgame out of spite ass.
There's loads of arcade racers on Steam, and quite a few in development currently. So many even that I can't think of any to write down right here, but they exist!
I'll say this.
The 6th gen truly was a golden age for Japanese developers.
also the 4th and 5th gen, i can name great japanese rpgs from those eras for days!!
So many good PS1 jrpgs
@@glorbojibbins2485 also on the snes, there's final fantasy 3 and the all-time classic crono trigger
@@ryhanzfx1641
I blame SONY for the most part. Instead of making a streamlined, easy to program X86 based system like the Xbox 360.
They had to troddle out a complicated, proprietary nightmare "Cell architecture" that programmers hated which severely crippled the console. That alone set Japanese game developers back a few years while U.S game companies enjoyed great success with the Xbox 360 for most of the 7th generation.
6th Gen was no Golden Age. No offense, it was experimental and wild, but it was the at best its Silver Age. Which arguably tends to be cooler. The silver age of comics for example brought us the Xmen in the form we know them as today.. How could you not consider the 4th Gen, including the SNES/Genesis, as the clear golden era of gaming, considering we're still, to this day, trying to replicate, remaster, recreate, reference, and reproduce everything from that era. It is the master source of gaming, that defines, the golden age.
Yeah, that period of Japanese games was weird. Those Front Mission mechs look pretty cool, especially the one with four legs.
+++ add another vote for VANQUISH and BINARY DOMAIN +++ ... These games are fantastic 3rd person shooters that are still super cheap and easily found 'in the wild' and online.
Just japanese game? The 7th gen had a disproportionate amount of trash from western devs too.
I'm sure he'll get there.
I really consider Persona 4 Golden and Xenoblade Chronicles the start of the reinesannce of Japanese games.
Id like to thank RGG studios for making Yakuza, some of the only super japanese games on the ps3 lmao
Binary Domain is awesome!
So many great character action games came out of Japan around this era- not just Platinum's work but my favorite example being Drakengard 3. Yoko Taro was and still is an absolute madman.
Nah the game is shit, Yoko Taro still the man though
Really though, Lost Planet 2 was the best anomaly to come out of this mess.
I'm surprised at how few people are bringing up Dead Rising. That and Lost Planet were the first game after Capcom came out and bluntly said they need to look at what the west is doing... and somehow Dead Rising one of the best games ever.
I agree! Japan was going in a bit of a originality crisis and it's one of the reasons why most Japanese gamers was so stuck to retro stuff with their modern stuff having nothing new brought to the table.
Wasn't Keiji Inafune partially to blame for this?
Chris Chen can't recall, how so?
@@MrDmoney156 Reasonable & unreasonable saying, 'Japanese games for us, only for Japanese.' quotation.
I would have to say that the PS3 era made me push away from gaming purely because of how the entire industry was in a crisis of some kind. The games coming out were unoriginal and boring and usually a carbon copy of each other. The PS4/PC era has made a comeback and I've found myself excited again and often playing games multiple times a week when before I was playing maybe a few times a month.
If you'd had an X360 you probably would have loved that generation. It was incredible.
@@wintermute8315 I doubt it since my preferred genre was RPG's and action/adventure. Xbox has always attracted the first-person shooter developers. I will say though, that Lost Odyssey, Nier and Resonance of Fate were good.
Man, I almost forgot about this. "Japanese games have not been good these days" was such a common narrative for several years. Remember when the developer of Fez told a Japanese reporter that "his" games suck? It was just accepted that the Japanese game industry was in the pits.
For a while I thought Quantum Theory was a game I had dreamed up instead of being an actual thing.
Oh, I got a review copy for Mind Hunter. I had to play it. I had forgotten about it. I am now TRIGGERED.
hi there, querido furro
So very many games of this type came out around that time, it's just depressing. They're quite simply a flaccid lot, mere shadows of the past. FFXIII is dull and lifeless, Resident Evil 6 is a frustrating mess, and Front Mission Evolved really does just make you think of Armored Core and weep bitter tears. Bomberman Act Zero though, that game actually has some TIGHT multiplayer which I will not hear slandered, despite the rest of the game. :)
THE FLACCID GEN
> FFXIII is dull and lifeless
big disgaree.
DRAGON'S DOGMA!!!! People are just now learning how wonderful that game is.
Interesting continuance of gaming Japan's Lost Decade, where the economic shrinkage of the 1990s was reflected by the aesthetic of urban ruin in titles of that time, but in a different direction. I think that earlier time led to a recognisable and enduring style, whereas yeah, here they didn't really know what they were doing. What I find interesting are the wonky Japanese games only on the Xbox, like Breakdown and Dino Crisis 3, and on the 360, like Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, which indicate early templates for games the American market might favour.
You sure do love that smooth MGS2 Jazz, as quite frequently does it feature in your vids.
Also, I think you're my favourite channel on the youtubes.
yes MGS2 good.
Also yeah, I'm slowly building a up a small collection of Japanese xbox games. It's like SEGA just dumped all of their excess Dream Cast games on there haha. I also just finished Lost Odyssey the other week. Will review soon!
Nice! I like how you give flawed games a good hearing, while keeping a critical edge in your reviews.
I really enjoyed Panzer Dragoon Orta, and the unlockable original that comes with it. Will probably try to get Jet Set Radio Future too at some point.
American made games generally suck. There are very few I like...The Last of Us, Uncharted - even tho it gets old and boring pretty quickly, uhhhm oh Half-Life 2 was fun but also got old quick, Diablo 1 and 2 were cool, omg I cant thunk of any more. I've been a Jrpg fan since the 90s, but have always played what looked good. Just so happens, 90%+ of the games I like happen to come from Japan.
Quantum Theory was one of those games I saw in a magazine and occasionally recall but can't remember the name of and start questioning if it even existed or if it was just a bad fever dream.
I remember wanting to like Quantum Theory so badly but the game felt like trying to play Gears of War 2 on an old refurbished Toshiba Satellite laptop that you bought on sale at Office Max.
Planet Schlock lmaooo
No, but really though
Don't fucking listen to either Yahtzee or angry Joe. I trust their critical opinion about as far as I could throw them, which in angry Joe's case, probably wouldn't be very far at all
Finally someone who gets it! Subbed! MindJack is like Gears of War, but actually good. Hell, it's one of the best third person shooters of the generation. No boring walk & talks to showcase Unreal Engine 3 gray, no pretentious heart of darkness rip offs that just say "war is bad m'kay". It's just 100% non-stop action featuring mechs, gorillas, drones, all tied together with drop-in/drop-out co-op and versus in a truly unique blend of multiplayer with single player. The AI is bad sure, but the game is designed for human players to control both friendly and enemy AI across the game, and thus an empty shell when you're not being jacked on by other players. The dynamically evolving difficulty of the campaign depending on who's in your game is the most unique part of it all.
PS3 times were pretty swell for midtier hyperkinetic brawler games, though. Heavenly Sword, Lollypop Chainsaw, DmC got some good ones, and all the Platinum games... Though the genre's largely disappeared again in mainstream, so maybe none of those made the moneys back.
Why doesn't Japan look up to Mortal Kombat Doom Wolfenstein God of War Etc.....
I like a lot of the Japanese games from this era especially the jrpgs and th then game like project diva f and f2nd, yakuza 3 and 4 plus this is the era that Japanese audio option became normal
The Angry Fedora Neck Beard Man! XD I also hate that guy. That's the perfect name for him.
I actually remember playing a demo for Quantum Theory. This was many years ago so I don’t remember much about the game, but I clearly remember a boss having a very prominent dick-like protrusion. The actual tower had a nice design, tho.
After some reflection, seventh gen consoles seem rather dated now. I mean, that generation started 13 years ago, but it wasn't until recently that I noticed how badly some AAA games from that generation have aged. Personally, I still think the sixth generation of consoles is my favorite due to it's wider acceptance of middle market games and lack of major streamlining to appeal to mass markets, but that's just me and my biased opinion. While the current generation isn't super amazing, there is definitely more variety out there now than there has been in a long time.
IMO not all of these games are bad they can be fun. But It did hurt japanese game company and thnakfully many are getting back on their feet and giving us games we like. Big and small in the west and hopefully we xb1 BC many older japanese games that were on the 360 could get a second life.
yeah, about Front Mission... ...they did make a new one, but not called Front Mission...
I cannot personally agree with your assessment of Front Mission Evolved as a, at the very least, competent entry in the Front Mission series. I think at the start of your review you mentioned that Front Mission 3 had been your only exposure to your series. I don't know how well Evolved stacks up against FM3 because I haven't played that one myself, but I have played FM1 and FM4, which were fantastic games (currently replaying FM4 and having, for the most part, a pretty good time). The story of Evolved is completely laughable.
You said the characters had a bit of dynamism between them and that couldn't be far from it. For one thing Ramsay and the girl (forgot her name cuz she is completely forgettable as much as that game is) never really had much interaction together whatsoever. But suddenly there was this scene where she says she loves him, like what? There was no build up or anything that hinted at it. It was just like "There is boy, is girl too, boy and girl should love." I wouldn't even be surprised if that's as much thought that went into it. And the villains, they're just evil for the sake of being evil; that's it.
FM1 and FM4 had far greater stories and competent stories and the voice acting in FM4 is excellent. I was surprised at how good it was, I didn't expect it to hold up after all this time. Furthermore there was another Front Mission entry that moved away from it's tactical identity that, unfortunately, didn't release in the US but did later on get a fan translation into English. It was Front Mission Gun Hazard for the SNES, and even with it's sometimes iffy translations the game still had a far more competent story than Evolved. And it's gameplay was pretty fantastic, despite the companion AI being a bit dull minded at times, but still managed to work well. When comparing Evolved to the FM series I tend to compare it with Gun Hazard, despite it being a 2D sidescroller, because they both strayed from the main structure of the series to a more action oriented one, and I have to say Evolved is lacking.
Hell, I'd go as far to say that I'd recommend Left Alive over Evolved. I would never recommend Evolved to anyone, it was a terrible game.
Anyway, that's my long winded rant over on a year old video.
Double Helix tried to be Gun Hazard in HD, not Front mission 3
though it failed just the same seeing as Gun Hazard had a lot of cool systems like the buddy NPCs that helped you, the whole RPG and proficiency system and was open ended so you could decide what you wanted to do.
Another lovely video.
That mech game looks neato
And have you played any Lost Planet games?
Hemang Chauhan Lost Planet 2 is legitimately one of the best co-op shooters of all time
Not yet, but I do own all of them already.
Characters in Japanese games almost never look Japanese, I don't think that's a specific thing from the 7th gen. Also, DMC is better than the bland DMC 4 and much better than the awful DMC 2.
I liked DmC too, trash story but gameplay was really cool.
7th gen was really great for japanese games, not sure what you're talking about tbh.
demon's souls/dark souls/dark souls2
armored core iv/fa/v/vd
tenchu z
catherine
bayonetta
vanquish
ninja gaiden 2/3re
metal gear rising
metal gear solid iv
deadly premonition
valkyria chronicles
wizardry labyrinth of lost souls
dragon's crown
3d dot game heroes
deception iv
earth defense force 2025
sin and punishment star successor
muramasa
xenoblade chronicles
nier
yakuza 3/4/5
folklore
cave shmups (deathsmiles, akai katana, dodonpachi daifukkatsu, muchi muchi pork)
g rev shmups (strania, mamoru-kun, under defeat hd, senko no ronde)
that's a really healthy list imiho and i'm sure i'm forgetting loads.
Just because great games still happend doesn't mean the industry wasn't suffering an identity crisis. I've covered loads of the games you've listed there, but that's not what this video's about. It's about all of the dumb confused shit, and how it in and of it's self, isn't as bad as the general zeitgeist makes it out to be. So don't go pointing fingers at me lol
oh, i don't disagree with that at all. there was definitely an identity crisis and i know you've covered a bunch of those games (i like your channel btw). i just disagree with the idea that "The 7th gen wasn't a good time for Japanese games". there was less of the batshit games that hikikomori media and you often cover, and more weird pandering to the west, but for me and my own personal taste there was still a really high amount of amazing games.
Will always fucking love that game over lmfaooooo, literally had it as my notification tone for a long ass time
Damn you Thor, I was really trying to forget Front Mission Evolved. Back to therapy, I suppose.
heh
I love your content so much, my dude
Love how you’ve been switching the format around on your reviews/analysis. I’m always learning something new from your videos.
I've played 2 out of the 3 of these, front mission and Quantum Theory.
I kiiiinda like Quantum theory, but I know it's heavily flawed. The combat is pretty decent stuff, but you always get this sense of roughness when playing it. there's also the really bad platforming, which you don't do a lot of the time, but it's really bad. Also Chapter 10 was a really terribly designed level in comparison with the rest of the game.
One thing I do like about Quantum Theory is the art style and the sorta story it has. You basically play as a living cancer cell teaming up with a white blood cell to fight off other cancer cells. It does give the game some identity which I think was interesting.
Front mission, I think you were dead on. It's not like an awful game and can be fun, but it basically kinda feels like neutered Armored core in a way. I think an action orientated FM game had potential, but Double helix didn't fully realize that. There is another action Front mission game called gun hazard, which is apparently really good, that I would like to try out.
Mindjack I do own, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. It's nice to hear that it seems like one of those so bad it's good kinda games.
I never thought about the cell thing, but that does make alotta sense. That "Diablos" stuff or whatever they called it has a lot of viral themes to it as well.
IIRC, coincidentally, someone from Square Enix later revealed that FM: Evolved was originally designed as Gun Hazard 2 or something like this.
i literally thought it was guts in the thumbnail and thats why i clicked the video
Though in Japan's defense, Demon's Souls was created during this dark age. And it was totally worth it.
The worst thing about all these games is the screen tearing...
Oh god my eyes
This just brought to mind a vibe, half life 2 and jedi outcast come close but isnt really there maybe cause its actually quality and has more variety. Cheapish sortof cookie cutter feeling games that never really draw you in enough to forget youre playing a game, that all sounds bad but i dont mean it in a bad way and it may not even be accurate all the time, mostly xbox and ps2 games come to mind, unreal tournament, psi-ops the mindgate conspiracy, paraiah, a number of simulator games have it as well
This aesthetic of muted and desaturated colors with a slight blue or green tint, sometimes of very grounded real mundane materials(lots of metal and rust and boxes and oil drums and gas canisters and concrete and metal catwalks and courugated metal and plywood and generic army gear), a certain amount of grittyness but not so much it feels that edgy while youre playing it, a soul of soullessness, they have some character but part of that character is a lack of character... and for some reason i find it curiously appealing...
front mission evolved was the most disappointing game, it had elements of all the best mech games of the era, front mission, mechwarrior and armored core were all represented, they even borrowed some stuff from the bad mech game, Shogo: MAD! It's just a shame that they only seemed willing to go 80% on any individual component so the whole game ended up playing like a flash promo web game movie tie-in instead of an actual AAA square-enix game
Silent Hill died, final fantasy made a trilogy of mental retardation, devil May cry got a edgelord reboot perfectly around the edgelord 2012 Spider-Man reboot, and resident evil turned into a genuinely fantastic comedy with RE6. A great time to love Japanese games indeed
Japanese developers fell off hard after the PlayStation 2 generation. And the extensive use of fan service and women as as sex objects top copy and paste o.t.t. flamboyant cartoon character designs makes taking their games / narrative seriously a chore ... I just can't and don't want to
The last japanese game I played was valkyria chronicles and damn son that game is cringey as hell. Its like the Shindler List would be directed by Winnie the Pooh. It is a shame, becouse the gameplay is realy good. And when I read what was going on in valkyria chronicles 4 - a game that was accused for being sexist, a JAPANESE game accused for being sexist - you know some shit has hit the fan HARD. And it was like with valkyria chronicles - good ideas covered with some cringey bullshit. And VC4 has more good ideas and MORE CRINGEY BULLSHIT! Like wtf is wrong with you Japan?!
But on the other hand that what you get if you nuke a nation twice I suppose. :|
There needs to be more videos on this subject. The 7th gen was interesting for a lot of reasons. One of them was the supposed decline of the Japanese gaming industry, which convinced them to become more "westernized"
Dammit Thor. How can you make videos about anything so interesting?
I might give Quantum Theory a shot if I can find a copy. It looks super fucking dumb, but in an interesting, anomalous sorta way. It looks like NieR gestalt but with guns.
God i forgot how much i hated this era. Japanese devs were a non presence, All American devs wanted to make where triple a grey and brown military shooters. Stylization and experimentation was basically dead, which is saying a lot considering the gens that came right before it
I'm ashamed to say this, but I still have a PS3 copy of Quantum Theory.
Why keep referencing Front Mission 3 when 4 and 5 also came out before evolved and are available in english? Just seems weird to me I guess.
Ahhh dirge of cerberus, nice memories, lovely aesthetic, fun gameplay, amazing ost, i had a lot of fun with that one
take my sub u beautiful person
Binary domain & Vanquish are actually in my steam wishlist...
It was because PS3 was expensive to develop for and most smaller companies went bankrupt or got absorbed.
Jesus I never realized how bad Tecmo's color pallettes are consistently. At least more recent musous have some color but god
Oh my god somebody finally said BARCUS BENIX
Who the fuck shoots with R2 on the PS3 controller? Any game that forced that was automatically worse off for it
>good games
>Last of Us
The dude in the thumbnail is like "kill me, please"
ThorHighHeels I got that MindJack game for $2 used in a pawnshop that game is cheeky, and kind of trashy Butt it satisfies my metal gear its the good kind of trash , you are you the true Messiah
yes thank you
Whats the intro theme at 6:31? That transition is killer!
Front Mission Evolved was such an utter fucking disappointment.
i used to play front mission evolved on my 360 holy shit nostalgia bomb
people always ignore all those shitty games keiji inafune let be made
Great video! This dark age of japanese games was, or maybe still is..hard to say if its over, something very sad. Japonese game developers were most of the time being praised for the interesting things that their minds was able to bring to the market, very unique ideas, concepts and stuff. Looking at the entire video game market, its not that hard to see that this "dark age" its kind affecting most of the devs, people are not trying to do great stuff, only stuff that sell a lot, and i belive that this is a bad way of doing basically anything. Some may argue that games are very expensive things do develop, and for that reason they has to be lucrative etc, but i would say that with the high tech from today, we should at least be doing things as good as ps1 age with a pretty decent graphic capacity (not because we need graphics, but because it can be made better, its easier with the modern tools), and they would certainly be cheaper. Games doesn't need photorealistic graphics, just something well done, there are far more important things in a game development, art direction for example, most of the time matter more than the graphic itself... lets wait for the next generation of games to come.
I feel like it's over. Tecmo went from Quantum Theory to Nioh, which just had a sequel announced that was big enough to be on the big screen at E3. To me that says a lot, and Square is now making games in Unreal 4, which is much more cost and time effective then them using their own engines. PS4 and Steam aren't hard to publish to, or develop for, and engines like Unreal and Unity are cheap/free and easy to use generally speaking. I think it says a lot that even Visual Novels have found their place on Steam, with Shibuya Scramble coming out for the first time in English soon. So honestly, while we aren't on PS2 level yet, I'd say the dark times are definitely over. Hell, even the devs behind Disaster Report are making a new game, and Platinum is making like a billion games at once haha
well, its true indeed, things are starting to head towards good stuff, hope we get as near as possible to ps2 game age, cause if you ask me, ps2 should be some sort of game ideal to aim at, in my opinion this console its almost impossible to let go, so many good games/ideas/concepts.
You posted this comment 9 months ago but I think it is definitely over now, with Capcom releasing RE7, RE2, DMCV and MHW.
came very late to the party, but BULLET WITCH