About ten years ago a curious change occurred in the Western gaming press, it seemed that anything Japanese was a byword for bad. This also had the effect of silencing the history of gaming that pre-dated it. Allowing for, among other things, derivative games to be heralded as innovative. Much of this stemmed from the narrative that Japanese games were seemingly dead, regardless of what was happening across the global market.

In reality Japanese games couldn’t have been doing better. With the likes of Nintendo's Wii and DS selling in vast numbers, they decimated their competition. Producing a combined install base of 250 million users across the planet.

The truth is that the last generation saw the Japanese industry reign supreme. Though the narrative from the Western press rebranded this success as false, that companies like Nintendo weren’t catering to “real gamers”.

I’ll let that sink in for a bit.

This being the same Nintendo that released gaming classics like The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (shown above) and the hugely innovative Super Mario Galaxy on the supposedly “non-gamers” Wii. Let alone their huge back catalogue of games that have helped shaped videogames as a medium.

It wasn’t as though Nintendo were the only Japanese company producing games either. As the last decade saw the birth of many new games and franchises from a large variety of Japanese companies. After all the likes of From Software’s epic Souls series was a fantastic success, to name but one of many examples at random.

In any case the ruse was a simple one; avoid direct competition and undermine the culture of your opponent. Western companies had been thoroughly trounced in the previous console generation, as they’d already tried to combat the Japanese games industry head on and come up decidedly short.

Rebranding the competition as somehow culturally invalid meant they could position themselves at the top of a huge PR and marketing war.

However, narratives like this only take hold when there is a kernel of truth to them. In this case, Sony dropped the ball with the launch of the PS3 and various Western games companies capitalized on it.

Suddenly all of Japanese gaming and even broader pop-cultural elements, such as anime, were in the firing line. New games that tried out new controls and mechanics were deemed awkward and the long dark night of functional homogeneity set in.

What’s more, some Japanese developers even saw it fit to jump on the bandwagon to get some attention. To which the Western gaming press gladly obliged.

For most gamers this was all rather confusing.

Games you’d grown up with suddenly didn’t count any more and now everything being made was somehow brilliantly fresh and new, regardless of what classic game it obviously copied.

What’s more the reality of the Western industry was in fact far bleaker than what was openly reported. To the extent that in the last generation the West lost the vast majority of its game developers. Whereas in Japan they weathered it far better. By not focusing on functionally standardised games, they didn’t get pulled into the same graphical arms race.

This kept the cost of games down and meant that, bar a few mergers and the odd studio closure, the Japanese industry survived quite well.

Admittedly we saw the Japanese domestic console game market slump back to 90s levels, but the strength of the Japanese industry was always its global exports. Not to mention its very robust second hand market, that evades these kind of figures.

So here we are at the relative dawn of a new console generation and this narrative is beginning to wear thin. This time Microsoft MSFT -0.51% dropped the ball with the Xbox One launch and the same story about the end of Japanese gaming is starting to fall on deaf ears.

From a game development point of view, this could not have come soon enough.

Understanding the low level mechanics of how games operate is crucial in their design. You have to be well versed in gaming history in order to learn from its mistakes and successes. Ignoring vast swathes of the medium’s lineage based on its cultural origin is idiotic, as you end up building upon a very narrow and limited functional foundation.

Being able to reference and learn from all games again allows game developers across the world to make better crafted and more varied games.

Gaming has been and always will be global, trying to falsify otherwise undermines the integrity of the entire medium.

As with all PR fuelled narratives, reality eventually caught up with it. Considering it didn’t just cover Japanese games but also the country’s broader pop-cultural output as well meant that it outdid itself sooner than many likely expected.

After all the PS4 is doing very well and Nintendo, while stumbling with the Wii U, seem to be onto something decent with the 3DS. Japanese developers are continuing to make solid console games alongside all this too.

As for Microsoft and their Xbox One, no PR campaign of cultural shaming can save them from their current situation it seems.

It’s worth explaining finally that just because Japanese developers make good games doesn’t invalidate the output of Western developers. After all I’ve made a fair few games over the years and I don’t regard them invalidated because other Japanese games exist. The fact people latched onto this sense of parochial pride regarding games is saddening, as it really doesn’t matter what country a game comes from.

Games can be and are made by anyone. Ignoring an entire country’s gaming output is remarkably stupid and actually makes newer games worse. Let’s not let that happen again.