An Assessment of Japanese Games: Visual and Storytelling Aspects






How have the visual and storytelling styles of Japanese video games affected those of American games?
















Subject: World Studies
Word Count: 3652






Table of Contents


1  Introduction
2 Main Argument
10 Conclusions
11 Works Cited













As one of the leading nations in the video game market, the influence of Japanese games has spread worldwide. With originally Japanese game companies such as Nintendo and Sony growing larger internationally, it comes as no surprise that their influence has spread throughout the industry. The concept of “Orientalism” - in other words, the study of the East by mainly Western scholars - is a term that has been adopted with the idea of broadening its meaning to become an all-encompassing topic for the East as a whole. In doing so, quite specific pockets of interest have developed over time, one topic in particular being David Morley and Kevin Robbins’ “techno-orientalism.” Delving deeper into these specific studies of Eastern culture (more specifically that of Japan), my question is this: How have artistic and storytelling aspects of Japanese culture and its video games subsequently influenced those of Western games? I will dive deeper into the concepts of Orientalism and techno-orientalism, in order to find a more in-depth explanation of the Western world’s modern day fascination with the daily life and culture of the East, and Japan in particular with its rapidly advancing technology (and in turn, its video gaming industry). My primary resource for this paper is “Atari to Zelda: Japanese Video Games in Global Contexts” by Mia Consalvo. This book provides invaluable data toward my investigation of the topic, as well as cite further resources for me to expand upon. While I make references and cite sources outside of this text, Consalvo’s work remains my primary resource. This research question is worthy of investigation, simply because there is not much data on the topic. While a select few studies have shed light on the topic of Japanese influence on American gaming (including that of Consalvo and her work), it is rather few and far between in terms of quantity.



	The relationship between North America and Japan has varied dramatically throughout history, but perhaps most pertinent to the topic is the state of this relationship during the late seventies through the mid-eighties. In his 1978 book titled Orientalism, Edward Said defines the term of the book’s namesake as the Western view of Eastern societies as “strange and exotic.” This raises a question: What led North American scholars to view the Japanese in such a way? One could posit that it was simply due to discrimination or prejudice against Japan; however, as Said wrote, the concept of Orientalism is after all a Western construct, and it is illogical to assume one can define geographical locations and its inhabitants “on the basis of some religion, culture, or racial essence.” (322) In terms of the relationship between America and Japan, the 1980s served as a period of tension between the two countries. The term “techno-orientalism,” coined by Kevin Robbins and David Morley during this time, outlined the developing fear of the West in regards to the growing ‘robot-like’ nature of the Japanese, as well as their subsequent outperformance in business and international trade. While there may have been other reasons for America’s anxiety toward Japan, the truth is that the problem was in fact primarily nested in the large gap in economic success between the two countries. During the 1980s, the Japanese economy was experiencing a great deal of success, with exports such as the Walkman, various car brands, consumer electronics, and more rising rapidly. On the other hand, America’s economy was experiencing a recession, caused in part by raised interest rates meant to handle the high inflation at the time. America was being outperformed by Japan, and the aforementioned inflation meant that the United States found less success internationally in terms of exported goods. Lee Branstetter, a professor of public policy and economics at Carnegie Mellon University, stated that “In the 1980s, Americans were really worried that the United States was no longer on top anymore. We were no longer making the best technology. It wounded our national pride.” The extent to which Japan was represented throughout the public eye was fueled by the fears of various economists, and in an attempt to solve this trade deficit, the Reagan administration pushed Japan to agree to place a voluntary export restraint on the amount of cars and other goods exported to them. These heightened tensions of the time gave rise to the fears of American society. As a result, such fears began to take rise in pop culture, leading to the popularization of such topics as the dystopian cyberpunk, where Asian styles and aesthetics are heavily apparent. This is effectively shown in the aptly named Cyberpunk series that began in the late 80s and early 90s. Published by the American video game development company R. Talsorian Games in 1988, the first game of the series takes place in the year 2013, in a dystopian society after governments have collapsed globally. While the original Cyberpunk is the tabletop predecessor of the series, it is often overshadowed by its 1990 video game sequel, Cyberpunk 2020. This game takes place in a similar setting as the first, occurring in the same dystopian world. However, the year is 2020, and the developers shifted the time period in response to Germany’s 1990 reunification. The game takes place in Night City, a fictional location in urban California whose aesthetic pulls heavily from the typical cramped, neon sign-filled urban streets of Tokyo and other such cities. Various neon billboards displaying Japanese lettering can be seen throughout the city, and the citizens of the world suffer from a global psychosis dubbed “Technoshock” caused by widespread fear of cybernetic enhancement and synthetic body tissue. Both the setting and the main conflict of this series exemplify the influence of techno-orientalism, and serve as one example of many games produced as a result of the mindset of the time. The concept of Orientalism was the basis of the foundation on which many other American games depicted Eastern cultures. Games such as the Prince of Persia series are prime examples. Displaying its namesake character on the box art dressed in rather flashy-looking clothing, these games furthered stereotypes of Eastern cultures being a strange and exotic people.
	The early 1980s served as the beginning of Japan’s direct influence on American video games. At the time, the forefront of video gaming in the United States was taken by Atari, Inc. Driven by the early success of the company and its products - most notably the Atari 2600 console - many video game companies hastened to gain a part in its growing popularity. However, this excitement is what ultimately led to the major video game crash of 1983. The rush to produce as many games as possible was not met with sufficient demand, leaving companies like Atari with millions of unsold copies of games. Other factors, such as the ease at which one could create unlicensed came cartridges for the consoles, played a part in this recession, which dropped revenue from video game sales by nearly 97% in two years. With a weakened gaming industry, America was left in a vulnerable state where most game companies were eliminated or negatively impacted and unable to fully recover. However, with this lack of competition, Japanese companies were able to find stable footing in the United States. Two years after the video game crash, Nintendo made its first move into the American gaming industry with its release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). While there was very little competition to oppose Nintendo at the time, they were cautiously optimistic. All titles released for the NES in America were carefully monitored, in order to determine which ones would be accepted and subsequently released. The console, a reworked version of the Japan-exclusive Famicom, was sold bundled with only a select variety of games, helping to control the growth of the company in the still-cautious nation. Furthermore, the NES implemented the use of a lockout chip to prevent the use of unlicensed or pirated game cartridges. In the mid- to late-1980s, the company began publishing its monthly magazine, Nintendo Power throughout America. While they used the magazine to an extent to define for readers what a good game was, as well as how to judge and rate games, Nintendo only released some genres of games, making sure that they were games that foreign markets would not find “too strange, too foreign, too different.” (Sheff) Despite the popularity of the Nintendo Power magazine, the American opinion on what video games should be remained dominant, and as a result Nintendo needed to localize many of their games. This process of localization meant the game would be subjected to multiple cultural, social, and technical changes before being released to the American public.
	As a result of Japan’s localization of its games, the majority of American players did not know that the games they were playing were Japanese games on Japanese consoles. Mia Consalvo interviewed many gamers about their experiences and thoughts on the games they played at the time. She found that most players played these games not because they were Japanese or American in origin, but for the simple fact that they enjoyed the games. Many games had a so-called “cultureless cover” in the sense that it was not evident where the game originated, and as a result, players based their opinions not on the developers behind the games, but rather on the game itself and its contents. This cultureless cover could also have been caused in part by the simplicity of the technology at the time, and the fact that the limitations of the games meant less changes needed to be made in the localization process. Nonetheless, Japanese developers still worked to eliminate the majority of foreign aspects from their games in order to retain their wide international market. While these localization efforts were effective in retaining their cultureless cover, the success of Nintendo’s games in the United States opened the eyes of many players in terms of adopting a more globally conscious perspective. As Consalvo states, some of the early players of these games “were nudged into considering a world beyond their own - not simply the game itself but the culture and country that produced them.” (20) This shift into a sort of cosmopolitan idealism got many American gamers interested in the specifically Japanese aspects of games. The stories told by such games were a major factor in pulling in these players’ attention. Through interviews with North American players, Consalvo saw a trend of higher expectations, as well as satisfaction, for Japanese storytelling in games than that of American games. Players justified these heightened expectations with various aspects of Japanese games that simply were not present in American games at the time. Players simply found Japanese games more notable. One particular example of this is the game The World Ends with You for the Nintendo DS, which featured “interesting worlds and people who do amazing things.” Others claimed that the charm of games such as this one was in part thanks to the fact that they “felt more like the real world possibly because it was really just sort of a little variation on the real world.” These types of games did not use the tropes found oversaturating many American games. They did not glorify every action of the protagonist, and more often than not these games refrained from making use of a “Hollywood ending.” In other words, many games featured endings that were not necessarily happy. They broke the stereotypical prince-save-princess plot, shown in games such as Final Fantasy VI in which some main characters die to serve the advancement of an overarching moral or bigger idea. Additionally, aspects of Japanese myths and legends tie into many of these games. One notable example of this is the Phoenix Wright series. In these games, the player follows the work of Phoenix Wright, a newly-hired defense attorney. This game series was highly localized, and the story told by them takes place in America, in American courtrooms. However, references were made to various beliefs and symbols of Japanese legend, including magatamas (curved beads which appeared in prehistoric Japan and were highly revered as Shinto talismans of good luck and fortune), Shinto priests (an individual responsible for the upkeep of a Shinto shrine, along with leading prayers to their respective deities), and possession. Japanese games often introduced new and interesting game mechanics into the gaming world. One example of this is 999: 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors, developed by Chunsoft. In this game, the main character is Junpei, a college student in Japan who gets kidnapped from his apartment by an unknown masked man. He wakes up in a locked ship’s cabin, and the player must solve puzzles to open the door after a window bursts and water flows in. After escaping the room, the player finds 8 others trapped on the boat, all with bracelets numbered 1 through 9. They hear an announcement that they must play the “nonary” game to escape, and that the ship will sink in 9 hours. 999 offers an interesting way of play, in that playing the game once only gives the player a limited amount of the story, and therefore must play the game multiple times in different ways to piece together the overarching mystery. The game was released in Japan in 2009 (and North America in 2010) for the Nintendo DS. The game was very well received. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that the game was quite well suited for the portability of the DS. Players could stop and start playing whenever, for short or long periods of time. A playthrough takes less than ten hours, so it is not a large time commitment. Additionally, the game notifies the player when they complete a playthrough which of six possible endings they have achieved, as well as how many others they have yet to find. The game also takes advantage of the limited size of the DS to create small, cramped rooms, shifting the player’s focus from a wide focus on the whole picture to a more detail-oriented approach. This attention to detail is critical in room escape games such as 999, since the player must pay close attention to find clues to answer the puzzles, such as a hidden code or small key that is easy to overlook. This ‘multiple endings’ trope, which is now seen throughout the gaming industry, has its roots in the Japanese visual novel genre. Visual novels are largely text-based games in which the player clicks to scroll through text and move through the game’s story. Although the visual novel genre makes up close to 25% of software bought and sold in Japanese video game stores, the genre is one of the least exported game types from Japan. 999 is commonly associated with this genre, because of its text-centered nature. Emily Taylor elaborates on this nature, saying that “players often ‘play’ the game for an hour or more before the first option appears” (Taylor 197) She also states that many visual novels share a common trope in that the protagonist is “typically in high school or college” and whose “daily experiences are normal and believable” (198) Visual novels make effective use of the multiple ending mechanic, prompting players to play the game many times in order to truly ‘win.’ As Taylor puts it, “...the only way to “lose” when playing a dating-sim game is not to get a bad ending but to get the same ending twice, since doing so prevents players from making any progress toward game completion” (195) Besides their storytelling techniques, Japanese-developed games held a distinctively unique style that set them apart from typical American games. Katamari Damacy, released in 2004 for the PlayStation 2, follows the son of the almighty King of All Cosmos, who accidentally destroyed the moon and stars. It is the task of this prince to rebuild the cosmos, by rolling around a magical ball called a ‘katamari’ that collects various objects it is rolled over, getting progressively larger until it is sent into the sky. The heavily stylized nature of these games, as well as the nonsensical setting and concept, are rooted in the Japanese beliefs of larger-than-life deities and spirits (hence the King of All Cosmos). Another example of a game that displays a distinctly Japanese style is Okami. This game, also released for the PlayStation 2 in 2006, tells the story of the Japanese Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu, who takes the form of a legendary white wolf and descends down to the world to save it from an evil encroaching darkness. The game’s art style is widely revered, making use of the look of traditional Japanese sumie (east Asian ink brush) wood block paintings combined with the cartoon-like aesthetic of cel-shading to create the image of moving paintings. The main mechanic of the game also pulls from the sumie art style, in that the player can alter the environment around them through the use of the ‘Celestial Brush.’ While games such as Katamari Damacy and Okami exhibit rather distinct and unique styles, many players interviewed by Consalvo agreed that a large number of Japanese games differed from Western games in that Japanese developers used more colorful, simple designs that diverged from the typical Western approach toward life-like, realistic graphics. This simplified visual style was a large part of what players claimed drew them in.
	While Japanese game developers attempted to mask the Japanese origins of their games in their early American marketing days, over time the aforementioned ‘cultureless cover’ began to fade, and games could exhibit foreign elements to a greater extent. Games began to draw inspiration from aspects of typical Japanese life, as well as traditional Asian ideals that American players had never experienced before. Games such as The World Ends with You and the Persona series pulled their stories from everyday life in Japan, including aspects of typical daily life in Tokyo, stories that take place in typical Japanese neighborhoods and cultures, and even making use of Japanese school life as a main plot point in various games. Alongside elements of day-to-day life, these games also include a variety of moral lessons that differed greatly with that of America. For example, the Pokemon games encouraged the player to “believe in their heart” to be victorious, whereas Western games more closely stuck to the idea that a hero should be physically stronger than his enemies to emerge victorious. These types of American games also tended to rely more on fear as their main source of conflict, employing the use of supernatural beings, rampant murderers, and the like to establish the antagonist. Conversely, Japanese games relied more on the idea of hope to establish a drive for conflict, with protagonists wielding pendants, trinkets, and other such items that hold significant sentimental value in order to motivate them to continue on in their journey. Furthermore, Japanese multiplayer games were - and still are to a large extent - centered on team cooperation to complete tasks. One example of this is shown in comparing the Japanese-developed Final Fantasy XI, which is largely built around group coordination and support, and the American World of Warcraft, which is built to cater more toward individual players (although both games can function either way).
	Contrary to the original dilemma of Japanese games masking their ‘Japaneseness’ to succeed in America, video games at this point were beginning to be admired because they were Japanese. This interest in the Japanese aspect of the games caused some players to gain a certain fascination with not only more Japanese games, but Japanese culture in general. Some studied the language to more easily access and understand Japan-only releases. The desire to play these Japanese games that had not been released in the US was made difficult by the fact that most game consoles are region-encoded, meaning that released games are designed to only run on consoles manufactured in a predetermined region or country. This roadblock meant that players either needed to buy a Japanese version of their console, or modify their own console. Modding one’s console required some level of technical know-how, so as to not cause irreversible damage to the system. Though many players decided to buy imported consoles or otherwise mod their own, they are in truth the minority compared to those who simply used their respective region-encoded systems. And despite these players’ attempts to obtain said Japanese games, those who were not fluent in Japanese were restricted to games with easily accessible rules and commands, or Japanese localized games.

	In regards to the drastically changed view of Japanese video games and other such technologies that America now has, it is clear that the country has taken a much more globally conscious point of view when it comes to the video game industry. The original view of Japanese cultures as observed by the Western world was one of uncertainty, viewing them as strange and exotic as shown in Said’s Orientalism. The video game crash of 1983 brought down Atari’s virtually industry-wide reign to an end, leaving the country vulnerable and open to new arriving game developers. Nintendo’s arrival in North America ultimately led to the eyes of American players being opened to the possibility of quality games outside of America, and fascinated with this fact they donned a more cosmopolitan outlook in response. Through my research, I have found that the visual and storytelling styles of Japanese video games have not influenced those of Western games quite as much as I initially believed; rather, they exhibited a large influence on the Western gaming audience, who in turn came to demand similar games in their country. One possible area of bias in the study was the interviews with the players themselves. Only interviews with players whose opinions supported those of the mentioned viewpoints were included, and I feel the report may have been supported by a wider variety of points of view and opinions.

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