QuoteI recall my peers would often ridicule Nintendo games for being "childish" compared to most of the games that were popular in the post-9/11 era, so I take it as a compliment from them that I was a fan of "childish" games.
Indeed. There are a few reasons for that. In the early to mid 90's, Nintendo and Sega's marketing focused on different age demographics. If you look at Sonic, you'll notice his shoes and "attitude" that catered to the adolescent "hip" crowd.
Nintendo's biggest blunder was to censor the blood in the SNES port of Mortal Kombat to please members of Congress. Like the game or not, Mortal Kombat was definitely a counter culture game at the time.
The other reasons for Nintendo's "kiddie" image are more benign: No first person shooters, more colorful palette, the "purple lunchbox" GameCube, just a lack of graphic violence in general.
I feel like most of these moves by Nintendo were not done to please the kids but to please the adult parents. They didn't have to make violent games themselves, but they could have allowed other developers to publish violent games on their platform.
I just did an essay on this exact topic actually.
There are a few reasons.
As others have stated, PC gaming is not popular in Japan, for various reasons. They tend to lean towards smartphones and consoles (if you call them that) such as the Nintendo DS. Often this is because of the structure of esports games, for League of Legends for example, when you press play, you have to sit there and play for 40 minutes, until the game ends, and usually you wouldn't just play 1 game in one sitting, maybe you would play 3 or 4. This is a damn long time, considering it takes many games to actually achieve a decent level of skill at the game. People in Japan prefer to play games on the train, after finishing homework, and so on. You have to remember that the typical Japanese child and Japanese businessman typically has less free time than their Western counterparts. Afterschool classes are common. Japanese businessmen are often expected to go out to dinner or drinking with their workmates after work. As a result of this, a game that you would usually sit down and play for maybe 3 or 4 hours simply doesn't fit well into their lifestyle.
Japanese gamers prefer to play games that are made in Japan, and their video game industry is extremely good at keeping the Japanese video game market this way. The highest selling games in Japan are games like Mario, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Monster Hunter etc etc. Apart from a few notable exceptions, these games tend to follow a certain format. Either a) there is a famous, lead character (Mario) or b) you collect monsters and battle / trade with them (Pokemon, Monster Hunter). But the best selling games in America? GTA, Call of Duty, Assassins Creed etc. You can clearly see a difference in the style of game that is popular among gamers in both societies. Popular Western games tend to have a more "mature" theme.
The way Japanese society is set up, taking a year (or 2 or 3) off of study to be a professional gamer is often a massive risk. Good universities are competitive, and things such as gap years are uncommon among students. On top of this, they don't have the esports structure that Korea has.
One thing that is important to note about Korea and China, the reason they have big esports scenes is because they heavily imported video gaming from the West. Japanese video game imports were banned, so their video game scene, without a strong basis for their own industry, was heavily influenced by the West. When video games first started becoming popular, the two biggest markets were America and Japan. Japan has stayed quite reclusive, America has branched into esports, and together with Korea and China (well the strength of China and Korea in esports is another topic) has made it into a huge industry.
they emphatized positive emotions, by also making you feel very inspired whenever you played them.
The story opens in Venice with Septem (賽特), a Frankish knight and covert intelligence operative of mixed descent from Gaul who was the lieutenant to Pepin the Younger. Septem possessed an heirloom bronze vessel with an eastern design, which was in fact the Monster Fusion Vessel.
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