"The Receipts: Mid 2000's Wildly Anti Japanese X Play Era | Castle Super Beast Clips"

[kane_magus]

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I somehow entirely missed all this "the Western video game industry and game journalism industry were egregiously racist against the Japanese video game industry back in the mid 2000s" shit at the time it was happening. Seriously, I don't recall seeing or hearing or reading anything about all this extreme dumbfuckery that they're talking about here and now. This, despite the fact that I was living in Redmond, WA and attending DigiPen from 2004-2008 and lived there for another five years after that, which was kind of like being at ground zero, in a way. I'm very glad I managed to avoid all that crap.

But then, I never watched G4 or Xplay or Attack of the Show or any of that stuff to start with. Mainly because I only had cable TV for maybe a year into living in Redmond before dropping that shit because it was too fucking expensive, and during that time I was mostly just watching Cartoon Network (in the rare moments that I wasn't either busy with school work or playing video games, which was another reason I dropped the TV part entirely and only kept the broadband Internet package, because why pay [too much] for something I was hardly using). Though what little I did see of it here and there, it always struck me as rather insipid and inane.

The main thing I remember hearing about G4 and the like back then was mostly incels, of the type who went on to make up the vast bulk of GamerGate when that became a thing, whinging about how the female hosts like Olivia Munn and Morgan ("Genji's story is based on the Genji period of Japanese history. We're not exactly sure how, but can you really blame us because who knows anything about Japanese history? There were some samurai, they periodically killed themselves, a rat learned judo, and they invented a religion that sanctifies small trees, and fat guys wrestling. Then we nuked them. That's when they turned into a real country.") Webb[1] were supposedly "fake gamer girls" or whatever, which is neither here nor there, except to show that the morons watching these shows were at least as terrible as the shows themselves. *shrug*

[1] - Goes to show that Donald Trump shockingly wasn't the first blatantly racist piece of shit to ever exist. Whodathunkit.

Comments

[owsf2000]

I don't remember that stuff happening explicitly either back then. I would like more examples of published articles from -different- sources that help show it was a widespread thing rather than just a (relatively speaking) handful of racist people that were reviewing games doing racist articles. I can't say I'd be terribly surprised if it turned out it was widespread though.

One thing I -do- remember though, since I was an avid supporter of japanese rpgs, is how you'd have various people shitting on the medium as 'anime' as 'cutesy' but 'the same old crap' under new coats of paint. And while to a point that's true, that's exactly how I describe every 1st person shooter ever. "Same crap but with a new series of levels. Usually." Very much a coat of paint in nature. Just didn't look cute. Probably the most in-your-face example of that jrpg-shitting I remember from back in the day was when the creator of VG Catz spent an entire comic saying this. ^^ Kinda felt stupid to me to say "These games are all the same." when they're part of the same genre - a collection of similar things so to speak. Yet these people never bitched about all FPS's being essentially the same game with different maps and occasionally a newish kinda gun, etc.

But alas I rant. I don't know if I really agree that jrpg is a racist tag, but I'm not the one who has to determine that. I guess the question is if it's just that one dev in japan that has a problem with it, or if most/many have an issue with being pigeon holed into that term. IE: Is that person being too sensitive, or is it a real sense of racism felt by japanese devs. For me the term mostly just described a type of game that happened to start and mostly happen in japan. If they have a problem with it, that's fine, but give us a term that helps describe the same genre of games. I would agree that calling them "japanese rpgs" these days is certainly less accurate since you can find these types of games created outside of japan nowadays... now that everyone with 50 bucks can get a legal copy of rpgmaker and start making those types of games. ^^;;;

And I will... eventually... I'm sure... probably... some day.

I guess my point ultimately whittles down to "Cool. I get you don't like the term. Give me a term that describes this type of game I can use instead then. IE: A game where you play the role of another (mostly) predefined character going through a (mostly) predefined storyline with a strict and separated battle system." Pretty sure that's mostly how I've thought about this genre.

*update*

Actually watching the video and reading the subject line now - like these guys, I don't really have any memories of this X Play thing. I wasn't in Quebec, but mid 2000's I didn't watch TV if that's where this was, and if it was just online then I guess I'd have to say I wasn't really watching any gaming media online either back then. In those days I was essentially on IRC and playing consoles offline on my own - often discovering games only when they showed up in ebgames/gamestop.

[kane_magus]

Xplay and Attack of the Show were shows on the now defunct G4 cable TV network. (EDIT) Though that Wikipedia article says there was a revival at some point? Hell if I know. I still have no interest in it. (EDIT 2) Guess I should've read a bit further, because it apparently died again just a year or so later. (/EDIT 2)(/EDIT) And... that's about all the familiarity I have with them, because I never watched them myself, outside of clips that would occasionally get embedded into a Kotaku or Destructoid or similar article (under which is usually where I saw the proto-GamerGate fuckwits complaining about "fake gamer girls" or whatever). And the clips never made me want to seek out more of it.

And yeah, pretty much every genre, Western or Japanese, is going to start to seem samey after the first dozen entries in said genres, if even that many. I don't see how JRPGs were or are supposedly any more samey than any other genre, such as FPS games, like you said, or sports games. If you want fucking samey, just look at each yearly addition to whatever American sportsball game you care to look at, and I know damn well sure that was the case back in the 2000s, too. See also MOBAs and MMOs, fighting games (either of the 2D or 3D variety), and... really, again, any genre, once it becomes popular enough. Hell, I'll just point to all the look-alike Vampire Survivors clones that have come out in the past year. It's the whole cookie cutter/jump on the bandwagon mentality. If a developer, Japanese, American, European, or whatever, sees a game that is popular and making a lot of money, they're going to want to make one of those, too. I heard a joke recently, regarding devs on games already in progress, where someone would come into the office and say, "You guys, I've got horrible news. Our project lead played [insert contemporary flavor of the month video game] over the weekend." I've been watching though Matt's "What Happened?" series (from oldest to newest, with the one on Star Fox Adventures being the most recent one I've seen), where he talks about games that had troubled development. Far too goddamn many games have been ruined (or else ended up cancelled entirely) after some empty suit would come into the room and tell the devs to drop everything and change the game to make it more like whatever happened to be the new hot shit that had just come out at the time.

As far as "JRPG" being an offensive term in Japan, honestly, Woolie and Pat talking about that in that previous video was the first I ever heard of that, too. Like you, I always just thought of it as a descriptive term that made sense, but if Japanese devs (in general, and not just the one guy) are associating it with that asinine "then we nuked them and that's when they became a real country" type of dogshit, then yeah, I can see why they'd not like it. But, as you say, I'm not really sure what else to call them. If it becomes a true Issue™ moving forward, I'm sure someone will come up with something better. Or at least new and different.

[kane_magus]

Also, I agree with your point about how more and more "JRPGs" are not even being made in Japan, too. Like how Ara Fell, which is one of the most JRPG-ass games I've played in a while, was made in... Akron, Ohio.