Akira Yamaoka, a world-renowned video game developer from Japan who has heavy influence on development on such franchises as Silent Hill and the Beatmania series, has made a rather confusing statement that Japanese development is in trouble. He doesn't mean in an isolated reference, but rather in comparison to the advancement of Western-development, in particular the U.S.

What I find to be rather perplexing is the fact that a number of the best games in recent years, namely Super Mario Galaxy and Okami, are Japanese based, and the games that are U.S. based have little to no consumer influence in Japan and other Asian countries. So how does he come to this conclusion that Japanese development is in trouble? Perhaps he is looking at the rather cringe-worthy early footage of GT5, or his own early work on Silent Hill 5. Let's not forget the terrible looking footage and screenshots from Devil May Cry 4 and Resident Evil 5, both of which look terrible.

Just in case you didn't realize, I'm being sarcastic. However, his comments may have been influenced by the fact that he is currently working with a U.S. based development team on Silent Hill 5, The Collective, and now that he has seen a U.S. game company first-hand, he may feel a little uneven about the state of the Japanese game development industry. In a way, this makes his comments justified, but not necessarily true. The Japanese culture and way of life is so uniquely different and uncanny to the Western way of life that he may have jumped to conclusions. While he thinks the team he is working with is "very advanced," I can't personally see how anyone, anywhere, could be more advanced then the Japanese. I think he has been whacked out at the completely different direction of Western civilization.

Akira went on to say:

"Their graphical and technical ability is amazing. There's a huge leap, actually. I look at what American developers are doing and I think wow... Japan is in trouble."

I don't want to under-mind the man as he's a genius, but maybe he is forgetting how the good-to-bad video-game ratio from Western-based game developers is not very good. I'd personally say it lingers around the 1:4, good:bad ratio, whereas the Japanese one is 50/50. Japanese games are and always will be developed in an overly artistic form (a la No More Heroes) whereas Western games are always going to have the burden of being developed by heavyweights EA and Activision Blizzard, both of which have been criticized for turning out too many average games and not enough good games purely to make a buck.

I don't think it's a matter of Japanese development being in trouble, but rather Japanese development taking more effort to provide new and more innovative games. To say Japanese development is in trouble purely because U.S. development has more of a focus on graphical presentation is ludicrous, as Japan has just as much, if not more, available to it than the West; however it chooses to mix and match a little more instead of going down the same path over and over again, which is only going to lead to simplicity - which leads to asking the question, have we already reached there?