I just want to add that in their Phil Fish talk, the Japanese guy who innocently asked Phil Fish (and Jonathan Blow) what they thought about Japanese games before he got disrespected was Makoto Goto. The guy worked as: - a cutscene programmer for FFXIII - worked in the animation department for Armored Core 4 - a programmer in Front Mission 4 - and I think his latest job was doing visual effects for AI Somnium Files Fez SUCKED, Phil.
Fez was okay, I wouldn’t put it in a top 50 indie games list, but it had some ideas. Did it age well? No, not at all, but there weren’t as many indies coming out, this was pre-2013.
Never forget Judas in Binding of Issac wears a fez because Phil Fish voted against Edmund McMillen in the Independent Games Festival, which Edmund felt was traitorous.
One of things that always gets me about Phil Fish is that he claimed to think Japanese games are bad, while FeZ's main mechanical draw, the perspective shift, is lifted from Super Paper Mario
I'm like highly convinced Phil Fish just has a behavioral disorder that makes him say inflammatory things by reflex. Half his nuclear takes he clearly doesn't even believe, himself. When people asked him to port fez to PC he got really angry and said no one plays on PC because it's just a spreadsheet machine. Phil Fish very obviously doesn't believe that, he began his gaming life on home computers instead of console, but he NEEDS to say the MOST divisive thing or else he'll DIE
Not to mention he didn't even answer the dude's question. Goto asked if any more recent Japanese games inspired them as well, not what they thought of the current Japanese game industry (circa 2013) overall.
I swear Phil Fish has to be one of the most astroturfed indie devs ever! He made ONE GAME and yet for some reason people would NOT stop talking about him...BEFORE his game came out! Of course I'm aware there are...reasons for this, but it's still insane.
The thing I remember most about Xplay was Adam Sessler going "FF7 was a shit game and you're stupid if you like it" and his cohost literally putting her hands up and physically stepping back away from him going "wow, they're gonna eat you alive."
I legit don't like FFVII and I played the game almost all the way through. I'm not going to tell people it's a bad game because it isn't but I don't believe it's half the game so many people seem to claim it is.
@@InsanoRider777 THe other difference, along with your better response, I believe you when you say you've played, whereas I have a strong feeling Adam didn't or still hasn't and just wrote it off to talk shit.
@@InsanoRider777 That's a fair take. There's a HUGE difference between "Ehh, this isn't for me and might be a bit overrated." and "This is trash and you're an idiot if you don't think so." Sessler is an egomaniac that thinks If I don't like something than that thing is bad, which is a childlike opinion that he is FAR too old for.
I like how any normal person would have said "You know, it was a different time, I've grown and learned a lot in that time, and yes, it was really racist of me to say that" But nope, he just had to double down on it
I have to guess he didn't even watch the actual clip because I refuse to believe someone can be that obtuse to relegate himself as some sort of martyr like he tried to make conversation to be with & I fucking quote "I'm willing to be your racist today, just as i have been your drug addict, your censor and your homophobe time and again. It seems to serve a purpose and i have no image i care to maintain that i'll let it run the same course as all the others."
did he really double down? I read his tweets and it was more like him being fed up with people bringing shit up from 15 years ago and being forced into a drama he doesn't care about.
We've all heard and laughed at things that are pretty fucked up, but the thing that gets me about X-Play and people defending it is that it is clearly not a joke: They did it almost every time an overtly japanese franchise or game showed up on the show.
@@damonsghost9235 The problem is they didn't treat Japanese games with the same disdain as WW2 games (Which were also oversaturated.) The problem wasn't that every game was trying to be Final Fantasy or Devil May Cry, it was that they were Japanese at all.
@@crazyinsane500 that pretty much sums up any japanese media import to the west, the people bringing it over actively tried to de-japanese it in the name of "localization".
Not so fun fact: Nuclear shadows are not burned into the stone/concrete, rather the intense heat obliterates the surface layer and the person took the hit instead so it leaves a clear etching of where they were when the explosion hit. So that child Pat saw was an almost literal laser etching of what that kid was doing when he got atomized by a nuclear explosion so hot it instantly cremated his bones to ash.
my favorite Phil Fish moment is when he got pissed on twitter and, without mentioning anything about the project before this moment, said that he'll no longer be releasing Fez 2.
Phil Fish is a clown for sure but Fez 2 was already announced and the thing he was pissed about was gamergate harassment, so maybe not the hilarious moment you remember it being.
@@tastyswitchcardtridge No, it was still really funny, because Phil was also one of the weird sex perverts guilty of using his position in gamer culture to sexually harass women, and when people called him out on it is when he decided to cancel the game which, as far as was known at the time, had only Phil's word that he was working on it -- there was no announcement beyond Phil's socials and some speculative media about it, and it *certainly* didn't have a release date. It's been a long time, i know it's hard to remember, but Phil is a racist sexual predator, and it was really funny that his only defense was "Well... IM GONNA DO THE SEQUEL SO BLEH!".
@@tastyswitchcardtridge Nah. It was still hilarious. Especially when people started digging into his finances and found out he was up to some shady stuff and also that everyone who ever worked with him hated him and that's the real reason why Fez 2 was cancelled.
@@tastyswitchcardtridge This is months old but I want to make sure you are aware that phil fish defended sexual harassment during that time frame, so this isn't exactly the gotcha you think it is.
Yeah, cause a lot of comedy in that era and a lot of comedy I appreciate in general is quite irreverant and sometimes politically incorrect. But oh god, oh no.
Exactly, the thing that gives all of those clips the "mouth agape in shock" factor is the fact that in your mind you can hear the sinking thought of "Holy shit, they actualy mean what they are saying" when you're watching them.
@@onimaxblade8988 The issue wasn't the irreverent racist humor, the issue was it was made clear in their reviews they actually did dislike japan and japanese culture and would subtract points from a game's review score if it was from japan. If they made the same jokes but at the end of the day still reviewed the games on their own merits without taking the game's country of origin into account I think fewer people would be as pissed today, (some people would still be mad but a lot less than are now).
Paraphrasing a comment I saw on this, but that clip of the panel shows Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow disparaging one Makoto Goto. Looking back at it 10 years later, neither of those two are in the games industry anymore, but Makoto-san is, one of his more recent credits is working on Ai: The Somnium Files. Stay classy indeed
Blow's been making a sokoban game for a few years now, I don't know what you mean by him not being in the industry anymore. Individual indie devs don't release that many games. Fish ragequit to no applause though, it was really funny.
Blow is also like making a coding language as an alternative to c++ for game devs. Its also worth noting Blow is pretty critical of most games no matter the origin and points out in the clip his issues with western games, that he likes very few games in general, and points out a couple Japanese games he does actually like. I think its fair to say he was still rude but I think there is a clear palpable difference between what Phil said and what Blow said imo.
It feels somewhat prophetic that in Tim Rogers's Boku No Natsuyasumi video some months ago, he specifically brought up the X-Play segment talking about the game and how "weird" it was for being...about a kid having a nice summer vacation with no hardcore action.
Oh I remember that. I remember similar complaints about Shenmue and how GTA3 IS Better because you can shoot people. Violence is core to the Yankee cosmology
@@RoyalKnightVIIIAnd the same reviewers were appalled that people called the most popular games "Murder Simulators". Like, the people calling games murder simulators were wrong too, but the mainstream mindset amongst game reviewers in the west being that a game must include violence didn't help them fight the Jack Thompson's of the world. Cue the CAD comic where Buckley threatens Thompson in the same breath he says gamers aren't violent psychopaths.
Yes, DmC Devil May Cry was created specifically because western video game journalism said "Japanese games suck" and for some reason a lot of prominent Japanese developers AGREED WITH THEM.
@pocketlint60 it still.blows my mind that Ninja Theory were the ones that wanted to make it more like classic DMC, and Capcom didn't. I always wondered what could have been.
He wasn’t roasting it, Soulja boy *liked* Braid! He was saying how it was like Mario and prince of Persia and that he was digging it. Jonathan Blow was mad that Soulja boy wasn’t picking up on the subtle intricacies of the game or it’s nuclear bomb commentary or whatever
@@zedc6072 God that is so on brand for Johnathan Blow. For all the things I do appreciate about him, the man is so far up his own ass that he'll probably choke to death on his head.
Man I remembered Xplay being unfair to RPGs, but until this started blowing up I didn't remember it was *that bad* and had to realize how long it's been, 'cause holy shit.
@@NegaRenGenX2gay2lift Not this bad IIRC, but I think I stopped watching before those were getting big. It's kinda horrific realizing "Oh no it wasn't a bit and even if it was god damn"
I've been rewatching a lot of X-Play before the controversy began to pick up steam, and I remember when any Japanese produced game came up that I had to brace myself for some truly dogshit takes. The Shining Tears review alone made me actively seek out a copy and enjoy it out of spite, it was that bad of a review. By the way, play Shining Tears, it's pretty good!
Devs decrying the success of their competitors by suggesting that they're wrong for not following the foundations they learned is some of the biggest industry clownshoes bullshit I'm familiar with. It's like they have stockholm syndrome, having all their creativity locked away to be pumped through the modern, optimal monetisation AAA framework.
I attribute this to game design schools becoming a thing. The students have to be graded somehow, so they learn a very specific way to make games and perceive that as the only way. When something that breaks the mold matches or even exceeds what was taught in class, some can't process and default to different = bad.
@dovalle New ubisoft programmers have to go through a game design version of basic training dubbed "ubischool." This got exposed when the source code for watch dogs legion got leaked and it was a bloated mess reminiscent of scratch. Professional programmers are using a language meant for children starting their first coding project.
@MekaniDragon Not at all. Dunkey gives clear reasons why he likes and doesn't like certain things, even if they are highly subjective. Those old G4 reviews are literally just "this group of people made it, so it's bad. Let's mock them for being born."
@@Dracobyte I think Dunkey sometimes goes out of his way to make games he doesn't like look stupid (I think Death Stranding is maybe the most obvious example of this as it seems like he took a lot of what Kojima said as some weird personal insult), but he also gives credit where credit is due. He doesn't hate the entirety of the Japanese gaming industry, he just doesn't like JRPGS most of the time.
One of the best satires ever made. Qoutable lines for days, held together by the sheer insanity that is Hollywood, made by folks very familiar with the BS.
Because It was actually funny and actually use it's dark offensive comedy to expose hollywood BS. Instead of just being out right racist like that talking ball sack Adam sessler and phil fish.
Regarding the "JRPG term controversy", I found an interesting take on Maximillian Dood's reaction video that I wanted to share with you: "About the JRPG thing, I have a bit of a unique perspective I'd like to share. I lived 8 years in Japan. Went over there to try and break into the industry... actually did it for a couple of years and worked at a very well-known company for a couple of years (not Square Enix). Anyway, I think the term JRPG was taken as offensive for Japanese developers for a number of reasons. It's not as simple as the negative connotations that sprung up at around the same time as FFXIII, though that's obviously a big part of it. What happens is that, for the longest time (and even today), they've used the term "youge" as a derogative for western games. They didn't even consider them "games" proper (see, "videogames", according to them, were "a Japanese thing" -- and I'm quoting Hideo Kojima here.) I was actually shocked at how disdainful the term "youge" actually was when I went there. Well, right at the time FFXIII came out, the Japanese game industry was declining rapidly in terms of market share. They needed to sell games in the west to survive, but they weren't doing it well. Today, the Japanese game industry is a cell-phone gacha fest, a shadow of its former self. Western developers were putting out console games, good ones, and selling gang-busters. And now Japanese developers were like "how are we supposed to compete with this? It's not fair! We don't have the budget, we don't have the sales!" And it's against this backdrop that the term JRPG began to be used. Regardless of the negative connotations it had over here, over there it was much worse, because 1) they were losing literally 90% of the market, 2) they'd always thought of themselves as making RPGs and 3) they had the term "youge" as an analog. So they automatically assumed that JRPG was as bad as "youge", and, especially as you're losing almost all of your market, that's gotta sting. What I think is that the term was being used negatively by some people at the start, but not all of them, and certainly it's become purely descriptive nowadays. But in Japan they resented the rebranding of the genre, and assumed it was like when they rebranded western games as "youge". The Japanese game industry narrative is this: "RPGs" were not intuitive and could not be enjoyed by a mainstream audience until the Great Yuji Horii came and made Dragon Quest; and they were a hit in Japan but not in the West, because the games were, in FF creator Hironobu Sakaguchi's words, too "complex" for Western audiences (nevermind that the genre originated in the West - but prejudice is never rational). However, thanks to the cutting-edge graphics pioneered by Final Fantasy, they started selling in the West, too. "Final Fantasy" is the big Japanese RPG franchise that sells in the West, too. Anyway, Yoshi P in particular has to have taken the JRPG classification personally, as he was one of the few Japanese gamers who actually did appreciate Western games. He played the original Ultima Online! He played Everquest! So for him to hear that term, and having "youge" as a point of reference, it must have really been awful. Its...complicated... Japanese society as a whole has both disdain and admiration -both superiority and inferiority complexes- with regards to the West. I would have trouble understanding it if I did not have very specific point of reference myself. Well, here's hoping someone takes the trouble to read this post, and that it helps shed some light on the issue."
That's hilarious, and throws all this sneering posturing about racists people seem to be doing a lot here into some relief. That this neutral descriptive term was interpreted as a dismissive racist slut by Japanese people purely because they assumed it was a western equivalent of a dismissive racist slur they were already tossing around and got mad because it was only okay when they did it.
In some my friend group that were japanese were legit calling their own games Kusoge since they really wasn't good games. Then the good ones got lumped into Kusoge pile due to having little to no advertisements. People that did love JRPGs for being groundbreaking was wondering wth was going on and why is Atlus the only one doing it right? Like Dragon Quest NEVER really were bad they just took a lot of time in the early game. It's just interesting and sad both sides of gaming juggernauts had a nasty disdain for each other.
Thank you. People downplay how much FF13 fucked up the franchise and japanese gaming as a whole, I don't understand why people see Nomura as SE's villain when Toriyama almost bankrupted the company THREE TIMES IN A ROW
Very interesting background, stuff like this very rarely boils down to one or two factors, it's a melting pot of frustrations, cultural understanding and knowledge of the time. Info like this is almost impossible to know unless you were there at the time so it's great to share.
This is definitely not the perspective on the situation that I expected to find myself reading. The entire premise of what was effectively this market war between the western and eastern developers slowly morphing into an unfortunate cross-cultural spite is honestly fascinating to consider. Also that FFXIII somehow was so bad that it actually affected the market as a whole is just the icing on the cake. Half-jokes aside, I do thank you for taking the time to write this, as it definitely deserves to be known and considered.
I always love how Fish and Blow went off about how bad "Japanese UIs" were among other things at that panel. Meanwhile, Mass Effect 1 came out a few years before that panel and had THE. WORST. INVENTORY. MANAGEMENT. SYSTEM. EVER.
The anti-japanese stuff was so big in the mid 2000's that Keiji Inafune even got in on it (and look how that's worked out for him), as well as Capcom as a whole (and we all know how that era of capcom went). I have a vague feeling like Kojima might have too, but that I'm not at all sure about. Being a kid at the time I was just like "Idk why they're saying this but I hope not, the games are really fun".
See, I'm of two minds in regards to Inafune's take in particular. At the very beginning, his stance and efforts towards westernizing Capcom gave us amazing gems like Dead Rising 1 and the first two Lost Planet games. It wasn't until they started outsourcing projects and sequels to western developers with zero experience in the franchises they were given that things completely fell apart and they were churning out piles of shit.
@@wilnich592 What are you TALKING ABOUT?! Ninja Theory wasnt some no name developer who just casually made shit. And if you even have a cursory look at how Capcom treated NT and Blue Castle with regards to DmC and Dead Rising youll figure out it was VERY MUCH Japanese head mismanagement of the projects as well as mistreatment of the developers. Its even discussed in the What Happeneds!! This level of revisionist history of what actually happened in the mid 00s between Japan and America, as well as not even understanding the FUCKING MEANING of the JRPG genre term has led me to believe most people have only started playing games in the last 10-15 years, when the 7th gen started. Which means yall have EVEN LESS OF A CLUE what went on even before then. Seriously, yall zoomers are freaking nuts.
Pat making it sound like Phil was coming by your house every day trying to sell you some shit. "I had to move to get away from." Excellent breakdown guys, thank you.
I'm a developer and occasional around the water cooler I'll be like, "Hey does anyone else remember that time period when the gaming industry was just straight up racist to the Japanese?" and people will be like, "'Oh yeah, I remember that *water sip*"
@@HumanoidCableDreads Why not both? Since western devs clearly been copying each other's homework. Acting like they're innovating shit. When really JP creator does anything "fun" they complain
@@ExeErdna Because I saw their tweets. There was nothing racial or nationalist about them. They were just mad their games weren't getting good reviews. I refuse to pretend to be a mind reader and ascribe racist motives to statements featuring none.
Pat's Fez rant reminds me of how I feel about The Witness. Nothing was more exciting for me than walking through a maze and going "this path is worn down so it should be the correct path" and being right! and then that was immediately followed up with my wandering around the next maze trying everything I could think of for an hour until my friend told me the puzzle was based on auditory cues that I was literally unable to hear. The absolute shattering of my trust was awful.
The Witness is a great game but the few moments where it was audio puzzles instead of visual puzzles shouldnt have been in the game. The only time I had to look up a solution was in the audio puzzle area, thankfully theres only 1.
I hurt something in my torso laughing at Woolie STARTING to do an impression of a racist character from MADTV and then immediately pulling the eject handle on it after his brain has a chance to catch up
I'm not sure the Miss Swan character was supposed to be asian, I think she was supposed to be a parody of Bjork who is icelandic, I'm not sure if the cultural zeitgeist considers making fun of icelanders to be racist in 2023.
The funniest thing about Phil Fish saying japanese games suck, is that he wrote a "Top 10 games of 2017" list for Giant Bomb, and Yakuza 0 was pretty high up IIRC
There were some professional ways to answer goto's questions. "It seems like Japanese devs seem to have been having a hard time converting to HD development, but yeah, I used to like their games." Is an example. No though, if your first thought it to just generalize an entire regions industry to being trash, you might be an asshole.
This isn’t really related to the topic at hand, but does anyone remember that TBFP podcast episode where Woolie read an email from a fan professing his desire to “be black” and Woolie leaned into the mic and said “S.t.o.p.”
went into electronics back then too because they sold to the Soviets as well. There's a picture of a bunch of senators smashing Toshiba boom boxes in front of the capital building that, admittedly, would make a badass album cover.
@@damonsghost9235 Look up the X-Play review for Persona 3. I assure you, the "fearlessness in the face of certain death" symbolism flew _right over_ Morgan's head!
@@blackheartzerotheundergrou3225 I didn't have to look at it. As the characters shoot themselves with the magic gun every time they use persona's. It's loaded imagery that's easy to joke about. The criticisms about the game are fair. They didn't like the highschool life and the one dungeon. It got a 3/5.
@@damonsghost9235 Ah. I misread your comment, apologies. This isn't about context or symbolism; the Evoker system totally looks how it does. No one's gonna deny that. That said, the fact that they leaned _all the way the frig in_ on the suicide and depression jokes, with the context of X-Play's xenophobia towards Japanese titles we have now, *_has_* to raise some eyebrows.
In hindsight, their anti-Japanese bias is the only reason I was predisposed to think Musou games were garbage. Had a friend in college who was addicted, but I never gave any of them a chance until Hyrule Warriors.
Musou suffered extra hard from this due to the series divisive gameplay But also koei games in general. For example The rotk and nobunagas ambition games have always been super well regarded in japan and are some of the progenitors of the modern grand strategy genre... but in the west they were constantly painted as being 'lame' and 'lesser' to the point that they are still looked down on today. ... shit like this is why we never got the amazing gundam grand strategy games koei developed.
Learning about the Koei hate was weird for me as a kid, cause i only ever played samurai warriors and when hyrule warriors was announced there was so much controversy but i was so hyped because i had no idea that their style of gameplay wasnt just some one off idea but like their whole mo as a franchise, i really like their games and never understood the hate, epsecially when Cod, Halo, and AC were all the rage, why couldn't the japanese devs make yearly installment games?
@@nahman3836 Cuz of xenofobia also a weird elitism from both character action and beat-em-up fans including from members of this podcast They keep acting like the simplified movesets and overall formula are lesser, or that the games are completely dumb (which does apply a bit to more recent ones... it tends to vary from entry to entry) when enemies in early games and higher difficulties on recent ones get VERY aggressive. Its to the point where I'd say dynasty warriors 2 and 3 (aka 1 and 2 in japan) are closer to an arcade style mount and blade thing, since you actually got to keep track of your allies and enemy placements (archers will kill you very fast if you try to just plow through them without flanking or meat shields... I mean allies) And every charge attack (aka, triangle/Y) had a different function to them, similar to how kunitsu-gami does it actually (charge one is a guard breaker, x and then y is an universal launcher/anti-air charge 2 - x,x,y - tended to be an AOE cloud clearer and so on) Later games did simplify things a lot, but still tried to do stuff like that, with different movesets having actual distinct functions to every attack in the combo. And thats not me going into the weirdly in depth military ranking system 3 had, which influenced duels, allies following you, etc. But nope, gotta look at musou games in general as brainless button mashers. And Koei as not being able to make anything BUT crappy musou games even though they all but created modern grand strategy and the like.
@@Maioly that and the battle report system after a match was so cool! Actually getting to see where the enemy broke the line and overwhelm an allied general. Seeing that the generals weren't just randomly calling out for help but where actually moving up or getting pushed back on the battlefield is such a great system I wish more game would take inspiration from it.
@@nahman3836 yeah, pretty much Those games had (and still somewhat do... depending on the entry) a massive ammount of complexity going on in the background that was super easy to miss. Its a funny thing, musou games have all but become exactly what people accused them of being.
@@pocketlint60 That, Nier got a 4 out of 5, And Deadly Premonition got a 4 out of 5. Those come to mind since those titles were getting mixed or negative reception by other outlets
@@Dracobyte um dunky has a very good or bad scale 1 and 0. I have bought games like no more heroes and its sequel which they spoke highly of and i wonder if its just a pick and chose
It probably doesn't need to be said, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying a Japanese piece of media for how "Japanese" it is. You can laugh at how weird Yakuza is in its storytelling and presentation. The important thing is to look for other merits to whatever it is and not just treat it like a novelty because of where it's from.
Fez came out at a really fortunate time (for it) in terms of indie games, where if your game LOOKED PRETTY and/or had a moderately neat gimmick, it exploded because the indie market wasn't as saturated as it is now. Obviously those two parameters still hold true now, but now you gotta fight a little more for the success. Hell, look at Braid, most mid shit in the world and yet if you look back it was considered THE indie game.
Liking anime and JRPGs in the 90s was rough. Now the worst you have to deal with is weirdos inside the fandom, but back in the day it was a legitimate counterculture. It wasn't a cool one, either. Some kids got their asses beat. It's why you see so many greybeard gatekeepers online. They have 90s nerd PTSD.
@@gdhuertas07 And paradoxically around the 2010s is when manga and anime series coming out started dipping in quality and becoming by-the-numbers. The industry had been recovering some of its creative spark in recent years thankfully but it's weird that it started becoming more acceptable and popular when it was getting worse.
No no, the weirdos aren't the worst. The worst one are dealing with the same peeps that bully you for liking anime and JRPG but now they "like" them because it's cool now.
never forget how bioware was shitting on jrpgs while dragon age 2 had an angst ridden white haired elf boy with a fuckhuge sword as one of it's main characters
Funny thing is, Fenris was actually one of the more likeable characters in the game, provided you could get over the idea of a "jrpg looking" character in a wrpg. He actually gets a decent character arc (friend route anyways, rival route actually feels pretty bitter) and two-hand builds are really fun in DA2. It's almost like "jrpg protagonist" isn't necessarily a bad thing, nor strictly speaking always even Japanese, if that makes any sense.
This might be the first time I’ve ever heard someone defend being racist by saying “everyone who disagrees with me is a pedophile”. Unfortunately it wasn’t the last (thanks Q-Anon).
@@damonsghost9235 Q-Anon are a right wing conspiracy group that believe all the left wing politicians in the country are pedophiles. They are weirdly obsessed with being seen as not racist despite being seen as complete lunatics.
What Pat is describing is exactly what it felt like playing games from like 2005-2015. It felt like there was this angst and jealousy from western devs and journalists that was poisoning everything about gaming in America. It was especially noticeable in small-town America where a lot of people were buying Xbox consoles because "Xbox is the American console" and they would talk about how you were a "bad patriot" if you bought a Sony or Nintendo console. The anti-Japanese sentiment in video games during the mid 2000's was INSANE
Oh that's probably a bleed over from the Car industry funny enough I hear that going into the 80s if you had a Japanese car, you could expect people to outright sabotage or fuck with it in some way. It wasn't until American Car companies started imploding that people stopped that
Which makes it hilarious and infuriating when they have the gull to lecture us about acceptance while they’re malting every time the Japanese are earning *their* customer base.
Pat's point about JRPGs being the only genre that has the nation attached to the front is mostly on point, but it's not the only one. He's forgetting KMMOs.
I wish they'd left in most of the Tunic Vs Fez comparison angle at the end because I'm suddenly really fascinated by that comparison, because they *do* have some *very* similar ideas but also you can definitely tell that Tunic fucking *loves* Japanese video games in a way that Fez pretty emphatically did *not* lol
tunic goes out of its way to give you the feeling of playing an imported video game with no fan translation, and considers that a positive and worthwhile experience. and that's just infinitely charming
@@bleack8701 Considering he seems to think Baten Kaitos is a "Pedophile Boner Simulator," I don't think his views have evolved much in the past twenty years.
I remember the Mass Effect guy saying "JRPGs aren't real RPGs because they don't include choices." Look, I don't think that's a crazy position, but I think karma caught up to you with that statement with what you did with ME 3, my dudes.
Woolie isn't exaggerating. I remember going to see family in pretty remote parts of Kenya and being recommended Tropic Thunder. I watched that shit on VCD. Not DVD, VCD. I fucking loved it.
I remember having The Matrix on VCD, as for some insane reason the portable CD player I had could play VCDs. Ironically it's the best feature that a portable CD player could have seeing as those things couldn't play music if you were traveling anywhere or put them on any kind of uneven surface.
People in other countries tend not to be so hypersensative. Reminds me of the guy who got Apu removed from The Simpsons showing "offensive" clips of Apu to his parents from India and they laughed and told him to stop being so sensative.
@@Kango234 yeah I feel like the controversy over it doesn't make a lot of sense to me seeing as the entire point is that it's a completely unacceptable thing for the actor to do and it's explicitly framed as a bad thing. Without any context I could see someone reflexively assuming the worst but the film expects you to understand that the guy doing it is a dipshit who is so insulated by wealth and privilege that he's incapable of understanding that he's just doing blackface, no matter how much he deludes himself into thinking he's pushing the envelope as an actor by playing a black man.
I was a HS geek at the time, and even i, being a pasty white ass swede, felt weirdly alienated by this shit. it wasn't until guys like Gene park, and other people who worked int he industry at the time, started talking about the turns around DmC & DMCV, that it all clicked. It's ALL scrubqoutes!!! by people salty that there f'ing Culture isn't dominating!!!!
that era is not gone yet. During the latest xbox direct thing, when they were showing hi-fi rush, the chat was filled with people being like "what is this japanese bullshit?"
Even a lot of modern gaming outlets that like to present themselves as progressive still kinda stink of this shit a lot of the time IMO, it's just that we've gone from saying blanketly that japanese games suck to always needing to talk about how "weird" and "quirky" and "out there" the latest big one is.
Due to A LOT of kids came up with just COD and GTA you born in the 80-90s you got exposed to a lot of japanese content. We were eating GOOD gaming in the 90s some kids boring late 90s were just turning 10 when shit started to change. They missed out on so much exposure to the culture.
I don't know. ...But are you saying we can't ever call other white people Weebs when they're just all "CONSUME PRODUCT" in a really Weeby way? Don't deny it has a definite mass-produced fan-fiction quality or just comes off like Neon-White's dialogue when it's an "homage"
Fun fact about Phil Fish talking shit to a Japanese dev. I believe I got the facts right, and that Japanese dev is Makoto Goto, AKA Front Mission, Armored Core 4, FFXIII, and Pat's favorite, AI: The Somnium Files!
As someone who has played dragon quest and final fantasy since I was like.. 8 it seemed weird to me that certain people disliked Japanese games so much especially since pokemon has literally always been huge since it came out. I mean even then people were super racist against Pokemon as well it's wild
What's especially funny is, I found out from James-Stephanie's video about this whole thing, back when Sword/Shield came out, there was apparent a super intense Reddit argument of people saying "No Pokemon is NOT a JRPG"
Also important to remember that this showed aired in the states while we were still processing 9/11, the Bush administration, and having an identity crisis as to our role in international politics. That created a insecurity that permeated through out the decade Xenophobia like this was common and I'll be honest, I'm shocked I didn't pick any of this up as a kid growing up around the time
Ah yes, this is the same X-Play that made so many racist jokes back in the day. Yet Adam Sessler will have you believe that anyone making similar jokes now is a 1940s fascist. The jokes are only ok, until they aren't, until they're ok again. It's ok to say Japan is not good at making games, until it isn't, until it is again. It's whoever is holding the leash. These people are grifters. Great video Woolie.
@@HumanoidCableDreads Oh God, I can't believe someone else remembered Extended Play! I felt the same way, but at the same time I was young enough to think there were some funny bits so I'm not going to act completely innocent. Now Attack of the Show fucking sucked and I hated it from day one so I'm right there with Pat and Woolie not know much about Olivia Munn outside of memes.
@@Kango234 Did you watch the Screen Savers? Now that was a show for real nerds. G4 felt like the Mountain Dew dude bros invaded the computer lab that was TechTV.
@@HumanoidCableDreads I did! My dad had a tech job so he was the reason I even knew of Tech TV. That said I was very young so I didn't get all of it, but I remember them modding a GameCube once and was bummed out when I realized stuff like that wasn't going to air anymore.
The take away is that a worryingly large amount of so-called nice people are actually only doing it performatively, but will gladly bully anyone if you tell them it's acceptable. Their entire political ideology and persona is mercantile, conditional on the basis they gain access to somebody they can direct their aggression at. Left, Right, it doesn't matter, they're found everywhere. This is how any group or society seems fine one moment, and then suddenly the mask slips and oops they want a race war.
What's absolutely crazy is that I felt like I fondly remembered XPlay/G4 but I straight up do not remember seeing ANY of that stuff, even after watching it all again
I mostly watched G4 before the TechTV merger, and enjoyed it way more. After the merger, content just went way downhill. X-Play wasn't there for the first couple years. Instead they had a show named after their website that I liked a lot more.
This whole period was deeply entwined with the “edgy humor” of the mid-2000 and on that gave us Yatzhee Croshaw and all his imitators. On a similar but distinct level, it’s also irony-poisoning at its most pervasive. Is the dismissively racist attitude real, or is it preformed as ‘a bit’? At a certain point, it doesn’t matter.
The difference between Yahtzee and his imitators, is that his hatred isn't exclusive to Japanese games. I was convinced for a while there that he didn't even like video games.
In regards to "is it real or a bit" I did partly wonder that. I watched a lot of XPlay and one of the things they would harp on the most would be all the hate they'd get for their reviews of things like the FMA game and DBZ games. Like you said, it doesn't matter much, although I'd guess it's probably both. The anti-Japan tones felt too strong to be a bit, but getting all the hate probably made them want to double down on it.
It was a bit. Sessler found a appreciation doing television (X-play). Politics poisoned his view. My guess is he no longer views gaming as a medium. All the old X-play reviews were written lines for the both of them.
@Damon's Ghost Okay. Now tell me why writing those lines consistently geared toward insulting the Japanese makes it any better. Again. It doesn't matter after a while whether it was a bit or not.
No he isn't, BG1&2 are fine, more than fine in fact. I'd argue its the best franchise Bioware has made, and i say this as someone that only played BG almost two decades after it was released, i have no nostalgia goggles. The notion that you need to "prep" or otherwise it is "unplayable" is just Pat being overly-dramatic as always. Same thing goes for Kenshi, which not surprisingly, he also hates.
@@agrippa2012I've never played either of the first two Baldur's Gates but do they have tutorials, or are they like the owlcat Pathfinder games where they expect you to have already played D&D before and the game only teaches you the controls? Because if that is what it is I would consider that prep
@@drexalnewb1500 They do have tutorials, but they are mostly about controls. The actual D&D mechanics that were implemented are not as complicated as one might think however, and the character creation process is really simple and pretty intuitive. The fact i never actually played tabletop D&D in my life wasn't really a problem. The only classes that i don't recommend for beginners are sorcerer and shamans, both for the same reason: once you select their spells, you can not change them. Incidentally, both classes were not present in the original release of BG1, you only have access to them if you're playing the Enhanced Edition.
@@agrippa2012 you can't say Bg 1 + 2 are completely fair, especially if you're trying to keep the whole party alive. There's a reason they added cheats into the re releases
@@Noisetank007 You mean the cheats (essentially the console commands) that can only be accessed by messing with the ini files? Yeah, i never used those, i never felt that i needed them. Also, "saving and reloading" is a thing you can do at anytime, just like most games. Besides, this has nothing to do with the main point, Pat wasn't implying that BG is "unplayable" because of how many game overs a player can get.
Two shows I watched all the time in high school, X-Play and Cinematech. Two things that stuck out to me most, X-Play would always have a segment about WTF games, and Cinametch had a half-hour episode of "Bizarre Games." Anytime X-Play did WTF Games, it would always be something from Japan. The Bizarre Games Cinematech episode did have some Japan games like Wario Ware and Katamari, but it did also have The Guy Game and Boogerman.
As a young black kid back in the day. It always rubbed me the wrong way when X-Play had those SUPER RACIST segments. Obviously I was super young so I didn't have the full vocabulary at the time. But holy shit it made me uncomfortable as hell. I usually sat down like..."I just wanna know about the game... why are they?"
Man I don't even remember that shit as a kid at all and the weird thing is for me, I'm from Hawaii. I am Hawaiian. We got tons of Asians from Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and so on and I remember ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THESE JOKES! Then I see all the clips and stuff people bring up and I realize WHY I DON'T. It's from before I knew the channel existed. I started watching it around 2010 or 2012. I liked watching for the cheat codes, Attack of the Show was fun, XPlay gave me funny enough a love of Japanese games since they were showing a lot of things I wanted to play. This was also way before I got a laptop for my 12 birthday so my main source of info was G4 back then and I always loved watching E3 as a kid during Summer. Wake up early and see tons of games. I fucking remember watching it when I had an ear infection and just putting the drops in and laying my head down watching it all morning. Like, it's weird how easy it is this stuff just flies over your head as a kid or if you even could register it till Twitter became a thing and people became more unhinged with their stances on things.
I actually do remember seeing that Baten Kaitos review on X-play, and even at the time I thought it crossed a few lines. Felt like they were just aiming to be as edgy as possible and dump on JRPG's at a time when they were seen as trope-riddled archaic grindfests and Western produced games were gaining immense popularity.
the xplay segment i remember most was when they dropped all the main consoles of the time, ps2 xbox and gamecube, off balconies n stuff to test which was the toughest. i think gamecube won
When they said they didn't get G4 in Quebec I was like "Damn' they didn't get to see Tommy Tallarico in his prime." But then when they revealed that they actually had and my heart soared. A true legend.
I don't recall these attitudes being all that prevalent in the UK at the time, though I guess that could be because we had a really vibrant micro computer scene in the 80s which directly fed into exceptionally successful and well received games on the PlayStation, N64 and beyond as developers who cut their teeth on the Spectrum and C64 flogging games on cassette tapes for about £5 a pop made some of the most technically impressive games on the market when they got access to new hardware. The videogame crash of the 80s was an exclusively North American phenomenon.
This entire debate is mostly american, yeah. Italy didn't have the rampant xenophobia, not much of a crash to speak of - cause games *really* took off in the PSX era here.
In the context of the video game scene, Europe (even the English parts) really was a completely other world than NA. Different gaming library, different gaming culture, even different popular platforms.
@@just_matt214 This deate doesn't really apply to most of western Europe anyways because half of it had already been enjoying manga and anime decades before it became mainstream in the US. Since you are from Italy, you have most likely realized that this appreciation of japanese media has been going on for a while. It's not really a shock then to discover that the countries that had a big thing for japanese media since the 1980s would have no problem with it in the 2000s
I never noticed this kinda attitude here in Brazil as well, but culturally we've never been insecure about liking japanese media, kids in the 80s and 90s watched tokusatsu and anime on public TV. If you're a millennial here and you've never watched Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Sailor Moon or Pokemon you are a weirdo. From my perspective the shame that americans have over liking another culture's media is fucking bizarre.
I viscerally feel Pat’s rage. Looking back at those clips where western developers casually dish out racism to a person’s face make me lose composure. I could be in the happiest mood, but seeing that shit makes me want to grab someone by the shoulders and cause trauma
And it’s even more maddening when they’ll turn around to lecture us. Forgetting we’re not the ones showing off our 80’s Japan level xenophobia like they are and actually respect their greats.
I also never saw any of X-Play and G4 (lived in the States, just never had the channel) and I was fucking *stunned* by all the clips popping up on Twitter. That whole era of gaming is fucking bizarre and you can still feel some of it today. You still see people refer to some games as 'Japanese bullshit' just cuz it looks a little anime-ish.
TechTV was better than G4. Also remember how Mass Effect 1 was heavily based on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within to the point they got Keith David to voice an important military man that gives orders to some of the main characters?
@@RavenCloak13 I hate how few people even remember or talk about this when discussing ME 1. I remember reloading in ME 2 and going why am I reloading, the guns in this universe function on a unique and cool concept (the whole firing bits of a cube at high velocity via Mass Effect fields in the gun). Then again, ME 1 had the writers who laid hints for the supernova plot for the Reapers on like 1 or two planet lore logs in ME 1.
The thing that always stuns me as an American is how inspite of all America has done to Japan in particular a lot of them took it surprisingly well to the point America gets more respect from Asian Countries than European ones. They restructured their government to mirror our own, theirs a period where they really tried to copy American culture, and even now theirs places that are “American Themed” in the most oddly glorified way. They have a Holocaust museum of what we did, theirs probably some people still alive that lived through that time in history and they still like us more than Europe and I’m genuinely confused.
@@Broomer52 The holocaust was an effort to exterminate all Jewish people. The atomic bombings of Japan were an effort to avoid a war in manland Japan that would kill far more Americans and Japanese people. To compare the two is ignorant
@@Broomer52 Interesting. Maybe their cultural segregation from the western world has helped with that? It fostered romantization of the foreign as opposed to active comparison, allowing them to distance themselves from it and romantize the occasional glimpse they get from foreign culture. Maybe globalization isn't all it's cracked up to be.
@@Broomer52 Nanking Massacre, Bataan Death March, the Manila massacre, Sook Ching massacres, and human experimentation camp Unit 731. Plus many more war crimes you can look up. Stop acting like they were innocent victims.
Man, as a 4-12 year old, I did not catch (or admittedly remember) alot of this stuff. I don't doubt that it was there, but before youtube we took what we could get. good conversation CSB
100%, I loved X-Play, but it's because it was the only video game show of its kinda, and I was a 15-year-old which Pat accurately points out means I was a shit,. When UA-cam and video game playthroughs started, I remember caring about G4 less and less.
I was an old X-Play/G4 junkie back in the day, and while the racist jokes and questionable content was there (and still kinda funny) that feeling was on the whole goddamn channel from Attack of the Show to Code Monkeys to Banzai. Them plus MTV and even Syfy back then were like if South Park was a whole block of television. It was an entire ecosphere of "aren't the japanese crazy and weird and silly" right next to "man this anime shit is great and Ninja Warrior is awesome." Also X Play was next to shit like the Man Show and Happy Tree Friends. It was just the 2000s man. The aughts were crazy.
Yeah, that paradox is probably why we didn't really notice or didn't really get bothered by it since this was literally the same era of people learning about anime, games coming out people wanted to try and stuff like VN's for most people whose only exposure to a "game" weren't old text based adventures but shooters. We both called it weird but also enjoyed what was coming. Least for some. And people made communities out of it. Most of the Japanese games I wanted to play and did were because I watched stuff like XPlay and stuff as a kid. We going to forget how much advertising Kingdom Hearts had? How big Pokemon exploded? The internet pretty much drug up both good and bad things about people but because it was in it's infancy things were on a whole more civil and we didn't have the host just admitting they hated stuff like this. We got the edited and filtered version which is why we have fond memories of this stuff.
The PS2 generation is when western games started making big money not just on PC but on consoles too & the 360 generation is representative of the shift towards western dev games dominating the industry. My point being that there’s a direct line between that shift & that specific brand of xenophobia becoming so prevalent during that era. It was like for some they felt their shackles were off & were free to just be openly racist about Japan & Japanese people because they no longer dominated the industry. EDIT: I listened further only to hear Pat say basically the exact thing I wrote. lol. Bravo guys!
That whole era confused the heck out of me. Were Japanese games not hitting it out of the park like they used to? Sure, but I personally felt that whole era was kind of not great imo and didn't see the Western Dev's as some sort of gods gift to gaming.
I'm so glad we're over that "everything japanese is cringe or porn and there's no in between!" part of the early 2000's. cuz people only knew japanese stuff as pokemon or hentai or video games and you were weird for liking it.
It’s so funny how JRPGs were considered bad just because FF13 was divisive. Like FF13 came it in 2009, Persona 4 came out the year before and Xenoblade 1 came out the year after. Both of which are some of the most celebrated JRPGs of all time. It’s like if someone said that all FPS games were terrible because that year’s Call of Duty wasn’t great.
EXACTLY! I've been saying this for over a decade, I remember literally arguing with a friend and asked why everyone is suddenly acting like all jrpgs are Hyper Dimension Neptunia or some shit. It was like this weird rewriting of history.
TBF with Xenoblade it took a realllllllllly long time to come out in the US at the time (although IDK if PAL regions looked at jrpgs differently in comparison to NA sooo) and at that point if ya knew about it you were in the niche fandom for jrpgs relative to FF 13 being a huge mainstream rpg flop.. but yeee even doing some basic research around then/especially looking back in hindsight there was still plenty of fantastic stuff coming out around then like Radiant Historia, Solatorobo, the Etrian Odyssey series, DQ Monsters Joker 2, Lost Odyssey
Maybe I'm giving these people the benefit of the doubt, but Persona 4 *did* kind of have the same problem with FF13 with "It takes a while to get good." That said, Persona 4 only took about five hours, and was actually good.
@@jac_238 Well, unfortunately it turns out that the fan campaigns did nothing in the long run. And it was mostly, if not all thanks to NoE (Nintendo of Europe), for it selling so well there, and then handling getting it to America's shores/stores as well. Which is why we have British voice acting in the game, even for the US.
It's funny how many people tend to memory-hole the very consistent bashing Japanese games got back in the mid to late 2000s when their only crime was being made by Japanese developers. Sure, there were plenty of games back then that were more deserved of getting poked apart (licensed anime games definitely come to mind) for being outright bad, but the very persistent way in Japanese games got mocked just because of a few quirky-by-western-standards titles existed absolutely created a feedback loop where using the term "JRPG" in certain circles was absolutely viewed as being a derogative. Like most wouldn't bat an eye if you said you enjoyed Oblivion or WoW, but if you bring up something like Star Ocean or certain Final Fantasy games you absolutely got flak for it over some inane reason outside of a handful of exceptions.
I actually think a lot of (IMO, ntentionally or not, often sex negativist and paternalistic rather then liberatory) the pushback on sexualization and the like in the 2010s evolved out of the idea of Japanese games and Anime being "old fashioned" and "something we need to evolve past" for "real, serious games as art" from the mid/late 2000s that's being discussed here. Obviously, there's been postive changes and there are real nuanced conversations to have around sexualizatgion, but a lot of it really was not nuanced, overly squeamish and puritan, and mostly targetting Japanese games, often in a way that was overgeneralizing and stigmatizing.
I always kind of wondered if the attempt to foster anti-japanese sentiment wasn't just racism and was bought and paid for, because there was a similar sort of hatred when Japanese automobiles started to come stateside around the time when people were looking for cheap and fuel-efficient cars
@@thecaptain6520 People STILL refer to customizing a car with decorative racing accessories as "ricing", because people who didn't know how to actually improve a car's performance and just wanted it to look cooler were doing it to cheap Hondas. Apparently they tried to change the meaning of "rice" in this context to mean Racing Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements in an attempt to avoid accusations of racism, but it was really just because it was most popular to do it to Japanese cars and is indeed a racist term.
To be fair, a lot of people (like myself, Pat and Woolie) had no idea that this was a thing (at least to this level) until these clips showed up. I remember seeing people making fun of some aspects of JRPG's (and japanese video games in general) back in the 2000's when i was in school, but, it was pretty much the same level of jokes that they would give to any other piece of media (and definetly nothing on the level of "we bombed them and now they're a real country"). This is literaly the first time i've been aware that stuff of this level was "common" back then.
Anyway I feel like a thing that always rubbed me personally the wrong way about Phil Fish and attendant discourse was the impression I would get that, because Fish was particularly unpopular amongst and enjoyed picking fights with a genuinely shitty proto-fash sect of internet trolls and because he was friends with other publically visible people who were generally seen as being progressive, a certain sort of commentator would conclude that he *must* himself be progressive, and thus anything he said must necessarily be, if not actively progressive, then at least not *anti*-progressive. And that would lead people to tie themselves into knots trying to launder shit like him going on just nakedly racist and certainly rude and unnecessary tirades against japanese games and devs and players as being okay or even Secretly Genius or whatever instead of as the dumb racist bullshit that they always were.
Glad this is coming to light but sad it took this long. In hindsight most of this wasn't in the background too especially seeing as how they are a lot of games that tried to appeal more to the west even big franchises.
I have a feeling, I don’t know for sure, that X-Play moments like those, is why the great Olivia Munn left G4. She may not be Japanese, but she is Asian and spent her formative years living in Yokota Air Base near Tachikawa in Tokyo, Japan, when her abusive stepfather got transferred there. She says that scheduling conflicts is the reason she left G4, but I bet these moments certainly made it easier for her to leave.
What's crazy is that I actually blotted these out of my mind somehow. I seriously didn't remember it being that way until it was pointed out, and it all came flooding back like repressed memories.
I remember watching those reviews back in the day and finding them funny, because my friends and I would make similar jokes, we found these jokes funny because we mutually understood that they were just jokes and not reflections of our actual feelings and that was what I assumed was the case with the people at G4. However I also remember back then being confused when a game simply being japanese in origin was counted against it's final review score and as time went on I started to pick up on the weird double standard G4 and other mainstream gaming journalism sources had in regards to how "weird" things from Japan were treated. Weird western games were treated as far more normal than even fairly conservative japanese games, aspects of japanese culture were treated as inherently surreal or kitsch simply because they were japanese. It's the same when it comes to anime commentary, even self professed weebs tend to act vaguely xenophobic, this is still happening to this day.
I just want to add that in their Phil Fish talk, the Japanese guy who innocently asked Phil Fish (and Jonathan Blow) what they thought about Japanese games before he got disrespected was Makoto Goto.
The guy worked as:
- a cutscene programmer for FFXIII
- worked in the animation department for Armored Core 4
- a programmer in Front Mission 4
- and I think his latest job was doing visual effects for AI Somnium Files
Fez SUCKED, Phil.
Awesome DD!
A clear example on how fragile big ego and bad attitude can be.
Makoto Goto is still going strong.
Goto-san also worked on Candance of Hyrule!
Nah, Fez was pretty dang good... but the creator... holy shit the creator was an asshole.
Fez was okay, I wouldn’t put it in a top 50 indie games list, but it had some ideas. Did it age well? No, not at all, but there weren’t as many indies coming out, this was pre-2013.
Shut up, you'll make him cry and refuse to release Fez 3, the sequel to the unreleased Fez 2 that he stopped developing also because he got cranky.
casual racism vs ranked racism
Ranked player
Competitive Racism
Diamond rank 1 tier rascism
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege? More like X-Play's Rainbow Six: Siege
Racism For Glory
Man, Kirby had a lot to say about Fez. Didn't even let Pat speak
You know the hatred is real when it's capable of changing a normal conversation to a Kirby monologue that fast.
Boy needs to inhale some soap for that potty mouth.
Funny thing is UA-cam reverted their swearing policy a few days ago, so now you don't need to censor every cuss word.
@@iveli_alpaca You believe UA-cam? Sounds like a disaster.
@@Andy_ARBS they made a blog post, a tweet, and a video about the announcement. pretty big stuff
Never forget Judas in Binding of Issac wears a fez because Phil Fish voted against Edmund McMillen in the Independent Games Festival, which Edmund felt was traitorous.
LMAO
Edmund was the only prominent indie guy at the time that isn't a complete asshole. Love him.
Holy shit that's fucking awesome
One of things that always gets me about Phil Fish is that he claimed to think Japanese games are bad, while FeZ's main mechanical draw, the perspective shift, is lifted from Super Paper Mario
I'm like highly convinced Phil Fish just has a behavioral disorder that makes him say inflammatory things by reflex. Half his nuclear takes he clearly doesn't even believe, himself. When people asked him to port fez to PC he got really angry and said no one plays on PC because it's just a spreadsheet machine. Phil Fish very obviously doesn't believe that, he began his gaming life on home computers instead of console, but he NEEDS to say the MOST divisive thing or else he'll DIE
@@qwertyqeys
He has SBD (Sassy Bitch Disorder). Other notable sufferers are Andrew Hussie and Notch.
Not to mention he didn't even answer the dude's question. Goto asked if any more recent Japanese games inspired them as well, not what they thought of the current Japanese game industry (circa 2013) overall.
This entire debacle marks the first time I’ve ever heard someone defend being intensely racist by saying all anime fans are psychotic racists.
C'mon man, "I know you are but what am I?" is a classic.
All they have is deflection. Theirs nothing in their court to fight back about the claims so they just accuse others of what they’re guilty of
This is actually why people are so anti woke, theve seen this kind of hypocrisy elsewhere
@@Maskof7eyes2 Nah, most anti-wokies are just insane culture warriors. Lol.
I like when people generalize anime fans as if there is only one anime everyone watches. It's like saying book readers are racists.
Pat’s hatred for Phil Fish and Fez gives me life.
The twist on why he hates him so much almost had me dying of laughter.
I'm just sitting here becoming the Chainsaw Man guy looking at the TV going "he just like me fr fr"
One of the few times Pat’s disdain for a person is on par with my own.
The fact people don't remember Phil Fish outside of that werid dude who was being an asshole to jrpg devs ....gives he life
I swear Phil Fish has to be one of the most astroturfed indie devs ever! He made ONE GAME and yet for some reason people would NOT stop talking about him...BEFORE his game came out!
Of course I'm aware there are...reasons for this, but it's still insane.
The thing I remember most about Xplay was Adam Sessler going "FF7 was a shit game and you're stupid if you like it" and his cohost literally putting her hands up and physically stepping back away from him going "wow, they're gonna eat you alive."
Didn't X-Play also get *really* shitty about Crisis Core, down to making a double down "review"?
@@jtlego1 Yeah, they were. It was really weird.
I legit don't like FFVII and I played the game almost all the way through. I'm not going to tell people it's a bad game because it isn't but I don't believe it's half the game so many people seem to claim it is.
@@InsanoRider777 THe other difference, along with your better response, I believe you when you say you've played, whereas I have a strong feeling Adam didn't or still hasn't and just wrote it off to talk shit.
@@InsanoRider777 That's a fair take. There's a HUGE difference between "Ehh, this isn't for me and might be a bit overrated." and "This is trash and you're an idiot if you don't think so." Sessler is an egomaniac that thinks If I don't like something than that thing is bad, which is a childlike opinion that he is FAR too old for.
I like how any normal person would have said "You know, it was a different time, I've grown and learned a lot in that time, and yes, it was really racist of me to say that"
But nope, he just had to double down on it
I have to guess he didn't even watch the actual clip because I refuse to believe someone can be that obtuse to relegate himself as some sort of martyr like he tried to make conversation to be with & I fucking quote "I'm willing to be your racist today, just as i have been your drug addict, your censor and your homophobe time and again. It seems to serve a purpose and i have no image i care to maintain that i'll let it run the same course as all the others."
@@KiKiDLR you don't know much about Phil then
@@patrickmcpartland1398 .....were we not talking about Adam Sessler?
Tripled down, even. This isn't the first time he's melted down on Twitter.
did he really double down? I read his tweets and it was more like him being fed up with people bringing shit up from 15 years ago and being forced into a drama he doesn't care about.
We've all heard and laughed at things that are pretty fucked up, but the thing that gets me about X-Play and people defending it is that it is clearly not a joke: They did it almost every time an overtly japanese franchise or game showed up on the show.
The market was oversaturated.
@@damonsghost9235 The problem is they didn't treat Japanese games with the same disdain as WW2 games (Which were also oversaturated.) The problem wasn't that every game was trying to be Final Fantasy or Devil May Cry, it was that they were Japanese at all.
@@crazyinsane500 that pretty much sums up any japanese media import to the west, the people bringing it over actively tried to de-japanese it in the name of "localization".
@@Shiirow yeah i remember my first exposure to sengoku basara being the vastly inferior port of the first game called DEVIL KINGS
Not so fun fact: Nuclear shadows are not burned into the stone/concrete, rather the intense heat obliterates the surface layer and the person took the hit instead so it leaves a clear etching of where they were when the explosion hit. So that child Pat saw was an almost literal laser etching of what that kid was doing when he got atomized by a nuclear explosion so hot it instantly cremated his bones to ash.
That is beyond messed up.
@@berrybluebird3842 True, but at least the kid died instantly
@@Scaevola9449 better than being the guy flash burned while looking at the explosion and his eyes swelled out of his sockets and popped out.
Holy fuck.
my favorite Phil Fish moment is when he got pissed on twitter and, without mentioning anything about the project before this moment, said that he'll no longer be releasing Fez 2.
Phil Fish is a clown for sure but Fez 2 was already announced and the thing he was pissed about was gamergate harassment, so maybe not the hilarious moment you remember it being.
@@tastyswitchcardtridge
No, it was still really funny, because Phil was also one of the weird sex perverts guilty of using his position in gamer culture to sexually harass women, and when people called him out on it is when he decided to cancel the game which, as far as was known at the time, had only Phil's word that he was working on it -- there was no announcement beyond Phil's socials and some speculative media about it, and it *certainly* didn't have a release date.
It's been a long time, i know it's hard to remember, but Phil is a racist sexual predator, and it was really funny that his only defense was "Well... IM GONNA DO THE SEQUEL SO BLEH!".
@@tastyswitchcardtridge Nah. It was still hilarious. Especially when people started digging into his finances and found out he was up to some shady stuff and also that everyone who ever worked with him hated him and that's the real reason why Fez 2 was cancelled.
@@tastyswitchcardtridge This is months old but I want to make sure you are aware that phil fish defended sexual harassment during that time frame, so this isn't exactly the gotcha you think it is.
We thought they were just being edgy until we realized they were being serious.
Yeah, cause a lot of comedy in that era and a lot of comedy I appreciate in general is quite irreverant and sometimes politically incorrect. But oh god, oh no.
"Yeah man, I love dark humor"
*Racism intensifies*
Exactly, the thing that gives all of those clips the "mouth agape in shock" factor is the fact that in your mind you can hear the sinking thought of "Holy shit, they actualy mean what they are saying" when you're watching them.
@@onimaxblade8988 The issue wasn't the irreverent racist humor, the issue was it was made clear in their reviews they actually did dislike japan and japanese culture and would subtract points from a game's review score if it was from japan. If they made the same jokes but at the end of the day still reviewed the games on their own merits without taking the game's country of origin into account I think fewer people would be as pissed today, (some people would still be mad but a lot less than are now).
Many such cases
Paraphrasing a comment I saw on this, but that clip of the panel shows Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow disparaging one Makoto Goto. Looking back at it 10 years later, neither of those two are in the games industry anymore, but Makoto-san is, one of his more recent credits is working on Ai: The Somnium Files.
Stay classy indeed
I should play Ai one of this days
Blow's been making a sokoban game for a few years now, I don't know what you mean by him not being in the industry anymore. Individual indie devs don't release that many games.
Fish ragequit to no applause though, it was really funny.
John Blow is an asshole but the witness is really cool imo.
Blow is also like making a coding language as an alternative to c++ for game devs. Its also worth noting Blow is pretty critical of most games no matter the origin and points out in the clip his issues with western games, that he likes very few games in general, and points out a couple Japanese games he does actually like. I think its fair to say he was still rude but I think there is a clear palpable difference between what Phil said and what Blow said imo.
Proof that the Japanese did indeed take over
It feels somewhat prophetic that in Tim Rogers's Boku No Natsuyasumi video some months ago, he specifically brought up the X-Play segment talking about the game and how "weird" it was for being...about a kid having a nice summer vacation with no hardcore action.
well now a Twitter user would say that's creepy and sus
@@DrRyan82994 UA-cam comments not bringing up Twitter Challenge Extreme Edition
Oh I remember that. I remember similar complaints about Shenmue and how GTA3 IS Better because you can shoot people. Violence is core to the Yankee cosmology
@@RoyalKnightVIIIAnd the same reviewers were appalled that people called the most popular games "Murder Simulators". Like, the people calling games murder simulators were wrong too, but the mainstream mindset amongst game reviewers in the west being that a game must include violence didn't help them fight the Jack Thompson's of the world.
Cue the CAD comic where Buckley threatens Thompson in the same breath he says gamers aren't violent psychopaths.
Find someone who loves you the way Pat hates Phill Fish
i showed my boyfriend Phil FIsh and he said "soppy lil cunt aint he?". we then went to whataburger afterwards
@@NegaRenGenX2gay2lift New Copypasta just dropped
The era that spawned DmC: Devil may Cry
Yes, DmC Devil May Cry was created specifically because western video game journalism said "Japanese games suck" and for some reason a lot of prominent Japanese developers AGREED WITH THEM.
@pocketlint60 it still.blows my mind that Ninja Theory were the ones that wanted to make it more like classic DMC, and Capcom didn't. I always wondered what could have been.
@@pocketlint60Capcom under Inafune was weird
@@juancarlosfernandezperez6843its almost like Inafune was a hack or something
The actual gameplay wad fine. The story... was something.
I still laugh at Jonathan Blow sitting solemnly in a dark room interspersed with Soulja Boy roasting his game.
He wasn’t roasting it, Soulja boy *liked* Braid! He was saying how it was like Mario and prince of Persia and that he was digging it. Jonathan Blow was mad that Soulja boy wasn’t picking up on the subtle intricacies of the game or it’s nuclear bomb commentary or whatever
@@zedc6072 is that about fez or braid? i remember he did that with braid, don't know if it happened with fez too
@@zedc6072 God that is so on brand for Johnathan Blow. For all the things I do appreciate about him, the man is so far up his own ass that he'll probably choke to death on his head.
@@StrangeCoincidence I think it was just Braid.
Jonathan Blow retweets and follows neonazi and terf accounts on twitter. He deserves nothing
Man I remembered Xplay being unfair to RPGs, but until this started blowing up I didn't remember it was *that bad* and had to realize how long it's been, 'cause holy shit.
how did they react to skyrim or any other elder scrolls and fallout games durring the 2000s?
@@NegaRenGenX2gay2lift Not this bad IIRC, but I think I stopped watching before those were getting big. It's kinda horrific realizing "Oh no it wasn't a bit and even if it was god damn"
@@NegaRenGenX2gay2lift They're WRPGs so they got universal praise. Pretty sure Skyrim was even GOTY for them.
@@ginger-ham4800 i do remember those shows on G4 sucking off Skyrim's vampire DLC when it came to review time
I've been rewatching a lot of X-Play before the controversy began to pick up steam, and I remember when any Japanese produced game came up that I had to brace myself for some truly dogshit takes. The Shining Tears review alone made me actively seek out a copy and enjoy it out of spite, it was that bad of a review.
By the way, play Shining Tears, it's pretty good!
Devs decrying the success of their competitors by suggesting that they're wrong for not following the foundations they learned is some of the biggest industry clownshoes bullshit I'm familiar with. It's like they have stockholm syndrome, having all their creativity locked away to be pumped through the modern, optimal monetisation AAA framework.
I attribute this to game design schools becoming a thing. The students have to be graded somehow, so they learn a very specific way to make games and perceive that as the only way. When something that breaks the mold matches or even exceeds what was taught in class, some can't process and default to different = bad.
@dovalle New ubisoft programmers have to go through a game design version of basic training dubbed "ubischool." This got exposed when the source code for watch dogs legion got leaked and it was a bloated mess reminiscent of scratch. Professional programmers are using a language meant for children starting their first coding project.
Honest question, is the G4 badly aged reviews comparable of today's Dunkey reviews?
@MekaniDragon Not at all. Dunkey gives clear reasons why he likes and doesn't like certain things, even if they are highly subjective. Those old G4 reviews are literally just "this group of people made it, so it's bad. Let's mock them for being born."
@@Dracobyte I think Dunkey sometimes goes out of his way to make games he doesn't like look stupid (I think Death Stranding is maybe the most obvious example of this as it seems like he took a lot of what Kojima said as some weird personal insult), but he also gives credit where credit is due. He doesn't hate the entirety of the Japanese gaming industry, he just doesn't like JRPGS most of the time.
The "X" in X-Play stands for Xenophobia
for the longest time I didnt know what the x ment
they could have made it stand for Xenogears instead, things would have gone very differently
@@Sonicfalcon16 before Morgan joined Adam hosted the exact same show called Extended Play. then the merger, rebranding yadda yadda.
@@miguelnewmexico8641 Extended Xenophobia Play, Xenophobia Extended Play, though either would be XX-Play...
It's hilarious to me that all of us are in solidarity over loving Tropic Thunder lol
One of the best satires ever made. Qoutable lines for days, held together by the sheer insanity that is Hollywood, made by folks very familiar with the BS.
@@Azmodeus87 It helps that it punches up at Hollywood bullshit rather than punching down.
Plus Tom Cruise's BEST performance
Because It was actually funny and actually use it's dark offensive comedy to expose hollywood BS. Instead of just being out right racist like that talking ball sack Adam sessler and phil fish.
Well, it's a pretty fun and funny movie. And it is legit satirical of Hollywood.
Regarding the "JRPG term controversy", I found an interesting take on Maximillian Dood's reaction video that I wanted to share with you:
"About the JRPG thing, I have a bit of a unique perspective I'd like to share. I lived 8 years in Japan. Went over there to try and break into the industry... actually did it for a couple of years and worked at a very well-known company for a couple of years (not Square Enix).
Anyway, I think the term JRPG was taken as offensive for Japanese developers for a number of reasons. It's not as simple as the negative connotations that sprung up at around the same time as FFXIII, though that's obviously a big part of it.
What happens is that, for the longest time (and even today), they've used the term "youge" as a derogative for western games. They didn't even consider them "games" proper (see, "videogames", according to them, were "a Japanese thing" -- and I'm quoting Hideo Kojima here.) I was actually shocked at how disdainful the term "youge" actually was when I went there. Well, right at the time FFXIII came out, the Japanese game industry was declining rapidly in terms of market share. They needed to sell games in the west to survive, but they weren't doing it well. Today, the Japanese game industry is a cell-phone gacha fest, a shadow of its former self.
Western developers were putting out console games, good ones, and selling gang-busters. And now Japanese developers were like "how are we supposed to compete with this? It's not fair! We don't have the budget, we don't have the sales!" And it's against this backdrop that the term JRPG began to be used. Regardless of the negative connotations it had over here, over there it was much worse, because 1) they were losing literally 90% of the market, 2) they'd always thought of themselves as making RPGs and 3) they had the term "youge" as an analog. So they automatically assumed that JRPG was as bad as "youge", and, especially as you're losing almost all of your market, that's gotta sting.
What I think is that the term was being used negatively by some people at the start, but not all of them, and certainly it's become purely descriptive nowadays. But in Japan they resented the rebranding of the genre, and assumed it was like when they rebranded western games as "youge". The Japanese game industry narrative is this: "RPGs" were not intuitive and could not be enjoyed by a mainstream audience until the Great Yuji Horii came and made Dragon Quest; and they were a hit in Japan but not in the West, because the games were, in FF creator Hironobu Sakaguchi's words, too "complex" for Western audiences (nevermind that the genre originated in the West - but prejudice is never rational). However, thanks to the cutting-edge graphics pioneered by Final Fantasy, they started selling in the West, too. "Final Fantasy" is the big Japanese RPG franchise that sells in the West, too.
Anyway, Yoshi P in particular has to have taken the JRPG classification personally, as he was one of the few Japanese gamers who actually did appreciate Western games. He played the original Ultima Online! He played Everquest! So for him to hear that term, and having "youge" as a point of reference, it must have really been awful.
Its...complicated... Japanese society as a whole has both disdain and admiration -both superiority and inferiority complexes- with regards to the West. I would have trouble understanding it if I did not have very specific point of reference myself.
Well, here's hoping someone takes the trouble to read this post, and that it helps shed some light on the issue."
That's hilarious, and throws all this sneering posturing about racists people seem to be doing a lot here into some relief. That this neutral descriptive term was interpreted as a dismissive racist slut by Japanese people purely because they assumed it was a western equivalent of a dismissive racist slur they were already tossing around and got mad because it was only okay when they did it.
In some my friend group that were japanese were legit calling their own games Kusoge since they really wasn't good games. Then the good ones got lumped into Kusoge pile due to having little to no advertisements. People that did love JRPGs for being groundbreaking was wondering wth was going on and why is Atlus the only one doing it right? Like Dragon Quest NEVER really were bad they just took a lot of time in the early game.
It's just interesting and sad both sides of gaming juggernauts had a nasty disdain for each other.
Thank you. People downplay how much FF13 fucked up the franchise and japanese gaming as a whole, I don't understand why people see Nomura as SE's villain when Toriyama almost bankrupted the company THREE TIMES IN A ROW
Very interesting background, stuff like this very rarely boils down to one or two factors, it's a melting pot of frustrations, cultural understanding and knowledge of the time. Info like this is almost impossible to know unless you were there at the time so it's great to share.
This is definitely not the perspective on the situation that I expected to find myself reading. The entire premise of what was effectively this market war between the western and eastern developers slowly morphing into an unfortunate cross-cultural spite is honestly fascinating to consider. Also that FFXIII somehow was so bad that it actually affected the market as a whole is just the icing on the cake. Half-jokes aside, I do thank you for taking the time to write this, as it definitely deserves to be known and considered.
I always love how Fish and Blow went off about how bad "Japanese UIs" were among other things at that panel.
Meanwhile, Mass Effect 1 came out a few years before that panel and had THE. WORST. INVENTORY. MANAGEMENT. SYSTEM. EVER.
It was pretty terrible, but I somehow had enough patience to get through it xD
And I played both the ps3 port and ps4 remaster
I’m legit so glad we don’t have to pretend that Phil Fish was a visionary anymore.
Luckily the phil fish problem took care of itself
@@jaykelley103😂🎉 15:41 🎉😂😂🎉u🎉🎉😊
Pat hates Phil because he embodies Quebec too much
Time for Pat to fight him shirtless on top of the CN tower at night
@@Kaarl_Mills in the rain, phil fucking stabs pat through the chest with his own sword
how so?
@@Kaarl_Mills probably more appropriate it to do it at the Olympic Stadium
@@ElvenSonic nah, Pat does the Vergil combo on him, but instead of a sword it's a week old baguette so it hurts more
The anti-japanese stuff was so big in the mid 2000's that Keiji Inafune even got in on it (and look how that's worked out for him), as well as Capcom as a whole (and we all know how that era of capcom went). I have a vague feeling like Kojima might have too, but that I'm not at all sure about.
Being a kid at the time I was just like "Idk why they're saying this but I hope not, the games are really fun".
See, I'm of two minds in regards to Inafune's take in particular. At the very beginning, his stance and efforts towards westernizing Capcom gave us amazing gems like Dead Rising 1 and the first two Lost Planet games. It wasn't until they started outsourcing projects and sequels to western developers with zero experience in the franchises they were given that things completely fell apart and they were churning out piles of shit.
@@wilnich592 What are you TALKING ABOUT?! Ninja Theory wasnt some no name developer who just casually made shit. And if you even have a cursory look at how Capcom treated NT and Blue Castle with regards to DmC and Dead Rising youll figure out it was VERY MUCH Japanese head mismanagement of the projects as well as mistreatment of the developers. Its even discussed in the What Happeneds!! This level of revisionist history of what actually happened in the mid 00s between Japan and America, as well as not even understanding the FUCKING MEANING of the JRPG genre term has led me to believe most people have only started playing games in the last 10-15 years, when the 7th gen started. Which means yall have EVEN LESS OF A CLUE what went on even before then. Seriously, yall zoomers are freaking nuts.
Kojima was always doing his own thing tbh so it doesn't relly apply. Hell, Metal Gear got even MORE whacky as it went on
Re-embracing their japaneseness in the last 7 years or so saved the company after the years of trying to westernize to very mixed results.
Kojima never steered away from Japanese stuff, he's just a massive Westaboo like Araki.
Pat making it sound like Phil was coming by your house every day trying to sell you some shit. "I had to move to get away from."
Excellent breakdown guys, thank you.
Woolie starts off by invoking the age old Canadian truism: "except in Quebec"
Damn those Napoleonic Code loving Frenchies.
I'm a developer and occasional around the water cooler I'll be like, "Hey does anyone else remember that time period when the gaming industry was just straight up racist to the Japanese?" and people will be like, "'Oh yeah, I remember that *water sip*"
Yes just "Remember" (insert Western Devs when Elden Ring dropped.png)
@@cyberninjazero5659 The responses from devs to Elden Ring were rooted in envy, not racism.
@@HumanoidCableDreads WhyNotBoth.webm
@@HumanoidCableDreads Why not both? Since western devs clearly been copying each other's homework. Acting like they're innovating shit. When really JP creator does anything "fun" they complain
@@ExeErdna Because I saw their tweets. There was nothing racial or nationalist about them. They were just mad their games weren't getting good reviews. I refuse to pretend to be a mind reader and ascribe racist motives to statements featuring none.
Pat's Fez rant reminds me of how I feel about The Witness. Nothing was more exciting for me than walking through a maze and going "this path is worn down so it should be the correct path" and being right! and then that was immediately followed up with my wandering around the next maze trying everything I could think of for an hour until my friend told me the puzzle was based on auditory cues that I was literally unable to hear. The absolute shattering of my trust was awful.
The Witness is a great game but the few moments where it was audio puzzles instead of visual puzzles shouldnt have been in the game. The only time I had to look up a solution was in the audio puzzle area, thankfully theres only 1.
I hurt something in my torso laughing at Woolie STARTING to do an impression of a racist character from MADTV and then immediately pulling the eject handle on it after his brain has a chance to catch up
I'm not sure the Miss Swan character was supposed to be asian, I think she was supposed to be a parody of Bjork who is icelandic, I'm not sure if the cultural zeitgeist considers making fun of icelanders to be racist in 2023.
That was a frame perfect cancel.
@@NoThanks-qp2ej after a quick google it appears she's meant to be ethnically ambiguous, but apparently her first appearance was decidedly Chinese.
@@miguelnewmexico8641 Really? I could have sworn she was icelandic.
@@NoThanks-qp2ej
I just thought she look a like a (wo)man.
The funniest thing about Phil Fish saying japanese games suck, is that he wrote a "Top 10 games of 2017" list for Giant Bomb, and Yakuza 0 was pretty high up IIRC
There were some professional ways to answer goto's questions.
"It seems like Japanese devs seem to have been having a hard time converting to HD development, but yeah, I used to like their games." Is an example.
No though, if your first thought it to just generalize an entire regions industry to being trash, you might be an asshole.
This isn’t really related to the topic at hand, but does anyone remember that TBFP podcast episode where Woolie read an email from a fan professing his desire to “be black” and Woolie leaned into the mic and said “S.t.o.p.”
what
yeah im gonna need that source too
What episode is that from
where?
You can't drop this on us and not provide the episode. Thats cruel and unusual.
That anti-Japanese vitriol also happened in the American automobile industry in the 80s. Only that time it had a body count.
went into electronics back then too because they sold to the Soviets as well. There's a picture of a bunch of senators smashing Toshiba boom boxes in front of the capital building that, admittedly, would make a badass album cover.
God it took me so long to find it again. Here. www.gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/05/10/l9ifvkccopm9bxqkpdsx.jpg?q=65&w=1280
@@Z3r0Sk83r
I feel like that IS an album cover.
Honest question, is the G4 badly aged reviews comparable of today's Dunkey reviews?
@@Dracobyte As long as Dunkey didn't dip into about Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing joke I think he's in the clear lol
_Suddenly, all those suicide jokes X-Play made in their review of Persona 3 have a much darker context..._
Bruh. The animations for invoking persona's speaks for itself. Knock it off.
@@damonsghost9235
Look up the X-Play review for Persona 3. I assure you, the "fearlessness in the face of certain death" symbolism flew _right over_ Morgan's head!
@@blackheartzerotheundergrou3225 I didn't have to look at it. As the characters shoot themselves with the magic gun every time they use persona's. It's loaded imagery that's easy to joke about. The criticisms about the game are fair. They didn't like the highschool life and the one dungeon. It got a 3/5.
@@damonsghost9235
Ah. I misread your comment, apologies. This isn't about context or symbolism; the Evoker system totally looks how it does. No one's gonna deny that. That said, the fact that they leaned _all the way the frig in_ on the suicide and depression jokes, with the context of X-Play's xenophobia towards Japanese titles we have now, *_has_* to raise some eyebrows.
@@blackheartzerotheundergrou3225 people are just overly sensitive because of current political culture.
In hindsight, their anti-Japanese bias is the only reason I was predisposed to think Musou games were garbage. Had a friend in college who was addicted, but I never gave any of them a chance until Hyrule Warriors.
Musou suffered extra hard from this due to the series divisive gameplay
But also koei games in general.
For example
The rotk and nobunagas ambition games have always been super well regarded in japan and are some of the progenitors of the modern grand strategy genre... but in the west they were constantly painted as being 'lame' and 'lesser' to the point that they are still looked down on today.
... shit like this is why we never got the amazing gundam grand strategy games koei developed.
Learning about the Koei hate was weird for me as a kid, cause i only ever played samurai warriors and when hyrule warriors was announced there was so much controversy but i was so hyped because i had no idea that their style of gameplay wasnt just some one off idea but like their whole mo as a franchise, i really like their games and never understood the hate, epsecially when Cod, Halo, and AC were all the rage, why couldn't the japanese devs make yearly installment games?
@@nahman3836 Cuz of xenofobia
also a weird elitism from both character action and beat-em-up fans
including from members of this podcast
They keep acting like the simplified movesets and overall formula are lesser, or that the games are completely dumb (which does apply a bit to more recent ones... it tends to vary from entry to entry) when enemies in early games and higher difficulties on recent ones get VERY aggressive.
Its to the point where I'd say dynasty warriors 2 and 3 (aka 1 and 2 in japan) are closer to an arcade style mount and blade thing, since you actually got to keep track of your allies and enemy placements (archers will kill you very fast if you try to just plow through them without flanking or meat shields... I mean allies)
And every charge attack (aka, triangle/Y) had a different function to them, similar to how kunitsu-gami does it actually (charge one is a guard breaker, x and then y is an universal launcher/anti-air charge 2 - x,x,y - tended to be an AOE cloud clearer and so on)
Later games did simplify things a lot, but still tried to do stuff like that, with different movesets having actual distinct functions to every attack in the combo.
And thats not me going into the weirdly in depth military ranking system 3 had, which influenced duels, allies following you, etc.
But nope, gotta look at musou games in general as brainless button mashers.
And Koei as not being able to make anything BUT crappy musou games even though they all but created modern grand strategy and the like.
@@Maioly that and the battle report system after a match was so cool! Actually getting to see where the enemy broke the line and overwhelm an allied general. Seeing that the generals weren't just randomly calling out for help but where actually moving up or getting pushed back on the battlefield is such a great system I wish more game would take inspiration from it.
@@nahman3836 yeah, pretty much
Those games had (and still somewhat do... depending on the entry) a massive ammount of complexity going on in the background that was super easy to miss.
Its a funny thing, musou games have all but become exactly what people accused them of being.
Xplay gave Devil May Cry 2 a 4 out of 5. Really think about that.
I would prefer to give it as much thought as they did, and do something more fulfilling instead :P
Which is double hypocritical because that's a Japanese game.
Honest question, is the G4 badly aged reviews comparable of today's Dunkey reviews?
@@pocketlint60 That, Nier got a 4 out of 5, And Deadly Premonition got a 4 out of 5. Those come to mind since those titles were getting mixed or negative reception by other outlets
@@Dracobyte um dunky has a very good or bad scale 1 and 0. I have bought games like no more heroes and its sequel which they spoke highly of and i wonder if its just a pick and chose
That era was when the game companies made a huge effort to bring in the "jock" type demographic
Yeah it felt like they were trying really hard to become SpikeTV at the time
@@Abdega Which is especially funny that the first real attempt at a video game awards show, which had G4 people like Adam on it, was ON SpikeTV.
Don't look at UK playstation magazines from the time, they feel like raunchy 18+ magazines rather than anything to do with video games.
That actually ruined gaming for years. It made me hate my own hobby.
Aaaand the opposite is being done today
It probably doesn't need to be said, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying a Japanese piece of media for how "Japanese" it is. You can laugh at how weird Yakuza is in its storytelling and presentation. The important thing is to look for other merits to whatever it is and not just treat it like a novelty because of where it's from.
Woolie couldn’t, that why we never got to see the rest of the Yakuza 0 playthrough.
@@kneeofjustice9619 That was due to Little V's retirement, had nothing to do with Yakuza's content.
Oh cool we're not pretending Fez is good anymore
Wait we were supposed to pretend it was good? I gotta go delete some rants
just watch SFO(Short Fat Otaku's take on all this discourse he's got the reciepts to killing Fez)
Fez came out at a really fortunate time (for it) in terms of indie games, where if your game LOOKED PRETTY and/or had a moderately neat gimmick, it exploded because the indie market wasn't as saturated as it is now. Obviously those two parameters still hold true now, but now you gotta fight a little more for the success. Hell, look at Braid, most mid shit in the world and yet if you look back it was considered THE indie game.
@@sdbzfan1 Isn't SFO a racist though.
@@KBaldy where did you hear that?
Liking anime and JRPGs in the 90s was rough. Now the worst you have to deal with is weirdos inside the fandom, but back in the day it was a legitimate counterculture. It wasn't a cool one, either. Some kids got their asses beat. It's why you see so many greybeard gatekeepers online. They have 90s nerd PTSD.
For real. It wasn’t until the 2010s when liking anime started becoming cool again.
@@gdhuertas07 And paradoxically around the 2010s is when manga and anime series coming out started dipping in quality and becoming by-the-numbers.
The industry had been recovering some of its creative spark in recent years thankfully but it's weird that it started becoming more acceptable and popular when it was getting worse.
No no, the weirdos aren't the worst. The worst one are dealing with the same peeps that bully you for liking anime and JRPG but now they "like" them because it's cool now.
@@gdhuertas07 Late 90's and early 2000's had the Pokemon craze, Yu-Gi-Oh craze and Toonami at full swing. Anime was cool to watch before the 2010's.
@@ginger-ham4800 You were ok if you watched DBZ. Liking anything past that was unacceptable socially back in the 2000's.
never forget how bioware was shitting on jrpgs while dragon age 2 had an angst ridden white haired elf boy with a fuckhuge sword as one of it's main characters
Dual wield daggers*
@@cyberninjazero5659 OP is talking about Fenris, he was a greatsword user.
When did bioware talk trash on JRPGS? Any bioware past Origins is not even worth considering in their opinion.
The same bioware that made jerkoff characters like Kasumi and KAI PUSSY LENG????
Funny thing is, Fenris was actually one of the more likeable characters in the game, provided you could get over the idea of a "jrpg looking" character in a wrpg. He actually gets a decent character arc (friend route anyways, rival route actually feels pretty bitter) and two-hand builds are really fun in DA2.
It's almost like "jrpg protagonist" isn't necessarily a bad thing, nor strictly speaking always even Japanese, if that makes any sense.
This might be the first time I’ve ever heard someone defend being racist by saying “everyone who disagrees with me is a pedophile”. Unfortunately it wasn’t the last (thanks Q-Anon).
Who said that?
@@damonsghost9235 Q-Anon are a right wing conspiracy group that believe all the left wing politicians in the country are pedophiles. They are weirdly obsessed with being seen as not racist despite being seen as complete lunatics.
@@conker690 dose simply calling someone out as a trump supporter mean that person is calling the other a pedo??
That guy ran from the internet.
@@damonsghost9235 why are you asking me this? Where did I imply as such lol
@@conker690 i miss read you however i would still like to who defeated being racist by saying "everyone who disagrees with me is a pedophile"?
What Pat is describing is exactly what it felt like playing games from like 2005-2015. It felt like there was this angst and jealousy from western devs and journalists that was poisoning everything about gaming in America. It was especially noticeable in small-town America where a lot of people were buying Xbox consoles because "Xbox is the American console" and they would talk about how you were a "bad patriot" if you bought a Sony or Nintendo console. The anti-Japanese sentiment in video games during the mid 2000's was INSANE
Oh that's probably a bleed over from the Car industry funny enough I hear that going into the 80s if you had a Japanese car, you could expect people to outright sabotage or fuck with it in some way. It wasn't until American Car companies started imploding that people stopped that
The funny thing is when you point out an Xbox is really just a Dreamcast... Once the dudebros and other normies got into games...
Which makes it hilarious and infuriating when they have the gull to lecture us about acceptance while they’re malting every time the Japanese are earning *their* customer base.
Pat's point about JRPGs being the only genre that has the nation attached to the front is mostly on point, but it's not the only one. He's forgetting KMMOs.
There's also slav-jank as well .
@@smokedeuch4039 They mentioned Eurojank, but Europe isn't a nation
@@manjackson2772 Neither is Slav.
@@Samm815 Exactly.
I wish they'd left in most of the Tunic Vs Fez comparison angle at the end because I'm suddenly really fascinated by that comparison, because they *do* have some *very* similar ideas but also you can definitely tell that Tunic fucking *loves* Japanese video games in a way that Fez pretty emphatically did *not* lol
tunic goes out of its way to give you the feeling of playing an imported video game with no fan translation, and considers that a positive and worthwhile experience. and that's just infinitely charming
@@voyagerwitch Oooh, yeah, that's a good angle on it.
Adam Sessler deserves every bit of that Twitter hate.
no just ignore the washed up old bag
he wants the attention so he can stay relevant
Sessler is a great reminder that just because SOME of your haters are right-wing trolls, it doesn't mean you don't deserve to have haters.
@@adams3627 It's also a good reminder that calling your critics right-wing trolls doesn't mean your critics are right-wing trolls.
@@bleack8701 Considering he seems to think Baten Kaitos is a "Pedophile Boner Simulator," I don't think his views have evolved much in the past twenty years.
This isn't even his first meltdown.
I remember the Mass Effect guy saying "JRPGs aren't real RPGs because they don't include choices." Look, I don't think that's a crazy position, but I think karma caught up to you with that statement with what you did with ME 3, my dudes.
Woolie isn't exaggerating. I remember going to see family in pretty remote parts of Kenya and being recommended Tropic Thunder.
I watched that shit on VCD. Not DVD, VCD.
I fucking loved it.
What makes that extra funny is that “movie is unexpectedly super popular in a remote part of the world” is one of the running bits in Tropic Thunder!
I remember having The Matrix on VCD, as for some insane reason the portable CD player I had could play VCDs.
Ironically it's the best feature that a portable CD player could have seeing as those things couldn't play music if you were traveling anywhere or put them on any kind of uneven surface.
Yeah I feel like anyone asking "can you make this movie today" missed the entire point of the joke.
People in other countries tend not to be so hypersensative. Reminds me of the guy who got Apu removed from The Simpsons showing "offensive" clips of Apu to his parents from India and they laughed and told him to stop being so sensative.
@@Kango234 yeah I feel like the controversy over it doesn't make a lot of sense to me seeing as the entire point is that it's a completely unacceptable thing for the actor to do and it's explicitly framed as a bad thing.
Without any context I could see someone reflexively assuming the worst but the film expects you to understand that the guy doing it is a dipshit who is so insulated by wealth and privilege that he's incapable of understanding that he's just doing blackface, no matter how much he deludes himself into thinking he's pushing the envelope as an actor by playing a black man.
What a insufferable era of gaming, where I had to “hide” my love of Japanese games
Then you must be pleased. Right now western studios are dropping the ball for politics. Once again gamers turn to the east.
@@damonsghost9235 I’m more than okay with that
Closeting can happen for the weirdest things. Glad you came out eventually, I guess.
I was a HS geek at the time, and even i, being a pasty white ass swede, felt weirdly alienated by this shit.
it wasn't until guys like Gene park, and other people who worked int he industry at the time, started talking about the turns around DmC & DMCV, that it all clicked. It's ALL scrubqoutes!!! by people salty that there f'ing Culture isn't dominating!!!!
@@theotherjared9824 It helped with dealing with jackasses, but thanks? I guess?
I only just now realized that the "Poyo!" is a censorship bleep I thought it was like a sub notice or something
that era is not gone yet. During the latest xbox direct thing, when they were showing hi-fi rush, the chat was filled with people being like "what is this japanese bullshit?"
Even a lot of modern gaming outlets that like to present themselves as progressive still kinda stink of this shit a lot of the time IMO, it's just that we've gone from saying blanketly that japanese games suck to always needing to talk about how "weird" and "quirky" and "out there" the latest big one is.
Due to A LOT of kids came up with just COD and GTA you born in the 80-90s you got exposed to a lot of japanese content. We were eating GOOD gaming in the 90s some kids boring late 90s were just turning 10 when shit started to change. They missed out on so much exposure to the culture.
I don't know. ...But are you saying we can't ever call other white people Weebs when they're just all "CONSUME PRODUCT" in a really Weeby way? Don't deny it has a definite mass-produced fan-fiction quality or just comes off like Neon-White's dialogue when it's an "homage"
My dude that will literally never go away unless 100% of people in existence loves anime/japanese influenced cartoon styles.
Yeah people still feeling that 80s Japan rising
I guess it's now going to be China
Able most Chinese games are mobile so overlooked
Fun fact about Phil Fish talking shit to a Japanese dev. I believe I got the facts right, and that Japanese dev is Makoto Goto, AKA Front Mission, Armored Core 4, FFXIII, and Pat's favorite, AI: The Somnium Files!
Yep, that's the one.
Fun segment but the censor is a bit much considering how often Pat swears lmao.
Poyo
They seem to only use it at the start of segments.
It is definitely causing me to click off these videos faster. Just gets grating after a couple minutes of constant "POYO!"
I think it might be to prevent youtube dumbassery.
@@ArcCaravan Correct, it's a thing to work around UA-cam's dumb policies. If there's any swearing in the first 1 minute I think, no ad revenue.
As someone who has played dragon quest and final fantasy since I was like.. 8 it seemed weird to me that certain people disliked Japanese games so much especially since pokemon has literally always been huge since it came out.
I mean even then people were super racist against Pokemon as well it's wild
Even setting Pokemon aside Mario and Zelda are both japanese
What's especially funny is, I found out from James-Stephanie's video about this whole thing, back when Sword/Shield came out, there was apparent a super intense Reddit argument of people saying "No Pokemon is NOT a JRPG"
Also important to remember that this showed aired in the states while we were still processing 9/11, the Bush administration, and having an identity crisis as to our role in international politics. That created a insecurity that permeated through out the decade
Xenophobia like this was common and I'll be honest, I'm shocked I didn't pick any of this up as a kid growing up around the time
Ah yes, this is the same X-Play that made so many racist jokes back in the day. Yet Adam Sessler will have you believe that anyone making similar jokes now is a 1940s fascist. The jokes are only ok, until they aren't, until they're ok again. It's ok to say Japan is not good at making games, until it isn't, until it is again. It's whoever is holding the leash. These people are grifters.
Great video Woolie.
I used to watch Extended Play, before it became the edgy/"random" humor show X-Play, I hated the format change at the time and stopped watching.
@@HumanoidCableDreads Oh God, I can't believe someone else remembered Extended Play! I felt the same way, but at the same time I was young enough to think there were some funny bits so I'm not going to act completely innocent. Now Attack of the Show fucking sucked and I hated it from day one so I'm right there with Pat and Woolie not know much about Olivia Munn outside of memes.
@@Kango234 Did you watch the Screen Savers? Now that was a show for real nerds. G4 felt like the Mountain Dew dude bros invaded the computer lab that was TechTV.
@@HumanoidCableDreads I did! My dad had a tech job so he was the reason I even knew of Tech TV. That said I was very young so I didn't get all of it, but I remember them modding a GameCube once and was bummed out when I realized stuff like that wasn't going to air anymore.
The take away is that a worryingly large amount of so-called nice people are actually only doing it performatively, but will gladly bully anyone if you tell them it's acceptable. Their entire political ideology and persona is mercantile, conditional on the basis they gain access to somebody they can direct their aggression at. Left, Right, it doesn't matter, they're found everywhere.
This is how any group or society seems fine one moment, and then suddenly the mask slips and oops they want a race war.
What's absolutely crazy is that I felt like I fondly remembered XPlay/G4 but I straight up do not remember seeing ANY of that stuff, even after watching it all again
Yeah, there was a lot I liked but I really don't remember moments particularly like this. Maybe they reran those less often?
I don’t think it was AS bad as wat they’re saying. Japanese games still reviewed really well back then. RE4 mgs3.
I mostly watched G4 before the TechTV merger, and enjoyed it way more. After the merger, content just went way downhill. X-Play wasn't there for the first couple years. Instead they had a show named after their website that I liked a lot more.
@@JackgarPrime same
@@locdogg86 Those are the exceptions that prove the rule cause both have american super agents as the protag.
This whole period was deeply entwined with the “edgy humor” of the mid-2000 and on that gave us Yatzhee Croshaw and all his imitators.
On a similar but distinct level, it’s also irony-poisoning at its most pervasive. Is the dismissively racist attitude real, or is it preformed as ‘a bit’? At a certain point, it doesn’t matter.
The difference between Yahtzee and his imitators, is that his hatred isn't exclusive to Japanese games. I was convinced for a while there that he didn't even like video games.
In regards to "is it real or a bit" I did partly wonder that. I watched a lot of XPlay and one of the things they would harp on the most would be all the hate they'd get for their reviews of things like the FMA game and DBZ games. Like you said, it doesn't matter much, although I'd guess it's probably both. The anti-Japan tones felt too strong to be a bit, but getting all the hate probably made them want to double down on it.
It was a bit. Sessler found a appreciation doing television (X-play). Politics poisoned his view. My guess is he no longer views gaming as a medium.
All the old X-play reviews were written lines for the both of them.
You mean Dunkey?
@Damon's Ghost Okay. Now tell me why writing those lines consistently geared toward insulting the Japanese makes it any better. Again. It doesn't matter after a while whether it was a bit or not.
The pain I felt when Pat said "Baldur's Gate". I felt physical pain, BUT HE'S SO RIGHT.
No he isn't, BG1&2 are fine, more than fine in fact. I'd argue its the best franchise Bioware has made, and i say this as someone that only played BG almost two decades after it was released, i have no nostalgia goggles.
The notion that you need to "prep" or otherwise it is "unplayable" is just Pat being overly-dramatic as always. Same thing goes for Kenshi, which not surprisingly, he also hates.
@@agrippa2012I've never played either of the first two Baldur's Gates but do they have tutorials, or are they like the owlcat Pathfinder games where they expect you to have already played D&D before and the game only teaches you the controls? Because if that is what it is I would consider that prep
@@drexalnewb1500 They do have tutorials, but they are mostly about controls. The actual D&D mechanics that were implemented are not as complicated as one might think however, and the character creation process is really simple and pretty intuitive. The fact i never actually played tabletop D&D in my life wasn't really a problem.
The only classes that i don't recommend for beginners are sorcerer and shamans, both for the same reason: once you select their spells, you can not change them. Incidentally, both classes were not present in the original release of BG1, you only have access to them if you're playing the Enhanced Edition.
@@agrippa2012 you can't say Bg 1 + 2 are completely fair, especially if you're trying to keep the whole party alive. There's a reason they added cheats into the re releases
@@Noisetank007 You mean the cheats (essentially the console commands) that can only be accessed by messing with the ini files? Yeah, i never used those, i never felt that i needed them.
Also, "saving and reloading" is a thing you can do at anytime, just like most games.
Besides, this has nothing to do with the main point, Pat wasn't implying that BG is "unplayable" because of how many game overs a player can get.
Two shows I watched all the time in high school, X-Play and Cinematech.
Two things that stuck out to me most, X-Play would always have a segment about WTF games, and Cinametch had a half-hour episode of "Bizarre Games."
Anytime X-Play did WTF Games, it would always be something from Japan.
The Bizarre Games Cinematech episode did have some Japan games like Wario Ware and Katamari, but it did also have The Guy Game and Boogerman.
As a young black kid back in the day. It always rubbed me the wrong way when X-Play had those SUPER RACIST segments. Obviously I was super young so I didn't have the full vocabulary at the time. But holy shit it made me uncomfortable as hell.
I usually sat down like..."I just wanna know about the game... why are they?"
Man I don't even remember that shit as a kid at all and the weird thing is for me, I'm from Hawaii. I am Hawaiian. We got tons of Asians from Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and so on and I remember ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THESE JOKES!
Then I see all the clips and stuff people bring up and I realize WHY I DON'T. It's from before I knew the channel existed. I started watching it around 2010 or 2012. I liked watching for the cheat codes, Attack of the Show was fun, XPlay gave me funny enough a love of Japanese games since they were showing a lot of things I wanted to play. This was also way before I got a laptop for my 12 birthday so my main source of info was G4 back then and I always loved watching E3 as a kid during Summer. Wake up early and see tons of games. I fucking remember watching it when I had an ear infection and just putting the drops in and laying my head down watching it all morning.
Like, it's weird how easy it is this stuff just flies over your head as a kid or if you even could register it till Twitter became a thing and people became more unhinged with their stances on things.
I actually do remember seeing that Baten Kaitos review on X-play, and even at the time I thought it crossed a few lines. Felt like they were just aiming to be as edgy as possible and dump on JRPG's at a time when they were seen as trope-riddled archaic grindfests and Western produced games were gaining immense popularity.
the xplay segment i remember most was when they dropped all the main consoles of the time, ps2 xbox and gamecube, off balconies n stuff to test which was the toughest. i think gamecube won
So if Custer's Revenge came out during this period, would Adam Sessler have given it an 7/10 because it's not "American Enough?"
Depends is it pixels or full blown 4k gameplay and SFM scenes?
@@ExeErdna Remastered pixel art like the old FF games got
When they said they didn't get G4 in Quebec I was like "Damn' they didn't get to see Tommy Tallarico in his prime." But then when they revealed that they actually had and my heart soared. A true legend.
Tallarico's grift game so strong, he even penetrates the insular media market of Francophone North America.
I don't recall these attitudes being all that prevalent in the UK at the time, though I guess that could be because we had a really vibrant micro computer scene in the 80s which directly fed into exceptionally successful and well received games on the PlayStation, N64 and beyond as developers who cut their teeth on the Spectrum and C64 flogging games on cassette tapes for about £5 a pop made some of the most technically impressive games on the market when they got access to new hardware.
The videogame crash of the 80s was an exclusively North American phenomenon.
This entire debate is mostly american, yeah. Italy didn't have the rampant xenophobia, not much of a crash to speak of - cause games *really* took off in the PSX era here.
In the context of the video game scene, Europe (even the English parts) really was a completely other world than NA. Different gaming library, different gaming culture, even different popular platforms.
@@just_matt214 This deate doesn't really apply to most of western Europe anyways because half of it had already been enjoying manga and anime decades before it became mainstream in the US.
Since you are from Italy, you have most likely realized that this appreciation of japanese media has been going on for a while. It's not really a shock then to discover that the countries that had a big thing for japanese media since the 1980s would have no problem with it in the 2000s
I never noticed this kinda attitude here in Brazil as well, but culturally we've never been insecure about liking japanese media, kids in the 80s and 90s watched tokusatsu and anime on public TV.
If you're a millennial here and you've never watched Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Sailor Moon or Pokemon you are a weirdo.
From my perspective the shame that americans have over liking another culture's media is fucking bizarre.
The UK got weirdly less racist during the early 2000s but now theyve caught back up in a BIG way. Like the less racist period did NOT last long lol.
I viscerally feel Pat’s rage. Looking back at those clips where western developers casually dish out racism to a person’s face make me lose composure. I could be in the happiest mood, but seeing that shit makes me want to grab someone by the shoulders and cause trauma
And it’s even more maddening when they’ll turn around to lecture us. Forgetting we’re not the ones showing off our 80’s Japan level xenophobia like they are and actually respect their greats.
Oh no! Not the X-Play receipts!
Honest question, is the G4 badly aged reviews comparable of today's Dunkey reviews?
I also never saw any of X-Play and G4 (lived in the States, just never had the channel) and I was fucking *stunned* by all the clips popping up on Twitter.
That whole era of gaming is fucking bizarre and you can still feel some of it today. You still see people refer to some games as 'Japanese bullshit' just cuz it looks a little anime-ish.
Nintendo fans when a new Fire Emblem is announced:
JRPG isn't the only one with a nation prefix.
KMMO's are a notorious one.
Yeah we've talked about this there's a surplus of genre naming conventions, including those that include nationalities
My fav ones are eurojank crpgs
Pat really crankin up the poyo counter today
I can't believe Kirby swallowed Louis C.K.
Again!?
14:43 He actually just lied about how much he worked on them. Watch that HBomb video Pat.
TechTV was better than G4. Also remember how Mass Effect 1 was heavily based on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within to the point they got Keith David to voice an important military man that gives orders to some of the main characters?
Yeah, and then for two they stripped most of the RPG mechanics out to focus more on gameplay for wider appeal.
@@RavenCloak13 There's a reason Mass Effect peaked at 1.
@@RavenCloak13 I hate how few people even remember or talk about this when discussing ME 1. I remember reloading in ME 2 and going why am I reloading, the guns in this universe function on a unique and cool concept (the whole firing bits of a cube at high velocity via Mass Effect fields in the gun). Then again, ME 1 had the writers who laid hints for the supernova plot for the Reapers on like 1 or two planet lore logs in ME 1.
@@HOMESLICE-fu3kq what?!?
@@EastlakeRasta7 the rpg mechanics got dumbed down in exchange for better combat. Think Daggerfall to Morrowind, and the same to Oblivion.
I went to hiroshima like 2 weeks ago as well and man... I could never even begin to joke about that. That's just horrid
The thing that always stuns me as an American is how inspite of all America has done to Japan in particular a lot of them took it surprisingly well to the point America gets more respect from Asian Countries than European ones. They restructured their government to mirror our own, theirs a period where they really tried to copy American culture, and even now theirs places that are “American Themed” in the most oddly glorified way. They have a Holocaust museum of what we did, theirs probably some people still alive that lived through that time in history and they still like us more than Europe and I’m genuinely confused.
@@Broomer52 The holocaust was an effort to exterminate all Jewish people. The atomic bombings of Japan were an effort to avoid a war in manland Japan that would kill far more Americans and Japanese people. To compare the two is ignorant
@@Broomer52 Japanese soldiers murdered over 30 million civillians in Asia but oh poor them why did they have to be bombed?
@@Broomer52 Interesting. Maybe their cultural segregation from the western world has helped with that? It fostered romantization of the foreign as opposed to active comparison, allowing them to distance themselves from it and romantize the occasional glimpse they get from foreign culture. Maybe globalization isn't all it's cracked up to be.
@@Broomer52 Nanking Massacre, Bataan Death March, the Manila massacre, Sook Ching massacres, and human experimentation camp Unit 731. Plus many more war crimes you can look up. Stop acting like they were innocent victims.
Man, as a 4-12 year old, I did not catch (or admittedly remember) alot of this stuff. I don't doubt that it was there, but before youtube we took what we could get. good conversation CSB
100%, I loved X-Play, but it's because it was the only video game show of its kinda, and I was a 15-year-old which Pat accurately points out means I was a shit,. When UA-cam and video game playthroughs started, I remember caring about G4 less and less.
Honest question, is the G4 badly aged reviews comparable of today's Dunkey reviews?
I was an old X-Play/G4 junkie back in the day, and while the racist jokes and questionable content was there (and still kinda funny) that feeling was on the whole goddamn channel from Attack of the Show to Code Monkeys to Banzai. Them plus MTV and even Syfy back then were like if South Park was a whole block of television. It was an entire ecosphere of "aren't the japanese crazy and weird and silly" right next to "man this anime shit is great and Ninja Warrior is awesome." Also X Play was next to shit like the Man Show and Happy Tree Friends. It was just the 2000s man. The aughts were crazy.
The internet was new enough to shed light on how people behaved without worrying about social media, it was great.
Yeah, that paradox is probably why we didn't really notice or didn't really get bothered by it since this was literally the same era of people learning about anime, games coming out people wanted to try and stuff like VN's for most people whose only exposure to a "game" weren't old text based adventures but shooters.
We both called it weird but also enjoyed what was coming. Least for some. And people made communities out of it.
Most of the Japanese games I wanted to play and did were because I watched stuff like XPlay and stuff as a kid. We going to forget how much advertising Kingdom Hearts had? How big Pokemon exploded? The internet pretty much drug up both good and bad things about people but because it was in it's infancy things were on a whole more civil and we didn't have the host just admitting they hated stuff like this. We got the edited and filtered version which is why we have fond memories of this stuff.
Honest question, is the G4 badly aged reviews comparable of today's Dunkey reviews?
The PS2 generation is when western games started making big money not just on PC but on consoles too & the 360 generation is representative of the shift towards western dev games dominating the industry. My point being that there’s a direct line between that shift & that specific brand of xenophobia becoming so prevalent during that era. It was like for some they felt their shackles were off & were free to just be openly racist about Japan & Japanese people because they no longer dominated the industry.
EDIT: I listened further only to hear Pat say basically the exact thing I wrote. lol. Bravo guys!
Pat’s the kinda guy to fight racism with MORE racism
Truly the Thanos of gaming
That whole era confused the heck out of me. Were Japanese games not hitting it out of the park like they used to? Sure, but I personally felt that whole era was kind of not great imo and didn't see the Western Dev's as some sort of gods gift to gaming.
Am I crazy? I remember a gaming show called "The Arena" and one of the games that people would compete in was Jedi Knight Jedi Academy.
Yeah, Arena existed the host sadly passed away, I think he was gonna start up a new show before it happened to.
That games multiplayer was the shit back in the day
yeah those videos are up under "arena is not dead" channel
Yeah i remember seeing competitions for soul calibur 2 and unreal tournament
3:07 HOOOOLY BASED
Pats reaction to the mentioning of Tunic cheered me right back up.
I'm so glad we're over that "everything japanese is cringe or porn and there's no in between!" part of the early 2000's.
cuz people only knew japanese stuff as pokemon or hentai or video games and you were weird for liking it.
It’s so funny how JRPGs were considered bad just because FF13 was divisive. Like FF13 came it in 2009, Persona 4 came out the year before and Xenoblade 1 came out the year after. Both of which are some of the most celebrated JRPGs of all time. It’s like if someone said that all FPS games were terrible because that year’s Call of Duty wasn’t great.
EXACTLY! I've been saying this for over a decade, I remember literally arguing with a friend and asked why everyone is suddenly acting like all jrpgs are Hyper Dimension Neptunia or some shit. It was like this weird rewriting of history.
TBF with Xenoblade it took a realllllllllly long time to come out in the US at the time (although IDK if PAL regions looked at jrpgs differently in comparison to NA sooo) and at that point if ya knew about it you were in the niche fandom for jrpgs relative to FF 13 being a huge mainstream rpg flop.. but yeee even doing some basic research around then/especially looking back in hindsight there was still plenty of fantastic stuff coming out around then like Radiant Historia, Solatorobo, the Etrian Odyssey series, DQ Monsters Joker 2, Lost Odyssey
Maybe I'm giving these people the benefit of the doubt, but Persona 4 *did* kind of have the same problem with FF13 with "It takes a while to get good."
That said, Persona 4 only took about five hours, and was actually good.
I agree with your point but NA didn’t get Xenoblade until 2012 and that was only after extensive fan campaigning
@@jac_238 Well, unfortunately it turns out that the fan campaigns did nothing in the long run. And it was mostly, if not all thanks to NoE (Nintendo of Europe), for it selling so well there, and then handling getting it to America's shores/stores as well. Which is why we have British voice acting in the game, even for the US.
It's funny how many people tend to memory-hole the very consistent bashing Japanese games got back in the mid to late 2000s when their only crime was being made by Japanese developers. Sure, there were plenty of games back then that were more deserved of getting poked apart (licensed anime games definitely come to mind) for being outright bad, but the very persistent way in Japanese games got mocked just because of a few quirky-by-western-standards titles existed absolutely created a feedback loop where using the term "JRPG" in certain circles was absolutely viewed as being a derogative. Like most wouldn't bat an eye if you said you enjoyed Oblivion or WoW, but if you bring up something like Star Ocean or certain Final Fantasy games you absolutely got flak for it over some inane reason outside of a handful of exceptions.
I actually think a lot of (IMO, ntentionally or not, often sex negativist and paternalistic rather then liberatory) the pushback on sexualization and the like in the 2010s evolved out of the idea of Japanese games and Anime being "old fashioned" and "something we need to evolve past" for "real, serious games as art" from the mid/late 2000s that's being discussed here. Obviously, there's been postive changes and there are real nuanced conversations to have around sexualizatgion, but a lot of it really was not nuanced, overly squeamish and puritan, and mostly targetting Japanese games, often in a way that was overgeneralizing and stigmatizing.
I always kind of wondered if the attempt to foster anti-japanese sentiment wasn't just racism and was bought and paid for, because there was a similar sort of hatred when Japanese automobiles started to come stateside around the time when people were looking for cheap and fuel-efficient cars
I remember people calling Japanese motorcycles "rice burners"
@@thecaptain6520 People STILL refer to customizing a car with decorative racing accessories as "ricing", because people who didn't know how to actually improve a car's performance and just wanted it to look cooler were doing it to cheap Hondas.
Apparently they tried to change the meaning of "rice" in this context to mean Racing Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements in an attempt to avoid accusations of racism, but it was really just because it was most popular to do it to Japanese cars and is indeed a racist term.
God I am so glad you stopped using the POYO censorship noise lmao
I'm surprised that it took up to YoshiP for people to take action
Same.
Take what action? This is ancient history that people are rediscovering
The term Jrpg is not derogatory.
I remember YoshiP had to be pushed in the interview to admit his history with the term.
To be fair, a lot of people (like myself, Pat and Woolie) had no idea that this was a thing (at least to this level) until these clips showed up.
I remember seeing people making fun of some aspects of JRPG's (and japanese video games in general) back in the 2000's when i was in school, but, it was pretty much the same level of jokes that they would give to any other piece of media (and definetly nothing on the level of "we bombed them and now they're a real country").
This is literaly the first time i've been aware that stuff of this level was "common" back then.
Anyway I feel like a thing that always rubbed me personally the wrong way about Phil Fish and attendant discourse was the impression I would get that, because Fish was particularly unpopular amongst and enjoyed picking fights with a genuinely shitty proto-fash sect of internet trolls and because he was friends with other publically visible people who were generally seen as being progressive, a certain sort of commentator would conclude that he *must* himself be progressive, and thus anything he said must necessarily be, if not actively progressive, then at least not *anti*-progressive. And that would lead people to tie themselves into knots trying to launder shit like him going on just nakedly racist and certainly rude and unnecessary tirades against japanese games and devs and players as being okay or even Secretly Genius or whatever instead of as the dumb racist bullshit that they always were.
Their inner voice talk they had at the end of the podcast better get clipped. That was insane.
The podcast clip titles get previewed in the description of the podcast itself. Don’t worry, that whole thing is on the list.
the way Pat described his, wasn't so much monologue as it was "inner-JohnMalkovich"
@@Noxshade oh is that what those are? Never twigged lol
There's one other genre that gets the country as a prefix, but it's not as common anymore, and that's Korean MMOs which are/were a whole thing.
Glad this is coming to light but sad it took this long. In hindsight most of this wasn't in the background too especially seeing as how they are a lot of games that tried to appeal more to the west even big franchises.
I have a feeling, I don’t know for sure, that X-Play moments like those, is why the great Olivia Munn left G4. She may not be Japanese, but she is Asian and spent her formative years living in Yokota Air Base near Tachikawa in Tokyo, Japan, when her abusive stepfather got transferred there. She says that scheduling conflicts is the reason she left G4, but I bet these moments certainly made it easier for her to leave.
What's crazy is that I actually blotted these out of my mind somehow. I seriously didn't remember it being that way until it was pointed out, and it all came flooding back like repressed memories.
I remember watching those reviews back in the day and finding them funny, because my friends and I would make similar jokes, we found these jokes funny because we mutually understood that they were just jokes and not reflections of our actual feelings and that was what I assumed was the case with the people at G4. However I also remember back then being confused when a game simply being japanese in origin was counted against it's final review score and as time went on I started to pick up on the weird double standard G4 and other mainstream gaming journalism sources had in regards to how "weird" things from Japan were treated. Weird western games were treated as far more normal than even fairly conservative japanese games, aspects of japanese culture were treated as inherently surreal or kitsch simply because they were japanese.
It's the same when it comes to anime commentary, even self professed weebs tend to act vaguely xenophobic, this is still happening to this day.