Rising Star Blog

"Man, Japan is over. We're done. Our game industry is finished."

That's how Capcom's Keiji Inafune felt after walking round this year's Tokyo Game Show, apparently. Inafune is best known as the creator of Mega Man, Onimusha and Dead Rising, but he's also had a hand in the Resident Evil series, the original Street Fighter, and about a million other of Japanese developer Capcom's greatest hits. It's difficult to argue with someone who has such vast experience in the world of videogames. But he's wrong.

Ever since I first visited Japan, several years ago, people have been using the Tokyo Game Show to predict the end of Japanese gaming. Japanese kids are all too busy sending emails on their phones, they'd say, or games like Grand Theft Auto are too dominant, leaving no room for Japanese games to find success outside Japan.

But look at the sales charts in the UK or US and you're likely to see a top ten full of Japanese games, whether it's familiar names like Tekken and Metal Gear Solid, or newer arrivals, like Professor Layton's latest adventure or Wii Fit. Outside the top ten, you're likely to run into the sort of unconstrained creativity and eccentricity that has given Japan such a well-deserved reputation for videogame brilliance: Valkyria Chronicles, Demon's Souls, No More Heroes, and Flower, Sun and Rain, to name but a few. What's more, one Japanese company, Nintendo, has almost single-handedly transformed videogames in the past few years, opening up rich seams of design innovation, and acquiring entirely new audiences of OAPs and toddlers.

So Keiji Inafune is wrong. The Japanese games industry is far from finished. Which is why this blog is just starting, to celebrate everything about Japanese gaming - the good, the bad, and the ugly, but also the neon-coloured, spiky-haired, and just plain bonkers.

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