Thread LRT Moreover, I find it baffling that this happened during a time when triple A Western games were arguably pretty basic and even bland. Like seriously? You’re putting Western games on a pedestal and shitting on JP games during the PS3/360 generation of all times?

I know I’m a JP game player far more than I am a Western game player, but I seriously can’t think of any Western games from that time that I particularly like. Maybe Skyrim and Infamous but that’s basically it.

Like, what is the PS3/360 generation in Western gaming? For me, the names I think of are Gears of War, Borderlands, Modern Warfare, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3/NV. I’m not gonna pass judgment on these titles themselves, nor am I claiming that no other games define the generation—

BUT, these are the games I think of when I think about that generation. And that counts for something because the prominence of these games is caused by the very same zeitgeist that popularized the “JP games suck” narrative.

If we actually think about this period of time and shift it to JRPGs in particular, it’s easy to see that the narrative just didn’t hold up. NieR and DoD3, Xenoblade, Disgaea 4, Vesperia, Graces, Xillia, Pokemon was PEAK here and will never be as good ever again!

Like, what was actually happening is that people who didn’t actually play that generation’s JRPGs just fell for that narrative because reviews for FFXIII and Nier backed it up and they wanted something to trash.

I think part of it is that most “gamers” back then didn’t play handhelds, which held most of the market during that generation. If they had, the narrative would have been far too hard to pass. But that’s just my analysis.

But yeah. “Gamer culture” zeitgeist is a herd that needs something to be the butt of the generation-long joke. I think that’s obvious enough. And that these people didn’t play JRPGs is also plain to see.

The thing is, though, it’s still disturbing because an already freakish hatred towards an entire genre had extended to any games made by anyone from an entire country. This is even true of indie devs at the time, mostly separate from corpo, and at that point it’s just racism.

It’s important to realize that game culture is different between countries and even between people. Not all art is aiming to provide what you want from it and you have to accept it as the nature of art. The end

I know there’s a slight hypocrisy to this thread and I’m not going to deny my hypocrisy, but to explain why I don’t really care about mine and hate theirs, it would require an entire additional thread about my theory on the values of opinion in public space

In short, my hypocrisy doesn’t matter here because my opinion on the games I listed doesn’t matter because the opinion should only matter to me and nobody else, meanwhile they were explicitly pushing a narrative, trying to get others to accept it.

TL;DR: Crazy that video game opinions turned into racism even though the popular western AAA games that gen were samey (observation) and shit (opinion that doesn’t matter to you because I accepted that those games weren’t trying to court my tastes, unlike the racists did)