You have to see it from his perspective. In Japan, the definition of manliness is being indistinguishable from a girl, wearing eye-liner and a feather boa, and shaving your chest. When he looks at Western games, seeing a collection of overly masculine dudebros with the personality of cardboard going on epic murder sprees must seem like such a significant departure.Segata Sanshiro said:
And to some extent, he's right. If Resident Evil featured a Japanese leading man, I doubt it would've reached the same cultural penetration in the West that it did. BioHazard is not nearly as popular in Japan as Resident Evil is in America - and a large part of this is the presence of burly men with guns and a surprising lack of Gackt. I'm not sure I agree with Shadow of Rome, but I think most people's complaints about the game were the stealth aspects of the blond character - they loved the big burly man ripping the arms off of other burly men, but not the effeminate "let's avoid conflict" guy.
The budget of HD gaming is so large that appealing to just Japan is increasingly not an option. Portables, with their lower budgets, can have as many schools with generic anime characters they want, but when you build something for the PS3 or 360, you pretty much have to factor in worldwide support - and they haven't really been getting that with most games.
My PS3 collection has 100 games, 25 of which are Japanese in origin (of those, 5 of them are Dynasty Warriors games). My DS collection, on the other hand, is 60 games strong, of which 50 are Japanese games. My PSP collection has a similar ratio. Japanese developers aren't developing for HD consoles because it's too expensive when you can only rely on Japanese gamers to buy them. With the current anti-weeaboo sentiment, things that are too anime or too Japanese are instant turn off to a vast majority of Western gamers. The only way to deliver a game with universal appeal is to A) appeal to a strictly casual market or B) drop the boas and eye-liner, add guns and muscles.
