Super Smash Bros. Creator Masahiro Sakurai Says Japanese Games Should Not “Americanize” Games
Every so often, the greats remind us why they’re great. Masahiro Sakurai, the video game director and designer who created the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series, recently won the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology Award for the Arts, which the Japanese government gives to someone who has made “outstanding achievements” in each particular field, or “opened up new aspects” of the field. However, Sakurai didn’t win the award for a video game but for his YouTube channel, “Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games,” in which he talks about the mechanics of game design, marketing, and even things like having a good work ethic. After receiving the award, Sakurai spoke with a Japanese entertainment website called Entax about what Japanese game designers can learn from China’s recent success in the industry, and he said that the key was not to “Americanize” Japanese games (translation via Video Games Chronicle):
“It’s not necessarily my own idea, but the trend in the games industry is that Japanese people should go for what Japanese people like,” Sakurai explained (via machine translation).
“A while ago, there was certainly a culture of making Americanised products, because various works were popular in the US. However, I feel that ‘Japanese game lovers’ overseas are not looking for such things, but for something unique and interesting from Japan.
“In other words, I think the ideal is to make the games the way you like them, and the people who can accept them will enjoy them.”
I don’t think anyone would argue against what Masahiro Sakurai said in that interview – outside of Western video game companies, anyway. He’s right; people who like Japanese games like them for what they are, not because they’ve been fine-tuned to appeal to a wider audience. That’s true of pretty much everything, which is why it’s so frustrating to see various IPs diluted for mass appeal only to become hollowed-out husks of what they once were – the thing that appealed to their fans in the first place. Moreover, Western entertainment has become a sanitized goo of uninteresting, assembly-line products designed to appease the cultural sensitivities of no one in the real world (like the customers) and reinforce subcultural ideas. This is part of why so many Western consumers have turned to Eastern products; they want a purer experience, one more concerned with creating a fun game than turning every piece of entertainment into a corny sensitivity training video. The part about China’s success in the video game industry is a reference to Black Myth: Wukong, a smash hit that dominated the Steam charts, with an all-time peak of 2,415,714 concurrent players. Now, they’ve got Marvel Rivals, an online free-to-play “hero shooter” that is succeeding where Marvel’s Avengers failed. These games succeeded in large part because they didn’t compromise for a Western audience.
And that’s the rub: what a lot of these companies probably think Western audiences want isn’t really what they want. It’s what Western entertainment companies obsessed with identity politics told them Western audiences want. That’s why games that ignore these warnings are hits, and games that embrace them crash and burn. Masahiro Sakurai is advocating for giving the customers what they want by being true to the game itself, not accepted social mores. And Sakurai is hardly a radical; Kirby and Super Smash Bros. aren’t exactly inaccessible to your average American gamer. But they are what they are: fun games with no lectures or forced political elements. In the end, American gamers want the same things Japanese gamers, European gamers, and gamers from anywhere else on Earth want; there’s no reason to fine-tune anything. In fact, using Marvel Rivals as an example, you could argue that Chinese developer NetEase Games made a more American game than something like Marvel’s Avengers because it kept the characters and story more in line with the American comics instead of pulling a bait-and-switch where Captain America, Iron Man, and the rest are sidelined for Ms. Marvel everywhere but the trailers. It’s refreshing to see a more honest game experience for people who have seen fewer and fewer of them in recent years, and Masahiro Sakurai is wise to see that and encourage others in his industry to capitalize on it.
Let us know what you think of Masahiro Sakurai’s advice for Japanese video game developers in the comments!
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