The Receipts: Mid 2000's Wildly Anti Japanese X Play Era | Castle Super Beast Clips 

Man, Kirby had a lot to say about Fez. Didn't even let Pat speak

casual racism vs ranked racism

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.

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

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.

This entire debacle marks the first time I’ve ever heard someone defend being intensely racist by saying all anime fans are psychotic racists.

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."

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.

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.

I still laugh at Jonathan Blow sitting solemnly in a dark room interspersed with Soulja Boy roasting his game.

Pat’s hatred for Phil Fish and Fez gives me life.

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

We thought they were just being edgy until we realized they were being serious.

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 era that spawned DmC: Devil may Cry

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.

Find someone who loves you the way Pat hates Phill Fish

Whats even weirder is that Baten Kaitos isn't even a game with "fan service" so Adam Sessler's comments don't even hold any weight and make his rant even weirder. It's Japanese so it's pedophilic by virtue of that alone was basically what he was getting at which is like a whole other level of batshit racism crazy. Wild stuff.

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.

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.

Woolie starts off by invoking the age old Canadian truism: "except in Quebec"

I’m legit so glad we don’t have to pretend that Phil Fish was a visionary anymore.

The "X" in X-Play stands for Xenophobia

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.”

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 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.

Pat hates Phil because he embodies Quebec too much

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

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.

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.

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*"

_Suddenly, all those suicide jokes X-Play made in their review of Persona 3 have a much darker context..._

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."

It's hilarious to me that all of us are in solidarity over loving Tropic Thunder lol

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.

Oh cool we're not pretending Fez is good anymore

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.

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".

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

That era was when the game companies made a huge effort to bring in the "jock" type demographic

Xplay gave Devil May Cry 2 a 4 out of 5. Really think about that.

Adam Sessler deserves every bit of that Twitter hate.

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

Fun segment but the censor is a bit much considering how often Pat swears lmao.

I only just now realized that the "Poyo!" is a censorship bleep I thought it was like a sub notice or something

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.

That anti-Japanese vitriol also happened in the American automobile industry in the 80s. Only that time it had a body count.

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

What a insufferable era of gaming, where I had to “hide” my love of Japanese games

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.

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

TBH the only real enjoyment I ever got out of G4 as a kid were reruns of Robot Wars, and later Ninja Warrior until I discovered RU-vid where I could watch the Sasuke events in full. I didn't even discover Code Monkeys until it was later added to Peacock. I feel really bad for The Completionist tho. His views fucking plummeted after he joined nu-G4, and now he'll forever be associated with that dumpster fire.

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?"

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

Pat really crankin up the poyo counter today

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

The pain I felt when Pat said "Baldur's Gate". I felt physical pain, BUT HE'S SO RIGHT.

I can't believe Kirby swallowed Louis C.K.

Oh no! Not the X-Play receipts!

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

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.

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?"

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

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

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?"

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.

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.

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?

JRPG isn't the only one with a nation prefix. KMMO's are a notorious one.

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.

Pat’s the kinda guy to fight racism with MORE racism

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.

Pats reaction to the mentioning of Tunic cheered me right back up.

I'm surprised that it took up to YoshiP for people to take action

14:43 He actually just lied about how much he worked on them. Watch that HBomb video Pat.

You can argue that JRPG stories are very similar and there's no innovation narrative-wise. Do NOT take it from western fantasy RPG devs. Dragon age, baldur's gate, Warcraft, warhammer. MANY rpgs that have orcs, elves, dwarves or any sort of medieval magic universe exist thanks to the work of Tolkien, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

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.

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 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.

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.

15:08 I remember reading reviews of Suikoden 2, that shitted on it for using "outdated pixel art", instead of 3D models.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Well looks like we found our lucky racist

Their inner voice talk they had at the end of the podcast better get clipped. That was insane.

When Video games finally became "acceptable" to admit to playing, sans Halo and Call of Duty, back in 2009 the only games left that you would get actively shit on for was jRPGs which I loved. The only reason why I didn't get bullied or swirlies etc is because I was bigger than almost everyone hieght AND weight and I was already being bullied for other "louder" character flaws (which even at the time I understood. I deserved at least some of it). Shit I was getting shat on for playing Pokemon until Gen 7 only for it to become socially acceptable and everywhere 1 generation later. Woolie and I are both outside of Capital City of Gaming on the outskirts in our little niche tents except on different sides I guess.

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

That kirby sound effect is fucking killing me. Like, not that it's funny, that it's giving me an aneurysm