Why Western Gaming Sucks 

Elden Ring is not "Western" it was developed by From Software a Japanese Studio headed by Hidetaka Miyazaki. The studio is also responsible for Armored Core and Bloodborne.

The point you make about Nintendo sticking to what makes them successful and not switching things up is so true. When I think about every game series I used to love (mainly being cod and Diablo) they are both shells of what they used to be and make me not want to play them whatsoever…

THIS is the main reason why people are still Nintendo fans. Not because they're nostalgic or they're into kid-friendly games (although those are some big factors). The main reason is because they have a big emphasis on quality over quantity, an emphasis that sadly many western gaming companies are slowly losing. Also, not gonna lie, I found this video kind of relaxing for some reason.

Despite Nintendo's flaws and DMCA legal team, you have to admit their developers and employees are really damn cool and impressive. Also, I've been reading articles mentioning that the developers actually took all the time they need in order to make Super Mario Bros. Wonder and legend of Zelda tears of the Kingdom and so much more, (except for pokémon which is mainly that's all on game freak) I honestly wish more game studios would accomplish this, however we have been getting some gold recently, especially with Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Sonic Superstars, Sonic Frontiers update 3 and so much more. Basically Nintendo, Sega, insomniac games and some of the other successful studios that have absolutely good developers and a good relationship with them are basically the only ones I love and surprisingly still kick ass, sure, those companies do have their flaws and problems, especially with Nintendo's, but at least those are the only companies that still remain as one of my favorites and the best! To conclude this, I am really looking forward to seeing what the future will look like for Nintendo, Sega, insomniac games and the other studios that have accomplished their games successfully.

Nintend focus on games for everyone/family, Japanese games overall have a similar design to be universal on its values but the gameplay usually aren't for everyone outside Japan, same goes for Western games that are made for the masses of Western audience, the gaming culture we have is different but we're more open to Asian games as time passes since they bring something "new" for our culture, not objectively better or worst, BUT if we consider how modern western gaming is all about political propaganda n self insert Mary Sue, it only makes Western games objectivelly worst to deal with, ignoring anual releases

The west has done a great job of getting gamers to expect their games to suck while the east has gamers knowing their games are going to be masterpiece’s

I just wish Nintendo's corporate and legal team wasn't so overly hostile towards their largest fans. That's their biggest problem imo.

Not even kidding dude, I completely agree. Nintendo games just have that different feel to em.. not just fun, but memorable. Very well made and good points Pete 👍

Hey man, great video! Nintendo for me has definitely created lots of memorable moments for me and my family. You’re absolutely right about the differences between Nintendo and Western companies. Nintendo focuses on what makes their game an actual GAME with meaning full gameplay and story, while western companies focus on how to make the most money with battle passes and rushed games with the least amount of effort put in to the soul of the game, (*Cough*) Call Of Duty. I don’t mind waiting longer for a game to come out, if the developers need the extra time then the publishers should give it to them. All in all love your content and can’t wait for another one!

I believe them being a totally Japanese and all higher up positions created of Boomer age helps. Once those guys gets replaced let's see how it holds.

Thank you for admitting how Nintendo is better than most now, but still has its own problems. Amazing video, very well-stated, you have a new subscriber now !

We still have some great Western devs (Ex: Id Software, Larian, Respawn, Crytech) but most greats now come from Japanese companies like Capcom, From Software, Square and Nintendo

american/western games are mostly 97% boring & trash games with no creativity, no innovation, no fun gameplay or story, always using dumb guns, no amazing artwork, super ugly as hell characters, no nothing unlike how great the Japanese make games & even their Japanese console like nintendo & MOSTLY Sony's unique PlayStation are innovative brilliance......Long Live amazing Japanese/Asian games & Japanese consoles FOREVER

While I generally agree that Nintendo is a great developer with flaws, after all, I have been playing their games since the 80s, I personally did not enjoy Breath of the Wild. The open world was great, but the lack of item progression and cleverly, thematically designed dungeon put me off. I have to confess at this point, that I don't own a Switch, my last Nintendo console was a 3DS, and I pretty much exclusively game on PC and retro consoles these days. I did play it for around 6 hours. It's by no means a bad game, but among my peers, including myself, BotW and with extension Tears of the Kingdom is splitting the fandom apart to some extend. I agree regarding aggressive monetization in Western games, but Japanese games are not exempt from that in some instances. ( Square Enix's Chocobo Racing GP introduced microtransactions about 2 weeks after release, so that the reviews were not "tainted" with negative points, for example ) And I can't tell anything about CoD since it was never my thing and I have not played a single game in the franchise, but there are also good, complete games that deliver on the hype they built, like the recent God of War games, Spiderman Games, Last of Us franchise, Horizon series ( all admittedly Playstation) or games like Baldur's Gate 3 and others. It is true that Western devs often are overambitious, but there are also outliers like Rockstar, that DO deliver on their ambitious titles like GTA5/6 and Red Dead Redemption 2, that DO deliver substantial single player experiences ( and a monetized multiplayer ). There is also a plethora of Indie titles that might not have all the graphical bells and whistles like AAA games have, but they often deliver excellent gameplay and innovate where it is appropriate. Last but not least, you mentioned Elden Ring as a Western game, which it is not. It is a Japanese production. I would have wished that you would have mentioned other Japanese devs like Capcom, who are also great at delivering excellent AAA games, without diluting the core of their games ( Street Fighter VI, Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, etc ) and sorry for that wall. Lol

If only (most of) these modern so-called "triple A" games were as good as this video, we'd be delighted. Perfect 10/10, everything you said.

I feel dizzy, I feel the video kept talking and repeating the same thing over and over for too long. I feel the video/script could have been better optimized, but I am also trying to be considerate as well seeing that this video is a bit old at this point

Video: "Nintendo makes quality games." Except for Pokemon games. They get immunity.

Black myth wukong and Phantom blade zero will cook western gaming industry.

While I agree Nintendo does a great job executing games well. As a gamer since the 1970s, I never was able to get into Nintendo-type games. They always felt kiddie to me, and just not my thing. I especially dislike Japanese-style fantasy games. I certainly liked playing a little Mario with my friends once in a while, but I was far more into other platforms. This is a cool video, but I just wanted to mention some people prefer Western gaming. To be honest, if I go all the way back to the 1970s, I am not sure one Nintendo game would make my top 50. I think a lot of the problems you mentioned about Western games are more modern issues that were mostly not issues in Western games pre-2010. Lucky for us all there are still developers making great Western-style games without all these unneeded things. I support the games that get things right, but I am not going out and buying a Nintendo. I do have some old Nintendo in my classic console collection for nostalgia, but it's hard for me to play those old games for more than a few minutes. Often I find my memory of an old game is far better than how it feels to go back and play it again in 2024. In the 80s I never would have traded my Commodore 64 or Amiga 2000 for any other platform of that time.

Sony wiped out their japanese stuidos and now all they do is make the most generic games possible.

Also Modern Warfare is okay, wait until you see mobile gaming which ironically is a chinese-dominant market and that is an eastern Gaming development mess, not all west or east is good or bad, there are treasures and dirt everywhere, you just gotta be good at looking and distinguishing quality.

Have you ever played Jak 2, Jak 3, or Ratchet & Clank games? Especially Deadlocked

many games old games even western ones used to like skate 2, Rayman legends splinter cell chaos theory, burnout, thief 1 and 2

Yes Nintendo games are great and even as an 41 years old i love them. But there are many many many fantastic games developed by western studios. You only talking about the big ones. AAA games. And then only Multiplayer. Western games aren´t only multiplayer games you know. This isn´t a fair comparsion. Did you ever play Spongebob Battle of Bikini Bottom or Cosmic Shake? They are maybe not as good as Mario Odyssey but they are fun games. Or The Witcher, The first Deus Ex, Red Dead Redemtion 1+2 and many many more i doesn´t have engough place here to be listetd. Whats with the amazing strategy games like Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empire oder Civilisation?

I've thought this for several years now, its the "pandering" and agendas that western devs shove into thier games, the copious microtransactions, the lack of true care and polish, yhe stale gameplay... I could go on but basically i agree with your take.

Nintendo only has that attitude because they were nearly muscled out of "their" market by Sony. People forget that Nintendo's meteoric rise in the 1980s and early 90s was not a bloodless one; they threw their weight around in ways that ended up pissing off quite a few of their best supporters at times (biggest example: Losing Squaresoft at the worst possible time over Super Mario RPG copyright claims. The following year, Squaresoft completely changed gaming with Final Fantasy 7). Internally, Nintendo doesn't look back on the N64 and Gamecube days as fondly as their fans do, since it was their time to eat crow and play second fiddle to another console giant for the first time since entering the video game biz. (Sony would later undo this via in a SPECTACULAR reversal of hubris via the PS3 for very different reasons.) I think because of that era, and especially the fact that it happened right as Japan's economy went into major recession solidified a need to ensure their brand quality was more than superficial, at least for core game entries. They're not above selling out their lesser franchises to make dirty money (see: Fire Emblem Heroes), but they play very protectively when it comes to the integrity of Mario and Zelda. Until the Wii bailed them out in 2006, Nintendo was basically leaning entirely on the GBA and DS. Western gaming giants, by comparison, have had it far too easy for far too long. They are still in the mindset of taking their markets for granted, and why not? Millions of gullible fools have funneled BILLIONS of dollars in revenue into half-baked, exploitative money-traps over the past 8 years. I can count on one hand the number of western AAA titles I've even looked sideways at, let alone been impressed with in the past 8 years. (Doom 2016 being the biggest and best by far) Right now, only Blizzard is imminently looking at death's door on account of losing basically every great mind that made them a household name 20-odd years ago and becoming a hollowed out corporate machine desperately employing every dirty trick in the book to appease those worthless shareholders. But make no mistake, every other western gaming giant like Zenimax, Ubisoft or EA is far from safe as their fortunes are by no means safe from the ever-growing Inflation Monster. Maybe once people have stopped spending gobs of money on video games for a few years (on account of not having any free money courtesy of our Fearless Leader O'Biden's plan of hyper-inflating the USD to pay for his corporate handlers' insane demands) investment and business strategies at the top will finally shift priorities away from the predatory BS they've been increasingly pushing since Horse Armor DLC arrived in Oblivion. If it ends with the alarmingly large crop of useless "progressive" diversity-hire layabouts getting canned across all of media all the better, because as fun as the whole "POC-stereotypes-written-by-white-women-leftists" and "White-men-are-universally-evil" fads have been to mock, I'd prefer if we went back to employing actual talent in creative writing and character design again. There's only so many ways these coastal naive elitist boomer crotch-spawn can publically embarrass themselves before I start actually feeling some degree of shame on their behalf by being associated in the same species as them. At the very least, our media giants can hire some of the upcoming Based talent; worst case scenario, their work will actually resonate with more than 7% of the population again.

Zelda Games are fun but for some they are too complex and for others too simple, the story is usually simple and one doesnt need to even know english to "get it", when it comes to gameplay it is simple and the complexity is on figuring out (for the first time) on how to deal with certain problems, they are mainly puzzle games. Souls games focus on offering the player a challenge, which is similar but it focuses on reflexes and combat, rather than puzzles, of course it has puzzles in the sense that you have to figure out where you are going. Monster Hunter Games are the complete other end, they are mainly boss fights, and they are combining both those aspects in a sense, the bosses need special ways to falter but they also require some level of skill and timing. Japanese Games have just about everything covered. Western and Chinese games usually tend to be greedy, but if you watch nintend is also greedy in a different way. Their games are more quality but also overpriced, they are against emulation also which is a bad thing considering disks and other media decay, internet stores can go out of service etc etc, so game preservation is sort of something they are against which is honestly a pitty for such good games. Imagine your children not being able to play wind waker or similar... That said the games are overpriced, 60-70 bucks usually each, and the consoles are also on a high budget considering it is like a hook to get into their ecosystem where they can sell you games and make profits. They operate with a very specific technique that is also seen in free to play games, but they just do it differently and they are generally the luxury brand in this case. They break the ice with the purchase of the console, then they make you spend in games for that console which they get big cuts from, so it is no less predatory than western and chinese games in that regard if you think about it, it is just more transparent and obvious, it also allows for more focus on making good games and less focus on monetization. Blizzard used to also be a company that releases quality games, literarly anything they released was quality, however they started going greedier and greedier and now lost touch, the reason why they produced quality games is because they had so many talents working with them, creative minds really. People who cared a lot and great artists.

19:35 *cough* *cough* MULTIVERSUS

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Though I largely agree with the conclusions you draw, I feel like the structure and argumentation has some areas for possible improvement. Just my two cents of course! From a videomaking perspective, I feel like a lot of of the passionate "this is a correct thing to do" examples could have hit home a lot stronger if they were compellingly and specifically contrasted with games that failed to do those things. This starts to happen in a really interesting way at around the 19 minute mark, but I think it could have been interspersed a bit more. I'm also not sure how understandable the specific points about Call of Duty are for someone who hasn't played since at least the original MW2-present. Lots of the complaints about the new Call of Duty games don't really feel like they map over much to the Nintendo games you talk about. You focus exclusively on COD's multiplayer and discuss the negative aspects of the battlepass/microtransaction/matchmaking systems. None of these are applicable to any of the single-player Nintendo games you champion, so it might not be the best game to compare imho on those points. I think the "focus on the core gameplay" aspect of this video is much weaker than the "add and don't subtract in sequels" part. For large open-world games like Cyberpunk or Starfield, the core gameplay is mostly combat and story - the same can be said for, for instance, Breath of the Wild. If your argument is that the reason people are critical of those games is because they're unfocused, I feel like there needed to be more concrete examples of this than pointing out the bugs in Cyberpunk. Surely a buggy game has more to do with a rushed development timeline, rather than a lack of focus? You never really get into Starfield at all, so I'm not sure why it's included here. Because of this, I feel like it's very easy to make counter-points for this video, especially since "western gaming" is summarized as COD, Halo (though this isn't talked about), Fortnite, Starfield (though this isn't talked about), and Cyberpunk. Someone could bring up hyped titles that were considered a huge success, like RDR2. I would also mention that Nintendo has subtracted a ton of features across the different smash games, which is part of why Melee still has such a huge following. Also, this might just be a pet peeve, but when someone uses arguments like "everybody hated this" or especially "actually good" or "actually fun" without really going into detail, it's a bit of a turnoff, even if you do go into detail elsewhere.

At least the culture is better outside of gaming!

i would agree but then i remember that rdr2 and tw3 are western games

Fully agree. however paper mario is the big exception to this whole thing...

I'm sorry. Time is gold. Nintendo wants your time. And anything that takes the time you give to legitimate nintendo stuff is bad to nintendo.

I would disagree. Western gaming can produce masterpieces when the right team and vision are present. Fallout New Vegas is arguably the best Western RPG ever made and for a simple reason-choices have enduring consequence. Where Japan succeeds at structure, the West succeeds at player influenced events.

in regards to Shooters, SplitGate is good.

6:32 Mario 64 is actually a 32 bit game

*Smash Community Defender Detected = Opinion Rejected*

good game design vid

nintendo is just 1 japanese company. big one, a successful one, not very innovative with their games, I adore their hardware though. but still just one japanese company you're comparing with entire europe and america. and you can't really compare nintendo vs west like this. beacuse everybody knows that overall eastern games are like a plegue. p2w, stolen assets, copycat mechanics, and overly sexualized women and men. yes microtransactions are invented in the west, by bethesda in particular, but still, not only pc games of course. mobile games born dead thanks to eastern cash grab p2w games, mmos. btw no epic games title is purely western, it's half owned by china's tencent. a mega corp only exist to serve china's communist party.

great video!

ahhh and American Gaming doesn’t? *cough* COD