They're huge in Japan, but why not the rest of the world? Siobhan Keogh looks at why some games just don't translate.
Yokai Watch is a video game franchise for 3DS, created by the people who made Professor Layton. It's massively popular - more than five million copies have been sold. To put that in context, Halo 4 has sold a little over five million as well. Kotaku reckons it could be the next Pokemon.
Never heard of it? That's because almost all five million copies of Yokai Watch were sold in Japan.
Lucky for fans of anime-style role-playing games, Yokai Watch is set to be released in the West next year. But the game is just the latest in a long line of Japanese games which are huge in their home country but don't seem to translate to English-speaking countries like the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
A screenshot from Monster Hunter 4. Photo / YouTube
You might have heard of Monster Hunter by now, which is one of Japan's most famous and most popular game franchises. The game does what it says on the tin - you hunt fantasy monsters in an open-world environment.
While Monster Hunter has been released in the West and has seen improving sales there, it has nowhere near the cult following it has in Japan. Monster Hunter 4 sold 3.9 million copies in Japan, 1.8 million of those within its first two days on shelves. In Europe and North America Monster Hunter 4 was the first of the series to pass the one million sales mark.
While everyone knows Final Fantasy, the list of Eastern games that never really made it here is long. When I talk about Dark Cloud - a game made by the same company as Yokai Watch, back in 2000 - most Kiwis will shrug their shoulders. This is a game that sold 1 million units worldwide and had a sequel. There have been no further sequels and no ports since Dark Cloud 2 in 2002.
A screenshot from Dark Cloud 2. Photo / Facebook
There are also plenty of massively successful American games that don't make their mark in the East. In particular, first-person shooters don't haven't sold there historically - which seems crazy when you think about how massive Halo and Call of Duty were three or four years ago everywhere else.
I think this is probably one of the reasons the Xbox and Xbox 360 never took off in the Japanese market. Those platforms seemed made for FPS games, and the Xbox's reputation in the early days was almost entirely built on Halo.
Of course, there's also the fact that Xbox - and first-person shooters - just weren't made in Japan and with Japanese audiences in mind.
The reason I find all of this so interesting is that the US and Japan both have some of the world's best games companies producing the world's best games. I love, love, love video games and sometimes feel like I just want to try them all, even if I don't get sucked in. It's hard to do that when there's a whole geography I'm missing out on. (If only I could speak and read Japanese - trust me, I've tried to learn.)
I also grew up on Japanese games. For a long time all I played was JRPGs - they were dominating the video game market at the time - and every time I tried to play an American game I'd be put off by something. Maybe it was the art or maybe I just found the strange culture that came through kind of exciting, but I preferred Japanese games from an early age. And more than once in my life I've either had to wait years for an English port, or missing out on a game entirely because it didn't get an English release.
I accept that these decisions are made based on the sales expectations of people who are much more business-savvy than I am. But boy, I really can't wait to play Yokai Watch.
