October 7th 2023.
Does Japan make the best games? Well, it certainly seems this way when you take a look at Edge Magazine’s Top 100 list of the best games of the last 30 years. The entire top five of the list is made up of Japanese made games, and in the top 100, Western games barely outnumber Japanese ones.
As a long-time gamer, it’s been evident to me that the best video games are almost always Japanese. Three Nintendo games are featured in the top 10, two of which are Zelda titles. FromSoftware also has two titles featured, Elden Ring and Dark Souls, plus Super Mario 64 and Resident Evil 4. All these games are not only classics but highly influential and, in many ways, unlike anything ever made in the West.
For the record, the other games in the top 10 are Doom, Half-Life 2, Halo: Combat Evolved, and Portal. All of these are first-person shooter-derived games, a genre that Japan generally does not make.
Compare this to the Japanese games, where even the two from the same franchise couldn’t be more different. Breath Of The Wild and Ocarina Of Time have almost no direct connection despite being based on the same game. Dark Souls and Elden Ring, although not technically part of the same series, are also very closely related in theory, but they’re also completely different experiences.
Resident Evil 1 is lower in the top 100, but compared to Resident Evil 4, someone who didn’t know about games would never guess that they were related. But show that same person Halo, Half-Life, and Doom, and they’d probably believe they were all sequels of each other.
Final Fantasy games are also very different, with no direct sequels in the 35+ year-old series. Shadow Of The Colossus is a prequel to Ico, but without knowing this, one would never guess that they’re related.
I’m not saying there aren’t boring and derivative Japanese sequels - there are thousands of them - or that Western sequels can’t be inventive, but in general, the top games from Japan are not only more wild and creative, but they are often that within the same franchise.
Japan is at the heart of the video game industry, and I don’t see that ever changing. Microsoft has always purposefully tried to sideline the Japanese development industry, in favour of a Western-orientated one, and this is why I’ve never been able to support Xbox.
People have their personal preferences, and that’s all right and proper. But for me, this is why I’ve always preferred Japanese games to Western made titles.
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