A Japanese dive into games

I’m drawn to a very specific genre of games, the stealth-action RPGs. Dishonored, Prey, Bioshock, System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief, and the like. I love how they give the player complete agency in their decision to approach a scenario and let them run wild with the game’s systems. I love how every time you replay them, you have a totally different experience. I love how slow-paced and cerebral the gameplay is, allowing you to perfectly plan your next move and then demanding that you nail the execution of that plan, improvising on the go if it fails. I love the worldbuilding that happens through eavesdropping on characters in the game and the environmental storytelling that the game world does through the dozens of scattered objects.

As a result, I’ve mostly spent my limited free time playing these types of games. I’ve watched them evolve over time into refined masterpieces and have spent countless hours watching GDC talks about how they came together as well as discussing their merits and pitfalls in online forums. I’ve learned a lot about how these games work and I’ve obsessively watched speedruns and no-power playthroughs to see how players creatively use the limited tools at their disposal (be it time or resources) to blitz through the games as quickly as possible. It’s no secret that I love this genre.

On the sidelines, I’ve been working on three different indie games. None of them are like the games I described above and they’re all catered to very different audiences. I’m mostly responsible for the UI/UX of these games, and I oftentimes found it difficult to create interfaces for them, primarily because I’m not too familiar with the gameplay systems of genres outside of stealth-action RPGs. One of these games in particular is catered towards a Japanese audience, and I was a little lost here. I didn’t even know how or where to start. I’ve played a fair bit of Japanese games in the past, but so much has evolved and changed in the past decade or so that I had to dive back into these games to familiarize myself with player expectations and common gameplay design conventions. I wasn’t sure what needed to be explained to the players through the UI and what didn’t. So for the first half of this year, I went on a binge to play some Japanese games outside of my favorite genre and experience what they had to offer.

In perhaps the most daunting way to begin this adventure, I started out with Bloodborne. I had been hearing such great things about it, but I had also been straying away from these Souls-like games for a long time due to their punishing difficulty. There was certainly a massive learning curve here, but turns out it wasn’t actually that difficult. The whole game’s combat system is like a puzzle where it has you figuring out the enemy’s attack patterns, timing your dodges into the right direction, and waiting for the right moment to counter-attack. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but boy is it rewarding when you take down a particularly tough boss with what feels like nothing but your own skill. There’s no plot devices or environmental hazards you can use to your own advantage, it’s literally your own raw skill against seemingly impossible odds. This is exactly what Miyazaki was going for and they totally nailed it. It’s not uncommon for you to take 15-20 tries on a single boss fight. I wrote more in detail about some of the gameplay systems unique to the genre in an older post. Overall, I loved the world and setting of the game. The art direction was phenomenal and it had me hooked the entire way through.

When it comes to the UI specifically, Bloodborne is a little ridiculous. The stats screen is completely overwhelming to a new player and it doesn’t quite explain things like weapon attribute scaling and some of its more obscure systems. Thankfully, new players can just sort of ignore the more complex stats and just focus on buffing their Vitality and Strength, because they’re going to be dying a lot. This lack of player onboarding game tutorials is something common across FromSoftware’s other games too, and it’s just something that players have come to expect from the developer, which also makes it very intimidating for new players. One touch I do appreciate about Bloodborne is that none of the UI pauses the game. It’s all realtime. This adds a lot to the tension in the game when you think you’re safely re-arranging your items but hear the masked growl of a werewolf about to pounce on you and quickly mash out of the inventory screen in a frenzied panic. It also forces players to go into a boss fight with the right items equipped in their quick-select slots. The game’s UI certainly doesn’t do anything to make it feel more accessible, and maybe that’s exactly in line with Bloodborne’s overall theme.

The next Japanese game I tried out was in a genre I rarely delve into — JRPGs (unless you count Pokémon), and the game was the much acclaimed Persona 5. My initial hook to it was a recommendation from other designer+gamer friends telling me to play it because of how stylish its UI is. It’s what got me curious about the game and I went all in. I was absolutely floored by how crazy and insane the game’s menus looked. It very quickly made my list of best video game UIs. It complements the game world perfectly and goes over the top with its presentation at every opportunity that it gets. I also found myself surprisingly enjoying the game. I’ll be honest, I wish there wasn’t as much sitting back and mashing the X button to read the next line of dialogue. It’s a little stupid how the game sometimes forces you into a 20-minute story cinematic with no way to save your progress. There’s a lot of talking in the game and the game is really, really long. I’ve been playing for 30 hours and I’m barely a third of the way in. I do appreciate it for what it is and I’m liking the character building a lot. It’s funny, quirky, and quite whimsical at times.

If anything, Persona 5 has opened my eyes to what Japanese players expect from roleplaying games. JRPGs typically feature turn-based combat and feature a cast of 4-5 “main” characters. The combat is offset by other side activities and building relationships with your allies. Players are used to lots of reading and on-screen text (unlike the Western world). They’re used to remembering lots of information about various game states deep into their playthroughs, and they are comfortable with processing complex logic about what the game expects them to do. All of this culminates in one big benefit, which is that the UI doesn’t have to work as hard to try and smoothly ease the player into the game. Players want it all and want to know it all quickly. The shared conventions and tropes are common enough across JRPGs that it doesn’t make sense for the game to handhold them through every specific scenario and situation. Let the players figure it out for themselves, because the fun is in the trial and error and discovering new things for yourself.

Finally, I tried out another highly recommended Japanese game, NieR: Automata. I found out about this through all the praise that was being showered upon for its glorious soundtrack. I was actively listening to the soundtrack for about two months before I actually started playing the game, it was that good. Once I began playing it to see how the music actually takes place in the game, I was more than impressed. There were multiple versions of each song, with very clever and subtle layering on each track, with and without vocals, upbeat versions and slow-paced instrumentals. The boss fight music was just out of this world good. This might just be one of my favorite video game soundtracks of all time, right up there with Transistor and Journey.

In terms of gameplay, boy does NieR: Automata switch things up. It constantly swaps between 3D and 2D sidescrolling views, between flight combat and on-foot combat, between third-person and top-down views. It all feels so crazy but so well executed that everything makes sense. The combat is a mix between bullet hell, hack-n-slash, and melee brawler. The movement feels so smooth and fluid, allowing you to run, dash, sprint, double jump, long jump, and glide for a delightful combination of floaty speed. The gameplay combines so many different aspects of so many different genres that I’m surprised how it all works so well together in one game. It’s both an homage to the legacy of the medium and an innovation of what the medium can be. It’s story is also incredibly engrossing, constantly surprising you with its deeper-than-the-surface lore and the strong emotions contained in it. It’s captivating, charming, and gleefully satisfying.

And we haven’t even gotten to the UI yet. It is a treat. All the UI you see in-game is literally what your player character sees, including the menus and loading screens. You’re playing as an android, after all. Even the saving system in the game and how a new game playthrough works is thematically tied in to the world. The game allows you to fully configure your HUD by physically removing those HUD “chips” from your body. You can get rid of the mini-map, the health bars, the damage values, and more to free up space for other more valuable chips that will give you an advantage in attack or defense stats. This is a direct play to cater to players in subsequent playthroughs, which you’ll definitely be doing in this game. The entire UI itself is a beautiful and pleasing shade of vignetted beige, and is quite intuitive too. The UI designer of the game has a great blog post dedicated to how and why they created it this way, which comes highly recommended for a deep dive into it.

Overall, NieR: Automata has been a fabulous experience so far. Its combination of story, music, and gameplay is such a perfectly executed mix. The gameplay is divided into a satisfying combat system, a great exploration and discovery loop, and some really unique systems around upgrading and optimizing your character build. I’m also a sucker for heavily stylized and beautiful art direction, which NieR: Automata definitely has. This game really took me by surprise, especially because I went in completely blind and wasn’t really expecting much aside from a stellar soundtrack. It has quickly skyrocketed into my top five games of all time list and I’ll most certainly be doing multiple repeat playthroughs here. If you haven’t given this game a shot, this is the one I’d recommend most of the games I’ve talked about here.

I also wanna give a quick shout out to the Gravity Rush series. I can’t believe I had slept on this game so long. The gameplay is phenomenal. When I first discovered that you could literally walk on any surface and fly through the skies at breakneck speeds, I couldn’t believe that a game about falling could be so entertaining. Sure, the controls are a little awkward and you’ll screw up sometimes, but the overall feeling of speeding through the city is so damn good that none of its other flaws even come close to tarnishing the experience. I’d even go as far to say that the gameplay innovation here is at the level of Portal. Gravity Rush is certainly catered towards a more niche audience, and it surely flew under the radar of a lot of folks. It’s a very addictive sort of gaming rush that’s very rare to find today.

So yeah, my gaming experience for the first half of this year has been packed with some interesting forays into Japanese games. There’s still a ton of Japanese games I’ve yet to play that I haven’t dived into. For instance, I’ve never played a Metal Gear Solid game and I really want to at least try one out, given my affinity towards the stealth-action RPG genre. I’m sure I’ll love identifying and spotting out the differences and similarities between the Japanese and Western versions of games in this genre. I’ve never even played a Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts game. I’ve been hearing fantastic things about the Yakuza series as well from fellow Persona fans. The Japanese game world is so unique and different that it’s like I’m discovering a totally new medium for the first time. I’m loving it.

In terms of specific learnings, I’ve taken away a lot about how Japan treats its gaming audience. Their players want wacky, crazy, and creative things from their games. Their players have come to expect a lot from their JRPGs and are extremely familiar with turn-based RPG systems. Their players don’t need every single gameplay system explained to them and are comfortable with figuring it out for themselves. They are used to lots of lore exposition through dialogue and games prioritizing relationships between their main characters as a gameplay element. And the UI needs to reflect all this. It needs to go along for the ride with these player expectations and match the intent of the game itself. It needs to have the right tone and feel that the game world has, because they’re all so different. And finally, it needs to present the player will all the information they’d need at any given time, without too much handholding in the start.

Many of these learnings can be applied to Western games as well, but there’s no denying that special care needs to be taken when dealing with the Japanese market. Their games industry as a whole has been evolving very differently from that of the rest of the world and it’s really humbling to enjoy it from the other side of the globe. Big names like Kojima, Miyazaki, and Yoko Taro have achieved a somewhat godlike status in the gaming community and everyone’s excited to see what they’ve got up their sleeve next. I can’t wait to dive in to more of what Japan has to offer. Maybe more than all, these games have got me really pumped to actually visit Japan, which has now quickly risen to the top spot on my list as my next travel destination. There’s a great article about how playing Japanese games can serve as a form of video game tourism, and they’ve certainly left their mark on me.