Elden Ring Discourse Emergency Dispatch

"Like most Japanese games Elden Ring has sharp knees"

Until now I’ve resisted the temptation to stray from game design into more topical issues, but I’m going to give in and discuss Elden Ring “discourse.” I don’t think “look at what these bozos are saying on Twitter!” is good content for “On Video Games”, so this isn’t going to be just that - but it’s going to be that at least a little.

I won't take pains to cover the context here but I’ll mix in relevant quotes throughout, so if you don’t know what the “Elden Ring UX Discourse” is you’re fine. This is less about that specific discourse and more about how it fits into a broader pattern of ethnocentrism as criticism.

When Game Criticism Is Cultural Chauvinism

I’ll begin by quoting Gene Park from the Washington Post.

I’ve been disturbed by the anti- Japanese sentiment after Elden Ring. I was appalled at one dev’s question whether Japanese UI isn’t “translatable” to the west. Considering FromSoft’s success I’d say it’s BEEN translatable and being Japanese has nothing to do with it. We can talk about the differences in design but those dev tweets got pretty brave in calling out race and culture as a factor. Which makes no sense since Demon’s Souls first found success in the west. If you're a critic or dev or anyone talking about "how Japanese" a game is, you'd better either elaborate on what exactly you mean by this or STFU.

It’s hard to miss how much of the discourse around Elden Ring steps into the tired realm of “Japan is bad at making games.” Japanese companies struggle with “HD development.” They don’t playtest their games or even understand what playtesting is. They don’t understand modern UX design or quest design.

Let’s get this out of the way first: cultural and regional differences are real and there’s nothing untoward about acknowledging them. It’s certainly not “racist” to criticize Elden Ring. But some of the Elden Ring criticism veers into what I’ll charitably call “cultural chauvinism” - which has a rich history in the video game industry. So much of the discussion either directly references the “Japanese nature” of the game or compares it unfavorably to western AAA “best-practices.”

This type of criticism falls into a pattern of low-effort takes. So I’m going to take some time to establish that pattern.

Exhibit A: “Japanese Games Just Suck”

This video is deeply embarrassing for many reasons. The initial comment is rude as is the rest of the panel chortling. The fact that Fish later “apologized” by saying “"I'm sorry Japanese guy! I was a bit rough, but your country's games are f*** terrible nowadays” certainly doesn’t help.

But something overshadowed by that rudeness is how vapid this conversation was, both at this event and historically.

Jonathan Blow was considered a gaming public intellectual largely on the back of his comments on Japanese games. But in retrospect (and at the time, if you were paying attention) there’s something curious about his comments: he doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about.

I don’t simply mean “I disagree with him.” In various interviews and talking head videos he sticks almost entirely to one point: Zelda has too many tutorials and doesn’t “respect the player” - which is supposedly standard for Japanese games. He’s rarely asked to elaborate - the obvious follow-up questions like “what about these other Japanese games that aren’t like that?” or “what about these western games that suffer from the same problems?” or even “which Zelda games are you referring to?” remain unasked.

Someone knowledgeable about Japanese games could talk intelligently about their differences from western ones from a consumer standpoint: gameplay, aesthetics, etc. They’d reference a variety of games and genres, pointing out both norms and how some games deviate from them. Someone knowledgeable about the Japanese games industry could talk about production and methodology differences - perhaps the difference between “planners” and designers or the prevalence of Excel vs other tools. Phil Fish, Jonathan Blow, the other panel members, some Elden Ring critics, and most of the people who most loudly condemn Japanese games do neither of those. They don’t appear to know anything about the Japanese game industry in a professional capacity, and they aren’t even particularly informed as players.

In Mario 64 when you press jump Mario jumps. In Tomb Raider when you press jump Lara waits until her foot is in a good position to play a jump animation or plays a knee-bend animation first, delaying your jump by a quarter-second. This is a difference in approach - control fidelity vs animation fidelity - that existed in some of the first 3D games and continues to this day. In Devil May Cry you plant your feet while attacking, but in Die by the Sword and Daggerfall you keep moving during melee attacks. The combat designers who worked on God of War specifically tried to create a more “Japanese” feel to the game and make it a real gameplay competitor to “character action games,” taking cues from Japanese action and fighting games. You can trace the lineage of combat in Jedi: Fallen Order back through God of War and to games like Devil May Cry and Street Fighter 2.

This is what intelligent discourse on Japanese vs western games sounds like. Or should sound like. But despite it being a topic of gaming literati for over a decade the conversation almost never sounds like this - it almost never goes beyond vapid bloviating and “lol too many tutorials.”

I’ll close out this sections with two other points on Blow. The first is that, in light of his view that women are biologically less-suited for video game development, and his intimations that COVID was an invention of world governments as an experiment in populace control, maybe, just maybe, it’s worth considering that some of his other deep thoughts, including ones on Japanese games, warrant renewed skepticism. The second is that Blow played Breath of the Wild on a Twitch stream and was terrible at it. After years of talking about how Zelda is too hand-holdy and doesn’t respect the player he struggled with it - in his case it respected him too much. Watching Blow play Breath of the Wild explains why Zelda games often have in-depth tutorials or helper characters or draw cracks on walls where you can use bombs: players like Blow need them.

I realize this section is heavy on Blow-bashing but when someone gains the status of gaming’s “most cerebral developer” by repeatedly weighing in on a topic I think it’s fair, 10 years later, to say “there’s not much evidence this guy knows what he’s talking about.”

Exhibit B: Whatever This Is

Answer the question Luke!

It began with this comment from Platinum Games director Hideki Kamiya:

Which lead to this Kotaku headline:

The headline transformed “no interest” into “clueless about” but the article itself is worse - Japanese people (not just Kamiya in particular) fear technology and their lack of interest in Steam is “baffling.” Only later did Kotaku add a “correction” that Steam wasn’t translated into Japanese.

One of the pieces of evidence that Japanese people distrust modern technology is that in Japan you can…buy download codes?

This distrust is so commonplace you can go to your local convince [sic] store in Japan and pay cash for your Nintendo online game downloads so you don't need to give out any information online.

The icing on the cake is Luke Plunkett telling Kamiya that the piece “explains a Japanese perspective on PC gaming.” And not just any old “Japanese perspective” but Hideki Kamiya’s own perspective!

The assumption here is that a low-information westerner knows more about Japanese gaming than a Japanese game director, and somehow knows more about that game director’s own perspective than the game director himself.

This is a particularly egregious example of what has become a cottage industry: western video game understanders spreading the gospel of Japanese game development inferiority.

The Three Rules of Western Superiority Discourse

1. You can end “the thing about Japanese games is…” with anything and people will nod along

2. The failing of any Japanese game is indicative of all Japanese games

3. The success of any Japanese game - design, sales, critical or technical - is at best anecdotal and irrelevant

Discourse Rule 1: The Thing About Japanese Games Is Anything

The thing about Japanese games is that they are too easy and hand-holdy - but also, too punitive!

The thing about Japanese games is that they don’t “respect the player” and make everything obvious - but also they are too cryptic, complicated and incomprehensible.

The thing about Japanese games is that they have too may tutorials and explain too much. But every time a new Japanese fighting game comes out people complain that the tutorial doesn’t explain enough. So that’s also the thing about Japanese games: not enough tutorials.

I honestly don’t even understand what Arthur Gies meant or why “very Japanese” was added to the end. Are Japanese games notoriously “clunky” and in what way? Didn’t a lot of games copy the Vanquish sliding mechanic? Aren’t western roguelikes naturally repetitive and punitive? This sort of criticism is a non-sequitur and once you start noticing it you’ll never stop - just adding “typically Japanese am I right?” to any design criticism.

Discourse Rule 2: The failing of any Japanese game is indicative of all Japanese games (but the failing of any western game is not)

A confusing aspect of the “Japanese games have too many tutorials” ding - beyond that most people who say this can only name a handful of Japanese games - is that western games also have a lot of tutorials but somehow that’s not a “western games” thing.

Assassin’s Creed (1?) begins with a section where you learn to stealth by trying to blend in with a crowd of people carrying pots - riveting stuff! Dawn of War 3 (or at least the demo) begins with a tutorial that explains click to move.

In Horizon: Forbidden West Aloy constantly spoils the solutions to puzzles. When trapped in a pool of water she says (paraphrased) “I can feel water currents - they must be flowing to an exit. I should follow the currents!” And Horizon is hardly alone. In The Last of Us Joel tells you that ladders can be used to climb things - thanks Joel! In Uncharted 1 when you’re in a cave in the opening levels Mark Wahlberg gives you increasingly obtrusive hints: “Drake we should look for an exit. Drake the exits are blocked by wood. Drake this wood looks dry and flammable. Drake there are torches on the walls, perhaps they could help us. Drake burn the wood with the torch you f****ing idiot.”

For years western pundits complained about Japanese games “not respecting the player” and of the intrusiveness of Navi-like companions, but it’s standard practice for western game protagonists to serve as their own Navi - something these pundits pretend not to notice.

Don’t even get me started on Detective Vision, Instinct Vision, Witcher Vision, Wraith Vision, Groot Vision, etc. The Last of Us has Hearing Vision (tm)! The thing about Japanese games is they don’t trust the player to figure things out - but standard practice in western games is to include a mode that shows the player climbing paths and puzzle solutions. World’s greatest detective Batman can’t be bothered to find clues, his Detective Vision just tells him where they are.

Somehow these failings are rarely “western game” failings, they are individual game failings. Or, often, they are western game successes - they are “good quest design” or “respecting the player’s time” or they “illuminate affordances” or are “proper signposting and guidance.”

A Japanese game with a Navi companion is a failure but a western game where you play as the chatty Navi is a triumph.

Discourse Rule 3: The Success of any Japanese games is immaterial

The “Japan is bad at making games” rhetoric was at least understandable in the “HD towns are hard” era. There was a crisis of confidence (probably more than an actual crisis of competence) in the Japanese games industry. Dead Rising 2 and beyond were made by western teams, as was Lost Planet 3 and DmC. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z was made by a western studio, as was Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon. High-profile devs like Keiji Inafune publicly voiced dissatisfaction with Japanese game development. It felt like there was something real there.

But that malaise has been overstated, and has become the unchanging history of Japanese game development.

Despite what Square-Enix said about HD towns Final Fantasy 13 holds up great, even on PS3 - yet it’s somehow a poster child for Japanese companies struggling with “HD development.”

The American-made Dead Rising games aren’t any better than the original. Insect Armageddon is one of the worst EDF games and reduced the number of enemies onscreen. I’m not sure how many people even remember Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z and Lost Planet 3. DmC ran at 30 FPS. One reason that era of western teams taking over Japanese franchises came to an end is that in practice the western-made games didn’t demonstrate appreciably better know-how or technical competence.

Capcom has a long history of technically proficient game engines. MT Framework was used from Lost Planet and Dead Rising in 2006 (both technically impressive games) up to Monster Hunter World in 2018. Its threading model was at the time far beyond many western game engines, which often didn’t scale with thread / core counts. Unity has spent the last 4 or so years struggling to create a usable jobs system but somehow that’s not a ding on western competence. (The Matrix demo for Unreal Engine 5 also struggles with efficient threading) When a Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem launches that’s never evidence that western companies struggle with “HD development.” Halo: Infinite was delayed a year and still seems way behind schedule, with promised features continuously pushed back. Why isn’t this evidence that western devs are struggling with “HD development”?

“The Japanese are just bad at game development” narrative is swelling in response to Elden Ring in spite of - or perhaps because of - its commercial and critical success. The coffee guy at my local farmer’s market asks me “have you played it yet?”, referring to Elden Ring. (This is 100% real and I have witnesses!) Somehow this success doesn’t count as evidence that Japanese devs are good at game development. Instead, unbelievably, it’s used as evidence that Japanese devs are still bad at game development. They don’t understand UX design or quest design. They don’t understand signposting and how to linearize an open-world game - how to take an open world game and make sure 95% of players follow the same path 95% of the time - you know, good game design! They don’t understand how to funnel players into tutorials (despite that supposedly being the hallmark of Japanese games!) They don’t do or understand playtesting. They still kinda suck at making video games and the success of the game is due to happenstance, fanboys, press bias, and gamers not sophisticated enough to appreciate that Battlefield 2042 is the superior offering.

It’s an unchanging narrative. Western game devs just know how to make games better than Japanese developers - even better than the devs who just released a competing product that kicked our butts. We just have good old American (and Swedish) know how - a genetically-derived insight into best practices.

Just today, weeks after the original Elden Ring discourse, I saw a thread by a popular western dev about how the oh-so-flawed design of the game limits the potential audience and invites bad reviews; something FromSoft could easily remedy if they listened to this developer’s banal #protips. The fact that sales and scores aren’t low is immaterial. Never once does the author - and there a lot of people like this - stop to consider “hmm this game doesn’t conform to my design ideas but it’s doing well - maybe I could learn something.”

On Unconscious Bias

Many in game development are normally sensitive to “isms”, both casually and in roles as pseudo-professional advocates. I’ve seen plenty of people confronted with concerns that the Elden Ring discourse flirts with various isms, and almost without exception the response is one of two things:

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m immune to unconscious bias.”

The first is just absurd - people who can normally hear a low-volume dog whistle from 2000 miles away are suddenly deaf. Frankly it reads like playing dumb - or maybe some people are so steeped in the waters of casual cultural chauvinism that they’ve stopped noticing it.

The second is also absurd - it’s called “unconscious bias” for a reason. Nobody is immune. If recent controversies have taught us anything it’s that the people doing advocacy convention panels and DICE speaking gigs are no more enlightened or perceptive than anyone else.

When Being Critical of Others is Easy

It’s easy to be critical of a developer who doesn’t speak your language and might not be aware of your comments at all.

It’s easy to be critical of developers who are non-confrontational and easy-going. Who wouldn’t show up in your Twitter replies even if they knew what you were saying.

It’s easy to be critical of a developer when you’ll never apply for a job at their company, never run into them at GDC, and don’t have any mutual friends.

This can be the difference between saying “this is trash” and “this is less than ideal.” Elden Ring’s quest design is awful but Aloy constantly spoiling puzzles in Horizon is just an unfortunate oversight - not because the former is genuinely worse but because some Guerilla employees follow you on Twitter. Western developers aren’t shy about calling the Elden Ring UX atrocious but Battlefield 2042 not having a functional scoreboard months after launch is an understandable resource issue - maybe scoreboards are outdated and funnel limited player attention towards non-central gameplay elements.

Gaming’s Most Toxic Developer: Hideo Kojima?

Hideo Kojima is very up-front about crediting people. There are credits before missions, credits after missions, credits at the start and end of games. Film-style posters for games include credits. Music artists are credited in real time. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Kojima might be one of the most diligent people in the industry when it comes to crediting others.

One of the people leading the charge against Kojima, Jennifer Scheurle, was someone who conspicuously took credit for the work of others - “my game” “my design”, “I won an award.” Not only were a bunch of people eager to say “yeah, Kojima does seem like a toxic auteur who takes all the credit for himself” - despite that plainly being false - they were willing to say it in agreement with someone who regularly actually did that. (I think history proves me correct here)

There was a GDC panel titled “Put Your Name on Your Game” which repackaged Kojima’s crime as common-sense wisdom: someone is going to get credit for the game so it might as well be you! I’ve seen almost no pushback on that.

What if had Scheurle tweeted this out along with “I wish Mike Bithell were better at this”? Would she have gotten thousands of likes and dozens of replies saying “yeah this guy should do better?” I’m guessing not.

I’m not particularly careerist, but even a more-Goofus-than-Gallant person like myself recognizes that criticism against “others” is just safer. If you want to take part in the “experimental gameplay workshop” you probably shouldn’t voice criticisms of Jonathan Blow or Robin Hunicke.

Even when there are no professional stakes there are personal and social stakes. People want to go to GDC parties without being “that guy.” It’s just easier in all respects to talk more harshly about people in different professional and social orbits.

When the Other is so frequently Japanese that may not be racism per se but it’s a function of race and nationality. And I think there is an element of specific race at play - if Phil Fish had said “I’m sorry Egyptian guy” or “I’m sorry Chinese guy” I don’t think we’d still regularly see Youtube videos and forum and twitter threads about how Fish is greatly missed.

“I’m sorry Chinese guy” sounds a lot harsher on the ears because there isn’t a long tradition of anti-Chinese game criticism - it’s not been normalized. Discussions of Chinese mobile games or gaming acquisitions often lead into accusations of sinophobia. Kotaku runs regular work by a Chinese author who suggests that criticism of F2P business practices is almost necessarily racist. But Kotaku will happily run “man in Japan” pieces by white guys about how Japanese game developers are “clueless.” That type of commentary is so common that to many it doesn’t even register.

Forespoken

When Forespoken debuted I saw many complaints about the characters and dialog. It was trying too hard, was too cringe-inducing, was stilted and stereotypically Japanese - another JRPG with bad dialog from Square-Enix!

Then people learned that Forespoken is written by people named Gary and Amy. The criticism largely subsided and was replaced with “I’m warming up to the dialog!” or “let’s wait and see.”

This is a reflexive impulse in some people. If something seems bad and it’s from a Japanese company it’s bad because it’s Japanese - even when the main complaint is that the dialogue is too Whedonesque. When that element turns out to be western the complaint is withdrawn. Country of origin is the tail wagging the criticism dog.

The Conclusion

The point of this post is not that criticism of Japanese games is “racist” - it’s not. There is no “stay in your lane” element here - anyone of any race or nationality can critique the product of any other race or nationality.

The point of this post is not even that criticism of Japanese games that references their Japanese nature is off-limits. Cultural context influences the product; British food differs from Japanese food in technique and ingredients. To note that is sensible.

The point of this post is this: if you’re going to use “the game is Japanese” as the central point of your criticism you have to know what you’re talking about. If you can’t approach the criticism with class at least approach it with knowledge and insight.

It’s damning that so many opining game developers, media people and “thought leaders” plainly don’t reach that bar.