Anyone who follows gaming at midcore or even simply casual level (at least enough to know the names of the most famous franchises like Mario and Resident Evil) knows that since the 80s Japan has been easily alongside America the dominant nation of the Gaming Industry.
Not only did Japan dominate consoles for over two decades (and in turn the RPG genre for home markets outside of PC gaming) but even within Japan some rich tactical RPGs and military and historical wargames have found a place in Japanese PC gaming.
For a long time as a Beijing native I used to think Japan had the most creativeand eccentric entertainment industry…….. You just have to see the Japanese style to comics and especially a lot of their animations which has whacky stuff like Ranma 1/2 and One Piece to see some bizarre and very fun creativity to storytelling……….
Until I started getting into Warhammer. While a lot of it is dereative, the stuff that they put original ideas n really are strangely eccentric and a bast to experience. I mean a green giant warlike races of idiots with IQ less than a Kindergartener inspired by soccer hooligans and who are biologically fungi that develop into Mushrooms and eventually grow into gung ho comedy Gold Humanoids? Who’d think of that????!!!!!!!!!!!!
And while DND tends to be lacking on the more entertainingly eccentric side of things, DND has developed multiple fleshed out settings……….
So it makes me wonder why Japan with a lot of its creative often eccentric approach to storytelling esp in comics and animation and how they to this day still remain one of the dominant gaming spheres……..
Never became a powerhouse in PNP RPGs and Tabletop Minis Strategy games the way USA and UK dominates those kind of games?
I mean on the tabletop end Japan isn’t exactly lacking creativity. Not only are 2 of the Big 3s of Trading Card Games are Japanese franchises (Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon) but they also created the very neat Beyblades game (I won’t explain it because its just that bizarre a concept that you’re better of reading from Wikipedia).
So I have to ask how a nation that could come up with the Tamagotchi concept and mix and match parts for spinning tops to duke it out in a Arena that will have different abilities based on the parts you assembled……… Could not come up with some awesome unique idea that could have lead t to become on equal footing to the USA and the UK on the tabletop end of RPGs and miniature strategy games?
I mean just look at stuff like Pikmin and Odin Sphere to see how willy creative Japanese game makers can be in RPGs and strategy games! So I have to wonder why Japan couldn’t come up with its own counterpart to Warhammer to gain popularity worldwide? Or why Japanese cretive energy went all into video games but never onto Pen and Papr RolePlay?
2 comments
It’s interesting, they did Maschinen Krieger but that didn’t really take off and is pretty much defunct these days
There’s also Gundam, which isn’t a tabletop game but it is the same building miniatures thing, and probably makes more money than warhammer, but I’m not sure
It does seem a bit weird they don’t have a tabletop game, but on the other hand they do have a pretty large miniature franchise still. And as you say they practically invented trading card games.
Warhammer is sort of a genre of its own which is part of its dominance. It’s not just *a* war game, it’s *the* warhammer game. Which honestly is why fans put up with all the bullshit they do, because it scratches a very particular itch that they can’t get elsewhere
My educated guess would be that this is because wargaming and tabletop RPGs are somewhat niche activities that aren’t worth the time and expense for Japanese companies to localize into other languages.
Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh appeared after Wizards of the Coast proved with MtG that there’s a lot of money to be made in collectible card games.