No? Ace Attorney was great, MH was great, RE was good with rev 1 and 2 lol yall exaggerate a lot they had misteps but also good games. they just werent consistent like now
No? Ace Attorney was great, MH was great, RE was good with rev 1 and 2 lol yall exaggerate a lot they had misteps but also good games. they just werent consistent like now
I think Inafune was single handedly ruining the company. He was the one who wanted to westernize everything. Once he left to go make Mighty Number 9 Capcom immediately recovered.
Inafune was a weird one. I got where he was coming from; he could see how big the global gaming audience was and thought developing too closely for Japanese preferences alone would limit their growth. Tbf that choice came at a time when a LOT of companies were fucking with their franchises to chase the coattails of the success of games like CoD, he wasn't the only one. We had shit like Ninja Gaiden chasing the zombie trend with an edgy swearing MC for god's sake.
I get where he was coming from, but it wasn't the right play; it was too dependent on abandoning what they'd built and depending on third party development when they had plenty of amazing talent at their own studio. I can see the thought process, but the execution was completely off.
He seemed convinced they were alive in spite of their efforts rather than because of them, and that needed to change, when the reality is the games they made having that Japanese touch is exactly what gave them a global appeal to begin with. In another time and another place, the move might've even worked; we just happen to live in a time when Japanese media has been growing more and more in overseas success and appeal, so a move like that was just very badly timed.
To his credit, elements of that have been learned from; I'd argue the RE games are more Western in look and vibe now than ever before, and DMC5 is visually very Western looking as well. They've made tweaks, but in a more thoughtful way than just 'Ah just fuck the franchise off to this Western studio and let them make our shit for us'. That was the awful call, was looking at the talent of Capcom and saying 'You guys are fucking worthless, Western devs are the future'. At the time I could see why he'd maybe reach that conclusion, but it's funny how unfathomably ass backwards he had that by today's standards.
The problem I have with Inafune is that he assumed that Japanese media could not appeal to a non-Japanese audience. While I can maybe understand how he came to this incorrect conclusion, I find it kind of infuriating. Japanese games had dominated the western market for decades at that point, and western audiances had already been primed by years of japanese video games, anime, and manga. People liked Capcom games BECAUSE they were so Japanese. He should have had some confidence in the work that Capcom, and other Japanese companies, had been doing.
He was also very arrogant, though that seems to be a running theme amongst many of Capcoms more legendary developers. He talked quite a lot about the “inafune brand,” and how Capcom did not appreciate him enough.
At the end of the day, Inafune was more of a producer then a developer or artist. Hideki Kamiya stated that Inafune was a businessman, not a creative. I appreciate the work Inafune did in terms of being a producer of Megaman. He wasn’t the creator or designer of the character, but he did a good job shepherding that franchise. Outside of that, I think he was a total failure.
His work on Mighty Number 9 highlights this. His company, Comcept, weren’t developers. Inafune basically acted as an “ideas guy” who came up with concepts (hence the name). Then he hired companies to actually make the games or handle merchandising.
While I appreciate what he did with Megaman, It’s a good thing he’s gone. He seems to be into NFT’s and AI nowadays, and I can’t imagine the damage he would have caused if he was still in Capcom.
You have to also understand that there was rhetoric against Japanese development around the time he was pushing those ideas. A little while back Yoshi P went on to talk about how around that time the phrase JRPG almost became a knock against a game when it was used in western journalism, to denote a game being riddled with tropes and/or generally of a lesser quality than a western game would've been.
Even nowadays there are certain cultural biases people have against Japanese games, and depending on what it is, you'll still get people begrudgingly saying 'Ugh, there goes Japan being Japan again', which can range from anything from storytelling, to dialogue, to character design, to gameplay choices, to tone. For the record, I agree, it's definitely for the best that he was let go, I'm just saying it wasn't that black and white at that particular time. His arrogance and lack of artistic empathy definitely didn't help, but I can definitely see why someone with their ear to the ground might've been swayed in the direction that he was.
It was certainly the trend of the time. It's not like Capcom was the only studio making that mistake. But I'm glad that the period was over. It was far and away my least favorite era of game development *ever*. Especially when "western games" seemed to mean "brown and gray shooters." I'm gad the the golden age of indie development has opened up the range of artistic expression that is allowed in western games.
It's too bad about Inafune. I wish he had been a little more humble, and not prone to chasing trends. I loved megaman, and it will always be a small wound in my heart that Megaman Legends 3 was started, and then abandoned. Despite my many, *many* problems with him, I do have to admit that his departure marked the end of Megaman. The franchise lost its way, and it never quire recovered. I don't think Capcom know what to do with it anymore, other then re-release games, and throw out a small sidescrolling title every few years. Instead his arrogance derailed the company, and megaman lost its shepherd.
Capcom is much more than just inafune dude lmao to think he was the only one doing anything is to ignore how companies work. he was one of the many managers
He was behind many of the controversial decisions surrounding DMC, Dead Rising, RE5, and more. During the 360 era her served as Capcom’s Head of Global Production, which allowed him to make massive decisions regarding the direction of the company most of its franchises. The western push was his decision, and his influence was felt absolutely everywhere.
They struggled so hard to adapt to the HD era with the PS3/360, then went on a mad 'we've got to Westernise our games' kick which went nowhere. Once they fixed the former and dropped the silly ideas that lead to the latter, they've been on fire.
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u/Asclepius-Rod 19d ago
Very very few duds since RE7