This tweet from the Editor-in-Chief of gaming news site DualShockers caught my attention earlier tonight:

As regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of Japanese games and visual novels and will frequently wax lyrical at great length on the subject of my favourite titles. Hell, I even set up a whole new website — MoeGamer — to have a convenient place to put my more in-depth commentary on games that I’ve found particularly interesting.

Over the last couple of years — in particular since I started my JPgamer column on USgamer, and subsequently moved on to my MoeGamer project after I was laid off from the site — I’ve gotten to know a fair few “faraway friends” on the Internet thanks to a mutual love of games from Japan. And all of them — including me — feel the same way: it’s sad that almost the entirety of a whole country’s output gets thrown under the bus, usually in the name of “progressiveness”, and usually with woefully little understanding of the works they have cast aside.

Sure, the Final Fantasies (except XIV) and Souls games of the world still get plenty of column inches, but the rest, as Nelva points out in his tweet, is ignored at best, and treated appallingly at worst.

I found Nelva’s tweet noteworthy because it’s the first time I recall seeing a member of the games press (aside from me) come out with sentiments like this, outside of sites that specifically dedicate themselves to this sort of thing. As such, I thought it worth talking about a bit, and to draw particular attention to a number of noteworthy developers, publishers and series that are well-regarded and regularly praised among players, but which receive less than stellar treatment from the press.

Let’s talk about the Vita

Dear old PlayStation Vita. One of my favourite platforms of all time, and declared “dead” roughly every two months by some idiot who sees that there hasn’t been a Call of Duty game on it since the atrocious Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified.

As a handheld gaming machine, Vita is never going to match the big boys in terms of power, and it doesn’t need to: when you’re playing something on the go, aspirations of being some grand cinematic masterpiece are largely wasted on a screen the size of an envelope. And this is why we don’t get any triple-A games on the platform.

What we do get is an absolute shitload of Japanese games. What we do get is an absolute shitload of Japanese role-playing games — a genre frequently and erroneously declared “dead” alongside the Vita by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. What we also get is a bunch of visual novels and strategy games. And this is just Japan we’re talking about, remember; all this is on top of all the great indie titles we get from Western developers.

There are a number of developers out there who put out their games on Vita as their lead (or only!) platform. And if these games got any coverage, it would be plain as day to see that the Vita is far from dead; there are plenty of great new games coming out for it on a monthly basis, many of which hail from Japan.

Let’s talk about “progressiveness”

It’s the current fashion in the games press to be as “progressive” as possible. That is to say, it’s fashionable to berate any games that feature attractive women or any kind of provocative, adult-leaning content as “problematic”, in the hope that frequent use of that word will make these critics look somehow educated and intelligent. In practice, all it does is undermine the other big argument these people make, which is that “games need to grow up”. You can have one or the other. You can treat gamers as adults and trust them to handle provocative content, or you can sanitise the medium to such a degree that everything becomes generic, inoffensive waffle.

The ironic thing about the supposed “progressive” arguments against these games — particularly against the ones that feature attractive women — is that they completely fail to explore the game on anything other than the most superficial level. It is, quite simply, “this game has women in short skirts with big boobs, so it’s bad”. This isn’t an exaggeration; this is a paraphrase of several Senran Kagura articles I’ve read from “progressive” games journalists.

As I’ve written at great length over on MoeGamer, I find it interesting that a lot of these games from Japan actually handle some pretty weighty themes throughout, and do so sensitively and enjoyably. In some cases, games, much like anime, allow creators to explore aspects of society that are still somewhat “taboo” in parts of Japan, such as homosexual relationships.

Others set a great example by having an all-female cast, often with no mention of men or romantic entanglements whatsoever.

Others still have a point to make with their erotic or quasi-erotic content; a while back, for example, I wrote a lengthy piece about how Criminal Girls uses its S&M-themed ecchi content to reinforce the narrative’s key message about trust. Or there are works like visual novel The Fruit of Grisaia, in which its erotic content is used as part of the characterisation process, particularly when it comes to the character Amane, who is an aggressively sexual individual for reasons that become apparent later in her narrative arc.

In damning the majority of Japan’s cultural output on the grounds of “progressiveness”, the self-proclaimed “progressives” are ironically missing out on some of the most progressive games out there.

Let’s talk about Falcom

Let’s talk a bit about Falcom first of all. Falcom is a developer who has been around since pretty much the dawn of gaming, with its long-running Ys series arguably playing a defining role in the modern action RPG.

Of perhaps even greater note, meanwhile, the most recent installments in the Legend of Heroes series — Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel — are absolute masterworks in how to blend the best bits of Western and Eastern RPGs. They’re well-written with excellent characterisation (though admittedly too wordy for some), they have some of the most astonishingly detailed worldbuilding I’ve ever seen in a game through a combination of their visuals and their texts, and they’re simply great games, to boot. And yet, it’s rare to hear them mentioned, even by self-professed JRPG enthusiasts in the press.

Why? Well, at least partly because they were on PSP and Vita as their lead platforms, though Trails in the Sky’s two currently available localised chapters have made the jump to PC since then. It goes back to what we said about the Vita before; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t cover the games, the platform withers, though at least in the case of the Trails series, there’s the formidable combination of XSEED’s enthusiastic social media team and plenty of fans who are more than happy to promote the series via word of mouth.

But it saddens me that there are probably a whole lot of people out there who have no idea that these games exist, or have no idea quite how good they are. That, surely, is the press doing these games a great disservice.

Let’s talk about Neptunia

And Idea Factory in general, while we’re on.

Idea Factory and its label Compile Heart have been very prolific over the last few years, and it’s fair to say that in the twilight of the PS3 era it took a while for them to find their feet. Titles such as Trinity Universe and Hyperdimension Neptunia were very much inferior to much of the platform’s other fare in technical terms, though those who played them will happily attest that they are both overflowing with charm to more than make up for their technological shortcomings.

Unfortunately, some people have never got past a bad experience they had with a game a few years back, and seemingly outright refuse to cover new titles from a company that has grown astronomically in popularity over the last few years — and, moreover, a company that has clearly learned from its mistakes, with each new game being better than the last by a considerable margin.

This is most clearly demonstrated by the Neptunia series, which has gone from unknown niche-interest JRPG to full-on cultural phenomenon over the course of the last six years or so. People online love Neptunia. There’s fan art everywhere, there are role-players on Twitter, there are mods for popular Steam games to insert the characters, there are people using Source Filmmaker to create their own Neptunia dioramas and videos — and, of course, there are the games, which tend to enjoy solid sales on console platforms (typically Vita, though the most recent mainline installment jumped to PS4) and then again a few months down the line when they hit PC.

Neptunia games still aren’t the most technologically advanced games on the market, but what they have always had since day one is an absolute ton of soul — not to mention the aforementioned progressiveness thanks to homosexual characters and a strongly capable all-female main cast — and something which is very much underexplored in gaming as a whole: satirical humour. Their developers know what the players want from a Neptunia game, and they provide it. And they are widely loved as a result.

Coverage? Some idiot on Kotaku writing about how the animated Live2D character sprites in the dialogue sequences freak them out. And little else.

I love Neptunia, as you know. But even if I didn’t, it would seem very strange to me not to acknowledge something that is so popular on the Internet at large that it’s frequent meme fodder. And yet that’s exactly what happens with today’s games press: it doesn’t fit the unwritten criteria, so it doesn’t get explored.

Let’s talk about overlooked games

I played through the visual novel Root Letter recently and had a great time with it. I only knew about it because it happened to catch my eye one day when I was browsing the publisher’s other works. I’ve barely seen a peep about it on other websites. I, meanwhile, wrote a bunch about it here.

In the case of Root Letter, the press can’t even play the progressive booby card to refuse to cover it: Root Letter has no ecchi content whatsoever, instead adopting an art style that features hand-drawn characters and “painted” backdrops of real locations in Japan. On top of looking beautiful, it’s the start of a new series from a fairly major publisher in Japan (Kadokawa) and, judging by the speed we got an English version over here, it looks likely that we’re going to see the other installments shortly after their native versions, too. Not only that, it’s noteworthy in that it focuses not on a group of teenagers as many other Japanese works do, but instead on a group of 33-year olds.

Let’s talk about why this happens

We all know why this happens: clicks. What games critic has time to cover obscure Japanese games when they could be raking in the clicks by posting meaningless, needless “guide content” for Watch Dogs 2 or Call of Duty? I know, I’ve been there, done that.

The thing is, this approach to content strategy becomes a vicious cycle. These games remain popular at least partly because they’re always plastered all over the major gaming sites, and the relentless pursuit of This Tuesday’s Article On The Big Game That Came Out Last Week does damage to gaming criticism as a whole because it gives needless amounts of attention to titles that already have a ton of attention on them thanks to their astronomical marketing budgets.

What I’d really like to see is more sites making a specific effort to go out of their way to cover games that are a little more off the beaten track, but which still have cultural significance of some sort — whether it’s the popularity of something like Neptunia, or the self-conscious maturity of Root Letter — and helping to broaden the medium for everyone. Some sites already make an effort to cover Western indie games in this regard, and while there are occasionally some questions to be asked over whether certain games would be covered if the developer and the writer weren’t friends with one another, I feel it’s more important to note that this is a start.

While we’re on, what I’d also like to see is a complete end to the mockery of Japanese games in the press, particularly by those who clearly have no intention of attempting to engage with a game. No-one should be mocking anyone else’s taste — particularly those in positions of power as “tastemakers”; live and let live.

The insufferable “progressive” crowd are always going on about “diversity”, so what I would very much like to see is an acknowledgement of Japan in 2016 as part of that diversity. There’s still a rich flow of quality games coming out of that country on a monthly basis, and as Nelva noted in that tweet that sparked off this whole entry, very few of them that don’t have Souls or Fantasy in their title get a look-in. Wouldn’t it be great to see that change?

I’m not going to hold my breath, mind you. In the meantime, well, I’ll do what I can with MoeGamer — so please, show your support if you like what you see.