Ninja Gaiden's wall-flipping, shoulder-launching badass intoxicated me, as did Panzer Dragoon's morphic flying dragons. Resident Evil's motion was frustrating but I at least felt like I was there - and when those dogs came through the windows I leapt out of my chair. You know what I'm talking about.
I think that's what I'm missing in the major Japanese franchises. Mario doesn't wire up my brain for movement. Final Fantasy - well, jeez. Chibi Robo, as adorable as it was, didn't make me feel like I was really there.
I want games to transport me, to upload my brain into some other kind of body - or some new kind of machine. And I haven't seen enough of that kind of thing in the games Nintendo, or much of the Japanese gaming industry, sends our way.
That leaves me with a sort of fond but distant regard for the efforts of Shigeru Miyamoto and his colleagues. Some of them make games I love. I read their reviews and interviews as obsessively as I do the rest of gaming coverage. But they mostly make games for people who are not me. Judging by the slow death spiral of the GameCube outside of Japan, I'm not alone.
The chasm between Japanese and western gaming is widening, not shrinking. Those distinctively quirky, idiosyncratic titles so beloved by our homegrown otaku don't find their way into the dorm rooms and LAN parties of America. Those of you who obsessively import the latest titles for your modded consoles do not comprise a meaningful constituency and your cries fall upon the market's deaf ears.
The battle for the mind of the western videogamer has been fought and won. This isn't a meritocracy and I'm not saying the games I love are better than the games you love. They're great games, innovative and delightful and bizarre. But the trend in this country is toward the marginalization of those strange and glorious mutants in favor of the well-defined genre assembly lines of EA, Ubisoft and Take Two. And I'm complicit in that process because the games I love are winning. It doesn't make me right and it doesn't make me happy. But I've seen the view from here and I'm telling you straight up: when Sony is run by a Brit and when even Japanese gamers want Xbox 360s almost as much as they want Nintendo Revolutions, you don't have to be a hater to see what's coming.
Otaku today, gaijin tomorrow, sayonara Mario.
John Tynes has been a game designer and writer for fifteen years, and is a columnist for the Stranger, X360 UK, and the Escapist. His most recent book is Wiser Children, a collection of his film criticism.
