Google up the influence of Wizardry on JRPGs as just one well-documented counter-example. Japanese game designers in the 80s and 90s were designing in the 80s and 90s, not during the Tokugawa shogunate.
The D&D spirit influenced both "Final Fantasy" and "Dragon Quest", two of the biggest selling games of 80s in Japan... which eventually grew into big games in the US as well. Tower of Druaga series also was D&D based IIRC. Legend of Zelda is very D&D-esque as well, Hyrulians are basically Tolken elves (magically inclined, pointy ears, "beautiful") while Kokiri are elves classic (magically inclined, short forest dwellers who help Santa build toys). Redead are your classic Zombies, and Wizards and magic items are the norm.
Its much like how the origin of "big eye anime characters" are actually traced to Mickey Mouse as the root of "big eye cartoon characters". There's a lot of influence from US to Japan, and vice versa (Lol Power Rangers)
The "strange" part is how language barriers seem to emphasize different parts. Like slimes in Dragon Quest are a major thing, but oozes / slime monsters have lost cultural significance in western D&D spin-offs like Diablo or Skyrim.
But go back to Bestiary 1.0 of D&D, and you'll see the significance in both Western and Japanese RPGs. Its just the different parts that the two cultures remembered about the book I guess.
Funny you mention Wizardry because it's yet another example of galapagos syndrome in action. They took the basic ideas from the first Wizardry (even the spell naming schemes are still used to this day in games series like the Shin Megami Tensei) and then.. literally stopped looking at anything new in the series. It's like Wizardry 8 never happened in Japan. Their Wizardry clones to this day still play like Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, the first game of the series, just with "improved" (but anime-style) graphics. The innovations like the more open world, various interactions with world elements, improved positioning and movement to the turn based combat and so on. There's still no concept of movement and position (beyond being "frontline" and "backline" binaries) in games like Etrian Odyssey. And then games like Fallout came out and showed it was possible to integrate a large amount of variable interactions with the world and consequences to your choices and Japan was still making those Wizardry 1 clones as if the genre could never, ever improve on that basic game design.
It's only very recently in Japan, with the success of games like Skyrim outselling their own jrpg in their home country, that japanese developers started to take note that maybe, the genre could do better than replicate the same game from the 80s ad infinitum. Which is how they ended up with games like FF15 which finally dropped the primitive, limited combat system from early wizardries that weren't even position aware. I prefer turn based RPGs, but I would take the real time FF15 over a system that doesn't even simulate the space in which you fight ignoring all potential positioning and movement tactics. Something that even board based, pen&paper RPGs can simulate. Their own take on the ability to feature combat in an actual environment usually precludes any RPG features other than pure combat, like Fire Emblem. They have good turn based combat but that's all there is to the game. No dungeons, no exploration, no world, not much choices, no nothing, just a series of combat missions after combat missions. It's the kind of hyperspecialization and narrowmindedness that led to the galakei and the inability to build anything like the modern smartphone.
Nintendo is another manifestation of the galapagos that has just recently started to panic and understand that they won't be able to go on forever like that. The next Zelda will finally let go of the template created by Ocarina of Time and will play more open. That's a start, considering how much they love to remake the same thing again and again. http://digg.com/video/zelda-is-going-open-world-and-the-game...
I see this trend in MMORPGs as well, where they try to "action" up combat and you end up running around avoiding circles on the ground while plinking away with your backing attack because anything else is suicide.
And i would love to see some flip phones in western markets. All i see now is a slab of glass monoculture. Cover up the logo and you would not be able to tell who made the damn slab.
At least compact cars have the aerodynamics excuse to all look the same. But i don't see that applying to mobile phones.
Doesn't seem like a "game design sense" anymore than the fact that they have an isolated culture and their games simply resonate within this culture.
We all know the 'asian websites' thing which is spoken about a lot. Their websites look like shit to use, but to them it is simply the better way.
Nothing "mystic" about it, it is simply how they do stuff.
At least this is what I think.
To be fair, I am kinda fed up as well of this American "Chickenshit Minimalism" ( https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1... ); If you've ever visited a US landing page, it's like it was designed for a five year old. Huge empty blocks of color, sentences consisting of three or four simple words in large type, very few links widely separated from each other, and almost completely static pages with very low information density. Are Americans illiterate or just easily confused? ;)
Joking aside, I'd argue the main reason for the rise of that style of minimalistic website was responsive design. It's much easier to design a website to be responsive if the content is sparsely laid out to begin with. There was a mobile-first trend in web design, and I believe the type of layout you're referring to was the result. Perhaps we'll find better ways of handling responsive design in the future (better in the sense of making sites that are able to better tailor themselves to available resources without a notable increase in code).
No no no... It's just that good web design is simply hard to find. No one is proud of these "asian websites". And it takes a while for updated good design practices to make it across the shore. Here is a decent site:
http://www.jp.playstation.com/psnow/
And for the record, a shitty "asian" one:
My main thing was that asian websites have more image-based content and their sentences and blocks of text look more blocky (due to uniformer characters and lack of spacing). I am not saying this is "shitty" - I am just saying that they have a different culture that makes these website the norm for them.
The rakuten looks quite busy, but at least it looks discoverable. I opened amazon and eBay and frankly they look hard to use since they hide some information.
But yeah the PS one looks more like a western page with a different language.
Also, if your ad blocker is on, you're probably not seeing these pages in their full glory.
JP Yahoo vs US Yahoo is a good contrast also, though the US site does smell of defeat as a portal (JP site is still dominant in Japan).
If you look at landscape design, blank spaces in modern Japanese architecture, minimalist poetry, painting, pottery, film, the websites stand out a lot. There is no "zen" in Japanese websites (again, generally speaking). The "mystic" is how we perceive their work. It exists because it's just hard to quantify art and design. We know something's there though. Famous designers and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright go to Japan and are completely floored. Did many other isolated cultures' aesthetics regularly floor their visitors? People don't get that from Japanese websites... we perceive them differently, without any sense of the "mystic." And that seems odd.
I think it's an interesting question (kind of like "Why is the USA bad at soccer?" which I've heard being discussed a lot before.) but only because of Japan's unquantifiable success in other areas of design.
I've heard the opposite. Think of all the LED and neon lights and the HUGE amount of advertisements in, say, Tokyo. It looks kinda like their websites imo.
For a lot of people, there isn't a good enough answer yet and that is why the question gets asked over and over again.
I think it's because a website isn't a "downtown." It's more like a single building rather than an environment built by thousands of different people. But where is the Toyo Ito of Japanese website designers?
It's true those may be reasons why they look like they do, or part of the reason, but I think it's a question that is interesting. Even if Japanese websites get their "language" from those things, it at least seems like they should get their language from other places also, such as modern architecture or industrial design.
> such as modern architecture or industrial design.
Except for some landmarks, temples and gardens, contemporary architecture in Japan is surprisingly ugly and noisy.
I think most of the big sinners of Japanese webdesign are stores (at least the examples I can think of) and something like Bic Camera is more noisy and flashy in real life than their web presence.
I saw similar differences in video game magazines. I've only had limited exposure to Famitsu, but it seems to favour a collage of smaller images laid out more evenly across the pages compared to something like Edge.
http://www.rpgland.com/content/media/2009/10/rpglanddotcom11...
http://perfectdark.retropixel.net/pdzero/scans/edge_november...
I like both styles, it's just an observation.
Some of the ideas just seem wrong to my foreign experience. A designer might say "this is easier for the player to understand", as he suggests something which seems to me 100% opaque and blackbox. There are fundamental differences to how a japanese mega-corp develops a video game.