Part of the problem, I think, is that the Japanese market has a lot of gamers who like to have their hand held, and relatively few who want an open-world adventure. The same may even be true of the Western markets, but open-world games such as Fallout do NOT sell well in Japan, and attempts by Japanese developers to put those elements into Japanese games provoke criticism from the fan base that the game is "too Western". So you get this thing of a game where what to do next is always real obvious. Go where the thing tells you, fight these enemies by waiting for an opening and then attacking, bomb the obviously bombable wall, etc. Press a food pellet, get a reward. An open-world game confronts them with the unpleasant possibility of the unexpected. Now you have to survive, and what you have to do to survive isn't obvious. So you're going to die, and die, and die an awful lot in the game, and there's nothing like the artificial feeling of "making progress" brought about by the scripted game's obvious action-reward mechanism. But each death, each failure brings with it new knowledge about how the game works and so when you finally do "make progress" it's because you gained understanding through effort and that's much more rewarding.
Part of the problem, I think, is that the Japanese market has a lot of gamers who like to have their hand held, and relatively few who want an open-world adventure. The same may even be true of the Western markets, but open-world games such as Fallout do NOT sell well in Japan, and attempts by Japanese developers to put those elements into Japanese games provoke criticism from the fan base that the game is "too Western". So you get this thing of a game where what to do next is always real obvious. Go where the thing tells you, fight these enemies by waiting for an opening and then attacking, bomb the obviously bombable wall, etc. Press a food pellet, get a reward. An open-world game confronts them with the unpleasant possibility of the unexpected. Now you have to survive, and what you have to do to survive isn't obvious. So you're going to die, and die, and die an awful lot in the game, and there's nothing like the artificial feeling of "making progress" brought about by the scripted game's obvious action-reward mechanism. But each death, each failure brings with it new knowledge about how the game works and so when you finally do "make progress" it's because you gained understanding through effort and that's much more rewarding.