That period of time in the late 2000s-early 2010s when Japanese companies pandered to Western audiences was just miserable
Wow, I can't believe Dark Void didn't just fly off the shelves.
Capcom was probably the worst offender, but Hudson made Bomberman dark, gritty and shitty with Act Zero and Namco made Ace Combat: Assault Horizon with QTEs and a NATO bootlicking plot, and gave Ridge Racer to FlatOut developers Bugbear to turn into a Burnout ripoff with Unbounded. Many such cases!
In 2010 the first Nier game came out in two versions, I remember being baffled by it but I suppose in the end they figured out that every culture loves
I played through the first three Onimusha games for the first time recently and you can see the beginnings of Capcom's Westward push in Onimusha 3 from 2004. The first two games are incredibly Japanese. The main characters are directly modeled after Japanese actors, the games take place in the Sengoku period and most of the named characters are actual historical figures and the stories are full of Japanese melodrama, especially the second game where characters will cry as they monologue about their traumatic backstories, their dreams, etc
Then you get to the third game and there's a clear push for more general international appeal. The intro cinematic has motion capture done by Donnie Yen and in addition to Takeshi Kaneshiro returning as Samanosuke from the first game, main character duties are split between him and Jean Reno as Jacques, a modern day French soldier/agent/guy with trenchcoat who becomes involved in the plot when series villain Nobunaga Oda finds a way to bring his demonic army through a time portal to modern day France.
Compared to first and second game it's very clear the game's storytelling tries to emulate Hollywood blockbusters, specifically Roland Emmerich movies (Jean Reno was in 1998's Godzilla 🤔). The scene where the Genma invade Paris looks like it's from a disaster movie and Jean Reno's character is a recent widower with a young son who does not get along with Jacques' new girlfriend
The Onimusha games were produced by Keiji Inafune, who was also the main driving force behind Capcom's attempt at appealing more to Western tastes. The first two games contain trailers for their sequels while 3 contains a trailer for Shadow of Rome, Keiji Inafune's first go at building a new franchise from the ground up for the Western market. It failed to sell in the US and the sequel apparently became Dead Rising instead
I actually liked all three games, and the third one might've been the most entertaining one. It was just really fun to see Capcom awkwardly trying to turn their incredibly Japanese samurai action game into something that would appeal (more) to Western gamers.
Their guesses as to what American audiences would like are also just fascinating. "Jean Reno? Paris? France? Americans think those are cool, right? Wait, I got it! Gladiators in Ancient Rome!"
I kind of want to check out Shadow of Rome at some point now 🤔
Dork Void is a turbojank game that barely lasts three hours and has Nolan North, but switching from dorky-third-person-cover-mode to dogfighter jetpack mode and buzzing ground enemies feels so good. You can pull off some bullshit in that game.
It's hideously bad here, thinking about it now the entire game seems to be built for the people who complain about plane games being about 'circling around and around shooting at dots on the screen' while missing that's kinda the point and also being incredibly reductive and showing they didn't actually play the game. Kinda like when someone complains that a mech game doesn't control like a normal shooter, I want to grab them by the shoulders and scream at them that's the point and that if it controlled like a normal shooter it would just be a hideously bad shooter.
And I just remembered the worst part of the game, the fact that there's 2 turret sections in this piece of shit disaster of a train wreck, not counting the AC-130 mission. Netting the minigun turret just as much attention as the two helicopter missions, 3 if we want to count the AC-130 as a turret section.
Assault Horizon actually was multi platform so I give it a pass because it was my first. But yeah bringing AC to IRL was a miserable idea that should never be tried again unless I get to play as S-500 operator who gets conscripted into flying a SU-75 after a Belkan American proxy bio-weapon targets all the pilots. Level 1 is actually just operating a fancy as fuck “shoots down Americans” machine.
I remember just before that when every North American game critic seems to hate Japanese games, stylized games, RPGs (especially JRPGs) and we're generally joyless.
I specifically remember XPlay said Kingdom Hearts 2 was too long, too complicated* and had graphics that were too stylized.