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Alive and Well: PC Gaming in Japan

For the past two decades, many gamers have considered Japan the gaming Mecca, the center of all things to do with digital entertainment, and it's certainly easy to see why. Some of the greatest console and arcade games ever created have come from Japanese companies like Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Capcom, Konami, Square, Namco, Enix...I could go on. For about 20 years, Japanese companies have been exporting games to the US that, while distinctly Japanese, have become as American as apple pie. The average Joe on the street can probably recognize Mario, Sonic, and Pac-Man for who they are, but he might not realize that they were created by Japanese companies. At any rate, Japan's impression on the video game market in the US--and the world--has been unquestionably significant, and with every passing year, it grows greater and greater.

The same, however, can't be said as far as Japanese PC games are concerned. PC gaming exists in Japan, and while it's a fairly successful industry, it has nowhere near the market share that console gaming does. While I'm no economist, I think part of the reason for the comparative lack of success of PC gaming and PCs in general in Japan probably has to do with several factors, including the relative lack of high-speed Internet access, the relative lack of cheap Internet access, the prohibitive cost of PC hardware, and the somewhat odd but logical fact that PCs are generally bulky. As anyone who's been inside a Japanese residence knows, bulky items have no place in a typical, cramped Japanese apartment. Consoles, on the other hand, are cheap, small, and don't need annual hardware upgrades.

As is the case around the world, Warcraft III is quite popular in Japan.

Despite these obstacles, there is a fair amount of PC gaming in Japan. You just have to look hard to find it. That's the good news. The bad news is that most of this PC gaming revolves around the peculiar genre of hentai, or anime-based soft-core pornography. GameSpot Live producer Craig Beers and I were in Tokyo a few weeks ago, and I think that we can both safely say that there are few things more embarrassing than inadvertently finding yourself in the middle of the adult section of a game store. Apparently, such games don't carry the same stigma over there that they would in the US, but it was still awkward nonetheless.

Undaunted by our run-in with material most foul, we continued on and finally stumbled upon an honest-to-goodness PC games store in the middle of Tokyo's famous Akihabara electronics district. A quick glance around this store revealed little more than what we'd expect to see at an Electronics Boutique or a Best Buy. The shelves were lined with an equal number of localized import PC games and domestic PC games. As you'd probably expect, Warcraft III seemed to be all the rage, as this store (and the stores we subsequently found) were adorned with posters and standees of orcs, humans, night elves, and undead.

"Tycoon" games seem to be quite popular as well--there was an entire shelf dedicated to the likes of Car Tycoon, Mall Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, RollerCoaster Tycoon, and so on. And not surprisingly, The Sims took up a significant amount of real estate in this otherwise tiny PC games store. Of course, they're not called "The Sims" in Japan--they're called Sim People. And the expansion packs? Party Fever is House Party, Happy Life is Livin' Large, and Love Love Date is--you guessed it--Hot Date. Even first-person shooters like Soldier of Fortune II, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Ghost Recon, Global Ops, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Command & Conquer Renegade seemed to be well stocked. Interestingly enough, Grand Theft Auto III for the PC was widely available, even though the original PlayStation 2 version has yet to be picked up by a Japanese publisher.

Ever wanted to play as the Germans? Chances are you're not likely to see these games at your local EB.

Typing games are also quite popular in Japan. We got a small taste of the country's obsession with this almost-educational genre with Typing of the Dead, but the selection of typing games in Japan is staggering. We counted nearly 90 different games, encompassing subjects that ranged from recognizable to downright bizarre. There were typing games for Macross, Gundam, Golgo 13, and Fist of the North Star, and they all looked quite good. The Macross typing game, called Aiuchi Typing Valkyrie, had a standard mode that involved your mech shooting down incoming Zentraedi battle pods as you typed away, as well as a Minmei mode that required you to type in the correct lyrics in succession with Minmei's singing--kind of like karaoke, but with a keyboard instead of a microphone.

Without a doubt, though, the most popular types of PC games in Japan--or at least the most prevalent in stores--are, of all things, simulators. And it's in this section of the store that we really realized that, no matter how universal Japanese games may be, we were truly no longer in Kansas--or California, for that matter. Japan has what's arguably the world's largest and most efficient public transit train system, so it was no surprise to find that Microsoft's Train Simulator is a huge hit there. Yes, the game also has a loyal online community in this country, but Train Simulator's minimal impact here just doesn't compare with the rows and rows of similarly themed train sims that line the insides of Japanese game stores. Microsoft's Train Simulator alone has been supported with the release of seven retail expansion packs that add more railways and current and classic Japan Rail cars and locomotives.

As wide as their selection was in that store, it wasn't the train simulators that opened our eyes to the differences in gaming culture between Japan and the United States. It was the flight sims. Arranged neatly along the length of several aisles were numerous flight simulators, some of which dealt with modern commercial airplanes, and some of which involved historical combat--really, no different than anything that you'd find at your local games store. Upon closer inspection, however, we noticed something a little funny. A Combat Flight Simulator 2: WWII Pacific Theater box depicted a Mitsubishi Zero instead of a Corsair on its cover, unlike the boxes in the US. Furthermore, the back had pictures that showed Zeros shooting down Wildcats and attacking US shipping. Personally, I don't know how I'd feel about buying Falcon 4.0 if the box featured an F-16 in flames, but that's to be expected--it's simply part of the localization process. But what Craig and I couldn't have anticipated was the sheer number of expansion packs available for Combat Flight Simulator 2, and how they were presented.

The battles of Pearl Harbor, Singapore, Midway, and Saipan are all chronicled from the Japanese perspective in these add-ons to CFS2.

The first add-on to CFS2 is called Attack of Pearl Harbor: Our Surprise Attack Shall Succeed. Its subject matter is pretty self-explanatory, but seeing it made us feel just as awkward as being surrounded by all those hentai games. In it, you assume the role of two different Japanese lieutenants--one for each wave--who are tasked with such missions as sinking the Arizona, the California, and the Nevada, as well as bombing Ford Island and Hickam Field. Japan's other major success in the Pacific war, the attack on Singapore, is chronicled by a second expansion pack called Battle of Malay: Sink the Prince of Wales. There were other add-ons that involved some of Japan's failures during the war, like Battle of Midway: Destiny of Five Minutes. This third expansion pack gives you the chance to change the outcome of the entire war by having the American counterattack take place at 10:25am instead of 10:20am, when the Japanese Zeros were stuck on their aircraft carriers, rearming and refueling. Four Japanese carriers, with their air cover grounded, were sunk that day, and the entire momentum of the Pacific war shifted in the US's favor. Successfully finish this expansion pack, however, and Japan retains her initiative. The last expansion pack of note was called Defend our Mainland: Destroy the B-29. As you'd probably expect, it tasks you with defending against the B-29 air raids on Saipan and Tokyo.

It was almost surreal seeing those games. American gamers play a ton of wargames, and I'm sure that some of those games would probably embarrass or at least uncomfortably amuse gamers from other countries. Wouldn't someone from Germany feel a little weird seeing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, for instance, with the invasion of Normandy on the box? Perhaps not really--Allied Assault was released in Germany, almost as is. You still play as Jimmy Patterson, and you still fight German-speaking Nazis, and the game was well received. In fact, it has quite a healthy community backing it up in Germany. For what it's worth, though, those expansion packs to CFS2 seem to have been very well done, and the developer, Twilight Express, is a rather large developer of all kinds of PC games in Japan.

I don't know how those games would fare if they were ever brought over to the States. While some war buffs would probably enjoy the chance to relive those famous battles from a different perspective, there would undoubtedly be some kind of backlash against the game's still-sensitive subject matter. By that same token, it's actually not so surprising that Japanese versions of these games are portrayed from the Japanese perspective. Regardless, it was good to note that PC gaming is alive and well in Japan, and it was certainly interesting to see how tastes in gaming in that country compared with ours.