Phil Fish response to Q&A question about Japanese games (Full context)

[Curious Duck]

Heya there,

Seeing as most people seem to miss the entire context (and hilariously misquoted lines) from the Q&A that Phil was part of. I took it upon myself to quote what was said through the response to the question asked to Phil.

The response contains dialogue from Phil Fish as well as Jonathan Blow in which the question was what did Phil Fish think of more recent Japanese games.

Phil Fish

They suck. I mean I'm sorry like you guys need to get with the times and uh make better interfaces and like update your technology because we're totally kicking your ass. Back then you guys were king of the world but the time has passed. I'm so sorry.

Jonathan Blow

I have a more game designed comment that is. Now this is uh, well I don't like Japanese games either. The thing that I don't like about them, all the modern ones that I've played except you know Dark Souls and Demon Souls and stuff. Is that you sit down and the game treats you like an idiot, right. You have to click through like 700 little boxes telling you how to do everything. There's this idea so western game designers. No I'm only familiar with the game dialogue in the west but old school games like adventure games had all this random stuff where you had to read the designers mind, right, and at some point we understood "oh, things kind of have to make sense for the player to expect to get through them, right?" So we have to train people on our game mechanic, and then the rest of the game can then be expanded out from that initial training, right?

I feel like Japanese games take that too far and they...it's...Japanese games feel like it's illegal to ever let the player do anything that has not explicitly been shown to the player in painstaking detail earlier in the game. And what that does is it kills the joy of discovery, and that's the thing I really value about games is when you figure something out that you haven't been shown, right? And when you show the player everything you're turning it into an exercise and it's an exercise that's kind of insulting because of course I can follow the exercise you told to do, right? And then they make me click through so much bad dialogue I mean western game dialogue is terrible also, but at least we hit spacebar and we can skip the whole text in there, whatever and they come in and make you hit A. Ok cutting it off there, but a more politic way of saying what Phil was saying.

Before this goes up on blogs and stuff, right? There are exceptions, right? There are Japanese games that are different from that. But the trend, just like the trend in America is like, you know, soldiers looking down a gunsight shooting dudes. It's the same felling.

Phil Fish

If you look at the first Zelda and the latest Zelda. The first Zelda, it just drops you into that world and it's just a completely open non-linear world and it's dangerous, and it's hard and you have to like learn from your mistakes and figure things out and there are these secrets, and these secrets are not obvious at all which makes them secrets and interesting. And then you play the latest Zelda and it's the most like, it's a straight corridor and everythings just holding your hand all the time. All the secrets have an arrow pointing at them, it's like "You can break this wall with a bomb" because there's a little crack and there's all this surprise and magic and like danger and mystery is just gone completely. Because of this obsession with like tutorials and making sure the player know about everything, like it just kills it for me.

Jonathan Blow

But what's awesome about that it's really easy to convince yourself that that's good design, right? Like "Of course we have to put an indication to blow up the wall

Phil Fish

Yeah, you have to clearly communicate things to the player

Jonathan Blow

It's like you have to communicate occordances, right? So therefore all the blow-upable walls have cracks on it, right? And it just...being logical about game design is too easy to take too far and then you have nothing. You have a joyless husk.

[undefined]

Couldn't agree more. Everything that comes out of that country is complete garbage. It's all nothing but mind-numbing, pandering trash.

Edit: He's ignorant towards PC gaming, but just about everything else he says I agree with.

[Blazedol]

I think you missed the point

[ℬüḓḓнїṧт_Gamer7☸]

thiz の投稿を引用：

Not supporting a developer who tells people to kill themselves on twitter. The end.

As much as it is bad to do this. The reporter and many like them deserve to be told that and more lol. They make a living stirring up trouble so they can get some advertising money. A leech reporter trying hard to make a few dollars will run down celebrtities and anyone famous to make a name for themselves.. ♥♥♥♥♥♥
i like to see them get slapped and hit when they run on people with cameras lol

[Blazedol]

No one deserves to be told to go kill themselves.

[Garlboh]

Hadley の投稿を引用：

Couldn't agree more. Everything that comes out of that country is complete garbage. It's all nothing but mind-numbing, pandering trash.

Edit: He's ignorant towards PC gaming, but just about everything else he says I agree with.

He's actually a fan of older Japanese games, he was talking about the current state of Japaanese games when he made that comment. Also, I could say the same about America.

[Cocyx The Gay Skeleton]

Blazey の投稿を引用：

No one deserves to be told to go kill themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic1YLkpl1Do

[Blazedol]

That was a great episode

[G.A.]

Ok, this is the deal:

I don't care about the developers philosophy, about what they think is bad and good and whathever. If they make a good game, i'll buy it. The end.

[Bongus]

thiz の投稿を引用：

Not supporting a developer who tells people to kill themselves on twitter. The end.

same here.

[Garlboh]

Barack Oshizzle の投稿を引用：

thiz の投稿を引用：

Not supporting a developer who tells people to kill themselves on twitter. The end.

same here.

So I'm guessing all the other people involved in making the game deserve to boycotted because of Fish too, right?

[thirdchild]

leave Renaud alone, that poor brave soldier

[Pink]

So because a guy is a douch, but makes valid points, his points become invalid?
Come on, if you can't accept the reality of the gaming world these days, then you deserve to play the carebear garbage that is produced nowadays.

[Nutter]

Cocyx The Gay Skeleton の投稿を引用：

Blazey の投稿を引用：

No one deserves to be told to go kill themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic1YLkpl1Do

Oh my god fish was quoting futurama. Brilliant. The more I hear about him the more awesome he seems.

[QUADS]

I think they're talking a lot of sense, even if they've done it in a somewhat dismissive and rude way.

[besmirched·tourist]

Because japanese games really do suck?