Since the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era, Japanese developers have struggled to keep up with their Western colleagues, as, according to the NieR series creator, they are not good at adapting technology from overseas for multiple reasons.
Discussing game development with Stellar Blade creative director Hyung-Tae Kim in a lengthy interview posted on IGN, Yoko Taro highlighted how it has proven difficult for Japanese developers to implement Western rendering systems, mostly because they are used to developing their own engines. Japanese developers were very late with incorporating rendering tools and middleware from the West, and even to this day, many schools still don’t teach this to new developers. In general, Yoko Taro feels that Japanese developers are not good at adapting technology from overseas, while Chinese and South Korean developers are much faster at using engines like Unreal for games with Japanese aesthetics.
While many Japanese developers definitely struggled with their proprietary engines, such as Square Enix with the Luminous Engine, which was used for only two games before getting shelved, other developers have developed great engines, such as CAPCOM with the RE Engine, which powers diverse games such as multiple entries in the Resident Evil series, Monster Hunter Rise, Devil May Cry 5, Street Fighter 6 and Dragon’s Dogma 2. With Unreal Engine 5 setting a new benchmark for visual quality, it will be interesting to see if Japanese developers will use it to power their future games or if any proprietary engine will be able to match its quality.
