Several Japanese AAA Devs talk PS4 and future of the AAA Industry in Japan

http://nichegamer.com/2015/08/top-ja...ames-industry/

Notes on the FF VII Remake from Kitase.
*They’re not opposed to making changes to the battle system, just working on the direction they want to take things.
Normally when you remake something like that it turns into more of an Action RPG but they want to retain the feeling of FFVII while pursing different ways of surprising you.

Both Sega and Koei-Tecmo planning on releasing PS4 exclusives in the following years.

And Harada of Namco-Bandai had a couple interesting things to say. This first one depresses me.

Over the last 10 years, Japanese devs seem to have lost the spirit to compete worldwide when it comes to new titles.


It’s hard to get those who like to play games on smartphones to want to play traditional console games. We need to get them to think that they’d rather play with a controller.

A lot of enthusiastic commitment mixed with cautious skepticism in there, especially from Kitase, but I don't think anyone can deny that the games are coming. I'm buying four Fall releases for my PS4 and three of them are Japanese, two of which are RPGs. It's a great start and the future looks even brighter.

I think the HD jump was hard for the whole industry, the difference being the West had Unreal Engine 3 to bail them out for the first half, while Japan didn't. The good news is Unreal Engine 4 has much better Japanese support out of the gate, hence why Dragon Quest XI and Kingdom Hearts 3 are already so far into development whereas FFXV seemingly continues to struggle.

The real test will be DQXI's PS4 performance in Japan, where it's going up against a version on the much more popular 3DS. I think that's going to determine whether this renewed commitment to consoles transitions into a full-blown renaissance or just a continuation of the familiar mid-tier titles, with the big players leveraging their flagship IPs every few years.