cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49816572
In an interview in the new issue of Famitsu, Miyamoto was asked why Nintendo‘s IPs are enjoyed around the world.
Miyamoto replied that the key to a successful game isn’t looking at what’s trending and trying to capitalise on that, but starting with ideas that the developers personally find fun and working around them.
“People have long asked me, ‘why does a mustachioed middle-aged guy like Mario sell so well?’ and I always think, ‘that’s a bit rude, isn’t it?'” Miyamoto joked (via machine translation). “Well, I wonder the same thing myself – why did an older guy like this become a hit? But if you look at it simply, it’s because he was introduced alongside incredibly fun games.
I suppose the real point here is to just make the games you want to make, and as long as your passion shines through your audience will find you.
But it’s interesting to me to contrast Miyamoto’s statement with the fact that Nintendo absolutely has been aiming to globalize their IPs - and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Look at Rhythm Heaven for example. DS and Fever had dubbed audio for the international releases, which was somewhat divisive with
weebsfans. Megamix featured dual audio for the first time, and that’s good because options are good.But then Groove took a different approach, the game is designed to not need a dub in the first place. There are fewer vocal cues compared to previous entries, and they’re either gibberish or in a few cases, English words that are so common to be understood globally (even for the Japanese version, random English words in video games is seen as cool). There simply aren’t any games with full sentences like Ringside or Love Rap this time around. So now the audio is just identical in all releases.
Vocal tracks are present, and most of them are Japanese, but they’ve also included a few in English, French, Spanish, and Italian. And those are again just the same in every version. Rather than swapping out the vocal tracks for localizations, they’ve opted to give the game a wider mix of more songs in more languages. It’s a deliberate change in direction, and it’s one I think is pretty cool. Reminds me of how Tekken switched to having every character speak their own native language (with subtitles).
It’s a sort of reverse localization, where they’ve designed the game in a way that minimizes the need to localize much anyway. I think it makes perfect sense to try and move in this direction, and it’s clearly worked out since Groove massively outsold its predecessors, but at the same time it’s a little sad to think there’s probably never going to be anything like Bon Odori in future titles.