The legendary game director Masahiro Sakurai was recently awarded the “Art Encouragement Prize” from the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs. At an acceptance speech given at the awards ceremony on March 11th, 2025, Sakurai was asked about what he feels the Japanese games industry should do to continue growing, to which he replied, “I think Japanese people should keep pursuing the things that Japanese people like.”
Out of context, this sounds as if he’s maybe attempting to stifle creativity, but that’s not exactly what he means. In an interview with Japanese outlet Entax, Sakurai explained that for a brief period in the Japanese industry, there was a trend of attempting to “Americanize” certain franchises (think Capcom in the seventh console generation). In his own words, “you could say that there was a culture of following de facto standards.”
What Sakurai believes has helped over the last few console generations is that developers have stuck to what local customers want. Not only that, but Western gamers have responded well to Japanese games because they are specifically Japanese. “I think that they seek the uniqueness and fun of Japanese games,” Sakurai stated. Surprisingly, this sentiment might be 100% true.
While you’d likely never be able to confirm or deny Sakurai’s claim with empirical evidence, one of the factors for the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series’ success is that the games are firmly Japanese. In the early days of the franchise, creator Toshihiro Nagoshi set out to make a game that appealed strictly to Japanese gamers. It saved Sega from bankruptcy in the 2000s and while the series would take another decade or so to catch on overseas, it eventually became a mega-hit. One of the most common compliments that foreign gamers give to Like a Dragon is that “it was different from Western games.”
By sticking to what his team knew best, i.e. their homeland, Nagoshi was able to steer Like a Dragon into a specific identity that then heavily appealed to a local audience and certain pockets of fans overseas. The games aren’t for everyone, but they are unmistakably Japanese and wildly different from what you can get in the West. You can apply this thinking to Western devs, too, who should make games from what they know instead of worrying about broad appeal.
Sakurai agrees with that, too. His ultimate conclusion during the Entax interview was, “In other words, I think that the ideal would be to make games the way you like, as those who agree with you will enjoy them.” Sakurai wishes teams would have creative freedom to explore what they want instead of trying to work to a specific mandate. Realistically, that would be the best outcome for the industry.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
