The original Xbox was hardly a storming success in Japan, but despite that, Microsoft went big in the region with its follow-up. In this period, you had an aggressive Xbox making moves in the region. Developers were courted as they always are, but it’s crucial that in this time period much of that courting came to consummation. Deals were inked, with Xbox ultimately signing a tranche of high-profile exclusives or timed exclusives for fans of Japanese games both in the homeland and abroad, and where true exclusive deals failed to materialise Xbox was able to successfully leverage the 360’s head start over PS3 to secure optically valuable ‘defacto’ exclusives.
Square Enix was approached, for instance, and while it took a while to cough up Final Fantasy it nevertheless spun up a suite of Xbox exclusives - Star Ocean 4, Infinite Undiscovery, and The Last Remnant. While Final Fantasy remained out of reach, Xbox also courted the franchise’s father, now divorced from Square, resulting in Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon - still two of Xbox’s most unique exclusives.
A little company called FromSoftware, which had already fully supported the original Xbox with games like Otogi, signed up with the likes of Chromehounds and Enchanted Arms. Namco proffered Tales of Vesperia, the criminally underrated Eternal Sonata, and the earth-shakingly good Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. The list goes on. Perhaps most consequential was Capcom, with that particular publisher offering up tentpole promotional exclusives like Dead Rising and Lost Planet, plus the promise of true multiplatform day-and-date releases in franchises like Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and Street Fighter.
There were the one million troops of Ninety-Nine Nights. Tecmo Koei had Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive. Oh, and Konami offered up Bomberman: Act Zero. That one sure made up for the lack of MGS4, yeah.
It goes beyond those big names, though. With its PC-like development environment and a clearly thriving Japanese development relations department, the 360 also quietly became a default platform for stranger, more niche Japanese offerings that for a long time had largely been banished to PC. Xbox 360 became the non-arcade home of shump bullet hell titles, for instance, with the genre-dominating Japanese dev Cave ultimately putting over fifteen titles on 360 including the likes of Deathsmiles and DoDonPachi. In the same period of time, Cave only committed a single shmup to PlayStation 3.
It wasn’t just shooters, either. There were occasional trashy-but-exclusive action titles from developers like Cavia, and the 360 enjoyed a healthy slate of exclusive Japanese visual novels and life sim games. That included some porny ones, yes (the 360, to its shame, is key to GalGun’s origin story), but beyond that too. The 360 was the initial console home of Namco’s The Idolmaster, and was also the first place that Steins;Gate was released, years before it landed on PlayStation platforms. Not all of these games would even end up releasing in the West officially, but many had English language compatibility anyway, and lots of the shooters were simple enough that you could puzzle through. It was a golden age of importing niche Japanese games that, not that long ago, were often arcade-exclusive.
What revisionist trash, which is expected from Eurorag and the rest of the ZD media at this point - both the framing of the headline and content. If the comparison is to the Xbox One generation… I’d still argue, “eh not really” if you look at the entirety of the respective generations. If you’re comparing to the current gen and beyond, there absolutely is no comparison… coming from the guy who owns almost every Japanese-developed title on 360 and further.
It’s objective fact: Xbox 360 was receiving hardly any Square Enix titles, save for Final Fantasy (for example, Kingdom Hearts remaster wasn’t available until Xbox One; I own the PS3 copy). Yakuza was not on 360, Dragon Quest (nor any Enix property) was not on the 360, and perhaps most ironically (despite their mention of Namco) after Tales of Vesperia, the Xbox 360 missed out on every single Tales game until the Xbox One (which amounted to four Sony exclusive Tales titles - until very recently - and I believe two for Nintendo). There is no good-faith argument to state that the 360 had better support than Xbox in the last decade.
Lest we forget that by the second half of the generation, nearly all of the Japanese support had dried up and I’m sick of this revisionist garbage from the usual rags, all to serve as a “see we didn’t always hate Xbox” false narrative… whilst propagating new false narratives.
Thanks for saving me the click though and being further evidence of the brain rot taken hold…
Edit: Hell, I even forgot to mention the massive dearth that was nearly every Atlus property skipping the Xbox 360, save for Catherine and one other title.
I’m not reading all this, but don’t we currently have better support for 3rd parties currently than at any time? including Japanese games?
We do. Don’t give these garbage sites clicks when they’re just spewing verifiably false information.
I don’t care what anyone says, there is such thing as objective fact and when such things exist, arguing against is akin to what we see with cultists and certain politic parties: it’s baseless, a waste of energy, and holds no value in reality. There are things such as games lists that games collectors, for example, use to validate such things and it’s pretty easy to see the massive dearth of Japanese content in the second half of the 360 generation compared to both the Wii and PS3, compared to what Xbox players currently are able to attain (even if you include the Xbox One by the aforementioned measures Eurorag so conveniently omitted).
Sure they commissioned more exclusives… but that’s all. Like that’s literally all. Until now, until the Series X|S consoles, Xbox was probably getting skipped on Japanese developed games like 80% of the time (random number I just thought up, but we all know it was more than every other game). There was a LOT of work done at the tail end of the Xbox One generation and now throughout the Xbox Series generation to improve support from not just Japanese developers/publishers, but creators in the east generally and everyone. There’s more games on Xbox and releasing on Xbox than ever. And as much as I love Blue Dragon (crazy it’s not more popular; I watched the anime as a kid) and hear how Lost Odyssey is revered, I just would not trade the third party support we have now for more commissioned exclusives. I mean heck, if all they care about are judging exclusives then PS and Nintendo have lost tons just because Japanese publishers are now trying to grow and be everywhere from day one. Persona and Yakuza for example have gone from something people consider defacto Playstation games to become massives popular global sensations.
At first I was excited for Eurogamer to do a whole series of articles on the Xbox 360, but I’ve been mostly disappointed at the actual articles. It’s a whole lot of the same old concern and dunking, just with the angle of, “Wasn’t the Xbox 360 great compared to how much everything sucks now?”
I’ll be honest I didn’t read all of the articles, I’m just posting them because I feel like it can be interesting to discuss here. But yeah, it reads like some kind of low effort post on reddit. It’s like they didn’t live through it and are only commenting on hearsays, assumptions and rumors. It’s like everyone has bad memory, writing from their bad recollections.
Microsoft had always some ties with japanese developpers, like SEGA with Shenmue or KOEI TECMO with Dead or Alive or Ninja Gaiden. They just tried to expand and fund exclusives game like JRPG that Xbox was lacking. I think it didn’t really pan out in the end, but it was a good effort and got some fine good games like Blue Dragon or Lost Odyssey. I think they should have invested more in porting in my opinion, but they were trying to get some of the JRPG audience on Xbox 360, just like they had some of the RPG fans on Xbox.
Did anyone read mine? 
[quote=“Jon “Sikamikanico” Clarke, post:8, topic:22645, username:Sikamikanico”]
Did anyone read mine? 
Yes, I did. It must have been so much fun organizing these “Sikfests”!
I don’t even know what to say other than Eurogamer has sadly turned into clickbait trash that spreads misinformation, how the might have fallen huh…trying to sell that the 360 had better Japanese support than what we have now is uninformed at best and suspicious and shady at worst, besides the many examples provided above by Knottian of Japanese IPs that have finally come to Xbox this generation we even had a fuckin’ Vanillaware game with Unicorn Overlord released at launch which is a first for Xbox as a platform in general.
The simple answer is AGAIN that no one in those sites actually play on Xbox that is why this “article” from this buffoon ended up being published, anyone that has Xbox as their main platform with even a sliver of interest in the Japanese gaming scene’s respond after reading this piece would’ve been “what the fuck is this bro?”.
Yep. “The only games I remember from the Xbox 360 are two exclusives (because if they hadn’t been exclusives I never would have touched the console at all lol) and since that generation I haven’t played, touched, or thought about Xbox… but here are my thoughts on the current state of Xbox.”
I would have been laughed out of the room had I even somewhat suggested a mainline Persona game would ever come to an Xbox much less anything from Vanillaware. (Still hoping to get more stuff on xbox from them. I would even triple dip on an Xbox version of Dragon’s Crown which I bought for PS3 and 4) Closest we got was P4Arena and Ultimax. Of course when it came to Japanese produced fighters the 360 was eating good and was the de facto Evo console , but not for jrpg’s and many other games . It was better than the support we got for the original Xbox ( though we still got great stuff like Phantom Dust, Phantom Crash , Metalwolf and Otogi . FROM Soft gave Xbox a lot of support in those days) but nowhere near what we’re getting now obviously.
I like Alex, but this is a bit wide of the mark.
This year Xbox published a Platinum Games and TeamNinja developed Ninja Gaiden 4 game, the first since 2012.
The 360 benefited from “arrogant Sony” a bit during the beginning of the generation. I guess this is rumor, but apparently Sony was rejecting games that weren’t “HD” or using the power of Bluray to showcase the console. Genres like Shootemups, Visual Novels, and small “indie game” weren’t being released on the PS3 so they moved to the 360 which created a little niche for the console. Eventually Sony wised up and started to support them again so that advantage just dried up.