5 Japanese Gaming Trends That Never Took Off In The West

By Patrick Hessman / August 7, 2013

Let's face it: What becomes a bestseller on one end of the Pacific doesn't always burn up the sales charts on the other. Case in point, video games. Many franchises and genres have been hits in both Japan and the United States, like the continuing excellent sales of Pokémon or Super Mario Bros. Heck, it was the relationship between the two countries' video game industries that saved the medium when the American market nearly killed it and the Japanese market brought it back. Sometimes though, a game comes along that breaks sales records in one country and barely creates a blip in the radar in the other. First person shooters, for example, routinely fail to find an audience in Japan. Here are five franchises and genres that Japanese gamers can't get enough of, but just never caught on with Americans.

5. Social Games

Ever play a portable game from Japan and find out there are cool features that you can only access through interacting with other systems, but miss out because you can never find someone else who has the game in your vicinity? Or maybe you can never find anyone to join you on hunts within your system's wireless range. Those come courtesy of the Japanese trend of wireless social gaming.

Handheld systems interacting with each other through wireless doesn't sound like a bad idea, does it? It can work excellently...when you have cities with population densities as high as Japan. When living in packed apartment complexes and traveling on crowded subways, there are plenty of opportunities for the DS or PSP to find another system to interact with. Compare that to the wide open spaces of the United States, and you have video games with features that unfortunately can never be utilized. Nintendo has begun to turn the tides for this style of gaming though with the 3DS, by building wireless social gaming right into the system itself with StreetPass.

Hey, speaking of multiplayer friendly games...