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If you argue a Culture X game's success is proves the superiority of Culture Y because someone from Culture Y made it in clear interest of Culture X, I'm not sure we have enough of an agreement on what culture is to have an interesting discussion. Are we talking cultural ideas, motifs, and themes, the sort of things that fiction invokes to convey common understandings and shared sets of expectations that is what culture even is, or are we deferring to ownership structure as our shortcut to what culture a game is?
If it's the later, I'm not convinced, any more than I am by many of your examples. Bloodborne is a gothic horror and cosmic horror game that is quintessentially European in cultural influence. Devil May Cry is so American-culturally influenced that it's unapologetically cringe about it, ranging from the gun culture flourishing to the main character archetype to the Christian normalism.
These Japanese companies aren't unable to do Asian-culture focus games if they want to, and when they do it's very, very obvious. When Fromsoft wants to do a Soulsborne-style Asian game, they make Sekiro. The Yakuza series is a thing. The entire Dynasty Warriors franchise and umpteen spinoff varients are distinct.
Nor is there a lack of successful culturally western games. Just last year Helldivers took the gaming world by storm, and it was a reboot of a European game parody of Iraq-War Americana. Red Dead Redemption is the same era as Dragon's Dogma, and it was (and still is) a classic American cowboy story. One of the top-selling strategy games of all time, XCOM, is basically American sci-fi with NATO-militaristic liberalism. Baldur's Gate 3, the Witcher, God of War reboot.
Appealing to Western-style games as proof of the superiority of non-western-culture is less proving the point and more like fish not having the word for water.
I don't have any opinions on cultural superiority, and as best as I can tell, the original comment didn't express any, either. Just that Eastern devs seem to be appealing to Western audiences better than Western devs. Again, I believe examples of Eastern devs using Western culture in their games even better than Western devs do only supports this notion more strongly, similarly to how an away team defeating the home team in a sport that has home field advantage is a stronger signal that the away team is better than if played on a neutral field.
Now, as you point out, there are plenty of Western made games that do Western culture well. I just think it's correct that Eastern devs have done it better, especially when considering within-genre - there's no Western-made game similar to Elden Ring or Devil May Cry that come anywhere close to those games in quality or stature.
And if the foreign team defeats the home team by adopting home team signature tactics, strategies, compositions, and paradigms, that indicates that the foreign team may be doing home-team tactics better, but it does not indicate that away-team tactics are a disproof of home-team tactics or premise, or that their approach is fundamentally different. The Japanese baseball team may out-play the American team, but the sheer fact that the teams are playing baseball and not shogi is indicting whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself.
This is especially ironic in the context of east-asian countries like Japan or Korea, in which Westernization was a deliberate national policy for generations and distancing themselves from their own cultural tethers to embrace western cultural aspects was a deliberate process, even as the comparison culture (the US in particular) is commonly understood melting pot assimilation of different cultural inputs. China has solidly established culture of mimicricy of outside forms as well. These are not divergent cultures, but in many real respects cultures that consciously try to get closer.
Sure there are. What constitutes quality is subjective (most players don't, in fact, enjoy fromsoft difficulty curves), but stature is not, and there are plenty of series that absolutely crush the likes of Elden Ring, let alone DMC. There's a reason that the Elden Ring peak concurrent steam players was a bit over 950,000, and Minecraft was over ten times that- the qualities may not be what you value, but stature doesn't care about what you value, it cares about what other people care about.
And this is just peak players- in terms of players over time for the last year, Elden Ring for most of the year before the DLC was around 50-60k. PUBG was often at or above 500k. Devil May Cry 5 was closer to 5k. That puts it on the same level as Warhammer 40K: Darktide. Change the metric, and we can probably find comparisons. Metacritic scores? Profitability? Impact / appearances in other cultural products?
This is the issue with semantic gerrymandering. 'Soulsborne' isn't a genre, it's a subgenre specifically defined around a single company. There's no shortage of successful fantasy, or dark fantasy, or adventure. Winnowing the basis of comparison to exclude all others isn't making a point about a much wider category (Eastern-devs), it's just structural cherry picking, just as selecting the highest-performing eastern success rather than the slop is selection bias in action.
Sure, but we're not talking about whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself. We're talking about which baseball team is better.
Sure stature is subjective. Popularity isn't, but stature isn't just popularity, it's reputation. In any case, the games you're talking about aren't the same genre, and one doesn't need to gerrymander a soulslike genre to do so. I was actually thinking of 3rd person action open world RPG for Elden Ring, and 3rd person crazy stylish action game for DMC. Again, for either, I can't think of any Western made games of the same genre that come even close.
No, the OP is talking about which cultural paradigm is better. Hence why it is Eastern vs Western media while trying to characterize the products as culturally eastern even when only their production or publishing is, and not Eastern-made Western media versus Western-made Western media.
Without knowing what sort of metrics you're using to make the claim of stature or genre, and with you dismissing popularity, I can't think of any way to disprove the position at all, or to prove it in the first place.
DMC is high-stature based on... what? Helping establish a niche sub-genre that most players don't care about? Elden Ring's stature water point, at least, was based on its immediate release popularity- but a non-trivial part of that just-release hype was popularity benefiting from the advertising emphasizing Game of Thrones as a bridge for the non-Soulsborne, and the player base dropped precipitously when most of those non-Soulsbourne dropped. Is Stature supposed to piggy back on the initial popularity, but not enduring popularity?
What does this category 'Stature' mean beyond 'I respect it, and I think a lot of other people do too' versus 'I don't respect it, and so it doesn't matter how many others do'?
Or, to put it another way- why, besides snobery, should I be more impressed by the DMC franchise (30 million sales worldwide) than the Civilization (40 million worldwide franchise sales) or Call of Duty (425 million copies, 100 million active monthly players in 2023)?
It's not like there's lack of established western franchises that meet your broad categories. Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Red Dead, and Grand Theft Auto are all open world action games of note, some with far more RPG credentials that Elden Ring which is JRPG in the mechanical build sense rather than story-changes-according-to-actions RPG. Depending on what you mean by 'stylish' action games, Helldivers, God of War, Fortnight, Gears of War, or even Doom. Call of Duty has been a spectacle shooter for over a decade at this point- is that not stylish because it relies on gunplay and grenades and setpieces rather than melee combos and stylized cutscenes?
Well, no. This is where we go back to rhetorical gerrymandering, and using winnowing language to remove comparisons. Elden Ring and SWTOR are both open world RPGs, but one is action with 'press X to act' parkour gameplay and a non-linear narrative delivery structure, and one is MMO with 'press hotkey to act' non-parkour to activate with at least 9 novel-scale storylines, ranging from hero's journey to revenge journey to a spy thriller. Both are open-world RPGs with considerable quality, but only one is dismissed by adding yet another qualifier.
And that's when the qualifier is clear. Helldivers and DMC are not the same sort of stylish action games, but they are both action games with an emphasis on style. However, the lack of a western equivalent to DMC specifically is evidence of failure, while the eastern equivalent to Helldivers 2's brand of dystopian-parody sci-fi team-killing we're-the-baddies co-op chaos is...?
If the argument just wants to be that certain sub-genres are dominated by non-western countries, sure. That's banaly true, and can even be narrowed down to 'certain sub-genres are dominated by specific non-western companies.' No one of note outside of Koei is making Dynasty Warrior successes. But it's equally true that there are sub-genres dominated by western companies, and arguing over the stature just turns into a 'my luxury playtime toy is higher class than your crass and low-class luxury playtime toy.'
I don't think your interpretation is correct. The fact that the OP also responded to your comment with essentially the exact same point I made, that the fact that Elden Ring is Western through and through despite the Japanese developers only reinforces his point, indicates that his point indeed was one of the devs, not about cultural paradigms.
Yes, obviously any talk about influence of fictional media is subjective. It's not infinitely subjective, but there's no avoiding subjectivity, and certainly objective numbers can't override it, though it can contribute to it.
I find this paragraph pretty ridiculous. That these games aren't in the same genre as Elden Ring or DMC isn't some result of gerrymandering, it's the result of people categorizing these games based on how gamers perceive them based on their interests and styles and such. Assassin's Creed and GTA could be said to fit into the same genre as Elden Ring, but the former has been shit on for over a decade already for being formulaic, while the latter's core combat and movement based around guns and cars places it ina different category. This isn't gerrymandered, this is the consequence of people noticing that these games differ in critical, important ways that directly affect the structure of the game and the way the players interact with them. Same goes for first person versus third person, which is a pretty major and meaningful differentiator, which is why DMC and Doom don't fit in the same genre (though I'd argue that Doom brought a lot of the feel of DMC from the third person format to third person), even before getting into the difference between shooter and melee combat.
I do think that the default presumption should be that any observation of differences here between East and West is an artifact of different countries being better at different genres. However, the fact that so many of the Eastern successes rely so heavily on Western culture - even the anime-style Genshin Impact is heavily influenced by Western medieval fantasy - only strengthens the point that the original comment was making.
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