Japan: The Psychology of a Hardware Launch

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" The successful applicant will work at first as an assistant, and perhaps eventually move up. The job description states that "It's difficult to describe what a game planner is, exactly; to put it simply, your job would be to think up ways for people to have fun." "You will submit plans to Square-Enix, and then see games through to completion."

The job will pay 900 yen (around $8) an hour. The position is five days a week, eight hours a day. Training will last a maximum of three months.

The applicant is required to send a resume, their email address ("if you have one", says the website), the name of the magazine or website where you learned about this job opening, and a list of videogame magazines you read regularly, to Square-Enix Japan's offices in Shinjuku by November 7th. The listing ends with "If you have not been contacted in forty days, we're very sorry."

My opinion: Square-Enix tried the same hiring tactics earlier this year, just following the release of Final Fantasy XII in March. It's been confirmed that much of their staff left to work on the games Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey with Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. Square-Enix's Final Fantasy brand is considered the strongest and most versatile in Japanese videogames; however, their fans are of the one-track-mind variety, sometimes being the kind of people to play Final Fantasy games and little else.

If you ask me, it would be such a nicer world to live in if at least one of the larger Japanese producers of internationally distributed entertainment content would have a tiny bit more pride in the production process, take creative risks, and hire people for their proven artistic track records (as Sakaguchi is doing for his games) to craft high-quality products, as opposed to hiring people based on the videogame magazines they read, and then paying them eight dollars an hour.

Then again, I'm just being pessimistic. Here, I flip the coin, and say: maybe some of the people reading Famitsu have ideas for better games than Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII: Lost Episode for mobile phones. I mean, your average Famitsu reader can't be any sleazier than that, huh? Then again, many Famitsu readers happen to be schoolkids who stand at the rack at 7-Eleven huddled around the magazine on Friday afternoon, stuffing the posters and inserts into their coat pockets.

ARMORED CORE 4

Meanwhile, a quick dig through the anti-PlayStation 3 on the ultra-devoted Japanese Xbox 360 fan community, inhabited by only the most plugged-in Xbox fans in Japan revealed a sad and weird insight: one poster (and Xbox 360 owner) says "As much as I don't want to, I guess I'll have to buy a PlayStation 3 so I can play Armored Core 4." Several replies later, another poster informs the previous poster, "Actually, Armored Core 4 is being released simultaneously on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360." "I didn't know that!" the first poster replies. "Neither did I!" I say, sitting here in my chair.

SALES CHARTS

1. Pokemon Diamond (DS, Nintendo) - 159,443 (1,233,570)
2. Final Fantasy V Advance (GBA, Square-Enix) - 124,840
3. Pokemon Pearl (NDS, Nintendo) - 116,051 [1,096,932]
4. Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! NEO (PS2, Namco-Bandai) - 67,642 [331,540]
5. New Super Mario Bros. (DS, Nintendo) - 40,609 [3,274,402]
6. Kanji Training (DS, Rocket Co.) - 36,622 [120,713]  
7. More Brain Training (DS, Nintendo) - 25,758 [3,314,005]
8. Bleach Blade Battlers (PS2, Sony) - 25,203
9. Animal Crossing DS (DS, Nintendo) - 23,627 [3,328,871]
10. Minna no Tennis (PS2, Sony) - 22,599 [439,106]

Provided by Next Generation—
Interactive Entertainment Today