>>43789617While reading Junichi Masuda's blog, 3 things stuck out to me:
1. He's a nice guy, cheerful guy. Spends a lot of time signing autographs, doing interviews, travelling on airplanes. He learned English around the year 2011.
2. He believes that "polishing" is the most important phase of game development, although he emphasized "deconstructing" and "reconstructing" the mechanics of a game, just like writing a piece of music broken up into parts (the different audio tracks). He said that you had to know what "rules" you had to have (like in sports), and thence build up the new rules of your game. These things would seem to contradict what Game Freak does: The games feel unpolished and the rules feel arbitrary and unexamined. Masuda is a living contradiction, especially when looking through the Gold & Silver development logs.
3. He doesn't like violent video games or hyper-realistic video games or first-person shooters. He doesn't like microtransactions or games that don't have originality or creativity. He values gameplay over graphics.
I think the problem is not with Masuda's philosophy, but his implementation of it. He seems like
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LiteralGenie . Gameplay over graphics? Ignore making battle animations. Know the rules of a game? Miyamoto does that better with Mario, but Miyamoto is somewhat flexible with the rules, always aiming to make a cohesively whole game. With Game Freak, some things are inflexibly unchanged: there have been few type retcons or name changes, they haven't added double-type moves, games always come in 2 versions, they won't remove trade evolutions, pitiful game difficulty, lack of multiple saves. I could go on. I think he stopped making games he enjoyed because he thinks kids will still enjoy them. (which contradicts what Masuda says, but Masuda is a living contradiction.)
