How is that anything but incompetence?
It's the question I'm asking myself right now...
How can I write that, globally Japaneses games' stories are more basic than Western games' stories, and someone read it as, "Japanese developers can write a complete story and yet Western developers can't"?
What level of "I don't can what you said, I'll hear what I want to hear", did it need to reach this level of made up interpretation?
More basic stories are, obviously, easier and faster to write, in addition to being, obviously too, easier and faster to finish.
When your story resolve around a MC that will almost never be involved with more than one character during a playthrough, it obviously need less efforts to keep the story coherent. Like it's easier and faster to have consistent dialogs when you've never more that three characters involved in it. This while more than half of the discussions will be limited to a face to face with two characters only.
Strictly speaking, most Japanese games don't tell a story, they tell a slice of life. Whatever if they are date sim or RPG, they are fully centered on the MC, resolving solely around his journey to go from A to B. What mean that it's also easier and faster to write the story itself.
But Western games do not rely on this.
Even the cheapest ones tend to place the MC into a situation that resolve around him, but isn't his doing. Something that starts in the background, and is generally unknown from the MC. This while even none Harem Western games have more than one significant characters in addition to the MC and those responsible to the said "situation"; and by significant I don't mean possible alternate LI, but characters that will play a role into the story.
Whatever if it's
Dating My daughter, with the "conflict" between the MC and his ex, or
Dreams of Desire, while the whole century old conspiracy to control the world and actual conspiracy to end MC's legacy. Even games that looks more simple, like
Big Brother, with Eric pervert mind, or
Where The Heart Is, with the conflict around the heritage, most Western games have this background story that is missing in ~95% of Japanese games.
It obviously need more time to write, but also to develop (not in the coding sense), such story.
You need to weight everything for it to not be too obvious, but also for it to not come as a fully surprising plot twist. The MC
and the player, need to feel that something is happening, that it's evolving.
And like there's more significant characters, you also need to take count of their own perception of the situation and it's evolution, as well as to the impact that each one of them have on all the others.
For each decision that a character will make, even if it's a decision that isn't immediately shown to the player (like by example
the betrayal in Dreams of Desire), you have to think about the possible impact that it have on all the characters.
Obviously, all this need more time to write. But also more time to develop the story itself, because you've more characters to introduce, then to actually make evolve into the story. They can't be blind to what happen, they have react to it, whatever strongly and frontally, or as an aside.
If, by example, the MC get arrested for whatever reason, all characters that matters will react to this. His family will worry for his future, his friends feel concerned by what happened, while the baddies will be happy. And you can't just have the next interaction with each one of them to not take this into consideration.
The mother will scold him, the little sister say how afraid she was. The best friend will either be "well done", or, "what crossed your mind", depending on what led to the arrest. Let's say that MC is an adult, one coworker will shortly address the subject, what will show to the player that MC's coworkers know.
And it's even more important to make the baddies react to this. It's how the player, and possibly the MC too, while have a small hint that "this is a baddy". But obviously if we don't know yet that it's one, the reaction must be weighted. A smirk while saying that it's sad what happen to the MC, or a smile once the MC turn his back.
Here too it's something that is missing in most Japanese Games. They lack this level of subtlety because they don't need it, not relying on stories that have place for this. But, obviously, the time you'll pass to weight correctly this reaction, the time you'll pass to think about each character and how it would react to the event, you don't pass it to actually add words to your story. Those words are added to the background of each character, for them to react accurately in the future.
Yes projects should use far more sprites then renderings.
I'll take "how to say 'my comprehension level is limited, please explain the obvious to me', without saying it", for 500...
