Yeah, I still remember the start of the PS3 era when everyone was struggling with the cell while Xbox focused western developers were having a grand old time. I didnt pay much attention to it because kojima still produced a stunner, and FF13 looked fairly comparable to other early gen titles, but they were soon left in the dust by developers like Naughty Dog, Guerrilla Games, SSM, Epic, Rockstar, and even mid tier western devs at the time like Rocksteady, Insomniac, Crystal Dyanmics, 343i and Sucker Punch who all produced some stunners towards the end of the PS3 cycle and graduated to A tier in a span of a generation.
Whereas the japanese industry just felt stagnated in general. Deep Down gave me hope and then took it away. Since then only the RE team and Kojima have produced some excellent looking games. Platinum just produced probably the worst looking game ive ever played. Nitnendo studios are stuck making games on 15 watt hardware. And other previously top end devs like Capcom and Square Enix have simply given up on pushing graphics. Now we have them a generation behind the big A tier studios like GG, but also behind B tier studios like Massive, Bethesda and Remedy who were able to take that next big leap and join the big boys while Japanese studios are still acting like a mom and pop shop owner.
maybe all the graphics talent is over in the west and Japan is just lagging.
At least their gameplay designers are still exceptional and better than the trash these A tier western devs put out. I put in 150 hours into Zelda and couldnt even beat Avatar. I beat RE4 8 times in a month, and took 4 months to beat Alan Wake once. Maybe they should contract out their graphics programming to western devs. Their artists are still able to push exceptional visual design.