I'd long theorised that western game journalism became cold, xenophobic, and at its absolute worst, racist towards eastern developed games after last generation. Its great/super-sad to now actually start being vindicated in such an extreme, distasteful idea.
Essentially, with the X360 era game journalists went from needing translators and flights to Japan to get the skinny on the biggest up and coming games to just popping down the freeway to people at western studios that would become drinking buddies/community manager position interviewers. Its also why the incredibly heavy Microsoft/Xbox leaning existed across the board until the PS4 really started taking down names. Relationships with asian developers slowly diminished and people put on those games for preview/review were usually the token resident weeaboo.
Most journos arent aware of it most of the time, but it colours their coverage of stuff from the far east in a way that results in more 'dehumanising' articles. Jason Schreiers "Is the artist on Dragon's Crown a 13-year old?" Kotaku article was a staunch example of this as well as other shit articles about Kamiya and so forth. No way to treat veteran legends that have shipped amazing games over the decades, but theyre no longer your only source of gaming news. They're off in that wacky land that "doesn't even really play console games now anyway." So whats slightly harsher ribbing gonna result in anyway? Famitsu gets all the juicy cuts anyway, fuck 'em eh, lads?
Yu Suzuki became this easy target because he doesnt have those western PR connections that Inafune and co do that smooth the landscape for him time and time again. Shenmue was already this easy target for sneering laughter, so now you have a rolling budget target and potential revival failure to FUD all day long about.
Good post.
The bias against Eastern developed games in the gaming press is a factor for sure, but there are other things to consider as well.
A lot of gaming media, particularly the bigger American sites (where most of these stories emanate), have always been bias against Sega (even when they were good), presumably because their writers grew up playing Nintendo consoles, which were far more popular stateside.
Yu Suzuki is at a particular disadvantage in this respect, not just because of his association with Sega, but also because he made his name in the arcades and arcade gaming is generally not recognised or understood by the gaming press in the same way as home console gaming is. The embarrassing reviews arcade shmups get from mainstream sites is a good example of this, but, more fundamentally, there is a pervasive perception that arcade games are cheap, shallow, artificially difficult etc. This perception has only worsened with the rise of the whole pretentious "games as art" wankery some 'critics' are trumpeting (as well as the decline of arcades themselves of course). As a result, someone like Yu Suzuki, who's body of work is mostly comprised of arcade games, isn't afforded anything like the same kind of sacred cow status as, say, Shigeru Miyamoto. In reality of course, he
should be canonised as one of only a handful of legitimate gaming 'auteurs'- and the only one who's body of work genuinely rivals Miyamoto's in terms of diversity, industry influence and quality- but he isn't, so sneering click-bait articles are fair game.
Take all these institutional biases, add into the mix an extremely poorly organised Kickstarter campaign to fuel the fire, and Shenmue III's coverage is entirely expected. The only surprise is that people seem surprised by it. Well, that and the fact that there are others who are actually leaping to the defence of these god-awful media outlets.