I’m slowly working my way through Dragon Age: Inquisition. Solid gameplay, good but uneven music, and an occasionally powerful story, but not an era-defining RPG like Skyrim or Baldur’s Gate II. It’s at its best during the main storyline, while the other 75% of the game has too much filler and repetitive fetch-questing. It’s like they had an awesome, thirty-hour game, then rushed at the last minute to add a hundred more hours of gameplay by scattering random items on every map and forcing you to gather them to level up for the next real plot point.
The timelines don’t quite line up. Japan’s economy exploded in the 1970s and 1980s, stagnated in the 1990s, and has declined relative to other countries since then. Japan’s video game industry exploded from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, stagnated from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, and has declined since then. In other words, the Japanese video game industry flourished most precisely when the economy stopped doing so.
I’m not sure there’s any real meaning to be extracted here. But it wouldn’t be the first time that the arts have suddenly flourished among the first generation that casts aside its parents’ hardworking, traditional values in favor of a more epicurean lifestyle, only to degrade slowly after that point.
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