Why did Japanese developers do an amazing job on American Licensed games?

[Low G Man]

There's Interplay. They made Total Recall for the NES.

Actually, that was Realtime Associates.

Maybe it just comes down to the highest bidder at the end of the day. Licensed games in Japan have often been made by reputable companies known for making great original games too. They don't want to tarnish their reputation by going half-assed on a licensed game. In the US (and Europe, with Titus and the like), it was often shit developers that created almost nothing but licensed garbage that landed these licenses. Even with their terrible reputations, the games still sold well thanks to clueless parents and little kids, so they had the funds to pick up more licenses and continue the cycle.



Eh, it's true that there are plenty of bad anime-based games and such, but I still think Japanese games based on Japanese licenses are better on the whole than American games based on American cartoons, movies, and the like.

I completely agree, Badly-made western games seem to be a lot worse than badly mad Japanese games.

Well, isn't that the thing right there? LJN is a shitty developer.

Yeah thats kinda what I was getting at. It kinda depends on the developer. Look at Bandai, they are Japanese and they did Dick Tracy, Dr Jekyl Mr Hyde, Toxic Crusaders, Gilligans Island. Nothing special here.

LJN never developed a single game. All of their releases were outsourced to other developers like Atlus, Beam, and Software creations. Same with Bandai, nearly all of their output was crafted by TOSE Software.

Couple things....Firstly there was almost nothing but crap from Western developers on the NES/SMS era of systems. Some of that was because most of them were developing for PC, and those games often didn't translate well to console. Also, remember that a ton of US-based developers went out of business in the crash, leaving the industry in shambles. They recovered in the 16-bit era I feel.

I maybe wrong, but the way I've seen it, Western developers of the day were more interested in developing the kinds of unique game that were popular on PC and saw console-style games like Mario & Zelda as kiddy fair, but eventually realized that's where the money is and began developing similar games, but were usually of low quality due to not having the same levels of experience and talents of those Japanese designers.