A Theory in Need of More Evidence

I'll pretend I'm in school and start with my thesis: Japanese developers almost never say interesting (an admittedly loaded term) things about their games. This is caused by a translation problem or a cultural difference, or some combination of these or other factors.

If your reaction is "well, duh" then I guess you can stop reading. If your reaction is "that's not true" or "what are you talking about?" then read right along. I'll provide an example or two of articles that made me think this, but keep in mind that I'm aware my tiny pool of anecdotal data keeps this observation very far from being a proven phenomenon.

I think the uncanny valley is an interesting concept. It's easy to understand and see examples of it, so I bet a lot of others think it's interesting, too. When I saw this Joystiq article a while ago, I was eager to see a take on it from an art...making...guy (thanks for the hard-hitting journalism, Joystiq) at Square-Enix, since the uncanny valley could be seen as having a big part in Old Square's fall, ie. Spirits Within. So what does the team try to do about it?

According to Kamikokuryo: "In terms of the uncanny valley, that is something we have to fight against. We can't go there -- that's basically how we feel about it. For all the things we create, many of the section creators get together and we make adjustments so this uncanny valley phenomenon doesn't happen. We don't usually use that phrase, because all the staff has this in mind while we do our work."

Seriously? You can't 'go there'? There's a problem, and you want to... avoid it?

I wouldn't have thought much of it at first, but the next article I read happened to be the latest of the Iwata Asks: Smash Bros Brawl. I don't know if you've read any of these, but it feels like sometimes they go out of their way to discuss something without actually conveying any information. In that link, for example... I get that Sonic and Snake play differently than the Nintendo characters, but despite some puttering around talking about auras or whatever, there's a distinct lack of information. I don't even want hard details here or anything. But they're "molded differently", they have a "distinct feel", they "account for characteristics that can’t be obtained simply by increasing the number of Nintendo characters?" Seriously? what am I supposed to take home there? And here I had thought that the non-Nintendo characters was potentially a point of discussion for really interesting comments.

The only English-speaking mouthpieces that are this uninformative are PR drones. Maybe we're just more specifics-driven? Maybe it's culturally inappropriate to talk about business specifics? Maybe it's all lingual? Maybe my examples and personal experience are abnormal? Have you ever noticed this?

And have you ever seen a Japanese dev lay it all out like this?