Four top Japanese devs choose their top 3 games of all time
In this week’s Famitsu, four notable Japanese developers revealed their top 3 games of all time. Puzzle & Dragons creator Daisuke Yamamoto, Monster Hunter producer Kaname Fujioka, Siren and Gravity Rush producer Keiichiro Toyama, and Ogre Battle designer Yasumi Matsuno shared their choices.
Polygon translated selections and comments for all four developers. You can find the results below.
Daisuke Yamamoto
Street Fighter 2
Pokemon
Tetris
“It’s easy to come up with a top two. That would be Street Fighter 2 and the original Pokemon. As for the third, if you forced me to pare it down from a large number of candidates…maybe it would be Tetris. Keep in mind, though, I’ve gotten a lot of influence from arcade games too. The game design’s oriented entirely around giving players a measure of satisfaction with a single coin, and a lot of that philosophy applies to smartphone games, too — how you have to provide something fun in a compact matter for limited free time.”
Kaname Fujioka
Mega Man
Street Fighter II
Castlevania
“The first one I’d say right off is the original Mega Man. There’s just no measuring how much influence I’ve received from that game. After that would come SF2, which I spent ages playing with against other people at the arcades, and after that I’d put the original Castlevania, which really amazed me in terms of graphics, environment, music…pretty much everything.”
Keiichiro Toyama
Space Harrier
Xevious
Virtua Fighter
“Being in the generation I am. I’ve gotten a ton of influence from arcade games. Among those, I’d say that Space Harrier, Xevious and Virtua Fighter are the three that really just changed my life the first time I saw them. Really, though, I could probably list about ten other titles beyond those.”
Yasumi Matsuno
Zelda
Ultima Online
Red Dead Redemption
“If I remember right, I was asked the exact same question a decade or so ago for one Famitsu article or another. Back then, I think my answers were the arcade Xevious, the first Legend of Zelda, and SimCity, which I played on the Mac.”
“I’d say Zelda, Ultima Online and Red Dead Redemption. Zelda is the perfect example of getting every aspect of a game’s design just right, and I still think it’s really the standard that other people learn by. UO, including all the multiplayer-oriented events, really reminded me what real RPGs are all about, though the core game design is something that influenced me as well. Finally, RDR is a game that reminded me all over again about the charms of an open-world title. It was the first time in a while when I thought to myself ‘I wish I could make a game like this’.”
