@Parma - yep! I have always felt that one general critique of the Japanese game industry - and more broadly, its visual media culture - is how it's centered around, if not Tokyo, dense urban cities. There's this tendency to tokenize and symbolize "Not Tokyo," and the kind of weirdness of it is that it's Tokyo that is feeding this stuff to people living outside of urban areas... in my travels around Japan it's super weird to see some weird anime shit just like being blared on TV in a random drug store in a small town.

So like... if that's a developer's basis and they were to try to write about the countryside or "culture" (imagine how Americans write their farming games lol...) it comes off as a bit like touristy usually..

@crimson2877 : That's an interesting defense of G/S - I would say that I would totally be interested in something that went harder on the simulation aspects that G/S had. I remember being really into those as a kid but somehow as an adult they just weren't as interesting... I think part of it is how none of those systems really feel demanded for you to engage with them, they kinda feel like they're just hanging out there. Like the radio/phone would work GREAT if I was actually into anyone as a character, likewise with the night/day stuff. So yeah, for me it's not that those things are inherently bad so much as they don't really cohere for me personally. But if something were to take those sim aspects, and build on the interesting qualities of Red...that could be neat.