Japanese comedian and YouTuber Eiko Kano, famous for his spectacularly chaotic playthroughs of the Resident Evil series, recently talked about an exchange he had with Shinji Mikami – director of the original RE and RE4 – on the topic of playthrough videos and gaming streams.
As reported by Nikkan, on June 18, Kano appeared on a TV program dedicated to sharing “badass” anecdotes from his life, and the moment he looked back on as exceptionally cool was his encounter with Mikami. Gaming streams can be a sensitive topic among game developers (particularly in Japan), with opinions divided on whether they’re simply a beneficial form of “free marketing,” or conversely, lead to a loss of opportunity as people “consume” games through viewing and don’t end up buying them. Given these circumstances, Kano had been concerned about his own streaming activities at the time.
Although he had explicit permission from Capcom, the fact that he was essentially spoiling the stories and puzzles of Resident Evil titles made him anxious about whether the creators behind them felt uncomfortable with it. When he later got an opportunity to meet Mikami in person, he decided to ask him directly about his stance. Although Kano was fully prepared to stop streaming if he got a negative answer, Mikami reportedly responded, “If viewers watch a playthrough of a game all the way to the end and are satisfied with just that, then it was only that good of a game.”
He went on to explain, “Our job is to make games that leave people wanting to clear them with their own hands, even if they’ve watched someone else do it, so keep streaming.” This suggests Mikami considers developers fully responsible for how exposure through playthroughs will affect their games. Incidentally, Kano adds that he has received almost the exact same response from Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii on the matter (although this doesn’t seem to be reflected in Square Enix’s streaming guidelines for the series so much).
Interestingly, Square Enix’s Naoki Hamaguchi, who’s directing the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy, expressed a similar sentiment not long ago, commenting that with playthroughs becoming increasingly popular nowadays, RPGs need to evolve in a way that makes viewers itch to play them themselves, rather than just consume the story.
