Setting Sun?

Grindhouse-style action title Shadows of the Damned was revealed in a trailer which, rather than focusing on features, focused on the talent. Where in the past, a game trailer would have bullet-pointed its essential statistics, instead we were given a trio of names to roll around - Shinji Mikami, Goichi Suda and Akira Yamaoka, director, producer and composer respectively.

Only a handful of developers in the west ever get their names particularly closely associated with their games. Sid Meier does, of course, as do Will Wright and Peter Molyneux, and perhaps more curiously, American McGee. But does anyone outside of the most hardcore, website-reading, forum-trawling fanatics know that Cliff Bleszinski is the man behind Gears of War, or that they have Ken Levine to thank for Bioshock?

Things are improving in this regard, of course, but many companies are still wary of attaching named talent to their games - after all, wouldn't Bioshock 2 have been a harder sell if the general public was aware that the creator of the original had moved on to new pastures? (The answer, of course, is to do as Hollywood does on occasion - when Ridley Scott doesn't want to direct the sequel to his hit film, get James Cameron on the phone instead.)

Yet Japanese creators have seemed more willing to seek the limelight, and their companies more willing to indulge them - so much so that their names resonate even with a western audience and provide cachet to Western companies who work with them. Perhaps it's simply that they seem a bit more exotic for Western audiences; perhaps it's that they're a bit more willing to wear tight leather trousers in public and sunglasses indoors, striking a "too cool for school" image that, amusing or not, works a lot better for PR purposes than the Western developer jeans and t-shirt uniform.

Either way, not only EA was seeking this kind of cachet this week. Microsoft's keynote at TGS on Thursday morning turned into a lengthy love-letter to Japanese game development - Suda was trotted out once again to talk about another title, alongside a number of other Japanese industry legends such as Masaya Matsuura (he of Vib Ribbon fame), Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Rez) and, er, Keiji Inafune (he of "earlier in this column" fame).

On the face of it, Microsoft is looking for success in Japan with these deals, hoping to boost sales in a territory which continues to be broadly disinterested by the Xbox 360 - and not just "because it's American", as some fans like to claim dismissively, ignoring the enormous success of products from American giants like Apple and Dell in this market. Certainly, a sales lift in Japan wouldn't hurt, but the real driving force behind Microsoft's Japanese deals has less to do with Japan and more to do with fans in the west.

It's that cachet - that credibility that comes from working with auteurs. While the reality of Japanese game development is every bit as corporate and money-focused as the reality of Western game development (maybe even more so, if you believe half the stories about the dirty money which underlies some of Japan's biggest game companies), this is a nation which has perfected the art of producing people who seem like credible game auteurs. It's a kind of cachet which, in EA's case, helps to cement its burgeoning reputation as one of the good guys of the industry, a creative powerhouse rather than a lumbering, franchise-churning gorilla. In Microsoft's case, it's a direct body blow to rival Sony - an acknowledgement that a part of the PlayStation's appeal to its core fans is the kind of Japanese titles which the Xbox has struggled to attract in the past, but fully intends to play host to in the future.

Is this an industry in crisis? On the one hand, we have Japanese publishers reaching out to the west - Capcom, Sega and Square Enix being the most obvious of examples. On the other hand, Western publishers race to collaborate with Japanese talent. The home market remains strong, if diversified - the glory days of the past decade, when one home console could rule the roost, are probably gone forever, replaced by a dizzying array of platforms ranging from home consoles through handheld devices to mobile phones and the PC, but the money is still flowing, by all accounts.

And all of this before we even talk about Nintendo, a company which does not exhibit at TGS but whose presence looms large. The 3DS is all anyone wants to talk about, and every major company seems to have something big in the works for the device. Microsoft's glee at getting Professor Kawashima's name onto a Kinect title is just another sign of the sheer muscle Nintendo wields not only in Japan, but globally - muscle that can turn an obscure (and not particularly respected, academically) professor into a gaming mega-brand which rivals swoop in to poach.

The Japanese industry, like every other branch of the games industry around the world, faces huge challenges in the coming years. It shares many of the challenges of the western industry, and has a few unique ones of its own as well. But is it "finished"? Is it all over for Japan? I don't know if Inafune ever really believed that - I doubt it - but few at TGS this week seem to share his sentiment.

Just as Japan itself once had to, the Japanese games industry has had to throw itself open to the world, absorbing new ideas and practices at a rapid pace. It's a tough, imperfect process - but one which is well underway. It would be a brave or foolhardy person who bet against Japan being a major force in game development and publishing for many years to come.