I just finished my first game review in a few months -- and big surprise, it was a niche Japanese role-playing game. NIS America's Cross Edge is a collaboration between several Japanese publishers and developers, but it shoehorns so many disparate concepts into a single game that it's rendered practically unplayable as a result. This isn't the first time I've been disappointed in this kind of game, though: Namco Bandai's Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology frustrated me back in 2007 by playing it safe and avoiding practically all of the elements that make the traditional Tales games work. But this got me thinking: Why can't Japanese developers seem to make these "all-star" RPG collaborations -- a seemingly fail-safe concept -- work? As far as I can tell, the answer might lie in their corporate culture, known for its endless bureaucracy.

And I can only imagine what it's like when you multiply that bureaucracy by five times! Cross Edge features characters from Capcom, Gust, Namco Bandai, Nippon Ichi, and Idea Factory -- and as I said in my review, the game feels like it was born from the wheelings and dealings of a Japanese boardroom, not from the creativity of a development team.

As some of you might know, I worked at Konami before I came to 1UP, so I experienced some of that corporate culture firsthand. Though NDAs prevent me from going into too much detail, I will say that working for a Japanese corporation revolves around a very regimented, bureaucratic way of doing things: reports piled on top of reports piled on top of postmortems and presentations. (As a coworker jokingly said to me once: "Report back to me on the report you just reported on!") This rigid structure permeates Japanese society -- ask anyone who's ever tried to do something as simple as withdraw cash from a teller at a Japanese bank! This is good in that you have a record of even the tiniest minutiae, and you can be sure that any proposals have already been proposed to death before they hit upper management. But in the world of game design, where creativity is king, that kind of thinking can kill any good idea before it has a chance to get off the ground. Unless your name's Shigeru Miyamoto or Hideo Kojima and you wield a lot of individual power, chances are you won't be doing things entirely on your terms.

The things is, I don't think a lot of Japanese workers understand how strange their endless checks and balances appear to an outsider. When you're raised in a certain environment, you don't question aspects of your culture if you don't know any differently. In fact, when I first started at 1UP, my new boss was going over the various responsibilities I'd have during a given week, and I asked her whether I'd have to put together weekly postmortems and presentations. After all, this is what I'd been doing for nearly three years, so it was second nature to me. She laughed, as if such a concept were completely alien. But Konami had been my only significant corporate experience since graduating college -- to me, that was The Way Things Were Done. As a result, the corporate machinations at Ziff Davis -- complicated as they were -- always seemed minor by comparison.

At last year's Tokyo Game Show, I actually asked Tales series producer Hideo Baba why Radiant Mythology had to be so different from the rest of the series. His answers made it clear that a lot of behind-the-scenes politics were involved and that it would be "difficult" to make a traditonal Tales game with characters from across the series. Whenever a Japanese dude tells you something is "difficult," that tells you bureacratic nonsense is probably to blame.

Obviously, this topic is a lot more complex than I can cover in a simple blog post, and since I don't know the behind-the-scenes details surrounding Cross Edge and Radiant Mythology, a lot of this is educated guessing on my part. But am I unfairly singling out the Japanese corporate culture here? Can you think of any time that Japanese developers have succeeded in making these all-star RPG collaborations work? Kingdom Hearts is the one exception I can think of, but -- surprise, surprise -- that one actually involved an American company.