To be honest I never saw the "western" vs Japan thing as fair, as that is one country vs every non-asia country. To their credit, sure the gaming industry is huge there, but it can't possibly compete with the sum of every country in Europe+Pacific+America. I'm just excluding S.E.A. countries (China, etc) since they don't count as Western and I have no idea where some others (like Russia) fall. But the point is made.
As for Inafune, other than Gunvolt I haven't heard anything from him since 2009, and Azure Striker Gunvolt is a Megaman X/Zero gameplay clone from what I have heard. So yeah, hypocritical a bit too, I guess?
There are a few games listed on wikipedia that he was involved in, but I haven't gone through the list. At a glance, Soul sacrifice looks decent, never heard of it though.
To be fair, I don't think anyone could have reliably predicted MN9's management would have turned out this way. I'm not someone who followed him extensively after he left Capcom, so I can't say anything for sure. Maybe someone who has all the info of what he was up to afterwards could say more. But to well, pull extremely silly decisions like this, I don't think that was something anyone could have predicted?
I'm interested in taking a look at his history and track record to see what happened. I find it pretty intriguing how he could have fallen from a "genre definer+fan favourite" to "shady moral/business practices and losing a lot of fan goodwill". I'll post the research if I ever get to it (not now).
And I keep thinking about parallels with Chris Roberts (Star Citizen) who was basically in the same boat, but is handling his development with a very open approach and doesn't decieve backers (mostly). By the same boat I mean: hasn't made one of their games in a long time (5+ year),and starving genre and fans (megaman style side shooter, and space sims). Both of which combined makes for a high disposable income.
And then we have Iga, but it's early days. How's he going so far?
And then there's Project Phoenix, which as far as I know has regular blog posts, but it pretty much under the radar otherwise. Anyone know how that is going?
@black-leg:
It's a shame because i was interested in that pirate game. The main character was a penguin. Although we should've seen signs from that seeing as they also announced an anime alongside the game.We should've seen it coming with these.
Interesting…