Okami is an example of a game being too easy for its own good IMO (Twilight Princess, also: the lax difficult fails to incentivise indulging optional content because there is no imperative to offset the difficulty when it is so low).

Though even if it wasn't, if it could be suitably substantiated that it had different design goals from harder games having one easy game be fine does not prove that being hard is an invalid design choice.

If you believe Okami's difficulty is in support of its design goals and not a shortcoming, why don't you prove it? It's not that hard: make a few supporting observations about design decisions that work cohesively with that design choice to achieve a particular effect.

For example, is it suggested that Amaterasu is supposed to be radiantly all-powerful and slicing through enemies like butter? If so the lore supports it, but what else about the surrounding game design feeds into/bounces off of that? Find that and you'll have found your substantiation. If you can't, your analysis either needs work, or its simply a design accident/oversight.

You said it yourself. you couldn't figure out what Bloodborne was trying to do. But there's more to the game than the difficulty that should tell you what it is trying to do and how it is intended to be experienced. The issue here is you simply don't have the literacy to parse how the game is telling you what kind of game it is.

And, TBH, that's not that strange as From's games have a far higher literacy barrier than most because of how arcane and intentionally obtuse they are, and also because they tend to play by a set of rules all of their own (whereas many AAA-games use established rulesets and assumptions that are common to their genre).

The problem here is the value proposition from employers is poor and they don’t realise it.

Vapid offers of making contacts, getting invaluable experience and so on are not guaranteed (contractually or otherwise) and depend a lot on luck (and the worker’s own efforts). Further, employers may simply never deliver on their promises of promotions and raises in the long-term, opting instead to outsource, downsize, or otherwise consolidate.

In other words, if employers want us to believe they can offer us this and that up they have to offer it up front — after all, they reap immediate productivity benefits, so why should candidates expect delayed compensation?

I currently live and work in Japan (in the game industry, no less), and so I see people who are diehard videogame players in-house, and regular people when I socialise.

The more hardcore gamers may go to game centres to play fighting games (the newest version of SFIV and Tekken being very popular), or get excited about releases like Monster Hunter World and Octopath Traveler (these were big topics in our office upon release).

Regular (working age) people though, basically don't play console or PC games at all (and often only go to game centres as an occasional date diversion). Though playing smartphone games in some capacity is extremely common (in both men and women).

There's also a third category of gamers that doesn't exist in the west: hardcore romance simulation aficionados. It's hard to call them hardcore in the sense that these games aren't challenging or deep, but their fandom and interest is very strong. You can typically find this demographic of women in the PS Vita section of certain game stores (in fact, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the romance genre is the sole thing keeping the Vita relevant in Japan).

I had a look at the game box the other day; interesting thing I noted is there's no markings on the PS4 version of Yakuza 3 to suggest any kind of enhancements (other than a vague mention of PS4 Pro support). No "Remaster" labeling, no mention of the improved framerate, performance or anything else. Nothing.

When the base assets are the same it's easy to look at it as simply an enhanced port, like a Super/Ultra version of the game. But there's a point where there are so many new things that you have to re-evaluate, and the newest Smash has proven to me that it has gone beyond that point. That said, as a new iteration of a fighting game, the divide between 'enhanced version' and 'sequel' is somewhat tenuous to begin with anyway.

Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, Dragon Quest XI, Ace Combat 7 etc; Not to mention the upcoming SMT game for Switch.

Even those games built on in-house engines such as Yakuza 6, Dark Souls III and so on, are easily a technical match for their western peers.

At the tail end of last generation the Japanese studios were flagging massively, but that's changed significantly over the last two years with releases like RE7 (60fps, high quality visuals), Nier Automata (a 60fps open-world game with GI) and so on. The idea that Japanese devs are behind the curve technically only applies when looking at AA-tier offerings... which basically don't exist in the West, making comparison impossible, anyway.

Japanese cables have two prongs, unlike the UK ones that have three. So the shape won't fit. You'll need another cable.

The game will get near impossibly hard if you keep playing that way. Not to mention battles will begin to massively drag.

As metalman0616 pointed out, the enemy level scales in accordance with yours, and if you're killing enemies that means you're essentially levelling up the bosses that you'll fight down the line. This is a big problem because the stat boosts the bosses get from levelling up are considerably larger than the ones you get (honestly, the difference between a level 10 character and level 100 character is so slight it's laughable).

As counter-intuitive as it is, you are better off drawing/stealing everything you want from an enemy... and then running away: You want to progress through the game keeping your level as low as possible.

If you want to power up your characters you should refined lower grade magic into higher grade magic. The game will still be easy this way... but you won't have to sit through long-ass summon animations all the time so it will at least be more interesting.

There are some genres I can't get into for the life of me, but would like to (like RTS).

I enjoy the companionship of coaching at the gym, so why not when playing a game?

For now I'm a freelance videogame localisation person (JP-EN translation, EN proof-reading, linguistic debugging etc).

There's a big change happening to my job role next week though, including a move to Japan.