Tokyo Jungle didn't resonate with US gamers as director would have hoped

Tokyo Jungle was a hit in Japan, according to the game's director Yohei Kataoka, and while Europe also took a shine to it, the same couldn't be said regarding its reception in the US.

Speaking with Siliconera, Kataoka said it may have had something to do with the players not taking the time to understand it.

“Europe loved it, and we got a lot of great feedback from that audience, but [in] America… that simply wasn’t the case,” he said. “We received a lot of negative feedback for the game.

“It takes time to make an unfamiliar audience understand something like ukiyo-e, right? So it might take something like travelling around an abandoned Tokyo as a Pomeranian a little bit of time to sink in, too. At least, that’s how we saw it.”

Kataoka said with Short Peace: Ranko Tsukigime’s Longest Day, he wants to bring "unfamiliar cultural elements into a familiar setting," and developed the idea as an action-platforer so it would be easy to pick up, "even for people who don’t play games very often."

“We lowered the difficulty of the game, too, to make it accessible," he said. "Another thing I’d like people to know about it is that, like the films, I want viewers to learn something about Japan.”

Short Peace: Ranko Tsukigime’s Longest Day is scheduled to launch in North America, Europe and Australia in spring 2014 for PlayStation 3.