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Platinum Games' Atsushi Inaba praises Switch as ground-breaking, says PS5/Xbox Series X lack "extreme surprise"

Get ready for more backlash!
by rawmeatcowboy
22 May 2020
GN Version 5.0

Platinum Games' Atsushi Inaba caught some backlash awhile ago for saying he wasn't too excited about the PS5 or Xbox Series X. Fans have been wondering why that is, and in a follow-up interview with VideogamesChronicle, Inaba has expanded on his comments. In his explanation, Inaba heaps massive praise on Switch, calling it a ground-breaking platform that opened up new possibilities. You can check out Inaba's full statement below.

I felt like when I gave that response there was a little bit of a backlash online to me being perceived as a snob or something! What I was trying to say was… I played Final Fantasy VII Remake recently and obviously so much has changed since the original game, especially with the graphical improvements. I’m always happy to see these makers that are pushing themselves to make more visual enhancements and improvements in technology, and I’m happy that we’re able to do more with each console.

But the comparison than I’m making is that… if you think back to the generation between Super Nintendo and PlayStation, and how we went from pixel art to 3D polygons… nobody could have ever imagined that a few years prior. When that stuff started coming out people were just blown away: they weren’t ready for it, they weren’t anticipating it… it was just so new.

Whereas I feel that the announcements that we’ve had for recent consoles generations, while all good and interesting, and of course I’m happy for us as developers to have better technology to work on… it’s a ‘perceivable’ future. There’s not the extreme surprise or the unexpected quality that I felt from the leap to previous consoles. Now I see the announcements and I think, ‘oh, that’s cool’ and then the next minute I think, ‘hmmm… what should I watch on Netflix tonight?’

But that’s just my personal opinion. As an industry, it’s all very promising and I don’t want to be perceived as too negative. But to give another example of my point, the Nintendo Switch was very ground-breaking in how it was able to just to take a home console and make it portable. It’s something that you hadn’t seen a lot of people doing before: it took this wall, that perhaps a lot of people didn’t know even existed, and broke it down.

Switch opened up all these new possibilities. I think the Game Boy and the DS also did that: there were so many surprises in those. If you compare that to when you’re simply seeing graphical improvements or just ‘faster, bigger’… obviously it’s nice, but it doesn’t have that same inventive quality that really surprised me with past consoles.

We haven’t seen everything from next-gen at this point, I think, and it’s still very likely that there could be a quality like that in these consoles that’s going to kind of be a game-changer, that’s going to change how games could be played. And if that is the case, then maybe they’ll blow me away. So I don’t want to sound like, ‘hey, I know everything about the new consoles and they’re boring’. But with the information that I have now, I haven’t seen any extremely big surprises.

[Link]