A portion of a Gamasutra interview with Keiji Inafune...

GS: You've talked a lot about Japan's game industry and its difficulties. What do you think it will take to get back on track?

Keiji Inafune: It feels like things have just settled down -- or to put it another way, that people just aren't hungry enough any longer. There aren't as many companies, or managers of development studios, that really want to succeed or accomplish something, so there needs to be something that gets that feeling back.

GS: Do you think there needs to be a bigger kind of economic crash within games before people realize the need for this rebuilding?

KI: There might be something to that idea, but talking about economic issues, that's something that is affecting the whole world at the moment, although Japan has had it worse due to the earthquake.

Essentially, though, that isn't as important as the fact we need a game, or something, to give us more courage to go in that direction, and the problem is that game can't be made.

Something that struck me when watching American movies or playing their games is that there's consistently a strong hero who's always the central point of the story. This has been the case for decades, and for games as well.

No matter how bad the economic situation is, there's always that hero, and he helps people and saves the world without really being employed by anyone to do so. That's right at the forefront. A hero who's separate from the economy.

And Hollywood, at the core, keeps putting out these hero stories, and the result of that is you have a nation who thinks to itself "I want to be like that." Compared to the U.S., though, I don't think Japanese games and other media really present that sort of hero to the audience. There were lots of those back when I was a kid, though. So it's a bit of a strange way of putting it, but I think the problem lies in the hearts of the creators. There are other issues, as well, but that's how I feel.