Yeah, I think there are cultural differences that makes Japanese storytelling not turn out well, at least to me.
From JRPGs like Final Fantasy to 'action' games like MGS4 or DMC and even non-game media like anime, I find Japanese storytelling very often rather heavy handed and unsubtle, with far too much long winded exposition, far too much over the top melodrama, unsubtle preachiness, heavy handed use of character cliches and wooden dialogue and convoluted arbitrary plotting. It's not always the case, of course, but I find there's still in general a definite trend.
Western games have their own cliches, too, and their own forms of poor storytelling, but it bothers me less firstly because western games have less emphasis on tons of cinematics and exposition; sure FPS shooter bald space marines are a cliche but if the focus is very heavily on gameplay it simply doesn't get the chance to be that annoying, whereas if you're going to have as many cutscenes as a Final Fantasy game having cliche characters in those cutscenes is going to be a real drag. Secondly, the western character cliches are just less annoying to me - again a gruff male space marine is cliche, but it's not an annoying character archetype to me so it doesn't grate as much as when JRPGs use character cliches that stand out because they are irritating character archetypes. Cutesy girls, child characters, emo whiners and so on are not just cliches, they are annoying cliches (to me, at least) which means it bothers me more when they are reused again and again.
From JRPGs like Final Fantasy to 'action' games like MGS4 or DMC and even non-game media like anime, I find Japanese storytelling very often rather heavy handed and unsubtle, with far too much long winded exposition, far too much over the top melodrama, unsubtle preachiness, heavy handed use of character cliches and wooden dialogue and convoluted arbitrary plotting. It's not always the case, of course, but I find there's still in general a definite trend.
Western games have their own cliches, too, and their own forms of poor storytelling, but it bothers me less firstly because western games have less emphasis on tons of cinematics and exposition; sure FPS shooter bald space marines are a cliche but if the focus is very heavily on gameplay it simply doesn't get the chance to be that annoying, whereas if you're going to have as many cutscenes as a Final Fantasy game having cliche characters in those cutscenes is going to be a real drag. Secondly, the western character cliches are just less annoying to me - again a gruff male space marine is cliche, but it's not an annoying character archetype to me so it doesn't grate as much as when JRPGs use character cliches that stand out because they are irritating character archetypes. Cutesy girls, child characters, emo whiners and so on are not just cliches, they are annoying cliches (to me, at least) which means it bothers me more when they are reused again and again.
