That is primarily a Western phenomenon.
The issue with Eastern vidya is they draw from a shallow pool of aesthetic and personality "sexy factors" at the expense of actually being a character. Same deal with storylines in general, they keep going back to the same wells. This is a bit of an issue in what are supposed to be story heavy games like RPGs.
To my memory its always been a mixed bag like this.
Western artwork was very good at things like atmosphere, Japanese art was better at designing attractive characters.
Like to use some examples:
I remember seeing this in stores (PC version had the same box art) and just being a little turned off by it. Obviously this is what they thought a "sexy woman" looked like back then but I dunno, this always read to me like my mom trying to be cool.
Now as for Japan:
So these characters aren't as ugly (depending on how you feel about 80s Toriyama designs) but... what even is this box art? A bunch of guys from a local SCA meetup giving you stern looks?
And in my experience this is kind of a recurring issue with Japanese box art--they like to put their attractive characters front and center, to the point where its actively detrimental.
(This isn't always a consistent trend tho... a lot of the Japanese Wizardry covers are actually kinda good, and Ys used to consistently invoke adventure instead of putting the waifus front and center... and I've also seen plenty of shitty western box art that can be described as "look at the boobs on this chick!" Heck that Wizardry Gold cover is basically exactly that).
It's basically like.... everyone with imagination and talent existed in the eighties and nineties, then with the 2000s came the coomerbrained troper types. This is of course also the era were writers like Howard and Doc Smith became more obscure and most people had never even heard of Frank Frazetta. I wonder if that's somehow related to the diminishing cultural imagination? It's like the more you lose touch with your history the worse your brain gets or something.
There's games that can be improved upon, and ones that can't. For instance, I want to see another city simulator game, because there's lots of ways the genre can be improved, with new QoL features, implementing strategy rather than just plopping buildings, and so on.
Going with this note, one thing I don't like about the trend of remakes, revivals, and Spiritual Successors to Other Games is.... they tend to always choose stuff that was already pretty good (not to mention over-saturated--we do NOT need another Mega Man clone!)
One of my favorite games growing up was a Windows game called Outpost, by Sierra On-Line. Now, Outpost was broken as all fuck, a lot of its mechanics basically did not work right (or at all) and the game had game-ending bugs.... and yet, I can't help but be in love with its concept, aesthetic and a lot of its presentation choices. I made a bigger post about it in the "Shit Games that Could Have Been Good" topic,
Link Here (you'll have to find Zelda--like most princesses--in another castle).
THIS is a game that I would love a spiritual successor (or even just a fan remake) of.... and its one nobody ever touches.
Of course, if they did, I'm sure they would want to "modernize" the very aesthetics that I like, so the Tokamak Reactors would no longer look like industrial dome things but instead would probably have that shit sleek iPhone look that everything seems to have now, and your AI companion would probably not sound like a 90s computer voice anymore.
