As the Western games industry spirals, TGS 2025 showed Japan is resurgent – though you might not recognize that over live streams

It’s fair to say that the Tokyo Game Show is back. This may have been the case over the last few years, to be honest – but this year marked my first post-pandemic return to Japan’s premier gaming festival – and in honesty, walking around the venue, I was shocked.

I’ve got a bit of a history with TGS. For many years I did something which few Western games media did: I went almost every year. That’s the influence of co-owning a website dedicated to role-playing games, a genre that has always been fairly Japan-centric. But that also meant that over the course of the 2010s I got to watch TGS dwindle. We talk a lot about the brutally swift decline of E3, but in those years the disintegration of TGS was arguably worse. By 2018, we’d reached the point where the show wasn’t even worth the cost of getting out there even to a website like RPG Site, where JRPGs were bread and butter. I tapped out.

This year, I returned to Chiba’s Makuhari convention centre on a bit of a whim. I didn’t really expect the show to be all that good, and I wasn’t really left all that excited by the snaking lines to get in on business day, for even when TGS was rubbish a lot of punters used to show up. But after a short exploration of the halls, I realized something: this show is brilliant again.

Watching the show from afar over livestreams, you could be forgiven for not necessarily recognizing that. In true Japanese industry tradition there’s a lot of stage shows where developers vaguely waffle without actually saying much while voice actors do little celebrity turns and the like. The live streams beamed westwards were relatively inconsequential too – a meagre obligation of a show from Xbox, casual streams from the big Japanese publishers, and a PlayStation State of Play that, while good, had next to nothing to do with what Sony was showing off in Tokyo.