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The story
On 5ch’s hardware/industry (“Geha”) board, a thread went up titled “If you’ve got normal sensibilities, you grow out of Pokémon and Mario by middle school.” Posts dismissing Nintendo titles as kids’ stuff drew a wave of pushback, with users arguing it’s “just the mindset of people who grew up on the Super Famicom and moved on to PlayStation.” The thread spiraled into back-and-forth citing specific titles like Xenoblade, and eventually into a circular debate over what “games for adults” even means in the first place.
What people said
Seriously, this is exactly it. It's only the old guys who grew up on the Super Famicom and switched to PlayStation to play Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy who are still stuck thinking "Nintendo is for kids."
Did you buy Fire Pro Wrestling ("Toukon")? What about Marathon? Show us your trophies.
It's pretty wild that you think PlayStation is somehow the one exception to all this.
A game that flips Nintendo the bird.
Games that never came to Switch but still sold well on PS in Japan — isn't that basically just Chinese mobile games, FF, and Monster Hunter? Is that seriously all there is to "adult games"? If there's more, you guys clearly aren't even buying them properly.
Some mysterious thing that nobody actually buys.
Well, they're basically bandits at the end of the day. The boss just throws some random underling under the bus and bolts.
Fair enough. But if you've got a family, there's barely any stigma attached… guess being single really is the crime here!!
Background and Key Points
Nintendo has been Japan’s dominant console maker since the Famicom (1983), but the “kids’ company” label dates to the mid-1990s, when Sony’s PlayStation captured the market with Final Fantasy VII and Dragon Quest VII, positioning itself as the choice for teens and adults who’d outgrown the Famicom/Super Famicom. That generational split — SFC kids who “graduated” to PS — is exactly what poster >>13 names as the source of the “Nintendo is for kids” mindset, and it’s the crux the thread never resolves. CERO, Japan’s ESRB-equivalent ratings board, is real and A/B/C/D/Z ratings do exist, but citing a CERO B rating (post 36) as proof a game is “for kids” is a joke, not an accurate use of the system — CERO ratings track content like violence and language, not audience maturity or design sophistication.
The thread splits less on whether Nintendo makes good games than on what “adult game” even means, and it never gets an answer. One side keeps naming actual titles — Pokémon, Mario, Xenoblade — while the other retreats to a vague, undefined category (“games for adults”) that, as poster >>40 points out, was never operationalized. When someone tries to pin it down (>>45: Switch-exclusive AAA titles that never ported), it collapses immediately, since Switch’s biggest “adult-skewing” gaps in Japan are arguably just Chinese mobile gacha, FF, and Monster Hunter — hardly a coherent genre.
What outside readers likely miss: this is a distinctly Japanese domestic framing. Switch is the best-selling console in Japan by a wide margin, and family/multiplayer titles dominate its charts there in a way that doesn’t map onto Western “Nintendo = kids” stereotypes, which stem from different marketing history (the 1980s American NES relaunch as a toy, not a 1990s PS/Nintendo split).
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “If you’ve got normal sensibilities, you grow out of stuff like Pokémon and Mario by middle school and play games for adults.”
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