Because to be honest, I don't care about "quirky" titles. I'm sure something like Tokyo Jungle is a good game for people who vibe with that, but that's not me.
I mean I look at my PS3 library and the Sony published Japanese titles are Folklore, Puppeteer, and well...Genji. Genji is straight-up bad in my opinion. The other two are ok games, nothing really that lit my fire.
Compare this to the PS4 and I have The Last Guardian, Death Stranding, Gravity Rush 2, Astro Bot, and Bloodborne. TLG honestly being the weakest with Astro being one of the best platformers vr or not. Death Stranding being my kind of a big interesting mess of a game. Bloodborne and GR2 are up there with some of my favorite games of that gen.
Honestly, for me, it's not really a contest.
I'm sure PS2 and PS1 were full of nifty Sony published titles as well, but like most people I know you bought a PlayStation for things like GTA, FF, MGS, and so on. Maybe some people liked Wild Arms, but it hardly came close to what 3rd parties published.
Honestly, it's my narrative that Sony first-party didn't come into its own until 2nd half of the PS3. That the PS3 gen was a rather dark time for Japanese games and the PS4 gen a sort of revival.
Now obviously I have my bias as I like the big cinematic games. I've grown up on story-focused games like MGS2 and FFX. So that's where I come from.
But when I think of this Japanese PS3 era vs PS4 era. I also have to give it to the PS4 era.
Sure I liked stuff like Vanquish, Bayonetta and Platnium in general. I loved Grasshoper 's output and find their absence pretty sad. Yakuza 4 was a great game and the series was strong. Things like Valkyria Chronicles were awesome. Namco still had stuff. And also some of the early 360 support was good to me if we count that.
But I look at my jrpgs of that time and it was pretty lame honestly. I sure did'nt care for White Knight Chronicles(Ok I forgot about this Sony game). Ni No Kuni was lame and well I just dislike Level 5. I said Namco kept trucking and they did, but outside of Vesperia I have found Tales to all just blur together in medicorecity.
But I compare this to my PS4 days and well it's a different story. Persona 5 came out(on PS3 as well, but I played it on PS4). We had one of the most beautiful jrpgs not called FF, with DQXI. Finally another Valkyria Chronicles the way people wanted with 4. You got better jrpg stuff like Nier: Automata, The DQ Heroes games, The Mana Remakes, Kingdom Hearts 3, Blue Reflection, and so on. Falcom jumped ship to home consoles and has offered plenty of things I'm into. I won't say they are great JRPGS, but I'll tke things like Fairy Tale, these Ryzna games, Exist Archeive, Star OCean 5(eww), and so on over the Idea Factory stuff that seemed like you had to deal with after you finished the other console PS3 jrpgs. You gotta dig deep on the PS4 before you have only those left. Also things like Vesperia and Resonance of Fate got great ports. Hell, something like .Hack//GU port did'nt seem like it was possible on the PS3.
Capcom was great PS3 gen. I'd say they are better now. A shame Lost Planet and Dead Rising died, but Resident Evil has lived.
I miss Ninja Gaiden kind of, but hey Ni-Oh is here and Dead or Alive kept kicking somewhat.
Perv games seem strong on PS4 as well. Senran Kagura is pretty ok and there's other shlock out there like Onechanbara Origins.
A series like Yakuza only continued to get better if you ask me. And Sega at least tried a new Sakura Wars. I liked it. I also tried Sega's jrpg offerings from Media Vision. Not so good, but again I'll play them over say Time and Eternity.
I've had nifty Japanese games like Sakuna:Rice and Ruin and one of my absolute recent favorites, 13 Sentinals. Seen more and more visual novels become more ambitious and actually come out here. Something like Stein's Gate was a small print run release on PS3. Now Robotics Note is on clearance at your local Best Buy where they may have a copy of Ai the Somnium Files. I got a new Ace Combat which makes me pretty happy.
As far as my taste are concerned, it was a far better gen. Now obviously these aren't exclusive, but if we also include the offerings on the Switch well....I feel it's been the best time to be a Japanese game fan, at least since the PS2.
At the end of the day, I feel I've enjoyed more and played more quality Japanese games on the PS4 than I did the PS3. So my narrative is I think the PS4 was a way better system.