Wow, I can't believe Dark Void didn't just fly off the shelves.
Capcom was probably the worst offender, but Hudson made Bomberman dark, gritty and shitty with Act Zero and Namco made Ace Combat: Assault Horizon with QTEs and a NATO bootlicking plot, and gave Ridge Racer to FlatOut developers Bugbear to turn into a Burnout ripoff with Unbounded. Many such cases!
Capcom's guesses weren't completely off the mark. With regards to the Rome thing, you had the precedent of popular things with an antiquity setting like the God of War games and The Gladiator with Russell Crowe. With Onimusha 3, Jean Reno was a somewhat popular actor and Paris was a modern Western city
The thing is that none of those would be the kind of extremely cynical, safe choice you'd make if you were looking to pander to US audiences, which makes them interesting
If you want to see an extremely depressing case of a Japanese developer trying to capture the Xbox bro audience, look no further than Quantum Theory from Tecmo which is a painfully bad Japanese copy of Gears of War by the creator of Fatal Frame