Games Bought Thread 3

[Dark Jaguar]

Yeah, I'm not expecting great things from White Knight Chronicles, but I have to try it.


Yeah, there's a lot of truth to this, but here's what I'm not sure of -- has anything actually changed, or was Japanese manga/anime/videogame writing always kind of been like this? Are the stories of the recent FE games actually worse than the GBA stories, or is it just that we have more exposure to the mediocrity of most anime/Japanese videogame writing now, which makes the newer ones look worse...

Like, you're absolutely right about most anime/etc. characters being extremely one-note regurgitated stereotypes, but it's kind of always been like that I think. Is it really getting worse, or have I just seen so much of it now that it's overly familiar?

I don't think it always has. Granted, I don't watch that much of the animu, but I know for sure that characters from shows like Full Metal Alchemist are much deeper than characters in whatever the hell "My Wife is Student Council President" is supposed to be (I'm pretty sure that whole concept should get everyone behind that show on some sort of government watch list, it's disgusting and I'd rather not see that stuff appearing on my Hulu feed). I'm much more familiar with video games, so I can safely say that the characters in Final Fantasy VI are FAR better written than the characters in Final Fantasy XIII. Heck, characters in Super Mario RPG are better written. Peach is a far more rounded character in that game than Lightning is.

Here's a more direct comparison. Lightning is basically intended to be "female Cloud". Everything about XIII was intended to recapture the popularity of VII. Say what you will of VII (first thing I'll say is the translation is pretty bad), but Cloud had an actual personality and more than one emotion. Lightning spends the entirety of her story being a "stern and silent" type, which is LIKE Cloud, but Cloud did more. Cloud joked. Cloud got embarrassed. Cloud worried. Cloud got angry. Cloud went on a da-te. Lightning did none of those things. They were so intent on making sure that Lightning was "like Cloud" that they forgot that Cloud was a more rounded character than "quiet and serious" at all times. When I go through characters in the old games vs the new games, I find that trend time and time again. XIII is filled with one-note characters and previous games allowed characters to be more fully fleshed than their single line description in the manual. In a modern game, a character who's "foolhardy" will always pick the dumbest and bravest possible thing to say or do in every possible situation. In an older game, that only describes what they are likely to do in situations that call for foolhardiness, but doesn't describe what they might do or say in casual conversation.

In Final Fantasy games, this has really become a problem, as recent installments that reuse the characters have made them all cardboard cutouts of themselves. Terra, who had a whole character arc that made her very expressive and fun to be around by the end of the game is reduced to a whining little girl too afraid to do anything in Dissidia. Cloud, in Dissidia and Advent Children and everything else, is reduced to that "strong silent type" with none of the actual personality he had in the original game. Sephiroth is portrayed as "always in control of everything and never surprised" in newer material, whereas he actually could get surprised and would easily reduce himself to playing around with his victims and even laughing at them in the original game, because again, he had a well rounded personality back then which he lacks now. The less said about Yuffie the better, but whereas she actually had some emotional baggage in the original, she's been reduced to eternally optimistic "eye candy" in newer installments, and she's not considered an adult. Creepy.

That creepiness is all over newer games as well. Past games would have child characters, but they were treated like children. Relm had a mouth on her, but was treated like a 10 year old. Then we've got one of the modern Star Ocean games, where another 10 year old character is wearing some kind of "stripper" version of a cat outfit. Relm had a cat outfit too, but it was big puffy pajamas essentially (like with the cat outfits in Super Mario 3DLand). This was a bikini with weird holes in it, and also cat ears. More and more games seem to add this sort of creep factor. The same can be said of the animes I've seen here and there. People kept saying I should watch Sword Art Online, because it was "Like .Hack", and what I found was a big bad monologuing to an entire city who's only reaction was "dull surprise", as well as 1 dimensional characters and sexualizing minors, which never happened in .hack//sign as far as I recall. I still love Studio Ghibli. They have so far been above reproach and have called out these problems themselves.

It doesn't help that most of the self-identified english speaking "anime fans" online with their weird anime girl avatars all seem to be MRAs. I've asked what some of the younger generation of anime fans find interesting about anime, what attracts them to it, and their reasons don't sound at all familiar to me. They like ONE type of story, and anything that deviates from the tropes is "wrong" or "not really anime" or "insulting to anime fans". They all speak their own language of bizarre terms that all seem to identify female characters solely by some fetishized personality trait. They really don't care about innovation or creative storytelling, just new cool stuff to look at. I do generalize, this obviously doesn't represent "all modern anime fans", but it does represent a general consensus among the "community" they've formed around themselves (a community I want nothing to do with). I also recognize their list of things they like about anime as exactly the opposite of what first got me watching those shows. It was something new, a way to tell a story I hadn't seen before, and had continuity, and that's what got me interested. Today, I tend to only watch original stuff on the outskirts of the wider market. It's why I barely ever bother with your anime thread, in fact. You tend to post show after show that's nothing more than "the exact same", and filled with all the problems I've noticed about stuff like that. In some ways, the worst part of anime is the community that surrounds it.

It's no wonder the "PC Master Race" has become so at-odds with the anime fans, to the point they automatically reject any western game that has an "unrealistic and cartoony" art style or make fun of any mod maker who decided to, say, add a bunch of weird anime eyes to Skyrim. It's an overreaction borne out of a rather toxic community's overbearing presence online. (Though, if you want my thoughts on modern modding communities, let's just say they've got their own skeletons, and they rhyme with "Charming better armor for Skyrim (female only)".