Games Bought Thread 3

[A Black Falcon]

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 sure you are joking here, but there are far worse things out there than My Wife is the Student Council President. I mean, it doesn't even have incest, loli-anything, or such! By the incredibly low standards stupid fanservice teasing animes like that go by, it could be worse. (Oh, and episodes are like 5 minutes each; it's not full length.)

Of course though, lots of anime really is terrible by any standard, I cannot defend the medium.

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.

And this is where the problem is, for this thread at least (where like no one else is going to read it) -- I'm far less versed in Final Fantasy games than you, so I can't really compare the old ones to the new. The only FF games I've gotten more than a couple hours into are V, X-2, and XII. As for older anime-style game character stereotypes versus newer ones, though, I think that anime has always been a stereotype-heavy field. In everything popular ideas are copied, but anime has taken this to an extreme. You might be right that over time the extent of the stereotyping has expanded, as now you can basically tell most things about a character just by looking at their design to maybe a greater extent than ever (twintails? Tsundere! Etc.), but it's always been a major element of the field.

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.

I haven't played much of these games so I wouldn't know, but these do sound like common anime stereotypes you see all the time, yes. I do think that older anime was often just as bad as newer anime, though -- part of the difference is just that more of the bad animes and games are released here now, versus then. But on the other hand yes, character stereotyping has advanced; it has always been there, but the extent of the paint-by-numbers, regurgitate-the-stereotypes elements of character design do seem to have gotten worse over the past 15 years. Or maybe it's just that I've watched more of it; there were plenty of awful, stereotyped animes back then too!

However...

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.

SAO started out as a light novel, a category of short books with some anime art in them that are popular in Japan. Once you got some decent stuff out of LNs -- one of my favorite anime franchises, The Slayers, started out as one, though I've only watched the animes -- but in the '00s the field changed in favor of a lot of series with overlong names and incredibly bad, paint-by-numbers writing. SAO is one of the worst of the bunch, and a good example of many of the worst traits of its genre. If it isn't clear I hate SAO, it's awful and nothing at all like the still-fantastic original .Hack//Sign anime series (which is still the best thing in that franchise!).

Some staples of generic LN writing include a harem-action setting, an absurdly overpowered protagonist who can absolutely crush everyone but is probably overlooked or under-rated by everyone for REALLY dumb plotline reasons so they can have their stupid-overpowered guy (and it is usually a guy) be the "underdog", and some form of alternate-world thing, either through VR like SAO or the closely related isekai genre, a once-promising field that is now completely terrible thanks to things like SAO. Isekai stories' basic plot concepts are all that the main character dies in real life Japan, and afterwards is reborn in a fantasy world with all of their memories intact. SAO isn't quite isekai, but it has some definite similarities, most notably the "cheat". You see, whether it's Kirito form SAO and his perfect knowledge of the game or generic isekai protagonist and the way they use their real-world memories to get ahead and be stupid-amazing in this fantasy world which just happens to have traits perfect for their particular set of otaku skills, a key element of these stories is that the main character has an inherent advantage over everyone else. It's a power-fantasy concept, of course, but it's troubling too, because it imagines that you can't really get ahead unless you start out with the right skills. Very negative outlook on the world there...

Plus, for SAO in particular, I hate the whole "if you die in the game you die in real life" element. .hack's constant use of having people fall into comas because of in-game actions is bad enough, but at least there there is no attempt to explain everything scientifically -- I mean, in Sign Tsukasa is stuck in the game despite not even being in a VR headset in real life! SAO, however, tries to explain it, but it's so brain-hurtingly stupid an explanation that it doesn't work at all. It just creates meaningless tragedy I'd rather not watch, early in the series particularly. (If you keep going though, apparently his harem grows over time, naturally. I did not follow it.)


If you want maybe the best VR-world series of the past few years, maybe check out Log Horizon. It's not perfect, as there sort of is a "cheat" element in that the main characters are all super-good at the game, but it has a unique and more intelligent spin on the concept than most -- here all of the characters are people who were in a VR game, but suddenly it became real. Apparently they were transported or something to a world where that VR game is a real fantasy anime world, and they need to deal with that. It's no .hack//Sign, not even close, and there's plenty of stupid-anime elements to the series, but at least I found it decent and somewhat interesting, which is vastly superior to everything else recent in the field, that is unless you count the last .hack OVA series, .hack//Quantum; that's good too.

They all speak their own language of bizarre terms that all seem to identify female characters solely by some fetishized personality trait.

This is very true, anime over the past couple of decades has, as I said, built up a stable of stereotype characters which writers drag out again and again, knowing that fans have one that they like, so why not just re-use that character concept instead of trying something vaguely original or realistic? However, this does apply to male characters too -- there is a genre of harem shows with a female protagonist and male harem, and each of the guys in those shows are specific stereotypes, just like the female characters in other animes. So this isn't exclusively a single-gender thing. The otome game genre of visual novels are the game version of this, and some have even come out here in the US -- the Hakuouki franchise is one example which comes to mind.

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.

Of course it's not ALL, but I have seen some of that, yeah... but why? I don't know all the reasons of course, but the nature of anime, the escapist, power-fantasy element, the predictable characters, the constant fanservice in a lot of things... maybe it attracts that kind of person. While I admit to sometimes liking some fanservice, it goes way too overboard a lot of the time, often in creepy ways, and either you can be bothered by that but watch anime anyway, or you can say 'that's fine', which, well, is a more MRA-like attitude...

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.

I definitely still watch anime, but I have found myself watching less of it in the past year or two than I once did; it's just so, SO similar that do you really need to watch more of it when they're barely different? Seeing generic stereotypical characters in some new-ish situation is amusing, and I will watch some, but I probably only actually finish a show or two a season. And I write reviews of the stuff a LOT less than I did a few years ago, as I'm sure you noticed. I decided at one point that it was not worth the significant amount of time it was taking, and I'd rather write about videogames instead since that is what I love the most. After that I started up the Game Opinion Summaries series.

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.

I'm sure there are plenty of bad apples on the "PC is the best" side too... likely a lower percentage of the total, though, that may well be true. But that whole "anime avatar = bad" stereotype surely is not always accurate, so yeah, I agree with you here for the most part -- it's an over-reaction because of how some or much of the community acts.

(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)".

I know the "best" response is probably to say that there should be less fanservice in things in general, and that is probably true, but if it is going to be there, I think that it should be equally applied to both genders. That WOULD be a change from how things are now, and it would be a change for the better. So yeah, (female only)... no.