Passing Trends

Posted by ASandoval on January 14, 2009 under Games | Read the First Comment

I have no problem admitting that I still like anime and manga, even if I’m a little ambivalent of its modern incarnation. I even think it does some things better than its Western counterparts (‘counterpart’ here meaning American comic books and TV serials). That said, the genre has worn on me a bit since my high school obsession. I still like all the things I did back then, in some ways appreciating them more now that I’m older. Certain aspects however, including a lot of repeated situations and themes that recur in just about all stories no matter what, have become somewhat grating. I recognize this is because they are for a Japanese audience, who are all very picky about the type of story they ingest and become completely disinterested if that aspect is not there. These do nothing for me. Worse yet, it seems that these trends have infested the medium entirely, leaving me unenthusiastic for any animation or graphic novel from Japan outside of anyone named “Miyazaki” who might have worked on it.

  Japanese RPGs are no different. I had a rampant obsession with this genre that even predates my anime obsession, around 1994 or so. This was during a time period where publishers and producers of video games would rather us not know that video games came from Japan and would either make the cover art as ambiguous as possible, or at worst, hire a Conan fan artist to draw them. Bad cover artwork aside, this was a glory period for the genre. Although it was rather unloved in America, it gave rise to some amazing titles from Square, Sega, Enix and every once in a rare while, Nintendo.

 

  Jump shoot to Final Fantasy VII, a game that rocked the world regardless of how you might feel about it. When I say it rocked the world, I mean it quite literally changed pop culture in both its home country and America. Firstly, it proudly announced that it was the seventh in a series, not hiding the fact that Nintendo had decided let some incarnations of the series remain overseas. What’s more, its enhanced visuals that, while now may seem dated, captivated an entirely new audience to see what this whole RPG thing was about. It opened many eyes to the world of both RPGs and Japanese culture, including many grade schoolers who were still a couple of years shy of high School. Thus, when the turn of millennium came about, this young crowd would be the target market for many, many years. An insurgence of anime styled RPG video games would be localized in America, but not only that, so would anime and manga itself. It was suddenly being aired on TV, being sold in boxsets at Best Buys and FYEs across America, and vendors outside of mall stores would start selling cheap knock off airbrushed ‘anime’ jackets. 

Final Fantasy VII also affected the JRPG genre accordingly, but not in the way you might think. While it’s true today that Square is trying to run the Final Fantasy VII train, they were more concerned at first with original IPs such as the later Final Fantasy games, Parasite Eve, Chrono Cross and others. No, if anything, Final Fantasy VII affected the other RPGs that were released by companies such as Atlus and even at-time-competitor Enix to a small extent. Now, everybody wanted to make RPGs since they were making big bucks, and it became important to remember how insistent the Japanese market is.  In order to do so, they did what they could to mimic the appeal of Final Fantasy VII. In this way, I sometimes like to think of Final Fantasy VII as the video game (or if that seems too general, the JRPG) world’s Watchmen.

 

I haven’t read the Watchmen myself, at least not to a great extent, but I do know what it did to the comic book world. Watchmen is, at its core, a satirical look at the nature of Superheroes, a look into what psychology could be applied to someone who would actually be a super hero. It was dark. It was grim. Comic book fans and creators alike ate it up, and the bronze age of comics came to a close. Characters needed to be dark and brooding; leading to the creation of characters like Spawn, and it was even injected into pre-established characters, most notably Batman in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Final Fantasy VII, in the same way, similarly changed the status quo. You weren’t the bright and optimistic hero, you were an apathetical ex-military who’s turned to terrorism for money and has a past shrouded in mystery. You weren’t fighting against a dark force out to conquer the world for his own greedy purposes, but a former friend who goes insane upon learning he is the creation of a genetic experiment involving the cells of an extraterrestrial life-form. And they are both pretty. Very pretty.

  Thus developers rushed to knock off as many elements as they could, including the brooding protagonist who learns to love element, and the pretty antagonist we’re suppose to sympathize with as they attempt to destroy the world. Not content with this, Japanese developers started going the extra mile, adding an anime aesthetic to almost every release. Now we had brooding heroes and evil villains on top of a candy coated color scheme, cute animal mascots, the usual assortment of Harem anime stereotypes filling out all the female protagonists and, of course, at least one awkward bathhouse scene. This tradition continues to this very day in Japan, even as America slowly wanes off the addiction to Japanese culture it had back at the beginning of the new millennium.

 

 

Thankfully for me, my schedule demands that I actually play less RPGs, so I don’t have to be subjected to it anymore. Of course, I don’t want to sound like a generalizing prick either. Just as there are usually a few good large-scale movies outside of generic blockbuster genre tripe at the Hollywood box office, there are a handful of RPGs I feel fall outside of this slew of generic crap, namely Final Fantasy XII, Mother 3 and anything by Mistwalker. All of these however, lie far from the Anime aesthetic (Yeah, ok, maybe not Blue Dragon), you’d almost think I was bigoted to those games. It’s a shame, because I long for a time when a brightly colored Anime style might attract me to a game like it used to with both RPGs and other genres alike. The world is a very different place now, it seems.