Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - Atlus With the Old, In With the New
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5912 Location: Virginia, United States |
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The biggest problem with comparing Japanese and American ideas of what is considered beautiful, cute, charming, sexy, realistic, woke, and safe is that we are not hiveminds.
Everyone's tastes are different, and all those terms mean different things to different people, even among those who think they are in a certain groups. Yeah, American AAA console games may be trending certain ways, but there is plenty to see and love. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6206 |
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If not for the obvious sexism and at times racism. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 584 |
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Truth. And if the word of Japanese developers and creatives were so sacrosanct, I struggle to understand why so many people in the US blew their gaskets when Ishiwatari sat folks down and patiently explained that Bridget was a trans woman, or why people review-bombed AI: The Somnium Files for touching on queer themes. A lot of the "Journos in the west hate Japanese games!" discourse doesn't carry any water when you look at the review scores Bayonetta and NieR Automata got (who do you think gave those games the "critic" scores???). There's a massive gulf between the way folks on G4 would talk about Baten Kaitos back in the day and the way folks today talk about Rune Factory or Shiren the Wanderer or Live A Live. Hell, just look at how Octopath Traveller 2 got glowing reviews. |
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Stelman257
Posts: 301 |
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Yeah it’s the worst thing with that crowd, when they say crap like “the last HOT FEMALE PROTAGONIST was 2B!!” it’s obvious they’re just there to crap on things, and be awful people. They have no idea what they’re saying because they will never actual interact with or play any of the things they’re endlessly complaining about. But they sure will try to tell you a lot about vagina bones!
As already said, most of the posts you see from the worst people online are the reverse of what you’re saying here. I rarely if ever see anything except people making huge thirst posts over new Genshin characters, and I think most normal cool people are totally fine if you love sexy waifus in games. Games like Nier Automata reviewed extremely well and 2B is such a popular character that she crosses over into everything. I feel like what you’re saying is exactly what I’m talking about when I say it’s the mindset and rhetoric this crowd is trying to spread. That people will call you out for liking 2B or Stellar Blade’s lead, and call you bad things if you don’t like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Hades 2 sexiness, and I can honestly tell you that’s simply not true. It’s like how we’ve also had plenty of sexy guys and girls in games since 2B, and Stellar Blade is not some final bastion or return of sexy girls. It’s just the latest thing this insincere crowd has chosen to latch onto and make a thing.
Maaaan don’t even get me started how bad the Bridget discourse got. Even more hilarious when transphobic people say stuff like “appealing to these people will not get you sales”, when that firstly isn’t the point, and secondly is also just flat out wrong. So many in the trans community play and feel welcomed with Strive, but I’ll bet these people making a stink about Bridget wouldn’t know a single thing about the game otherwise! |
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DKL
Posts: 1957 Location: California, USA |
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To be honest, based on how people talk, I’d be surprised if all these people using these games as excuses to go out and fight other people even knew how to play the games they’re trying to prop up. Because they were too busy fighting instead of picking up the sticks. |
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i got the shivers!
Posts: 102 Location: Brazil |
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Forspoken was a co-production written, designed, and had music composed by westerners. The programming was done by Japanese individuals but all the things people heavily hated from that game stemmed from the western side like the writing and protagonist. I don't recall the actual gameplay being a huge point of contention with people so much as the writing and characters.
My favorite thing that happens is when someone says "if X came out today it would be called woke" and then a release or remake of X gets annoucned and it's heavily altered and the people in charge of it condemn and trash the original as being regressive and outdated and the new version is going to fix that. I really enjoy how so many things are both woke and anti-woke at the same time Really shows you how subjective these things are. |
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Trollhiti Tour Guide
Posts: 17 |
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If you're actually looking for an answer and not just being rhetorical the Bridget thing was because ever since the character's inception they were portrayed as a crossdressing boy/otokonoko until Strive changed it. I think it's pretty common whenever a popular fan favorite character gets heavily changed it results in backlash. Although the truth of the matter is it's usually the opposite that happens. There was a This Week In Anime article about "queerbaiting" in Sound Euphonium and the discussion go into more detail but a lot of the time it's when a creator confirms a character not being gay or trans that ignites a storm in the community. There was the whole Bayonetta 3 ending being a perfect example of this. If the leaked Paper Mario TTYD information is to be believed then we'll no doubt be seeing some there when that game comes out. Vivian is always weird to me because it was only Italian localization that tried to say the character was trans and neither the JP nor EN script did. Very rare case where people try to run with a non-English localization as their preferred canon and people were naturally setting themselves up for disappointment if they thought a random Italian localization was going to be the one that gets chosen to be the baseless everywhere. And of course Persona 4's Naoto and Kanji discourse will always be eternal. |
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Rubicon
Posts: 5 |
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Fantastic column! Love reading your work, Jean-Karlo!
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Stelman257
Posts: 301 |
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To be fair, you make this seem like such a constant thing when the reality is Bridget had only appeared in Guilty Gear XX and it's re-releases/version updates as far as the Guilty Gear fighting games are concerned. One game, and her story in that was inconclusive. One of the big things Daisuke Ishiwatari and the rest at Arcsys said was that they had wanted to tell a story like Bridget's in their game for a long time, but weren't sure how, and that with Strive they felt the world had finally caught up to what they were trying to get at. It was definitely an official transition of a character in the truest sense, but majority of the "backlash" was very thinly veiled in what it was actually about, and it wasn't about Bridget. It was about woke western culture polluting pure Japanese games that totally never ever have anything political or environmental to say in them. I remember the huge amount of lies people made up, saying it was a mis-translation, it was the BAD ENDING, that they didn't mean it that way and so on. The character literally turned to the screen and said I'm a girl and people still denied it happened until the creators came out and very patiently explicitly said so. And their gender identity is all that changed, their appearance, and their fashion, even their teddy bear and usage of yo-yo's were all still the same! The character was hardly heavily changed, they simply had their story told. |
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onpufan
Posts: 154 |
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I assumed it wasn't American - or at least WayForward - when they used the original Marian design and not the re-design from River City Girls. I always hated that redesign and it felt like they were trying to make a statement on how Marian being girly and sexy was bad so they turned her into some buff musclehead. It was always especially odd since WayForward was usually one of the few western developers not afraid to make cute girls and had no problem with that design in Double Dragon Neon back in 2012. But perhaps they're also deciding to move away from from that philosophy Either way I'm just glad Gaiden uses her OG design. Samus is another character that seems to be different in western produced and eastern produced games. There was a viral meme awhile back where people argued if the more realistic style in Prime was better or the more anime/girlier design from the later games was better. I prefer the Japanese style of course but it does highlight the difference and how some people cling to old American Nintendo Power depictions of the character despite them not being canon.. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 584 |
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It's a mythology gag. Marian got rock-hard abs because her kidnappings always start with someone her punching her in the gut to knock the wind out of her. (See: the intro to the original Double Dragon.) So she got the rock-hard abs so she can't get sucker-punched in the stomach anymore.
We'll be touching on the TTYD Remake this week, but long story short: the JPN script never calls Vivian trans but does underline that she is likely genderqueer (likely assigned male at birth but presents as a woman), and her sisters give her endless crap for it. Hence why folks have read Vivian as trans. It's hard not to, the themes are all there.
Thank you kindly. I appreciate my regular readers and I enjoy being a part of people's weekly readings. |
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