Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - What Is An 'Anime Game,' Anyway?
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2570 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I've honestly never seen anyone experienced in fighting games define an "anime fighter" as simply "can you air dash?", as the people I've seen talk about generally boil it down simply to "How unga is it?", i.e. "How wild & crazy can it get?". The more mechanics there are (like air dashing, but more than just that), the faster the speed of a fight is (a.k.a. is there any point in playing defense?), & how wild/crazy the visuals are what I see used to define is something's an "anime fighter" from the experts I've watched talk about the concept. Essentially, "Hit hard, hit often, never back down, & have it look as utterly flashy as possible, in the process". In that regard, yes, I've never seen anyone call Dead or Alive an "anime fighter" because despite all of the fanservice, & the later games featuring some wild visual moments, it's still mechanically a rather simple & straightforward game (Punch, Kick, Guard, & Free/Counter), since DoA is an offshoot of Virtua Fighter. In comparison, I've seen some say that Tekken 7 & 8 do approach "anime fighter" territory, as the series has essentially embraced the wild & crazy when it comes to visuals (especially T8), many characters have a phone book-sized command list (since the devs apparently almost never take moves away from returning characters), and there have been various mechanics added in over time, sometimes being exclusive to a single character. Personally, I don't really use the term "anime fighter" to describe any fighting game, except maybe BlazBlue (which, to be fair, essentially aimed to be as "anime" as utterly possible), but I can see the logic, at least in the definition I've seen experienced fighting game players use. |
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Kicksville
 Posts: 1197 |
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I feel like there's a bit of history missing here regarding the term "anime fighter"...although to be fair, that history actually IS missing, since the original discussions were on message boards that are largely lost to time.
Going off of my own recollection: "Anime fighter" as a term came about very specifically to get rid of the term "doujin fighter". When Melty Blood came out, a PC only doujinshi game, it was widely circulated for free by English speakers without any real awareness it was even supposed to be paid for. People heard it was a "doujin game", and assumed that was a Japanese term for freeware. Games like Queen of Heart, Eternal Fighter Zero, etc were distributed under the same assumption - they were doujinshi games, but they weren't supposed to be free. (This also popularized the term "poverty game", a particular meaning which has weirdly been lost over the years) That incorrect usage of "doujin game" eventually went away, but many fighting game fans thought "doujin" was a classification for genre of fighting game. Melty Blood was a "doujin fighter"...and Guilty Gear was a "doujin fighter", and...Marvel vs Capcom was a "doujin fighter". If it had air dashing or super high jumps or hyper action or something like that, it was doujin, regardless of origin otherwise. People seriously believed this. So there was an effort to figure out a better name for these games, which came down to "air dasher" and "anime fighter". Depending on where you go, sometimes one term is more common than the other, but either way: The "doujin fighter as a genre" term was replaced and went away. This, I think, is part of why "anime fighter" is so ambiguous. It comes from a name that only applied to a small number of doujinshi games, which was then overapplied, and then was consciously reclassified, but with a whole bunch of asterisks to include or exclude things that overapplication covered. Marvel vs Capcom is considered a separate thing now, but Guilty Gear isn't. And of course, with "anime" right there in the name, titles that arguably barely qualify will make it because there are anime-like characters. It is sort of funny to me looking on places like Reddit now, where people think Guilty Gear is the quintessential anime fighter, when that term was only retroactively applied - and get confused as to why French Bread games are counted, when the term largely originates from trying to classify those games. |
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AQuin1904
Posts: 266 |
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I mean...yes? DoA has been pushing toward photorealistic graphics for about as long as Tekken, albeit with lesser fidelity, while Under-Night In-Birth deliberately evokes 2D cel art. Even if they both use narrative tropes (that were never unique to anime anyway), one obviously draws on more elements than the other. |
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DKL
 Posts: 1956 Location: California, USA |
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I was not aware that there were people that thought that the Murder of Sonic was a just cynical April fools throwaway thing.
That VN was great and I would pay full price for a more fleshed out experience from the same team. |
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