Unnecessarily drawn out cutscenes with not much going on or conversations between characters where for no apparent reason they take long pauses and don't say anything and just stare into space. Plays hell with my short attention span.
When is a game too ''Japanese'' for you?
- Thread starter Hades
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Only when prepubescent girls and boys start flinging themselves about like a shallow, narcasistic college fashion/dance project - does it lose me. Now the darker, more inspiring and less Freudian types...perhaps then does it finally get my attention. When the characters make me think of them instead of the writer's lack of imagination and personal fantasies, otherwise it pulls me out of the experience. It isn't escapism then, it is character profiling of somebody that shouldn't be in my mind. The same goes for any country's media including my own. (I hate modern Dr Who for precisely these reasons. Also too much whimsy for sci fi. Sci fi should delve deep into the philosophical and psychological...we aren't lost teena...well maybe that's the target audience.)
I dunno if there's a hard line, most Japanese tropes and cliches I can tolerate as long as they are done well. The High school setting is more something I see in Anime, but I can stand it in games like Persona, harem tropes can get especially bad, but I'll tolerate them for a good story. Fan service can come off as annoying, but the worst examples tend to have shit gameplay so I don't play them anyway, or are visual novels, which just isn't a genre I like that much.
In cases like that video Raddra linked, that kind of thing is unbearably annoying to me, but there are plenty of Western tropes that annoy the shit out of me if their done badly too.
I suppose my only real hard line is the Underage fan service and sex, fantasy or not, that stuff creeps me out. In part because I deal with kids for work, and playing a game like that could easily get me fired. In second because I've dealt with one too many actual child molesters that had that shit on their computers or in their stash, it has made the connection inseparable in my mind. I know liking that crap doesn't automatically make you a pedophile, but I've met too many that were to look at that stuff without feeling creeped out.
In cases like that video Raddra linked, that kind of thing is unbearably annoying to me, but there are plenty of Western tropes that annoy the shit out of me if their done badly too.
I suppose my only real hard line is the Underage fan service and sex, fantasy or not, that stuff creeps me out. In part because I deal with kids for work, and playing a game like that could easily get me fired. In second because I've dealt with one too many actual child molesters that had that shit on their computers or in their stash, it has made the connection inseparable in my mind. I know liking that crap doesn't automatically make you a pedophile, but I've met too many that were to look at that stuff without feeling creeped out.
Personally I find that attitude among Western audiences to be incredibly closed minded and regressive. Its symptomatic of a horribly prudish society. And lets not pretend that western games don't try to do very similar things when they think they can get away with it, its just that Japanese games on the whole tend to be more refreshingly direct, open and honest about what they're doing.
Not that sometimes it can't go a bit too far, but that happens with any theme in any medium. I have very few problems with playing any kind of Japanese game, or western game for that matter, if the actual gameplay is good and/or story is good and/or I like the characters or setting. I don't think I've been turned off a game for being "too" something; though I have for a game being either poor or, even worse, bland.
I used to be like that. But just the other week I ordered an import game. Its entirely in Japanese and I understand very little Japanese but...well for one its apparently quite easy to get by in said game even if you don't and for two I guess I can try to learn a little.Barbas said:
Why would you need to justify why you play any game to anyone? If you are enjoying those games then why does it matter what other people think? I don't play game so I can tell other people why I play them. I play them because they have something in them that I like.Harlemura said:
I think people are missing out on great games because of this. Some people have mentioned Final Fantasy X-2 and Tales of series in this thread which are known for their excellent battle systems. What else do you really need in a game?
It gets too Japanese for me when there is an unnecessary "mascot" in the game.
Persona 4 has Teddy, which is fine but Valkyria Chronicles has that pig with wings that contributed nothing to the story.
Persona 4 has Teddy, which is fine but Valkyria Chronicles has that pig with wings that contributed nothing to the story.
That's all well and good, but I find there is some fault on the Japanese end of things, too. One strong indication of this is when the Dead or Alive developers try to justify their fanservice with "Big boobs are our culture." Make that of what you will.Lightspeaker said:
And yeah, Americans can be kind of prudish about the whole fan service thing, considering a number of our media standards. I mean, why do we censor video games when not every game is for kids, adults have the responsibility to monitoring which games get into kids' hands, many of us are adults ourselves? Makes you wonder...
Yet, Japan does tend to go a bit too far. Hyperdimension Neptunia is easily one of the worst offenders. Most, if not all, of its fanservice is beyond pointless, and they use some of the most ridiculous reasons to justify using just about every female stereotype for fanservice in existence, from the "onee-chan" to the "yandere" to the dominatrix to the airhead, etc. And it doesn't help that despite all this, despite all the blatant fanservice, I could never shake the feeling that the game just doesn't like me, the player. But that' something for another day.
Project X Zone, while not as bad, still has its issues, only here, its fanservice is more meant to distract the player from the game's flaws if anything else. Those flaws are rather glaring, too, which makes the fanservice kind of insulting in a way.
And then there's Rosario x Vampire. You know, I actually like the manga. Despite the high school setting, and the harem set-up, I found it rather easy to enjoy it...especially when one of the harem candidates said a flat-out "no" to the idea of polygami. *sigh* AND THEN THE ANIME CAME OUT!!! My word, the animators used every opportunity they could to throw in as many panty shots as they could. Even the f*cking end-slate does nothing but wave a female ass with a very short skirt in front of your face, achieving approximately one panty shot per second, instead of actually previewing the next episode! THAT'S NOT WHY I WATCH THIS STUFF!
And then we have Persona 4. You know, the Golden version of the game has a bath scene and a hot springs scene. I can handle the bath scene, because the bath scene uses the in-game models, so fan service is pretty much non-existant. Plus, the scene is pretty much played for laughs. Yet, the hot springs scene is full animated, and it's pretty much standard anime fare. Fanservice, two of the guys are peeping, they get caught, all of the guys get punished, and not in a good way. I'm still kind of wishing they had handled the scene better.
I dunno, it just feels like the Japanese overuse sexual fanservice to the point that it's going out of style. If they tempered the usage, checked the reason why they were including the fanservice in the first place, there might be some taste to it. But as things are now...it's just too much.
But fanservice doesn't NEED to be justified. Fanservice is fanservice. There isn't a problem with it. You might not like it but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.Dragonpit said:
That's because the game is made for very specific and niche audience who likes ALL of that. Fanservice is there for the sake of fanservice which is fine. Some people like it. There is nothing wrong with stereotypes either because this audience likes them.
Have you considered that maybe some people do watch it because of that?
The scene was fun. Nothing special but nothing too bad either. It's just a small part of the overall game so it doesn't even matter that much.
Here is what I do. I enjoy games for their gameplay mostly and if a game that I consider good has fanservice in it, I just mostly ignore it. Because why should I care? I like the game for the gameplay. Fanservice might make the game interesting for other people so it's a win-win situation.
My boy, have you even heard of the sixties? Everyone was fckin everyone else at the time. Then aids sort of appeared to tell everyone they should probably calm down a bit. Carry ons plus Monty pythons and let's not forget the eternally booming porn industry. Only higher class toffs are the prudes, the rest of us are filthy, horny beasts mate! Don't listen to Yahtzee, he's got a Brit-prude complex probably from his high class upbringing. But...umm...anyways...continue!...Lightspeaker said:
None. I'm mostly just confused why this Japanophobia cropped up in the last ten years in the games industry and community. It's just really uncomfortable and comes off as the kind of crap you'd see in the Reagan-era with misinformation leading to stereotypes that are backed up by the media as well as the community.
A few reasons, I think. One is that people want to feel superior to other people and one easy way to do that is by putting down what other people like. Another reason is that there are many things common in anime that are, by the norms of western culture, strange and "weird", making an easy target for people who dislike anything that strays too far from what they consider normal. Finally, we must admit that a certain small minority of anime fans are, shall we say, somewhat over-enthusiastic in their preferences.Aiddon said:
I will literally play any game if the gameplay is good enough regardless of story, that being said story can and does bring the game down as whole sometimes, anything by compile heart for example normally has a good battle system but a story that range from barely passable to completely awful.
Thing is...you can make the exact same argument for violence in most cases. How about those MGS torture sequences? Quite easy to argue that putting them in all the damn time is unnecessary to the story but they're in there all the time. Fundamentally fanservice is simply a part of the tone of a piece of media. Its there for its own reason, it doesn't NEED other things 'justifying' it. If you don't like that tone then there's plenty of other stuff with its own tone to go enjoy. I mean its not as if they've shoehorned panty shots into This War of Mine or something.Dragonpit said:
Hell, you brought up games like Hyperdimension Neptunia which, at its core, is a funny, silly, irreverent story poking jabs at anything and everything it can get its hands on with a hefty side-order of cuteness which both uses and lambasts tropes. Fanservice in a game like that absolutely fits with the tone.
I find it weird that you're saying 'trying to pull the wool over my eyes' when talking about Japanese originated stuff though. Like I already said...Japanese games are actually MORE honest and open about it than western games are, which tend to be more coy about it when its put in at all.
Frankly, I also find the whole "violence is good, naughtiness is bad" thing to be a weird as hell result of America influence on media. Personally for many years I was like that; the whole 'trenchcoat-edginess' thing as a means to try to be cool. But then I grew up and out of my teens and I realised I was exhausted of that garbage and, frankly, how rather horrific the whole thing and people's attitude to it was. And I realised that...you know what...I can like cute and funny things and not give a damn about what anyone thinks about it. Not everything has to be grimdark.
You don't HAVE to like any of it. But I find it extremely bizarre and more than a little sad the phobias and shaming attitude people seem to have towards anything even slightly risqu?.
I'll probably avoid that for now. Compile Heart was in the habit of trying to get ALL my money last year; got at least four games of theirs to complete first.Tony2077 said:
I'm pretty down with anything JRPGs do, and don't really have a "cap" on how japanese a game can be. Part of it is similar to what someone earlier said: that when I was growing up anime was insanely hard to come by, especially in my small rural town, and as a result any time I stumbled upon a game with obvious japanese influences it was something to celebrate. That reflex hasn't entirely disappeared, even now, twenty years later.
Fanservice isn't something I'm especially fond of. 90% of it does nothing for me, and some of it creeps me out. Still, even when it's at its most pervasive, it's generally easy to ignore. Usually it's just the stray scene here and there, unless the game is built for fanservice. Unless it's something that extends to the standard character models (such as Neptunia's infamous "boobs that jiggle despite the model not moving to cause said jiggle, as if possessed by the devil") I just pay it no mind.
Fanservice isn't something I'm especially fond of. 90% of it does nothing for me, and some of it creeps me out. Still, even when it's at its most pervasive, it's generally easy to ignore. Usually it's just the stray scene here and there, unless the game is built for fanservice. Unless it's something that extends to the standard character models (such as Neptunia's infamous "boobs that jiggle despite the model not moving to cause said jiggle, as if possessed by the devil") I just pay it no mind.
There are plenty of RPGs with awesome battle systems, so why not stick to playing RPGs with great battlesystems that have do something else right as well? Most of these things are 30-50 hours long, and that's a lot of time to spend on something for just one aspect of it.SquallTheBlade said:
Don't do it, my brother/sister. Save yourself from the shame. Watch a few youtube vids instead to get an idea of what I'm talking about.infohippie said:
In truth, the game itself isn't that great. The mechanics are boilerplate JRPG and the story is passable at best. I do confess that I stopped at the 13 hour mark and JRPG storylines are known for being slow burners but this one just didn't hold my interest enough for me to overlook all the aftorementioned nonsense.