A common thread on these forums is which games should be made into movies. This overlooks the obvious fact that the answer is NONE of them, as game-based Hollywood movies almost always suck and are strictly average even when they don't.
However, anime is a different matter. MANY games over the years have been adapted into anime. Originally it was mainly fighting games being adapted into movies and OAVs, some good (Street Fighter, Fatal Fury) some not so good (Tekken, Art of Fighting). But especially over recent years there's been a wider variety of games adapted to anime, such as Xenosaga, Valkyria Chronicles, Zone of the Enders, Tales of Symphonia/the Abyss and The Tower of Druaga (based on an ancient NES game of all things!) Persona 3 even got an anime sequel, although it really had little to do with the actual game. And this isn't even counting .HACK, which was designed as a cross-media project from the beginning.
But what I'm wondering is why haven't the following games been adapted yet? These would be AWESOME anime if done right, but they seem to have simply slipped everyone's minds:
1) Odin Sphere.
When I think 'epic', I think of Odin Sphere. This game had simply the best plot I've experienced is a LONG time, with 5 great lead characters, beautiful love stories and a war which raged across an entire world. Not bad for an entirely 2D game which used no prerendered cutscenes but only its own ingame engine. While I can imagine the multi-viewpoint story to be a bit difficult to do in a TV series, surely it could be adapted without too much difficulty by a sufficiently talented team.
2) BlazBlue.
Judging from these opening movies, BlazBlue is halfway to being an anime already. If you know anything about the backstory of the games (or even if you've only played them and don't skip the pre-battle chatter) then you know that BlazBlue has a story WAY too deep to be contained by a simple 2D fighter. Given some of the good adaptations that have come from even simpler games (the plot of Street Fighter II was basically "a bunch of people get together, beat each other up, then beat up a major crime boss" yet it was adapted into both a fantastic movie and a great TV series) it's practically a crime that BlazBlue hasn't been given a proper anime yet.
3) Digital Devil Saga.
Of all JRPGs released over the last decade, THIS is the one that most deserves a proper anime adaptation. Interestingly, Megami Tensei HAS in fact been adapted before- aside from Persona: Trinity Soul there have also been 2 OAVs and 3 TV series based off the franchise (including one called Digital Devil Story, which was the name of the original novel series the entire SMT series is based on, although it is ancient and unrelated) as well as a variety of manga adaptations. But this 2-game mini-series, released in Japan as 'Avatar Tuner' is the best of them all, ESPECIALLY from a story perspective. The stories of the SMT series actually don't tend to make good material for anime as the plots, while extraodinarily deep, tend to be pretty minimalist (the main series) or slowly paced (Persona). DDS isn't like that- you have a fantastic cast, well-rounded antagonists and a brilliantly deep story for them to work with. Again, the fact that it hasn't been adapted is enough to make me weep.
So, which games do you think would be good to adapt into an anime?
However, anime is a different matter. MANY games over the years have been adapted into anime. Originally it was mainly fighting games being adapted into movies and OAVs, some good (Street Fighter, Fatal Fury) some not so good (Tekken, Art of Fighting). But especially over recent years there's been a wider variety of games adapted to anime, such as Xenosaga, Valkyria Chronicles, Zone of the Enders, Tales of Symphonia/the Abyss and The Tower of Druaga (based on an ancient NES game of all things!) Persona 3 even got an anime sequel, although it really had little to do with the actual game. And this isn't even counting .HACK, which was designed as a cross-media project from the beginning.
But what I'm wondering is why haven't the following games been adapted yet? These would be AWESOME anime if done right, but they seem to have simply slipped everyone's minds:
1) Odin Sphere.
When I think 'epic', I think of Odin Sphere. This game had simply the best plot I've experienced is a LONG time, with 5 great lead characters, beautiful love stories and a war which raged across an entire world. Not bad for an entirely 2D game which used no prerendered cutscenes but only its own ingame engine. While I can imagine the multi-viewpoint story to be a bit difficult to do in a TV series, surely it could be adapted without too much difficulty by a sufficiently talented team.
2) BlazBlue.
Judging from these opening movies, BlazBlue is halfway to being an anime already. If you know anything about the backstory of the games (or even if you've only played them and don't skip the pre-battle chatter) then you know that BlazBlue has a story WAY too deep to be contained by a simple 2D fighter. Given some of the good adaptations that have come from even simpler games (the plot of Street Fighter II was basically "a bunch of people get together, beat each other up, then beat up a major crime boss" yet it was adapted into both a fantastic movie and a great TV series) it's practically a crime that BlazBlue hasn't been given a proper anime yet.
3) Digital Devil Saga.
Of all JRPGs released over the last decade, THIS is the one that most deserves a proper anime adaptation. Interestingly, Megami Tensei HAS in fact been adapted before- aside from Persona: Trinity Soul there have also been 2 OAVs and 3 TV series based off the franchise (including one called Digital Devil Story, which was the name of the original novel series the entire SMT series is based on, although it is ancient and unrelated) as well as a variety of manga adaptations. But this 2-game mini-series, released in Japan as 'Avatar Tuner' is the best of them all, ESPECIALLY from a story perspective. The stories of the SMT series actually don't tend to make good material for anime as the plots, while extraodinarily deep, tend to be pretty minimalist (the main series) or slowly paced (Persona). DDS isn't like that- you have a fantastic cast, well-rounded antagonists and a brilliantly deep story for them to work with. Again, the fact that it hasn't been adapted is enough to make me weep.
So, which games do you think would be good to adapt into an anime?
