folks, i said it once, and i’ll say it again. i unironically think FFXIII is an incredible game. you just have to treat it like ATB Devil May Cry
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I mean in all seriousness parker is right, FF13 has huge pacing issues because you spend all your time on the field. When people are complaining about it being “linear” they aren’t really complaining about the map design because FFX and co. are largely the same way, it’s mostly a complaint about lack of gameplay variety and pacing. Other FF games do a much better job of disguising the linearity of the early game whereas 13 is completely uninterested in that. The two sequels get much, much better about this but I still think 13’s combat, the premise, and the characters/story are interesting enough that the first game is still pretty good even if they have trouble executing.
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Anyway, to address one of the core assumptions of your point, I don’t know if you’re been to Japan yet but my experience as an anime stan living there in 2002 is that the vast majority of people there had little respect or interest for anime either, except for like Ghibli films. Also, everyone loves Doraemon but they don’t like “anime for otakus”, just like foreign anime fans have zero interest in Doraemon and its style does not actually register as “anime” in the way that the term is being used in this thread. There’s a strong symmetry in attitudes to anime across cultures which indicates that the reactions cannot have primarily arisen from racism/exoticism but rather emerged from anime itself.
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Yep. I think FFXIII started from an admirable depth of self-examination. What began with an attempt to answer, why do these battle abstractions like turns and standing in formation still exist?, became, why do you talk to random people? why do you visit towns? What’s core to this RPG experience?
And these are good questions to ask, and they made reasonable attempts to solve them. But as cruel reality has beaten into me, when you start with a sturdy framework, deviations are very difficult because so much more than you realized was load-bearing and important to its structure.
You need to know why you’re trying to solve these problems differently. What new thought or feeling are you trying to express? Design solutions to that, not to a need to modernize.
I think the characters suffer the most; here I agree with tim that they feel market-tested to death. They don’t feel like they illuminate aspects of the story, each feels like they exist to give a market quadrant an entrypoint into the story.
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it might not be racist, but it’s still boring and useless
anyway i bring up 13 cuz this game reminds me a lot of lightning returns and that’s partially why i’m getting into it I think!
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But I think it’s not boring and useless though and let me try to unpack why.
The word “anime” vividly elicits this complex idea: wistful wish-fulfillment fantasy. We all know what a wish-fulfillment fantasy is and Western media is full of them. The key distinction is wistful. It means a simultaneous regret arising from an awareness of impossible distance from the desire. Even the high-school romances and sports anime have a hyperreal quality to them that we know only matches a real romance or sports match in how it appears in nostalgic memory, not how it plays out in reality. And in turn this is why there is so much irony in modern anime, that nevertheless still leaves the wistfulness right at the surface where it can touch anyone sensitive and make others cringe.
I haven’t played FF7R yet, but what I’m hearing in this thread (especially from the Aerith talk) is that it has that quality.
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This thread took a turn, lol. Anime is a genre form with its own common tropes and sometimes this game uses some of those tropes too, e.g. Roche doing cartoonishly physics-defying motorcycle tricks and screaming about how glad he is that only Cloud can go toe-to-toe with him, reveling in their high-level violent competition as a form of barely-sublimated sexuality.
Sorry this thread doesn’t read like a JSTOR journal, but this game just came out and most of us haven’t even finished it yet.
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in a more just world Aerith’s shinra bedroom would have been a irl promotional arg tie-in airbnb that you could rent and sleep in
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i know what people are talking about when they refer to dub quality or characters hairdos or even certain character/relationship types as “anime” and im not really bothered by that (though 99% of the time people are specifically thinking of shonen anime) it’s when anime gets used like it’s a synonym for trashy/bad media that it gets irritating and borderline xenophobic imo
It’s kind of lazy and kneejerk either way, i mean you could be using more specific language that ultimately would avoid this kind of conversation, but if you can mentally replace “anime” with “animation made and produced in Japan (or in a Japanese style)” and not feel uncomfortable about whatever you were going to say then go with god idk
i spoiled the ending of the remake and it made me lol
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The biggest problem with FF7R in my opinion is that it was made EXCLUSIVELY for the fans.
I don’t mind something being made with fans in mind, but the original FF7 hasn’t aged well, and it needed a proper remake. Instead it got an Alternate Universe Sequel in remake’s clothing, and that just is not an acceptable substitute for playing the original.
Someone who has never actually played the original won’t understand what’s being changed and why, and things like Cait Sith appearing at the Platecrash and Zack’s Last Stand not only popping up out of nowhere, but ending differently, will be COMPLETELY lost on newcomers. They won’t know that Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie were all supposed to die when the pillar went down, and so Wedge making it out alive has NO impact. The Time Janitors make even LESS sense if you don’t know things are changing.
I’m not saying it’s a bad game, or that there shouldn’t have been changes. I completely 100% understand their desire to mix it up. I just think maybe it should have been saved for DLC or maybe NG+. New players need to understand how the old one went in order to properly appreciate the changes.
This, in my opinion, is a much bigger point of contention than only-8.5/10-voice-acting.
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tbh I don’t think I’d have minded the ambition of that, saying “yeah, we know we’re redoing this ridiculously beloved media property and we don’t intend to obsolete it, and we’re taking for granted that everyone in the damn world is familiar with it” if they’d executed on certain aspects a little better (cf @bib’s post). I still like the idea! it’s just that the deviations are in practice usually worse than the elaborations (and the explicitly meta parts arguably worse still).
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Absolutely, some of us immediately harped on that after finishing it last week, but being pretty early in the scheme of things there’s been a ton of tangents since those posts (patches of spoiler text)
I’ve been supposing the next game could spin things a few ways re:the Cetra and Lifestream, or further alien entities like Jenova, trying to alter destiny and realizing you still have to sacrifice something or rethread it…but none of those seem likely or even able to rationalize the extreme narrative dissonance where this kinda shit the bed, imo
the honeybee in sequence is like if the the jabba’s palace special edition song was good
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lol anime
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the motorcycle stuff towards the end is a drag
When I said anime earlier, I was referring to a specific acting style in the english VO world that was created in the West. It wasn’t meant as some sort of derogatory catchall, but I assume most didn’t read it that way.
Anywho, the point I’ve come to over the years (and from my own experiences acting and directing) is that at its core, an actor’s process doesn’t necessarily change all that much whether they’re on a stage, in front of a 10,000 dollar camera or in front of a 30 dollar microphone. You either find the circumstances to bring that character to life, or you don’t (think about every press junket where a reporter asks an actor how they prepared for a role, and how often they look absolutely exhausted answering the question).
That said, form and style are demanded by and expected in the Product, pulling the art in different directions. As someone mentioned in the thread, these things develop into a set of conventions. I often use “anime” as a shorthand descriptor for those qualities just like I say “animated” (for western cartoons) “broad” “grounded” “cinematic” “theatrical” and so on.
If you’re following what I’m saying, know that the original game director for Guild Wars 2 (who left many years ago, I’m not exactly sure when) was a Super Fan of anime dubs, to the point where most of the eighty or so actors that were hired to be in the 2012 launch of the game were many of his favorite anime dub actors (some contemporary, some going as far back as the 1992 dub of Castle of Cagliostro).
So you had a game with Daniel Dociu’s (Half Life, Dishonored) concept art, married to a western MMO made to disrupt WoW by a Korean-owned Seattle area developer, releasing with a very distinctly “anime” sounding original language recording. It was not created like a dub in any way, but rather 100% a result of the makeup of the cast.
A few short years and many changes of management later, the game moved on from that release and the style has since shifted many times depending on who has was able to exert their will the strongest at the time, along with members of the cast rotating in and out. After 2012, you had Tara Strong showing up as the main villain one season, John Dimaggio showing up to do an amazing Kelsey Grammar-esque side kick, Sumalee Montano doing a film noir protagonist, and so on and so on, and it all had a radically different feel inside of what was supposedly a contiguous product. Anyway I know very few people here have even tried the game, but boy, has it GONE PLACES in regards to its acting.
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ho ho ho
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I’ve been chatting with him about the remake and trying to get him to come back here.
spoiler alert: he begrudgingly likes it despite the ending. also pretty sure he is pretty squarely in the ffxiii is good camp these days, though I can’t speak for him obviously
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