Do you have a good summary of Jade Empire’s problems? I played it near when it came out and didn’t see anything worse than Japanese takes on mythical Chinese history then, but I have no idea how sharp my memory of it is.
I played it then as well, but looking back on it, it’s a really weird thing where they make up a fake China (like it’s clearly supposed to be China, but is also clearly specified not to be China) and had a whole class of white actors doing bad fake Chinese accents. It’s not even mythical Chinese history, as like this whole made no world of fake not-Chinese stuff. It’s rough to look at now in terms of cultural appropriation stuff.
On top of the weird racial stuff, it didn’t help that it was a broken mess of a game where you could easily paralyze the last boss to death.
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yeah it was definitely pitched as like “Ersatz Orientalism from the makers of Knights of the Old Republic!” in a way that wasn’t actively offensive for 2005 but would come across as puzzlingly bad taste today.
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Thanks for the response.
The voice acting was real rough, yeah, and not a good choice next to just making a decision about casting or bypassing it completely. It felt on the level of a lot of the ‘world’ movies in the '80s, like The Last Emperor.
I thought the setting was supposed to be fantasy mythic China, bronze Age China or thereabouts (Jade Emperor obviously, though the conquistador sidequest throws it more in line with the pastiche western medieval fantasy uses).
Cultural appropriation in this context is a big thing to dig in and I could see strong arguments against the game for that reason, though I’m naturally in favor of mixed-up reshuffling of religious and mythic themes and my eye didn’t see a lot of negative stereotypes being reproduced, which is where I see a lot of the identifiable harms alongside replacement or native works, which isn’t a factor in this case.
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reminds me of how epic drastically changed fornite player perceptions of how powerful shotguns are by changing the color & text of their rarity indicator & leaving actual stats & drop rates the same
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I think a lot of the problems with using asian-inspired settings without any kind of cultural context is that it lowers the bar for other people to do the same thing. eventually you get culture-as-aesthetic, which then makes it difficult for people within that culture to claim identities outside of that pre-ordained space. it’s essentially the model minority shit but in aesthetic terms
a side effect of this is the normalization of an entire continent of people around the portrayals that dominate the non-asian spheres
there’s a big fight for disaggregation in AsAm activism because lumping all of asia into one big group might have worked as a blunt force tool for civil rights but doesn’t work when burmese people living in america make essentially half what chinese people do
and like, it’s really difficult for me to be into mixed-up cultures as setting when those cultures you’re mixing up can barely get their voices heard WITHIN their own sub-group of activists who are ostensibly on their side
coincidentally it was AsAm Equal Pay Day yesterday
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" Ultimately, the game’s mixed Western and Japanese aesthetics work because they all exist autonomously and alongside one another at the same time. This quote from Jason Vandenberghe, the game’s creative director, can serve as proof of this approach: ’ What doesn’t work is to take those Western and Eastern elements, and sort of mix them into one thing. What does work is to say: here’s Joe’s bar and grill and here is Ming Pow’s sushi’s place. It’s not a Western-looking cowboy katana; it’s a katana, and a revolver, and they’re clearly in their own place. '"
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Turns out they meant early Dylan. Like before he learned how to play any instruments early.
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what will happen first: me beating baldur’s gate 2, or EA firing 80% of bioware’s staff and moving the rest to strange mobile games that no one will ever hear of again?
I think I might be the only person on this forum who liked ME enough as a series to be legitimately interested in Andromeda and boy, they used up that very limited reservoir of goodwill in just record speed
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So I think Nintendo just announced VR for the Switch, as a Labo thing?
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virtual boy eshop games confirmed
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i thought andromeda was decent!
the future: gaze into a bird butt
also i deeply hope the one at the top left is some kind of very elaborate “here comes the train!” baby feeding apparatus
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Why has nobody made that game yet, Ryan Gosling Cereal Simulation VR Experience
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Yeah, no, they were really clear and emphatic that it wasn’t actual China, just some completely made up place that borrow a bunch of vague Chinese culture. It feels a lot like an excuse to not bother actually examining Chinese culture or history or anything.
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Ok, I think I saw Jade Empire as more specific than that in the number of quests based off specific folk tales I saw, and the core myth based rather closely around Jade Emperor stories.
I don’t know where the line in which pastiche is ok, though, because it’s certainly the norm we expect from mediocre culture – almost all Western fantasy is a potluck soup of Tolkein, Arthur, folk tales, and second- and third-generation blends of these.
This is dead ass just Google Cardboard/Daydream but like, Nintendofied
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I was just thinking about how metroid prime would make a great VR game
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