Email: TO You I finally understand what you meant by using that word “anime”

I’m guessing you meant use anime to define “senseless over-the-top style,” which I agree whole-heartedly with you. What made me realize this was when a friend of mine invited me to the Distant Worlds Final Fantasy concert on the date of the series’ 25th anniversary. I never understood why Final Fantasy 8 was the one that ruined anything with the words “Final Fantasy” in the game’s title for me, but your recent posts about how Japanese game developers want to inject cultural references that only Asians would understand into their story because they assumed that was the norm around the world really began to manifest itself in the series at this point. Square marketed the game’s plot somewhere along the lines of “deep touching love story played straight,” but you’d only see said “love story” if you viewed it through the lens of a live-action Asian drama, and since I wasn’t familiar with that storytelling style at the time, I pretty much said “wtf square” and stopped caring about Final Fantasy afterwards. And that’s not even going into the actual game mechanics either! The big glaring one was the “spam the triangle button to increase damage output during the long and overdrawn summon animations that cost nothing to cast so we can pad out the game length to be at least as long as VII’s even though it should take you less than 15 hours to complete despite the fact that this game comes on four discs instead of VII’s three if you only knew the not-so-obvious way to break the game by maxing out the number of times you can cast certain spells and then applying that to your character’s stats to be ridiculously overpowered because the character levels in this game are just a red herring to make you think you’re getting powerful every time that number goes up, especially if you’ve played our previous Final Fantasy games.” There’s  also that card game random NPCs would keep peddling me to play, which I would’ve tried if I wasn’t so burned out from spamming summoning spells for every freaking encounter. 

 

But I digress. Anyway, at the concert they played orchestrated versions of certain songs from various Final Fantasy games, and they had a projector screen showcasing actual game footage found in the released versions. However, once it got to the Playstation era, the footage they used were almost entirely CG cutscenes and nothing from the game engine itself. Since Final Fantasy VII had a standalone CG movie called Advent Children, they were also playing scenes from that, and the footage I saw as well as every Final Fantasy game that was released for the PS2 era was ridiculously over the top, or excessively “anime-esque.” I couldn’t find the exact scene they used from advent children since square-enix seems to like purging those from youtube, but I found another equivalent:

 

I’m blaming the Star Wars prequels for starting “anime” sword fights

 

But the sheer irony of the concert was that their magnum opus was nothing from any of the recent Final Fantasy games, but a recreation of the opera score found in Final Fantasy VI (the version that wasn’t interrupted by Ultros), complete with English lyrics. I really couldn’t get into the concert at all, but when they started playing this, I was completely engrossed, and I was pleasantly surprised that the only thing that really sounded different from the SNES version and this live performance was the fact that they had English lyrics that fit perfectly in place of single synthesized voice notes in the SNES original. When they were done with the entire song (which was ten minutes long), the audience gave a standing ovation, myself included. This example demonstrates what you’ve been emphasizing several times in your blog that music is more powerful to one’s imagination than telling the game through over-the-top anime cutscenes, that latter which the most recent Final Fantasy titles have bucketloads of.Sound and music is the most powerful tool video games have. It also never ages. Ever. Where the game budget should go is in the aural experience. Your favorite video game usually has incredible aural elements. Consider Mega Man, any Blizzard game, the Marios, Metroids, and Zeldas, and so on.

Anime used to be useful to show stories that couldn’t have been done in any other medium. I just rewatched Robotech, and there is no way that could have been done with real life actors. Even computer animation can’t simulate the ‘finesse’ of fighters looping around. Anime should be a story using the medium correctly. Today, anime doesn’t do that.

I love science fiction. Star Trek writers had a rule that every story required that it required science fiction to be told. Because who wants to watch a romance show or crime fighter show that didn’t use any science fiction within a science fiction show? Star Trek was quite successful as the series lasted for over four decades. Where does science fiction go wrong? It is when it becomes like anime, just a bunch of nonsensical crap.

I think anime’s downfall and stigma is due to the creators not using the anime medium correctly. In a similar way, video games’ downfall and stigma is also due to creators not using the gaming medium correctly. Games aren’t movies. Games aren’t ‘artsy things’.