| Kenryoku_Maxis said: But I didn't read his point in the first place. I was just replying to the typical 'WRPGs vs JRPGs' concept this thread was obviously made to propagate. As for your claim that Japanese stories are more fancifal than Western....I would say that's not true at all. Just look at the origin of 'Science Fiction' with HG Wells and Jules Verne. Many Japanese novels and even Anime that have been made in the last 20 years are closer in style to the earlier works of Science Fiction than the 'grim realistic' stuff popular in the west. Even products like Star Wars and Star Trek are a rare novelty now adays. While in Japan, they are some of their major source of inspiration to this day. Of course I'm not going to say Japan doesn't have its own post apocalyptic/grim take on Sci Fi as well. In fact, quite a few of them have influenced the west in recent years (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion). But at the same time, Japan is still producing a lot of Sci Fi works in that older style with flying airships in space and cybernetics that help people in the near future, etc. If you're looking for where HG Wells and Issac Asimov live in the modern day, its in Japan, not the west. |
No. No no no no no no.
You're arguign with me about scince fiction. That's fine. But your explanation of your understanding of the genre is almost solely based on its aesthetics. That's not the point.
To start it, Star Wars and Star Trek are anomalous in the canon of Western science fiction because they are not grounded in hard science in any respect. Star Wars in particular is the scifi most heavily influenced by Japanese traditions, not the other way around.
Your H. G. Wells comparison - and Verne, too - Christ, Verne - is particularly distressing. Wells I can almost understand in some capacity since his use of science fiction was as political allegory, but Verne actually sat down and did the cold hard math on every single story he ever wrote. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was almsot prophetic in how well it predicted the scientific advancemnt of the U-boat and Journey to the Center of the Earth, while scientifically inaccurate, was based on the best scientific understanding and theory of the day. Jules Verne is the father of hard science, of grounded fiction which flirts with the fantastic without ever lifting its skirt up.
The Wells problem is worse because "grim realism" is almsot exactly hat he was all about - War of the Worlds is one of the grittiest, darkest, starkest science fiction stories ever written, and even its more fantastical elements were grounded primarily in understanding of what was possible at the time. That's the differenc between Japanese and Western science fiction right there.
Read anny anthology of Japanese science fiction (you could just watc anime I guess but it's not the same) and you'll discover something surprising: Japanese science fiction is rooted in fantastical elements without the constraint of possibility. That's why so many elements of science fiction are prevalent in Japanese fiction and not western fiction: mecha, the space opera, "energy weapons", on and on and on.
I'm not saying that all western science fiction holds to hard science. Of course it doesn't. Star Trek and Star Wars are two examples of science fiction which throw the traditions of Verne and Wells out of the freaking window and never look back. That said, they are not the norm, and it's Wells and Verne who set the tone for Western scifi which has been held to since then.
You're not going to find echoes of Asimov's ruminations on artificial intelligence in Japanese games, but you can find it in the geth in Mass Effect.
You're not going to find Verne's adherence to the problem of pressure and heat in Japanese games, but you can find it squirreled away in the limitations of the Normandy.
You're not going to find Wells' grounded damnations in Japanese games, but you can find it in the claustrophobic halls of the vaults.
The point is that Western science fiction is gounded in physics, in mathematics, because that's the tradition on which we were raised and it's the tradition which we understand. Mecha don't appear in serious Western science fiction. It doesn't happen.
This isn't about setting.
This isn't about aesthetics.
It's not about politics.
It's not about tone.
It's about being grounded in our current understanding of the universe, about capitalizing the "science" in science fiction. Western scifi - and western games, born of the same traditions - do that. Japanese games, as a rule, don't.
