Fire Emblem's new anime direction (RANT)

[ToraTiger]

sundin13 said:

ToraTiger said:

sundin13 said:

The point is fairly silly as like I said, they took something hollow and filled it. Kid Icarus was overall lacking personality and they filled it. Metroid's story was generally hollow and they filled it (although the writing and the boxes they were written into severely harmed the final product). In these two cases, it is simply a Japanese company injecting personality into works and you complaining because anime.

I don't really see your conclusion of this argument other than "anime is bad and it should stay out of my games".

You think the Metroid and Kid Icarus creators intended for their games to be turned into chiki centric anime inspired bland stories?  I dont know what you mean by the 2 games lacking in personalty, metroid had plenty of official backstory and plot and so did kid  icarus, and they existed without the need of filling their stories with hallow anime tropes.

First of all, what the hell does chiki mean? The only context I've ever seen that used in is meaning "chicken", but apparently it means "acquaintance", but I highly doubt that is what you mean.

Second, I think once again you are confusing your (seeming) xenophobia for anything of substance. There is nothing wrong with the story of Kid Icarus Uprising. It was entertaing and fun and quite different. It was certainly not adherent to "anime" tropes or pandering to otaku, and like I said, it was more similar in many ways to saturday morning cartoons than anime. Additionally, the story stayed consistently interesting, extremely well written, all of the characters were fun and it all lent itself to an amazing experience. Bland? Bullshit.

Third, have you played the first two Kid Icarus games? They were literally just gameplay with some goofy off the wall humor added on. Remember the Eggplant wizard? I don't think we are missing out on some deep sprawling narrative when the series moved to...well goofy off the wall humor.

As for Metroid, I would argue that none of that games flaws came from anything related to anime. The flaws were largely:
a) overwriting the characters: There was too much writing put into many areas where they should have went with silence or a more subdued tone. This was largely because they focused more on story than previous installments. The story however, was far from a typical anime story and I believe that the characters all stayed away from tropes. They weren't extremely deep and the writing was questionable, but neither of these things have anything to do with your point. Additionally, Samus was based off of the precedent set by previous games. The personality of Samus was already set long before Other M (see Metroid Fusion), and this personality once again has nothing to do with anime.
b) Trying to fill in nonsensical gaps: Many things in the gameplay of metroid just simply don't make sense. The most notable of these is the loss of powers at the begining of every game. The writers wanted to keep this gameplay pillar but write it into the game, which caused problems because no matter how you look at it, this doesn't make sense. The solution the writers came up with was far from elegant, but once again has absolutely nothing to do with anime.

Fourth, the fact that you are pulling Fire Emblem, Kid Icarus and Metroid all under the same umbrella elucidates one of the key problems with your point. These game are all hugely different in style, tone, writing, characterization, etc and yet you decide to refer to them all as "anime" as if that actually made sense. Anime is a medium, not a style or a tone. There is a huge variety of anime, and while your point made some semblance of sense at the beginning when you were just talking about Fire Emblem, the more your broaden it, the more it falls apart.

If you want to criticize moe culture, go ahead, but none of these three franchises demonstrate the qualities inherent to that.

If you want to criticize weak writing or characterization, go ahead, but don't attribute it to any sort of "japanification" or "animification", because you just don't have the strongest argument to make to correlate the two things or even really explain your point of view in any way that doesn't sound intensely xenophobic.

I might be spelling it wrong, but Chiki is similar to a word in Japanese that means friendly and cutesy.  That is what I mean when I said that.

And I stand by my initials statements, they didnt have to mordernize/animize the art like that, and make it lose the originality that the NES and GB game had, the story and writing is very different from the japanese version, so of course that is partially why it doesn't come off that way, Nintendo  likely knew that the original japanese-y plot would scare away westerners who aren't interested/repelled by that culture, so they gave them free reign on the writing.  I can speak Japanese midly well (Was dating a japanese chick for 3 years) and looking  through KI U japanese videos I can confirm that anyone with a little bit of Japanese experience would know how easternized the plot was originially.

The story and characters did come off as a bit bland for me in some spots, I loved the writing for the villans but Pit's typical small young hero bravado and Palutena's excessive smarts was a bit bland in my opinion, and what makes it worst is that they were literally the main characters and 70 percent of the dialog.  Viridi was kinda okay I guess.  I played the first 2, and I like the style and tone of them, as well as the concept art. 

Not being Xenophobic here, but excessively eastern (japanese) stories tend to suck, and suck just as much as excessively western stories (G.I Joe, Gears of War, ect) The story and characterization in other m was typical corny japanese narrative.  Not saying all japanese narrative is bad and cheesy, but Other M was literally the equalient of a cliche Michael Bay film with Megan Fox showing her boobs, explosions, and car chases.  I don't think they were akin to mainstream popular anime, but Samus' weak strong girl persona is so typical of a Japanese story.  Also Samus in Fusion is nothing at all like she is in Other M.  Hell Samus barely had any deep characterization up until other M, which to me is better than turning her into a weakling of a woman.  How doesn't it make sense how she loses her powers?  Her weapons/armors get damaged and they go offline, that is usually the reason 80 percent of the time.  Way better than an old wrinkley white guy telling her when she can and cant use the grapple beam.  That system was so much fail, and why would a badass like Samus need a man's authorization to use her tools? lol

I refer to them as anime because they adhere to many of the tropes of anime, just like you can call kid Icarus cartoonish.  They use anime cliches and plotpoints for their stories, as well as anime styled art for the presentation.

And no, I'm not saying it's moe, my point is they are taking their core franchise which were developed mostly in a western style (See Zelda, Mario, thank god they haven't gone down the same route) and turning them easterize, which not only kills the tone of the originals in comparison but they also have the nerve to use cliches and predicable tropes that you would find in an anime.