I'm still thinking about yesterday's discussion on creativity in Japanese development versus Western styles, and PlatinumGames' Atsushi Inaba's feeling that Japan no longer dominates the game space due to a "lack of creativity."
And loosely speaking, I agree -- only to the extent I'm qualified to do so, being that I don't develop games, I don't play a lot of pure imports nor have I even been to Japan. But as a more-than-casual observer of games, anime and Japanese pop culture, I do notice a prevailing tendency to create new creative aesthetics by pastiching influences from previous successes, whether they hail from East or West, rather than being overtly inventive.
I just read this entire article analyzing the use of gun-to-head imagery in Persona 3, for example, and while I don't necessarily disagree with the author's interpretation, it's also worth noting that many, many installments in Japanese media, whether that's games, comics, anime or anything, pair children alongside unsettling psychological or religious imagery for an immediate effect. It's a long-running trend.
The first time I saw it was in the seminal anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, and I've since seen it aped nearly everywhere else, from other anime like Elfin Lied and Gunslinger Girl to games like Xenosaga (which I loathe) and, yeah, Persona 3 (which I love) -- and these are just the examples that immediately come to mind. And it's not just the thing with the children. A huge range of themes and images repeat themselves over and over again, and any new media product tends to cherry-pick and recombine major themes and styles from previous successes (strictly talking anime, for example, see Haruhi from FLCL from Urusei Yatsura + Eva). Square Enix has got it made, because it only needs to borrow from itself. Flame me if you like, but I simply cannot tell the difference between the chick from FFXIII and princess Ashe from XII.
Even PlatinumGames' Madworld, shown above, looks like Sin City, and Bayonetta has already drawn comparisons to Devil May Cry. So while we can place the force of genuine symbolism behind traditionally Japanese game aesthetics all we want, and even come halfway to a valid analysis, part of me thinks that from a creative standpoint, most of it's assembled very outside-in, very style-over-substance.
Not that it's necessarily a bad thing.
This kind of methodology results in innovation via natural evolution -- media spawns imitative media, until, like genetic mutation, some new variable's introduced that reverberates its success across other media. And it tends to be a much more reliable way to innovate -- drastic overhauls or constant aims for total originality can be a crapshoot, not to mention that they can sacrifice the core quality of a product, just as Inaba said. Finally, it doesn't mean that the ideas themselves are "less creative" over time -- just that the creators are less willing to be radical. And Western titles tend to innovate more on the game design side and less on the concept side -- how many games with space marines or military men in a pending apocalypse can our retail shelves hold? I wouldn't call that "creativity," either.
Whenever we discuss the aesthetic of Japan versus the West, the conversation always tends to focus on RPGs. "In most western RPGs its about MY STORY, not whatever silly anime otaku pandering pile of cliches and character stereotypes destined to be turned into fan made porn the developers came up with on the wheel of generic RPGs this week," commented Captain Rufus, apparently agreeing vehemently with my idea about recycling and recombining concepts.
But commenter Alvin prefers stronger story elements. "I haven't tired of JRPGs because I never really play them for gameplay," he wrote. "I play them to be engrossed in a 50 hour interactive story. Western RPGs never really got the story aspect right, so while BioWare's RPGs have streamlined skill building, they suck at story (honestly, KOTOR = Jade Empire = Mass Effect. I just hope they don't give Sonic the choice to bone Amy if he plays his cards right in Dark Brotherhood).
I framed yesterday's discussion around RPGs, because no matter where they're from, the RPG genre tends to be the most systematic and rulebound, and therefore the easiest to use in comparisons. RPG video games were essentially born out of tabletop RPGs, after all, that live and die on rules.
But we forget, sometimes, that Castlevania, Devil May Cry and Silent Hill, for example, are Japanese games also. And just about everything I've written here at SVGL in the past couple weeks has come back to the fact that I'm currently spending most of my gaming time playing Symphony of the Night for the billionth time (level 60, just got the Crissaegrim, and it's friggin' on, baby). And last night when I was busy equipping to raise my STR and INT, I thought, hey -- these stat concepts come from Western pen-and-paper like Dungeons & Dragons, don't they? And yet Japan was the first to widely use these concepts in a mainstream way, in both RPGs and action titles.
And interestingly, recall that the next Silent Hill game is being developed in California by the Double Helix folks. Weren't a lot of people concerned about the future of the franchise when they heard it was being developed in the West, and isn't Retro Studios' Metroid Prime arc, arguably an excelsior modern interpretation of Metroid, something of the series' bastard stepchild nonetheless? And wasn't I disappointed that Siren: Blood Curse had Westernized its themes somewhat? And even I'm less enthused about Resident Evil 5 than a longtime fan of the franchise ought to be -- because it looks very much like a Western shooter to me, and less like a Japanese survival horror game.
Yesterday we mentioned the increasing willingness of Japanese development talent to work with Western publishers, a trend we're cautiously optimistic about. Wonder if we'll see the recent increase in Western development working with Japanese IP continuing, too? Will that be a good thing, too?
Post title comes from commenter thesimplicity's contribution to yesterday's discussion, who says the most important thing he needs to know about JRPGs is "Do you kill God at the end of the game, or just your dad?"
