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This Week in Games - Atlus With the Old, In With the New

It would be nice if we could all just freely admit if we like something or not without putting on airs to try to justify why dumping on the latest Japanese game's character designs are considered cool and acceptable but doing it to the newest AAA western game's female lead is bad.

@Nigel

Most comparison posts online are literally the reverse of what you're complaining of. Gamers TM posting images of characters from western* games mid-speech and then comparing them to characters from japanese or korean games striking poses. Or complaining that western influence has led to japanese game franchises having less sexy characters (this came up in the pre-release of pokemon s/v and it's come up again with the new avatars in pokemon go).
Is there anti--asian discrimination online? Yes, it's been discussed in the origins of the term JRPG. But it's disingenous to act like that's all it is. Many of these people online coming up with terms like 'safe horny' aren't asian nor do they actually care about the discrimination of asian people.

*The MC from Forspoken is a favourite example of this even though the devs and publishers of that game are japanese.

I feel like the pro degeneracy side that wants to stick it to all the woke feminists or whatever dumb shit they mindlessly go on about are doing a disservice to the game with their lack of nuanced insight since they are devaluing what the game is actually doing extremely well: vibing to cool music in a desolate wasteland.

I'm going to say a portion of this just boils down to the thinly veiled anti-Asian sentiment that was all the rage in the early 2000s gaming community that never truly went away. It just shifted to clickbait websites and people with hot takes comparing western games to eastern ones and saying the west is better because it's more progressive while Japan, Korea, and China still relies on outdated designs and have embrace the modern era where people of all shapes and sizes are called sexy and no one is ever ugly. This has resulted in people allowed to say penis jiggle physics in Baldur's Gate 3 is cool but boob jiggle physics in Stellar Blade or DoA is bad. Or that it's okay to say the new miHoYo character is too sexual and hot but if people say Aloy or Karlach are ugly then they're clearly virgins who have never seen a woman before or some other silly ad hominem. Personally I don't find BG3 or Hades sexy at all but if people can then good for them. It would be nice if we could all just freely admit if we like something or not without putting on airs to try to justify why dumping on the latest Japanese game's character designs are considered cool and acceptable but doing it to the newest AAA western game's female lead is bad.

If the word of Japanese developers and creatives were so sacrosanct, I struggle to understand why so many people in the US blew their gaskets when Ishiwatari sat folks down and patiently explained that Bridget was a trans woman, or why people review-bombed AI: The Somnium Files for touching on queer themes.

They have no idea what they’re saying because they will never actual interact with or play any of the things they’re endlessly complaining about.

The MC from Forspoken is a favourite example of this even though the devs and publishers of that game are japanese.

Everyone's tastes are different, and all those terms mean different things to different people, even among those who think they are in a certain groups.

If the word of Japanese developers and creatives were so sacrosanct, I struggle to understand why so many people in the US blew their gaskets when Ishiwatari sat folks down and patiently explained that Bridget was a trans woman, or why people review-bombed AI: The Somnium Files for touching on queer themes.

If you're actually looking for an answer and not just being rhetorical the Bridget thing was because ever since the character's inception they were portrayed as a crossdressing boy/otokonoko until Strive changed it. I think it's pretty common whenever a popular fan favorite character gets heavily changed it results in backlash.

I tried to see if Double Dragon Gaiden was made by a western studio or not since that was the last indie I played and apparently Raymond Teo is from Singapore so I suppose it's Eastern as well.

oilers2007 wrote:

I tried to see if Double Dragon Gaiden was made by a western studio or not since that was the last indie I played and apparently Raymond Teo is from Singapore so I suppose it's Eastern as well.

I assumed it wasn't American - or at least WayForward - when they used the original Marian design and not the re-design from River City Girls. I always hated that redesign and it felt like they were trying to make a statement on how Marian being girly and sexy was bad so they turned her into some buff musclehead.

FinalVentCard wrote:

If the word of Japanese developers and creatives were so sacrosanct, I struggle to understand why so many people in the US blew their gaskets when Ishiwatari sat folks down and patiently explained that Bridget was a trans woman, or why people review-bombed AI: The Somnium Files for touching on queer themes.

If the leaked Paper Mario TTYD information is to be believed then we'll no doubt be seeing some there when that game comes out. Vivian is always weird to me because it was only Italian localization that tried to say the character was trans and neither the JP nor EN script did. Very rare case where people try to run with a non-English localization as their preferred canon and people were naturally setting themselves up for disappointment if they thought a random Italian localization was going to be the one that gets chosen to be the baseless everywhere.

Fantastic column! Love reading your work, Jean-Karlo!