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This Week in Games - Pirate Things, Dancing, and the Robot Boy Who Couldn't

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Meanwhile, CAPCOM has long-since course-corrected and moved past that weird obsession with pandering to the West with the numbers to back it up.

I dunno their games still feel pretty westernized to me. Resident Evil and Street Fighter don't really feel fully back to their classic Japanese style of output of the older games. Maybe that's just Modern Gaming though. If they ever do a new Mega Man or Breath of Fire it'd be really interesting to see.

As far behind as I am on the LAD series, I'm sorely tempted to jump right into the pirate game (god only knows when I'll get to LAD8, so I'm hoping it's a fairly stand-alone narrative). All the ship combat stuff looks really fantastic, and is exactly the kind of iteration I'd been hoping to see on the Black Flag formula that just... never happened.

I just really hope it's not all condensed and action-focused. One of my favorite parts of these sorts of games is just... exploring the open sea, being one lone ship out in the water, crashing through the waves. Or happening into a thunderstorm that really gets the water roiling -- always delightful.

oilers2007 wrote:

I dunno their games still feel pretty westernized to me. Resident Evil and Street Fighter don't really feel fully back to their classic Japanese style of output of the older games. Maybe that's just Modern Gaming though. If they ever do a new Mega Man or Breath of Fire it'd be really interesting to see.

It's definitely more to do with modern gaming than westernization. The RE series since 7 has been more serious than the B-movie feel of the older games because that kind of tone is seen as more marketable, while SF maintains some weirdness from its roots while moving to more traditional storytelling and trying to make the cast at least a little more "contemporary" for the same reason. Basically, they've just shifted more to the AAA method of appealing to the lowest common denominator.

I don't think that one is necessarily because of AAA aesthetics being flattened, I think it's just modern aesthetics in general. Like, Street Fighter still has a very obvious style all its own; if anything, it's a modern take on Street Fighter 3's New York-inspired urban aesthetic ("Look at all my haters, yeah I'm makin' 'em mad!") And I definitely miss the George Romero take on zombies that the older Resident Evils boasted, but I think that that one isn't entirely dependent on gaming's flattened aesthetics. That's just how people want their zombies; 28 Days Later popularized fast zombies. Past Shaun of the Dead, I struggle to think of anything else that keeps the old Romero-mold around (especially if it's not for parody).

FinalVentCard wrote:

I don't think that one is necessarily because of AAA aesthetics being flattened, I think it's just modern aesthetics in general. Like, Street Fighter still has a very obvious style all its own; if anything, it's a modern take on Street Fighter 3's New York-inspired urban aesthetic ("Look at all my haters, yeah I'm makin' 'em mad!") And I definitely miss the George Romero take on zombies that the older Resident Evils boasted, but I think that that one isn't entirely dependent on gaming's flattened aesthetics. That's just how people want their zombies; 28 Days Later popularized fast zombies. Past Shaun of the Dead, I struggle to think of anything else that keeps the old Romero-mold around (especially if it's not for parody).

With Resident Evil in particular, I reject the assumption they're rejecting the B-movie feel when RE7 owes a lot to hillbilly horror, especially The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Village is a sendup of the Universal Horror monsters. Even horror itself has changed. In particular it's also difficult to claim "Westernization' entirely when Monster Hunter Rise is Japanese as hell right down to the ninja village and Wilds has decided to make the blacksmith character a gyaru.

being fair Resident Evil was western in the first place

I don't think that one is necessarily because of AAA aesthetics being flattened, I think it's just modern aesthetics in general. Like, Street Fighter still has a very obvious style all its own; if anything, it's a modern take on Street Fighter 3's New York-inspired urban aesthetic ("Look at all my haters, yeah I'm makin' 'em mad!") And I definitely miss the George Romero take on zombies that the older Resident Evils boasted, but I think that that one isn't entirely dependent on gaming's flattened aesthetics. That's just how people want their zombies; 28 Days Later popularized fast zombies. Past Shaun of the Dead, I struggle to think of anything else that keeps the old Romero-mold around (especially if it's not for parody).

I dunno, aesthetics change in response to the changing zeitgeist in culture at large. It's hard to pin this on just the AAA gaming sector, I think. Even if it was the factor, the simple matter is that artists change and evolve over time. Oilers brings up Breath of Fire, and that's a great example: Tatsuya Yoshikawa's art doesn't look like what it used to with Breath of Fire 2. Akiman's art doesn't look like how it used to in the 90s. Even Ken Sugimori left behind the watercolors and ramrod-straight character poses ages ago.

With Resident Evil in particular, I reject the assumption they're rejecting the B-movie feel when RE7 owes a lot to hillbilly horror, especially The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Village is a sendup of the Universal Horror monsters. Even horror itself has changed. In particular it's also difficult to claim "Westernization' entirely when Monster Hunter Rise is Japanese as hell right down to the ninja village and Wilds has decided to make the blacksmith character a gyaru.

Microsoft and Sony had nothing to do with Bayonetta beyond it being on their platforms; Sega were the ones who pulled the funding for 2, with word being that it was because they wanted to focus on established franchises rather than take risks on new(er) ones like Platinum's.