Our Man in Japan -- Fe Bu Ru
DeanRaker - Columns - Comments - 10/04/04
Because I've been reading impressions on the game on English forums, I'm momentarily reminded that according to the cliches about Japanese gamers, we're not supposed to be impressed with stylized realism, all we like is anime and apparently we're obsessed with youth. I mentioned this to my friend, 'Hey, you know how the character's limbs are a bit big for him?'
'Yeah, it looks cool.'
'Mmm. Guess what? That's a sign that this game is for children.'
My friend gave me a look as if I've clearly lost my mind. I said, 'maji de' which is super-popular Japanese slang for a lot of things depending on the inflection, but this time it means, 'I'm dead serious.' I launched into a nature-documentary-like description of how the Mama American leaves her children in the adult wild once they've grown up and forbids them from ever associating any style of portrayal which might recall such childhood in order to be real men and women. After telling me how weird I am, my friend stated, 'Americans have childhood abandonment issues.'
You see, he's kind of the Middle East of opinions, whereas I'm more like Canada, because I added, 'Well, its only some of them and it is their choice, however bizarre and off-base it is.' Tatsu asked me whether I think it is for children, and other then the farting and the shallow sex, which both of us just shrug off as silly, neither of us think its for any particular age: it's just 'there' with its choices of visual, storytelling or gameplay style owing to other issues than maturity of the target market.
Both of us also think despite the fact that there's a lot of RPG smoothness behind your choices with regard to the battle system, it doesn't have much finesse or technique, which is typically a huge sticking point with Japanese audiences, who will criticize down to the millisecond reactions and combos and the way they are built. And neither of us agreed that the magic targetting is really all that flawed.
But despite those agreements, we've had a couple of heavy very Middle East/Canada disagreements. Tatsuhito insisted Fable has acute Miyamoto-love syndrome and is heavily influenced by the 3D Zelda's. I think its just aiming for similar levels of accessibility and very unlikely that Peter has played Zelda in any great depth. He said the combat system is practically gaming plagiarism, I said its unlikely that most American designers really care that much about Japanese design methods to rip them off.
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