Category Archives: video games

People Who Play to Prove Something Cause Damage to Those Switching Out

Posted on by

While I have had many friends over the years who were quite fond of Magic: The Gathering, for one reason or another I never quite got into it. So when I began reading about the different player types in Magic as defined by the cards’ creators, I found it so fascinating in a way that I kind of wish I had gotten into the game more. But while I do not have familiarity with Magic, I have thrown many hours into the Pokemon series, and I thought about whether or not I’d be able to determine by player type based on my experience there.

According to Mark Rosewater, the architect behind the current card creation system, players of Magic fall into one of three categories: Timmy, who “wants to experience something,” Johnny, who “wants to express something,” and Spike, who “plays to prove something.” More details can be found here. I’ve found myself unable to quite determine where I fall in the spectrum, but perhaps if I explain how I feel about one aspect of the Pokemon, maybe you can help me out.

The second generation of Pokemon games introduced an attack called “Hidden Power.” Story-wise, it was supposed to be a mysterious strength lurking deep within your Pokemon which allowed it to attack with a type element that it normally would not able to. On a technical level, it was an attack ranging in power from weak to medium strength that could be any one of the 17 Pokemon types in the game depending on your individual Pokemon’s inherent statistics. At first it came across as a move you were “lucky” to get, but its meaning and purpose changed in the context of high-level competition, where it could be manipulated to give you exactly the type and strength you wanted. Combined with the fact that nearly every Pokemon could learn it, Hidden Power became a wild card of sorts, customizable just like everything else in the game.

I did not like Hidden Power then, and even though its capacity has been a little more limited since Diamond and Pearl and the re-categorization of “physical” and “special” attacks where the move only becomes useful to “Special Attackers,” I still do not like it. As a person who really enjoys creating Pokemon teams using Pokemon that are not the cream of the crop and trying to figure out different ways to make them work even when they’re at a distinct disadvantage, the way Hidden Power has been continuously used as a near-automatic suggestion to fill a Pokemon’s move slot has always bothered me. Need your Hypno to fight a Swampert? Just give it Hidden Power Grass. Ground types giving your Jolteon trouble? Hidden Power Ice is your answer. Rather than encouraging players to really sit down and think about how a Pokemon could make the most out of its limitations, Hidden Power became a band-aid that could be applied to just about anything, the chainsaw applied to the proverbial hedge maze which just encourages laziness. While I don’t necessarily fault anyone for using the move (why ignore it if it’s there?), I would rather it never existed in the first place.

I am well aware of the counter-argument that Hidden Power is a boon to these lesser Pokemon of which I’m so fond, as it gives them diversity and the ability to compete where without it they would just have no other choice. After all, why should Dragonite get Ice, Electric, Fire, and Water attacks but not Pidgeot? I understand that side well, but I just wish the solution wasn’t as simple and widespread as Hidden Power. With Hidden Power, there’s so much less challenge in trying to get a Pokemon to work that it takes some of my enjoyment out of team-building, because I can’t just ignore that it exists because it’d inevitably be used against me.

So what do you think? I get the feeling I’m not really all that Spike, and I know hybrids can exist, but I’m not too sure where I fall between Timmy and Johnny.

As an aside, I’m quite pumped that Mewtwo finally gets its own signature attack. I’ve been hoping for this since forever because previously Mewtwo’s only distinguishing trait was that it was “really good.”

Why Are They Making Ash Ketchum’s Eyes So Huge? I’ll Tell You!

Posted on by

In anticipation of the latest Pokemon Black & White games, the anime of Pokemon is undergoing a revamp, and with this newest iteration comes a great amount of aesthetic change for a series which has up to this point remained fairly static in that regard (or at the very least has experienced change so gradual as to be unnoticeable). Many long-time characters are undergoing design changes, but perhaps the most prominent is that of main character Satoshi, possibly better known as Ash Ketchum, whose irises appear to have doubled in size.

Around the internet, people have been wondering what could possibly be the catalyst for this change. The truth lies with the character designer for the Pokemon games, Sugimori Ken.

Sugimori was the original Pokemon artist, drawing up all 151 of the originals as well as all of the character artwork. Even now he remains in that position, with his works being the official depictions of all humans and Pokemon in the franchise. Essentially, this means that Sugimori has been drawing for Pokemon for 15 years now, and his artistic sense and style have grown accordingly. Whereas the designs for the anime originally drew inspiration largely from Sugimori’s original designs for the first generation of Pokemon games and have remained fairly constant since, Sugimori’s own artwork has gone through a one and a half decade process of refinement.

Left: 1995-1998, Right: 2010

When you look at the anime’s new character designs, you can see that they are simply re-aligning themselves with Sugimori’s work.

So in a way, the artwork for the Pokemon anime is pretty much ending up where it should be.

V! V! V!

Posted on by

Puberty is a funny thing when you’re a fan.

In some instances, a female character can enter the mind of a young boy just by virtue of being the most prominent female in his favorite show, and then stay with him as he awakens sexually. Of course it doesn’t happen to every fan, and I’d be remiss to not include female fans who carry the torch for their male childhood crushes (or varying combinations between these two areas), but as a guy who likes girls I want to focus on that area. Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts given your own sexuality.

The first examples I can think of are Sayaka from Mazinger Z and Chizuru from Combattler V. While they are obviously not applicable to me seeing as I did not grow up with either show, in Japan and Italy and other parts of the world where these shows found popularity you have a lot of devoted male fans who will sexualize them and possibly draw fanart of them, to the extent that someone unfamiliar with these series might scratch their heads, or perhaps get the wrong impression of them when they see fanart of Chizuru in an outfit that’s quite a bit tighter than canon suggests. This is not a knock on either Sayaka or Chizuru. I can easily see guys liking them for legitimate reasons, and they’re even portrayed as attractive within the contexts of their shows (e.g. shower scenes), but I think there’s more to it than that.

An even better example might be video game characters. I’m not talking about your RPG characters who get loads of development, or games that have come out more recently and have the benefit of powerful graphics to improve character design and rendering, but those old, let’s say pre-90’s video games which barely had stories to go with them. While Samus Aran has had a lot of development over the years, guys were finding her hot since the NES era. Obviously her stripping to her skivvies in the ending sequence plays a role in this, but I think what pushes that over the edge is that you play as her for so long that you get attached to her. Again, familiarity.

Of course this doesn’t happen with every fan, but being a fan makes this more likely, I think. To preserve the memories of their favorite “stories” from childhood and bring those memories with them through to their teenage years and possibly their adult life, isn’t that the kind of thing a fan does?

And then my thoughts lead towards “moe.” Modern moe shows of course don’t have that advantage of familiarity, but when I think about it, liking a video game character because of the two or three things you know about them and liking a moe girl who is a collection of moe traits aren’t that far off. So I wonder if moe in the marketing sense of the word is trying to tap into that same nostalgia reservoir, only through more “efficient” means.

I’m not here to judge what characters you like for whatever reason, but to simply put down my thoughts on the way the fan mind works, particularly for when you start thinking girls (or guys) are awfully nice-looking.

On another note, I realize my past three post titles have all been song lyrics. Yeah I don’t know either.

To Be an Electric Type is to Be One with the Speed of Light! …or Not

Posted on by

Ever since the first games, I have been a big fan of Pokemon, particularly when it comes to multiplayer battling. I remember the absolute Psychic dominance of Red, Blue, and Yellow, and I know well the competitive trends from sequel to sequel. And even though Pokemon as a whole is not the most balanced of games, it’s clear that the creators have tried to make some concessions to multiplayer fairness, strengthening some things while weakening others.

While this effort towards balance is much appreciated however, I feel that there has been an increasing amount of homogeneity in Pokemon moves, removing some of the individuality and uniqueness of each Pokemon type.

Since the early games the Normal type has had a certain identity associated with it. In terms of effectiveness versus other types, the Normal type is the only kind that is not super effective against any other type. On the other hand, very few things resist it, so it’s fairly neutral overall. But what made Normal type attacks so special is that they had by far the most range and utility in the game. You had kamikaze attacks in Selfdestruct and Explosion. You had Hyper Beam, a powerful technique which exhausts the Pokemon after each use. You had the purely random Metronome. You had Swift, an attack which always had perfect accuracy. You had Quick Attack, a move which lets the Pokemon hit first no matter the actual difference in speed.

And so each Pokemon type had associated with it certain strengths and weaknesses well beyond that 17 x 17 grid denoting super effectiveness. But let’s take a look at what’s happened to Quick Attack since then. You now have Extremespeed, a rarer form of Quick Attack which is twice as powerful. But then you also have Mach Punch, Aqua Jet, Bullet Punch, Ice Shard, Shadow Sneak, and Vacuum Wave, all differently typed attacks which do the same thing as Quick Attack. Where is the type identity? What happened to the time when you could say that Fighting attacks tended to be powerful yet risky, or that Grass attacks tended to be fairly weak but had their place in taking out specific threats?

I will say though that there have been some advancements. The Dragon type for example has benefited greatly in terms of becoming more pronounced in its identity. Dragon is the only type more neutral on offense in Pokemon than normal, hitting 15 of 17 types for normal damage. In the first game however, there was only one Dragon attack, and because it inflicted a set amount of damage no matter what, it was almost pointless for it to be a “Dragon” type attack. But as the games continued, Dragon gained a reputation for extreme power and the ability to end matches quickly.

I just hope that with Pokemon Black and White that we move towards more pronounced differences in Pokemon types so that each of them can shine in different ways, as opposed to the exact same glimmer.

Kamoflage

Posted on by

For those of you who’ve been watching the Pokemon anime for years now, you may recall the female character May (Japanese name Haruka), who was the main heroine for the entirety of the Game Boy Advance era of Pokemon games.

What you may not have noticed however is that her character design, well, changed throughout the course of the series. See if you can spot the difference below:

Thanks to kransom for finding this.

What in the world could be responsible for Haruka’s, shall we say, simplification? The easy knee-jerk reaction would be pressure from foreign countries to reduce the amount of eye candy in their internationally famous Japanese franchise cartoon, but something tells me that it has a little more to do with someone realizing that the girl is supposed to be ten years old.

It’s All in the Execution

Posted on by

Marvel vs Capcom 3 successfully captures the look a fighting game about Ryu fighting Captain America targeted towards American audiences wants to have. It’s a grittier style when compared to the one used in Tatsunoko vs Capcom, which makes perfect sense. MvC3‘s aesthetic step in the right direction however reminded me of a similar attempt not so long ago, Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe.

Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe was an aesthetic failure. Just like MvC3, the game looked to bring together two sets of characters by uniting them under a more realistic visual style, but the end product was just a series of awkwardly stiff 3-d models and jerky animations.

What is going on with that torso?

Worse yet were the Fatalities, that classic trademark of the Mortal Kombat franchise, the violent killing blows which defined the series in the eyes of so many gamers. In MKvsDC, the Fatalities were not only toned down in brutality but also terribly uncreative regardless of the level of violence, especially when compared to the stylish Instant Kills of games like Blazblue.

My goal isn’t to just trash MKvsDC though, and of course I can’t really compare the gameplay to a game that isn’t actually out yet. I just wanted to point out that it’s amazing just how much two different projects came aim for the same basic goal and produce such different results. Marvel vs Capcom 3 is exactly what Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe wanted to be.

For comparison:

A Visual Comparison of Marvel-Style Capcom and Tatsunoko-Style Capcom

Posted on by

When the preliminary screenshots for Marvel vs Capcom 3 were revealed, the way the Capcom characters were portrayed really caught my eye.

Now it wasn’t too long ago that the similarly themed Tatsunoko vs Capcom saw the light of day. Both it and MvC3 portray Capcom characters using 3-D models, but you might see a notable difference between the two games.

Ryu here, despite being in two very similar games, turns out looking quite different. Against the anime characters of Tatsunoko he too looks closer to an anime character, but against the American-friendly grittiness of Wolverine and other Marvel characters, he too becomes almost equally gritty. His design is being adapted differently in order to better match with the types of opponents he’s facing.

In any crossover but especially in video games, visual consistency is important. If the characters do not look like they belong together, then it becomes extremely jarring. The Capcom vs SNK series suffered from this, as the old Alpha sprites of the Capcom characters clashed with the newly designed sprites for the SNK characters. As an opposite example however, Sakurai Masahiro purposely added realistic touches to all of the characters the later Super Smash Bros. games in order to minimize the visual discrepancies between them, so that someone like the relatively realistic Samus Aran matches up with the more cartoonish Mario. If you look at Mario actually, he has much more detailed textures on his overalls than in any other game he’s in.

One last thing that I find interesting is that the old VS games (most notably Marvel vs Capcom 2) actually leaned in the opposite direction of MvC3 by having the Marvel characters designed to better match the anime-style Street Fighter characters used at that time. Either way though, the message seems to remain the same: MUGEN is really ugly.

A Form of Evolution, Perhaps

Posted on by

A couple days ago I talked about how I like the idea of broad interpretations of  video games for film and TV adapations, citing examples such as Tekken, Super Mario Bros, and Pole Position. But soon after making that post, I realized that I forgot probably the best example of taking necessary liberties with a video game property in order to adapt it into some kind of narrative media. That game is Pokemon.

Although the series stays true to the basic premise of Pokemon, a young kid goes out to capture and battle with monsters of which there are at least 150, it also plays around with and introduces a lot of ideas. As it would be difficult to write a long show without giving our hero Ash (Satoshi) some traveling companions, the writers took the first two bosses of the game, the “Gym Leaders” Misty (Kasumi) and Brock (Takeshi), and made them into supporting characters. They even went as far as to revise their outfits to be more suitable for travel. In case you forgot or just never knew, Misty originally wore a two-piece swimsuit and Brock was shirtless.

The Team Rocket in the show consisting of Jessie (Musashi), James (Kojirou), and Nyarth (Meowth) are entirely the product of the anime. Instead of having recurring antagonists in the form of faceless foot soldiers, the show saw it fit to give their primary representation of Team Rocket distinct looks and personalities. And just like Harley Quinn from Batman: The Animated Series, they were popular enough to be introduced into the original source material after the fact.

Then there’s the Pokemon themselves. In the video games, they made digitized sounds meant to be perceived as cries and roars, but that sort of thing can’t really fly in a TV show, so they introduced the concept of Pokemon talking by saying their names over and over again. And now it’s the way we think Pokemon talk. The show, especially early on, also modified the idea of the “Pokemon Battle,” converting the turn-based battles of the game into something more dynamic. They often played fast and loose with the rules, with ideas like a Bellsprout that knows kung fu, Whirlwind as an offensive technique, even outright ignoring the game’s type weakness chart by having it be possible to “super charge” Pikachu to the point where it could overcome the Ground type’s immunity to electric attacks.

Speaking of Pikachu, it might very well be the greatest liberty taken of all by being Ash’s starter Pokemon. The starting Pokemon in the original games were Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle, but in order to keep kids from thinking that their own personal pick for their first Pokemon was somehow “wrong,” they picked a neutral Pokemon. Actually, at first they planned to use Clefairy, but found Pikachu to be more popular.

So think about how much of Pokemon comes from outside of the games, and once again consider the possibilities of adaptation.

Well My Parents Don’t Drive Awesome Flying Cars

Posted on by

For the most part, video games have advanced in a positive direction in terms of artistic progression. Though I don’t agree entirely on how our newfangled advanced realistic graphics are being used or certain trends in storytelling or interaction, I can say that we’re doing okay. At the same time though, I’ve come to realize that when video games look this good and have fully elaborated stories and such, it often leaves less room for creative, off-the-wall adaptations in fiction.

At this point with games looking and feeling closer to the realm of film and animation and other storytelling mediums with characters having concrete personalities, there  are fewer opportunities to make great leaps in interpretation. Yes, I understand that products like the Super Mario Bros. movie are exactly the kinds of disaster that comes from being too “loose” an interpretations, but I believe there is a definite charm.

This applies not just to storytelling but also visuals as well. Although the Tekken OVA of the 90s was awful, could you imagine a Tekken anime today, given the fact that it would be 2-D interpretations of such detailed 3-D characters? Good looking or not, you could see the move from blocky polygons anime designs to make some sort of sense.

Basically, I’d like to still be in a world where a racing game with a normal setting could be interpreted as a futuristic setting with talking computers inside my motor vehicles.

Is that too much to ask, I wonder?

Praying Towards Castle Grayskull

Posted on by

When it comes to the international phenomenon that is Pokemon, producer Ishihara Tsunekazu had the following to say:

石原： 北米ではけっこうクラシカルに伝説系のポケモンの人気があるんですけど、リザードンのような見た目か ら強そうなタイプのポケモンが好まれています。それとミュウツーでしょうか。

Ishihara: In North America, classical-style Legendary Pokemon are popular, but Pokemon who look strong like Charizard are also preferred. Mewtwo as well.


Charizard and Mewtwo

While Ishihara then goes on to say that  universally speaking, Pokemon like Pikachu are popular everywhere, I want to to focus mainly on this unique bit of difference North America has.

While I can’t speak for Canada, Mexico, or Central America, I think it’s very well-known that America likes powerful characters. More broadly, America likes the hero who rises above all, the larger-than-life figure. He may have a humble background, but the end result is still strong. It speaks to our culture of individualism, and it is reflected in the popularity of action movies as well as in the existence of iconic heroic figures in cartoons and comics such as Superman, Captain America, He-Man and Flash Gordon. When the US encounters the creative output of another nation such as Japan, it very profoundly reflects this ideal.

This is also partly why I think many of the anime that have been popular in the US are or were popular. Compared to the less popular One Piece, Naruto and Bleach exude seriousness and power in their aesthetics, doubly so for something like Dragon Ball Z. The hyper violence of MD Geist and its contemporaries in the 80s and 90s felt new and fresh to some extent, but that level of violence is I think something comfortably American, animated cousins of action movies.

I think it’s very easy to take one’s own cultural upbringing for granted, to think that the ideals of your own culture are the ideals of everyone else’s. It’s not small-minded or biggoted so much as it is a fairly natural progression if there is nothing to jar you out of it. In an article from 1987, Frederik Schodt, author of Manga! Manga!, points out that American superhero comics do not do well in Japan. Back then, they were considered too plain and too wordy, and today I can tell you that superheroes are better known through their movies than anything else. When I was studying in Japan, I had a conversation with a Japanese classmate, where I tried to explain the Flash to him. I told him he was “red and very fast,” to which he responded, “Daredevil?”

That said, there are a number of manga artists influenced by Americann superhero comics, such as Nightow Yasuhiro (Trigun) and Takahashi Kazuki (Yu-Gi-Oh!). In anime, it goes at least as far back as Gatchaman. Still, you will find that just as we have taken anime and said, “This is what we like in our anime,” they have said, “This is what we like in superheroes” and transformed it into something more in-line with their culture.

Cultural exchange, as they call it.

One last thing to dwell on is the way Europe has approached anime and manga. Taniguchi Jiro, who is influenced by the French comic artist Moebius, is much more popular in Moebius’s home country than he is in the US. His style is very European, incorporating complex and detailed backgrounds and placing a great visual emphasis on environment (not to be confused with “the environment”). But as I said before, I’m no expert on European comics, so I’ll leave someone else to fill in that blank until I catch up.