The Game in the Anime, the Anime in the Game
While I disagree with his take about Bakatest, there’s a side point that has been cooking for the past couple decades. I rarely see anyone talk about it, so maybe it’s time to bring it up.
Let’s start with the term “moe blob” as a debased term. (And I love you Nayuki, don’t take this the wrong way!)
Have we ever considered the doujin-soft game Glove on Fight, which is a full-on parody in nature, the kind of forerunner of the modern insult? The original promotional flash video drives home the idea of the game pretty well, that you have your standard 8-pack of popular bishoujo characters in a fighting game. Well, that’s just combining two otaku pastimes, one could say. But a boxing game? With the kind of design exaggeration you can see above?
Glove on Fight is an easy pick because it is an extreme exaggeration. Super deformity has its root in manga and anime as comedic, light-hearted things, but GOF is not quite your standard SD-ness. It operates within the same visual/iconic vocabulary as SD (note that the eyes are small, near-perfect circles) but the characters express themselves appropriately, fitting for a fighting game.
The turn of the century marked a major rush of getting manga and anime visuals crammed into our Japanese video games. Well, it’s not an exact mark, as the concept has been around for ages. It is only until the Playstation era that we had graphical hardware and advances in production techniques to make it notably more cinematic, more like an anime. Final Fantasy 7 is a good example. Before then, it was present, but largely in that SD form in which we are familiar with almost on a genetic level.
I say “genetic” level because people who grew up in the 80s are probably familiar with these concepts at a young age; the evolution of these manga-style icons matched the evolution of the bodies and souls of that generation of people. Games like the very original Super Mario Bros used SD emoticons to express simple concepts (like being stomped on is bad). It’s so pervasive that even some of us brute Americans understand what X_X means, loosely.
At any rate, what I wanted to say is that Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu brings that visual style, that “Disgaea” feel (which is trying to cop a manga/anime style), to an anime. It’s like a double regurgitation. It’s like watching not just a trailer video for Glove on Fight, but an anime based on Glove on Fight. I mean, Disgaea is like a sprite-based game, but Bakatest uses their “game” video as a 3d/2d rendered thing that they can crunch out (without actually doing the 2D animation stuff, perhaps). Just so it gives a feel that it’s like a video game. It’s different technology, and there are differences in the visuals, but it’s the same visual representation.
I wonder what would an anime that is suppose to feel like a chapter in Sakura Taisen would feel like. I guess that wouldn’t be any different? In which ways could an anime adaptation of a video game or manga visual aesthetics feel sufficiently like a newly invented thing? This is the finer points about an adaptation that ought to get talked about more…
Right. It’s like what Pani Poni Dash would have been if PPD wasn’t a comedy so much as a straight-up parody, and Shin Oonuma had been the full director instead of Shinbo.
I suspect that an anime that’s supposed to feel like a chapter of Sakura Taisen would feel a heck of a lot like the Sakura Taisen anime. :P Though the issue with adaptions of material like that is that stripped of their interactivity you end up only being able to see one of the many potential paths through the game. The more unique the different story paths are, the more annoying it is when an anime adaption only does one.
I also feel I should assert that the Disgaea anime was terrible.
Bakatest *does* feel like a Japanese SRPG a lot. In fact the setup and so on seems to almost lend itself toward some kind of game adaption. Perhaps that’s why I’m able to completely ignore how absolutely ridiculous the whole concept is and just take it at face value. It’s not like it’s that much more retarded than some of the crappy JRPGs that I like to play.
@digitalboy: lolwut
@NegativeZero: yeah. it is like playing a video game. that’s what i want to say. or maybe, it’s like watching someone play a video game.