This is something that has been on my mind for quite a while now. After revisiting some of the earlier games like Storm 4, FighterZ and Xenoverse 2, it got me thinking about how we still haven’t seen many anime games reach a higher level of quality that is expected in 2018. Mediocre seems to be the normal standard with these types of games and we as anime games consumers have been enabling it for far too long!
When you look at all these anime games have that have been coming out in recent years, one can’t help but wonder why some of these games look like they came out in 2010 for the PS2. When I first saw Naruto Storm for the PS3, I thought that this would be the stepping stone or a new goal for anime games to reach in years to come for but so far in recent memory, there hasn’t been an abundant amount of games has come close to that of the Storm series in terms of quality and polish aside FighterZ and maybe Xenoverse games.
All of these recent titles such as Shinobi Strikers, My Hero One’s Justices and The Seven Deadly Sins: Knights of Britannia are just few examples of the many anime games that just barely made it to the mediocre standard. Facial animations are always bland and lifeless, movements in gameplay are stiff and sometimes come off as unpolished and the contents in these games are bare-bones at best. This has become too norm for my liking.
Of course I’m aware of certain development teams having to deal with budget constraint and whatnot, but it’s gotten to the point in which we as the community who consume these types of product have normalized it and are to blame for it. Yeah, some game companies may have budget constraint, but it’s not all of them. Most of the times, they’re are been rushed, probably being pressure by their publishers to release the game so that they can make that quick buck.
We’ve let our nostalgia and love for these anime blind us from judging them as anime games like any other games. We’ve convinced ourselves that by buying these games, we are directly supporting the authors of our favorite manga, which sometimes just isn’t the case. By buying these games, we are telling the publishers and game companies in Japan that we are OK with the quality of these games. We need to do better. We gotta let them know that we expect better for the money we’re giving them. I’m mean, this is the cycle I see all the time:
We all get hype for a game, we get the game because everyone (including your favorite Influencers) hyped it up without criticism, we play the game only to realize that it’s shit, then we complain. Sound familiar? There’s nothing wrong in pointing out flaws in any game, that’s how you weed out the bad from the good and keep the publishers on their toes.
