Great Cultural Differences, pt 2

Anime/Manga vs Realism.

You know, up until this current generation of consoles, getting realistic graphics was practically impossible. If you try to make something realistic and then for whatever technical reasons, have to start cutting a lot of corners like polygon counts and texture resolution and all of a sudden, what seemed quite realistic in 3D has become polygon mud.

During the 8 and 16 bit eras, stylization was mandatory. 8 bit, certainly. 16 bit, artists were certainly more ambitious as you started having still frames that looked like grainy photos but it was a stretch. I guess I should say, at 16 bit, people certainly tried.

The 32 bit era brought as many colors as the human eye is capable of recognizing. making it possible to load realistic photos and video.

Okay, enough beating around the bush with all this hardware history, it just looks better if things are stylized when technology can't deliver real. Even if technology can push more polys than the uncanny valley can shake an uncanny stick at, solid style will stand out above the crowd.

I can't quite recall where I heard it or what game it was about, but some game had a bunch of enemies chasing a character. JP Techno limitations could only show 4-5 enemies chasing, but due to creative camera angles, the player was given the illusion that a huge horde of guys was after him/her.

Of course, if they had some better tech, they could have actually shown a lot more enemies. But the creative camera angles worked. So does the technological limit really matter?

It is indeed true that manga has a lot more cultural acceptance in Japan than comics do in the US, but comic book publishers are mostly to blame for this, not American culture. There's manga for ANYONE, but comics? Not so much.

So, you have a look that's well accepted and low-tech friendly. Put two and two together and it's pretty dang obvious why stylized graphics are so in! While most home consoles and PCs have the ability to push the polygons and texture resolutions to fool people, there's still the widely popular DS and PSP. The Wii might be able to...Maybe...I suppose if developers really figure out some awesome tricks, we might get some high fidelity stuff outta a Wii but I'm not holding my breath, I don't really care either.

I suppose over in the West, you want to show off how impressive your poly-pushing techonogy is? Show off something realistic and people go ooh! wow! That's some amazing stuff there. But on the flip side, there's our friends at Pixar. Recognizable style, yes some stuff they do is amazingly realistic like the way fur moved in Monsters Inc, but even then, consider the fact that the super real Final Fantasy CG movie flopped(it was a mediocre bout of storytelling which Pixar doesn't do) but Pixar...Wow. Perhaps game developers can thank Pixar for conditioning Western audiences to appreciate stylized graphics. Anime master Hayao Miyazaki might too, as he gets a lot of praise and interest outside of Japan. And among anime, Miyazaki's art is undeniably unique.

In conclusion, style has the power to make something look amazing and great in spite of technology. It's something I wish developers would put to use more often, as the most notable Western dev to do this is Blizzard with World of Warcraft & platform scalability. Good art directors that can make every in-game object look consistent with a style are extremely important since if anything looks out of place, there goes the style.

Make use of style, it beats getting lost in the tide of realistic wanna-bes.