This Week in Anime

What Is An 'Anime Game,' Anyway?

Chris
Ah, gaming. The only pastime more engaging is pedantically arguing semantics, so sure, I'll head down this rabbit hole with you, Lucas. Let it be known that this go-around, we are This Week In Games—wait, no, can't use that, our good friend Jean-Karlo already has that as his column. Oh well, I'm sure we'll figure something out before this is over.

Or maybe not, since you'd think the answer to what an "anime" game is would be quickly deduced: a video game based on an anime. Boom, dusted.

I never got around to the Naruto games myself, but running in fighting game circles as I did in that era, I heard a lot of good things about them. That was before they were licensed for English release, back when people were importing and talking about these rad Gekitō Ninja Taisen arena fighters. Stuff like those and the concurrent Dragon Ball Z Budokai games were a damn sight ahead of schlock like Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout from the previous generation. You can see their engaging quality paving the way for the success of stuff like FighterZ today.

Amongst other licensed options, the anime-based fighting game is a subgenre with a pretty robust selection. Dragon Ball has solid entries going back at least to the SNES years. And I fondly recall the region-free abilities of the Nintendo DS and the PSP, allowing me to import and play multiple Bleach fighters before they came out here.

Forget FromSoft's offerings, this will always be my Dark Souls.
Still, while fighters based on anime series make for an easy "anime game" designation, they also provide a handy segue into the more nebulous definition that kickstarted your conundrum. After all, "anime fighter" is a recognized subset of the broader fighting game genre!

Hell, I'm particular enough about this that I'd argue that Street Fighter isn't an anime fighter. Save for maybe the Alpha series. See, it's murky!

Still, stuff like Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, and French-Bread's Under Night In-Birth are built on the same aesthetic sensibilities as popular Japanese anime and manga that they fit right in with that fandom. Heck, BlazBlue is another one that has its own anime adaptation, though I haven't seen folks talk about it much. They can't all be Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie.

If aesthetic signifiers are all it takes to be an "anime," then any video game made in Japan thus counts under the "anime game" term. However, that might speak to the multimedia sensibilities of so many of these productions, wherein you can wind up with something like Melty Blood, which encompasses fighting game, visual novel, manga, and out there in the tangential adaptational ether, anime.

This is why Bandai Namco gave us the God Eater series, games which aimed to be "Monster Hunter, but more visibly anime." It's another one that got an anime adaptation nobody talks about!

You also bring up an important distinction, which is that there is a metric crapton of games that lovingly ape that anime aesthetic but weren't produced in Japan and have bugger-all to do with the art form. And while I love stuff like VA-11 Hall-A and Helltaker, it'd be disingenuous to say they belong to the same ilk as anything from, say, the Type-Moon Industrial Complex.

There's plenty of convergent evolution of the dense, plot-driven RPGs between both the Eastern and Western sides of gaming. It's been nice to see stuff like Baldur's Gate embrace the dense romance options codified by Japanese gaming's entire extremely anime dating-sim genre.

Now, if only we could get them to stop doing dating sims as jokes for April Fools' Day.

It certainly speaks to a disregard for that particular side of culture, even as whatever "anime games" are has become increasingly mainstream over the console generations. It's particularly pointed because visual novels and dating sims are so foundational to big crossover hits like the Phoenix Wright series or the just-mentioned Persona.

You don't get here without Tokimeki Memorial, and that's to say nothing of several of those fighting games and indie hits I rattled off that also owe their existence to VNs.

That lays out what tends to be my platonic ideal of an "anime game": a game that lets you feel like you're playing an anime. To get back to the RPG precedent of Persona, this is one reason playing the Lunar games back on the PS1 was so formative alongside my anime fandom. Yes, the actual anime cutscenes were a big part of that, but their stories and characters were rooted in the same broad appeal of the stuff I'd seen on Toonami at the time.

While getting various licensed anime tie-in games here wouldn't really take off until the PS2 era, the PS1 was no slouch when it came to some anime-ass games getting Western releases. Lunar was one at the forefront of that, back when RPGs of its style seemed to be referred to as "anime RPGs" as often as the (arguably derogatory) "JRPGs."

Notably, these PS1 games are actually remakes of even older titles from the Sega CD, but this is where their crisp anime aesthetic (with crunchy CD-quality FMV cutscenes) was really sold. Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete is a fantasy epic that swerves as often as it plays tropes from both the RPG genre and anime medium straight. It's a role-playing game with a hot springs scene—that's anime all over.

Their English releases were also Working Designs joints, which certainly reflect the, uh, looser sensibilities for localization at the time.

Gotta love Atlus' attempt at using "Revelations" as an English equivalent of the Shin Megami Tensei name, reflecting the tenuous state of Japanese franchises here at the time. Luckily, that didn't last.

Decidedly "quirky" adaptational choices aside, plenty of PS1 games were selling themselves on that anime identity. Wild Arms featured an opening animation that played each time you loaded your save file, like the beginning of a new episode. Galerians sold all of its cutscenes stitched together on DVD (and PSP UMD!) as an "anime" OVA!

This gets into the idea that the definition of an "anime" game isn't just one of aesthetics or story influence, but the delivery of that material. It's why one of the most "anime" games in my recent memory is the 2019 soft reboot of the Sakura Wars series. Sure, this game has Tite Kubo character designs, and an anime OP like so many others, but it also has next-episode previews.

Also another hot springs scene, so at least my standards are consistent.

Anime adaptations of storied Japanese game franchises like Sakura Wars can have a hard time catching a break; just ask Muv-Luv.

While I can confirm that those vibes are important, I would round back to my earlier point that these things still require some confluence of Japanese production and anime aesthetics to meet the qualifications. Otherwise, we're dangerously close to considering Doki Doki Literature Club an "anime" game, and I ain't about that.

You can fight Saber in multiple crossover anime fighters now, she's got better things to do than Shirou.

Though notably, the original Fate/stay night is hardly forgotten. It's finally getting an English release later this year, along with Tsukihime, progenitor of Melty Blood.
That only took twenty years and the most successful mobile game on the planet.

Oh yeah, that's been the case for Fate/stay night since the first time it was remastered. It serves as an indicator of how the ambitions and influences of these series have always spread beyond their humble illicit origins. Maybe that's just one more ingredient in the anime qualification cocktail: Sure, outsiders looking in may know something like Kill la Kill as that thing with all the fanservice, but anime viewers know it for its stirring storytelling and eccentric animation (and all the fanservice). So the same goes for a steamy start-up like Fate that introduced the world to a dense, well-loved anime setting.

Hey, I can discuss horny. Don't ask me about my other recent favorite anime adventure: All fans of 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim know we can't talk about our game!

Look, if Advent Children was an anime movie then the FF7 remakes are absolutely anime games. But maybe that's for the best that we can't get video games in as easily for these discussions as we do anime, so this probably won't become a regular focus of the column. Like I said, Jean-Karlo's already got the "This Week in..." front locked down for games. Plus it turns out I wasn't able to figure out a proper name for this iteration of TWIA after all. "This Week in Anime...Games"? We barely managed to figure out what those were!

You know what, I'll take that win.