In this part of my research, I have started to focus on the games that have been made by Japan. I want to pick out the key elements that make them look distinctly Japanese which means how there culture and style has informed their design.
Dragon Quest VIII by Square Enix
The first out of this categories is a colourful game known as Dragon Quest which is a hugely popular role playing game within the Japanese gaming culture. I say this because I remember reading an article about vast amounts of Japanese business men booking time off work to play it! So what makes this a Japanese game? Well the first clue is the style of the game, it clearly been drawn from Manga (can be translated as humorous pictures) which became more and more popular when laws prohibiting the publication of the type of content was a lifted through the 20th century.
Title Unknown 1950s Manga
As you can see from the two manga images below, the resemblance is very similar in terms of style with the games style. The Characters are eccentric with wide eyes and wacky clothing, the colours are vibrant and bold and if you look further into manga comics the settings are as eccentric as the characters are!
Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo
As you can see the from the images below with the ones from above, they both share a distinct resemblance in their style but of there is one key difference, movement.
As with all games, there has to be movement and in this case the developer has captured this traditional manga style look with a technique called cel shaded which means to give a 3D object (or animation in this case) a hand drawn cartoon like appearance. If you look closely, you can make out a black outline which would be seen in most comic, manga or cartoon styles.
Zelda "The Wind Walker"
Here is another example of a Japanese game which has been cel shaded in a more simpler manner. There seems to be more and on a 3D form which still some how looks 2D.
The Prince of Persia
Another cel shaded game but this time form a western developer "Ubisoft". This cel shaded game has gone for a highly detailed look which looks stunning in stills as much as it does in movement.
What is interesting is the fact of how this links to some of the box art I have looked at. The western games seemed to go for a highly rendered look with the eastern going for a more simpler look. Another piece of information that I found is which games received the highest review score. The simple Japanese games scored highly across the board whilst the western scored low. What this tells me is that the aesthetics of the game don't make a difference if the mechanics of the game are shallow.
Task
Although I can't actually make a cel shaded character or setting using the normal 3D rendering technique but, I can imitate it using the software and drawing skills I have on hand. I think I will focus on a simple character and try to stylise it to aim it a Japanese audience.
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