Games and japan

[kLaUS]

ey guys, have you played a game that has any japanese touch on it?¿, i mean japanese culture, characters or that japanese feeling like samurais and stuff, and if you have, witch one is the best?¿

i love that kind of games and i looking for some, right now im playing OTOGI 2 for xbox, and its visually awesome, all those swords, beasts and sakura trees are great and i really love the action, totally recommended.

[Dtortot]

Yes I have, plenty of times.

All my loli H-games.

[Yodatsubato]

Well, it's great that the .Hack games let you preserve the audio in Japanese (with subtitles if you wish). If the language doesn't count as Japanese culture, I don't know what does.

There's also a "historical" (note the quotes) Risk-like strategy game series called Nobunaga's Ambition. Nobunaga was a great (albeit bloody) samurai general who united a fair portion of Japan during the 1500's, paving the way for Hideyoshi and Tokugawa to complete the unification process after his death. I recognized a bunch of the names from that game as actual historical generals, shoguns, prominent families, etc. from Japan's history. Though that doesn't really mean much, gameplay wise. Granted, I only played the NES version, and only briefly.

I feel that most Japanese-developed games (especially RPGs) have aspects of their own culture in it, whether subtle or extreme. A lot of games draw characters with the signature anime style, both in-game, in avatars, and during cutscenes.

Also, you have much more subtle references. For instance, the "PHS" system in Final Fantasy 7 is actually a real phone system called the "Personal Handy-phone System." It was created and implemented in Japan, but never really made it far out of the country and eventually became outdated. Go to Wikipedia and check the article titled "Personal Handy-phone System" for more information. That's a reference I would never have gotten, had it not been for me randomly hearing something during a wireless communications class I wasn't even enrolled in.

I covered language, history, art, and technology, and Dtortot covered girls. In short, there're references everywhere. You just have to know how to extract these references from everything else the games have to offer. This is hard to do, and acts as proof that to learn a culture, you need to do more than just play their games. =)

[Mana]

The SailorMoon Anothery Story game for the SNES has a surprising amount of Japanese Culture in it. Your healing items are all different types of sushi (or a whole bento for a lot of HP), and part of the game is spent just wandering around Tokyo.