This doesn't undermine your point which I 100% agree with and think stands nonetheless, but I do think it's kind of funny funny that A Game of Thrones is older than all three of those games.
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Final Fantasy XVI
- Thread starter Mogri
- Start date
This doesn't undermine your point which I 100% agree with and think stands nonetheless, but I do think it's kind of funny funny that A Game of Thrones is older than all three of those games.
4-So
Spicy
Whether S-E was influenced by Game of Thrones or not, who gives a shit? Why does it matter? Comparing the trailer (which is designed to tantalize, of course) to Game of Thrones says more about the person making the observation than anything else. What it seems to say I don't actually know because I don't see a problem with the comparison. Still, if people mention Game of Thrones it's almost certainly because that show is in the pop-culture consciousness. People are going to know GoT more than Vagrant Story or Vandal Hearts. Considering the low-tech high-fantasy setting, the warring nations, the gratuitous violence, the implied sexual situations, the (seeming) betrayal in the scene where someone loses their head, political intrigue and scheming etc., it's not exactly a head-scratcher why someone would compare this most recent trailer to GoT, regardless of the intention or influence.
The Twitter-level discourse about this - and not here, mind you, just in general on The Webz- is tempest in a teapot fluff and noise.
The Twitter-level discourse about this - and not here, mind you, just in general on The Webz- is tempest in a teapot fluff and noise.
I don't mind the comparison, the comparison makes sense. It's the presumption that there's a direct influence is something I'm gonna need the receipts for. Like I said, I'd sooner assume Zeta Gundam would be an influence before GoT.
It is! But specifically the show's broad influence on fantasy television/movies/games in the manner that tends to be talked about is not.
That is not the issue at hand for me. Lots of things have similarities to GOT, including things that came before it. Personally I just find the frequent comparison of things to GOT irritating in a "Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this..." way. There are other things! When done frequently enough it reduces the conversation about any piece of fantasy to how like or unlike Game of Thrones anything is, and that's a pretty boring conversation. We're having it right now! I'd rather it just not be the common fantasy touchstone.
edit: nm
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I think it's both true that Final Fantasy is often a very derivative work of major trends in pop culture (and I don't think that's necessarily bad), and also that some of the Game of Thrones comparisons are probably overstating/oversimplifying things.
yeah that's one of the many reasons that it doesn't undermine your point, i just think it's funny how old it actually is
you also can never rule out romance of the three kingdoms and its nearly infinite adaptations in japan and china and beyond, as well as Taiga Drama adaptations of the Genpei Wars, Warring States Period conflicts, etc etc etc (matsuno, for example, definitely is into Ro3K and local historical dramas)
yeah that's one of the many reasons that it doesn't undermine your point, i just think it's funny how old it actually is
*thumbs up* thankee for clarifying
Lol, this is more a function of my having fallen off the downloading train, but yeah I need to track that down. But that’s for a different thread.Yeah. But I think your case is even more advanced than mine, lol. There's a new Macross movie out and you haven't even commented on the fact, let alone seen it yet!
Fyonn
did their best!
This is tangential to the discussion at best, but I have discovered by playing it on a whim that this is simply a description of The Last Story (once it gets around to giving you the mechanics about three-four hours in). Actually, The Last Story has a similar aesthetic tone to FFXVI, come to think of it.
Big fucking L from Yoshi P: Final Fantasy 16 Director Says They Didn't Want to Over-Incorporate People of Colour Due to Setting
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"We want our fantasy rooted in reality, so we're not going to be as diverse as reality" 
Talk about an unforced error, but I can't say I'm surprised. I wish I could, but I can't.
Ugh. That's the first major damper on my enthusiasm for the game.
It's a bloviating mess of an answer. At this point it feels like whatever good intentions Yoshida might have with his art are being compromised and strained to a breaking point by him having to represent a mega-franchise in public relations around the clock.
On a more personally frustrated level, the way Yoshida opens that whole diatribe is so beguiling and slimy in framing it like it's a topic that's been relevant "of late" instead of an universal aspect of creating fiction and like he's being forced to respond to it instead of having an innate drive to always keep it in mind as a storyteller... especially with the kind of stories he ostensibly is interested in telling.
On a more personally frustrated level, the way Yoshida opens that whole diatribe is so beguiling and slimy in framing it like it's a topic that's been relevant "of late" instead of an universal aspect of creating fiction and like he's being forced to respond to it instead of having an innate drive to always keep it in mind as a storyteller... especially with the kind of stories he ostensibly is interested in telling.
Honestly, I think you're giving him too much credit here. He could have just declined to answer the question if Square management/staff were putting pressure on him about things he didn't agree with. I interpret his statement as pretty close to how he feels about the subject. I'm pretty damn disappointed with him, ngl
I'm not giving him any credit; read back through this entire thread if you want to see basically nothing but criticality and skepticism based on the material shown and how it's talked about--this latest subject is just the latest extension of a recurring pattern. I don't think he's being used as a mouthpiece for external views rather than the responsibility of fronting a project of this scale--and of a different context than what he's famous for and experienced with--will result in different creative results, not all of them particularly interesting ones.
The sentiment he is now espousing flies in the face of how he has made a point of in the past of representing his and his team's work on a project like XIV, and in contrast to the qualities that typically bring people to that game as far as the avenues for inclusivity they facilitate, a history which cannot be separated from XVI as the goodwill generated there is a big motivator for people to be interested in the team's newest project. The worry has always been that this single-player turn at the wheel will embody the least interesting aspects of the team's signature style, and dilute or twist the messaging around them in how Yoshida and others will be asked to rationalize those choices when questioned, evidently unable to justify any of it. It's not an unexpected turn for me, personally.
The sentiment he is now espousing flies in the face of how he has made a point of in the past of representing his and his team's work on a project like XIV, and in contrast to the qualities that typically bring people to that game as far as the avenues for inclusivity they facilitate, a history which cannot be separated from XVI as the goodwill generated there is a big motivator for people to be interested in the team's newest project. The worry has always been that this single-player turn at the wheel will embody the least interesting aspects of the team's signature style, and dilute or twist the messaging around them in how Yoshida and others will be asked to rationalize those choices when questioned, evidently unable to justify any of it. It's not an unexpected turn for me, personally.
Fair enough. Yeah, I haven't been paying close attention to news about the game - I won't be able to play it until it's ported to something else anyway so I haven't been all that interested, but when that article came across my feed I figured I'd share it, especially considering how much I loved XIV.
The guy is a product of a deeply racist society and culture, and to expect anything different from the status quo there is naïve at best imo.
fanboymaster
(He/Him)
Literally everyone having this discussion are products of a racist society and culture, this isn't a question he was ambushed with he's clearly got multiple flavors of PR tested response loaded for bear in response to this question. I trust this 49 year old man to have had opportunities to think about what he is doing on a level as basic as "were all the medieval times ethnostates and should that believed past be emulated?"
I was a bit reductive because I didn't want to wall-of-text a discussion when a simple answer is honestly good enough. WE are products of a racist society. We are also - if you truly look around - outliers as well. Expecting someone else or most people to also be outliers... well you wouldn't be outliers anymore at that point, right? (We are looking down the barrel of a legal fascist takeover in my country, and the majority of citizens either care more about gas prices, are completely indifferent/disengaged, or actively supporting the fascists.)
At the end of the day, Naoki Yoshida is just your average, middle aged, straight, Japanese, male, who has at this point spent the majority of his life working in a Japanese corporate office. All of this nonsense is pretty par for the course, and should be the default expectation unless given clear reason to expect otherwise, IMO. The weird idolatry of "YoshiP" because he is the top billed producer of a game you enjoy has always felt, at best, intensely weird to me.
The guy lives and breathes inside multiple closed off social bubbles that is hard for most of us to even comprehend. One such bubble of broader Japanese society that is culturally and ethnically one of the most irregularly uniform and insulated cultures there are among developed countries. A country where nationality and ethnicity are interchangeable, where citizenship for a foreigner is essentially impossible, and where the values of collectivism and adherence to the group are the primary informants of how their society works. Ethnic minorities barely exist beyond tokenism, and those that do are viewed in pop culture at best as exotic, cartoon stereotypes. Usually far, far worse. To most Japanese people, black people are thought experiments they see occasionally in foreign media, not real people with thoughts, feelings, needs, and perspectives they could possibly come into contact within their daily lives.
And it's a culture where one of its most infamous and common idioms ("The nail that sticks out gets hammered down") gets said proudly as a warning to others. Even for the more progressive members of Japanese society, who are not actively racist or even harbor only minimal subconscious racial biases, their worldview is still going to be invariably shaped by the filtration of information through their language (that's a unique in the world as an isolate unrelatable and unintelligible to any other), their closed off media environment, their draconian immigration laws, and intense social ordering based on "in" and "out" groups. When you're stuck in a bubble like that, you don't look around at the hegemony of your society and lack of ethnic diversity as strange or irregular. It's what you were born into and lived and breathed your entire life and you don't see it as a problem. It is your default baseline. Even if you know intellectually it's not how the rest of the world is, there's a big difference between knowing something intellectually, and actually living/experiencing a different way of life. There are opportunities for the racists in our countries to come in contact with minorities, and the hegemonies they yearn for don't and have pretty much never existed. That is not the case in Japan. The racism and racial dynamics there are completely different and almost incomparable.
And I'm sure I don't have to regale you guys with how fucking shitty corporate business culture is in Japan. How jobs are by design, insulate their workers from society at large and trap them within their crafted social spheres, upheld by tentpoles of social drinking with your coworkers/bosses, and working absurd overtime hours and literally living in the office. Leaving very little else in terms of living experiences - let alone people - for your typical office worker to have the benefit of interacting with.
I don't outline this stuff to make excuses for the guy. I'm as disappointed as the rest of you. But I'm just explaining why I don't think anyone should expect anything different. Yes, he ought to know better. Most people ought to know better, but they don't. So having an expectation of anything else is kind of naïve. And you'd think that being in charge of a global product where the vast majority of your revenue comes from out-of-country at this point would be incentive enough for a good businessperson to take into consideration said global audience into your design and messaging. But that 1) presumes he's a good business person (he's a good product manager maybe; doing international public relations is a completely different skillset) and 2) that train of thought gives way too much credit to completely bogus Laissez-Faire economic theory of how economic incentives work. When in reality, people are flawed, stupid, creatures of habit who would rather let inertia and what's comfortable/familiar rule their decision making rather than to put in the bare minimum mental labor of being actively considerate of other points of view and modes of life.
At the end of the day, Naoki Yoshida is just your average, middle aged, straight, Japanese, male, who has at this point spent the majority of his life working in a Japanese corporate office. All of this nonsense is pretty par for the course, and should be the default expectation unless given clear reason to expect otherwise, IMO. The weird idolatry of "YoshiP" because he is the top billed producer of a game you enjoy has always felt, at best, intensely weird to me.
The guy lives and breathes inside multiple closed off social bubbles that is hard for most of us to even comprehend. One such bubble of broader Japanese society that is culturally and ethnically one of the most irregularly uniform and insulated cultures there are among developed countries. A country where nationality and ethnicity are interchangeable, where citizenship for a foreigner is essentially impossible, and where the values of collectivism and adherence to the group are the primary informants of how their society works. Ethnic minorities barely exist beyond tokenism, and those that do are viewed in pop culture at best as exotic, cartoon stereotypes. Usually far, far worse. To most Japanese people, black people are thought experiments they see occasionally in foreign media, not real people with thoughts, feelings, needs, and perspectives they could possibly come into contact within their daily lives.
And it's a culture where one of its most infamous and common idioms ("The nail that sticks out gets hammered down") gets said proudly as a warning to others. Even for the more progressive members of Japanese society, who are not actively racist or even harbor only minimal subconscious racial biases, their worldview is still going to be invariably shaped by the filtration of information through their language (that's a unique in the world as an isolate unrelatable and unintelligible to any other), their closed off media environment, their draconian immigration laws, and intense social ordering based on "in" and "out" groups. When you're stuck in a bubble like that, you don't look around at the hegemony of your society and lack of ethnic diversity as strange or irregular. It's what you were born into and lived and breathed your entire life and you don't see it as a problem. It is your default baseline. Even if you know intellectually it's not how the rest of the world is, there's a big difference between knowing something intellectually, and actually living/experiencing a different way of life. There are opportunities for the racists in our countries to come in contact with minorities, and the hegemonies they yearn for don't and have pretty much never existed. That is not the case in Japan. The racism and racial dynamics there are completely different and almost incomparable.
And I'm sure I don't have to regale you guys with how fucking shitty corporate business culture is in Japan. How jobs are by design, insulate their workers from society at large and trap them within their crafted social spheres, upheld by tentpoles of social drinking with your coworkers/bosses, and working absurd overtime hours and literally living in the office. Leaving very little else in terms of living experiences - let alone people - for your typical office worker to have the benefit of interacting with.
I don't outline this stuff to make excuses for the guy. I'm as disappointed as the rest of you. But I'm just explaining why I don't think anyone should expect anything different. Yes, he ought to know better. Most people ought to know better, but they don't. So having an expectation of anything else is kind of naïve. And you'd think that being in charge of a global product where the vast majority of your revenue comes from out-of-country at this point would be incentive enough for a good businessperson to take into consideration said global audience into your design and messaging. But that 1) presumes he's a good business person (he's a good product manager maybe; doing international public relations is a completely different skillset) and 2) that train of thought gives way too much credit to completely bogus Laissez-Faire economic theory of how economic incentives work. When in reality, people are flawed, stupid, creatures of habit who would rather let inertia and what's comfortable/familiar rule their decision making rather than to put in the bare minimum mental labor of being actively considerate of other points of view and modes of life.
Purple
(She/Her)
I apologize in advance for how spicy this particular take I'm about to lay out is, but "well of course this guy's a massive racist, he's Japanese" feels like the same weird sort-of-racist-in-itself excuse as "there's no cultural stigma against 'loli stuff' in Japan"/"Japan doesn't have any of this queer stuff" (ABSOLUTELY not to compare you to to sort of people who say that sort of thing by any stretch, of course).
Like, if the official line was just "oh, damn, we just didn't think about it" then you could MAYBE play the "it's easy to forget diversity is a thing when you're from Japan" card, but what we have here is someone who is A- A long term employee of a company that makes most of its money from foreign markets and has been doing so for his whole adult life, B- Is bragging about how much he's done his homework on medieval European history, C- Is pretty much quoting word for word the exact easily debunked historical revisionist BS white nationalists spout off with, and D- being super condescending about it.
Like if nothing else, I'd think a big Western history buff who makes games would have at least a passing knowledge of the ubiquitous as all hell Japanese board game Othello, and probably have some passing familiarity with its namesake.
Also I can't help but see "it's not like there's airplanes in this world" and not note that airships have been a thing in... literally every Final Fantasy game.
Plus like... even historically quite isolated Japan has indigenous people who have a noticeably different look going on, so the whole monoculture thing has never really been true.
Like, if the official line was just "oh, damn, we just didn't think about it" then you could MAYBE play the "it's easy to forget diversity is a thing when you're from Japan" card, but what we have here is someone who is A- A long term employee of a company that makes most of its money from foreign markets and has been doing so for his whole adult life, B- Is bragging about how much he's done his homework on medieval European history, C- Is pretty much quoting word for word the exact easily debunked historical revisionist BS white nationalists spout off with, and D- being super condescending about it.
Like if nothing else, I'd think a big Western history buff who makes games would have at least a passing knowledge of the ubiquitous as all hell Japanese board game Othello, and probably have some passing familiarity with its namesake.
Also I can't help but see "it's not like there's airplanes in this world" and not note that airships have been a thing in... literally every Final Fantasy game.
Plus like... even historically quite isolated Japan has indigenous people who have a noticeably different look going on, so the whole monoculture thing has never really been true.
