Japanese Retrofuturism and Chrono Trigger
theappendix.net
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It seems most JRPGs are set in a world that combines science fiction (advanced gadgets) and fantasy (magic, swords) whereas the western world keeps the two entirely separate.
I don't know if this represents anything fundamental, or just the influence of a few people like Tolkien and Gygax and how people responded to their works initially. Certainly in real life there was a period where guns and swords competed that lasted 500 or so years in the west and east.
http://dragonquest.wikia.com/wiki/Metal_dragon http://dragonquest.wikia.com/wiki/Machine_Family
And DQ IX toads have cannons and mortars strapped to their backs
The John Carter of Mars stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs have some weird technology with sword and sorcery tropes, IIRC.
The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey transitioned from one genre to the other.
And, of course, we have Star Wars. Would you characterize as sci-fi or Fantasy.
I believe Western culture has the tendency to specialization, while japanese blend a mish mash of tropes together. That's one of the things that attracted me to japanese anime, manga and games.
One of the two most directly influential series for early JRPGs is Ultima, which for its first three incarnations (especially the first two) liberally combined science fiction with fantasy.
In America, the early '80s was a time where mixing fantasy and science fiction was popular. You had products like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Thundarr the Barbarian, for example. Perhaps these influenced Richard Garriott (creator of Ultima).
Neither western fiction nor western RPGs universally keep technological advanced gadgets and magic/swords "entirely separate".
> I don't know if this represents anything fundamental, or just the influence of a few people like Tolkien and Gygax and how people responded to their works initially.
Gygax (and Gygax-era TSR) actually did quite a lot of mixing of these things, perhaps the most well-known example being Dungeon Module S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.
Would like a video game set in that kind of world.
EDIT: while not a rpg, a better example would be "Thorgal" ,which mixes viking stuffs with sci-fi , a great cartoon,from Belgium.
The whole "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" thing.
I don't know, back in the Snes days where Chrono Trigger originated I remember playing Shadowrun (on the Snes) which was based upon a very successful western franchise by the same name which combined magic and technology.
After an uprising, Tahei and Matashichi escape. Near a river they find gold marked with the crescent of the Akizuki clan. They thereafter travel with the General of the defeated Akizuki clan, Makabe Rokurōta (Toshiro Mifune), while escorting Princess Yuki Akizuki (Misa Uehara) and what remains of her family's gold to a secret territory. In order to keep her identity secret, Yuki poses as a mute.
During the mission, the peasants impede it and sometimes try to seize the gold. They are later joined by a farmer’s daughter (Toshiko Higuchi), whom they acquire from a slave-trader. Eventually, they are captured and held by Rokurōta's rival, who later unexpectedly sides with the Princess and Rokurōta.
The peasants stumble upon the gold, but are later captured, whereupon Rokurōta explains Yuki's true identity, and states that all of the gold has been used to restore her family's domain. The peasants are then dispatched, taking a single ryō. In the final scene, Tahei gives this to Matashichi to protect; but Matashichi allows Tahei to keep it."
Ok. Inspired, sure, you can see some parallels. Based off, no :) (at least not as The Magnificent Seven and For a Fistful of Dollars are based off Seven Samurais and Yojimbo).
Is it fundamental? I don't know, but there's a lot of culture behind that distinction.
If anyone is interested, Shadowrun is mixing gadgets and magic in its universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Its culture/context is mostly Western, with lots of Eastern elements thrown in.
If you like books where they combine try the Incarnations of Immortality series or the Apprentice Adept series both by Piers Anthony.
Not true. There are many western RPGs that do that: Albion, Wizardry, Ultima, Arcanum, Might&Magic and that's just of the top of my head and some of these are whole series of games.
If I were to throw the term 'retrofuturism' at a SNES game, though, I think I'd have to pick Earthbound/Mother 2 -- the 'juvenile future' described by the author fits perfectly in this world of star-shaped robots and perfectly spherical flying saucers.
Sure, there is Satellaview content lost to time, and that is exactly where we are going to be 10 years from now when our current consoles' DRM servers go offline and we have no way of playing that WiiWare or XBLA exclusive game that is tied to specific machines. Remember how much phones preloaded with flappy bird were selling for on ebay?
And his takeaway is thought provoking. We're doing this to ourselves. In a way this is bad - if we don't understand our past mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them. But then again, like so many time traveling heroes in our stories, sometimes it takes ignoring the past or ignoring tradition to build a better future.
This made me very sad. I'm not overly sentimental for that game, but it still has a lot of merit, and my computer can still play it. Should I have to wait for EA to repackage it in some kind of virtual console store? (No.)
EA was giving away Battlefield 1942 on Origin last time I checked. Why is anti-priacy circumvention required?
Are people forgetting that Star Wars was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away?? Star Wars takes place in the past.
There is a major scene in Episode 6 where a primitive band of Ewoks takes on Empire Walkers using nothing more than sticks, spears, and logs. Light-Sabers are melee weapons based on an ancient religion (very fantasy-esque). Beyond all the space future stuff, there is a lot of "retro-combat" and high-fantasy elements going on here.
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Even Star Trek has its "retrofuturism" if you squint hard enough. Elves have pointy ears and are good at magic. I mean... space elves (Vulcans) have pointy ears and are good at science.
Orcs are generally evil and have deformed faces. But they're super strong. I mean... Space Orcs (Klingons) are generally evil with deformed faces.
Watch out for the undead (Borg). They might turn you into a zombie / assimilate you.
Has anyone read and enjoyed it?
(no referal, but is a smile link)
We can do better than this. I haven't read his book, though I plan to. Until I read it, I can't comment upon what sort of review it really deserves. But if you read the book, and you enjoy it, please do the author a favor and go review it properly on Amazon. If you don't like it, that's cool. Either way, give a reasonable rundown of its strengths and weaknesses. The author deserves the benefits of a larger sample size and more thoughtful evaluations.
Outside of the CT one--I recommend the Earthbound one unreservedly, but I'd call the ZZT one in the series its (flashing red) weak point. a lot of research went into it and I appreciate the effort but it's hugely self-indulgent (which, to be fair, is pretty clearly tipped off in the Amazon summary so you do know what you're getting into) and it suffers from a really weak narrative voice[2]. It is also incomplete--I feel like Anthropy's desire to combine a discussion of ZZT with her personal evolution does a hatchet-job to the history of the ZZT community.
[1] - This is about as high a praise I give for games meta-writing. I don't think game journalism has many (any?) good writers, folks whose stuff I'd read even if I knew everything about the topic they were writing about. (Joe Posnanski fits that bill for sportswriting, I don't know of anybody similar in games writing.)
[2] - Weak even for games writing, so calibrate accordingly.
I would never imagine such thing - games via satellite - ever existed, let alone for Famicom!
Living in Japan in the 90's might be have been pretty amazing, it was like living in a retro version of the future. I remember when my friend came back from Japan and brought payphone cards, something I would only see again 10 years later in my country.
On the other hand, most places didn't take credit cards and I saw very few personal computers compared to the USA at the time. So it really was a strange, uneven retrofuturism.
Look at all the accessories coming you could get for the PC Engine (Turbo Graphics 16), and how they all hooked up, were powered, and what it took to play some of these games. All this for a consumer device, and NEC expected to turn a profit.
All in all just technology for technology's sake.
Do you want to buy a NEC PC-9801 or a Sharp X68000? How about a nice FM Towns from Fujitsu, the first home computer with a built in optical drive? But all my friends have a MSX computers! Okay, should I get the MSX 2+ or the turboR, from which manufacturer? I like Panasonic's model, but I heard Yamaha's has a good music interface. My friend has an old Fujitsu FM-7, but man the X1 Twin looks cool with it's integrated PC Engine! http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/JPNcomputers/Japanesecomput...
Amazingly, not a single one of these machines made it to the U.S. Commodore and Atari were simply far too dominant. Jack Tramiel even addresses keeping the Japanese out of the U.S. market as a principle concern. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gmODkpnjO0
Also, not a single one of these architectures lives on today. I think the FM-Towns (an almost PC clone) and the Sharp X68k series went on the longest. But it's a tremendous surprise that so many personal computers were available, in a country that's never really been known for personal computer ownership. Even today, the typical Japanese office space is piled full of file cabinets and paper. It's like something right out of the 1970s and 80s. http://www.accountant-tokyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/J...
All of the basic system architectures dead-ended. Most were using Z80s, which never evolved beyond the 16-bit-ish R800. 6502 variants were common, the NES ran on this, the SNES ran on a 16-bit variant 65C816. But that's it. The X68000 series ran on the Motorola 68k chips, which as we all know dead ended with the switch to the PowerPC line (which BTW, still powers all sorts of consoles today). The only system which picked up on the Intel lines was the FMTowns, but architecturally deviated from normal PCs enough that it's not compatible.
Japan during during and right after the bubble was amazing.
That shows how sometimes the market potential is there, but the technology is not.
And the UK had BASIC games for the BBC Micro broadcast over terrestrial analog TV. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesoftware
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_ex...
I hadn't heard about this before, but I may actually order it, because I like the game so much :)
(Spoiler alert: it's Lavos).
Edit: I think it's an IBM 1500¹ station, in which case the left-hand display is a mainframe-controlled 16mm film projector².
¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1500
² Buck & Hunka, Deveopment of the IBM 1500 Computer-Assisted Instructional System http://digitallearning.ualberta.ca/-/media/digitallearning/i...
> I have trouble accepting a disappointing truth of human progress—there are things that have been forgotten, and they will never be re-remembered.
Thinking back on the millennia of our existence, how much of our experiences as a species have vanished forever, never to be rediscovered?
http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/party-like-its-1999-jap...
Not trying to being entirely negative... This is a really great article!