Gaming‘s influence is spreading across all of pop culture. There’s been movies, music, books, tv shows based on games, but it’s especially becoming prevalent in anime. From virtual reality MMO to game adaptations to competitive anime, it is becoming a whole genre of its own!
One of the main shows that spread like wildfire and spawned many other anime’s like it is Sword Art Online! It shows how exciting and fantastical it would be to live in an MMO RPG through virtual reality, meanwhile at the same time showing the dangers of addiction and manipulative use of technology. It shows us what could be the future of gaming and how it could affect our lives.
Sword Art Online’s characters, heroes and world’s are as if you’re watching a video game RPG as an animated tv show. In the first season the hero Kirito logs into the virtual world of Aincrad through a virtual headset to set off to an adventure, but then he and thousands of others find out they cannot log out until they clear out all 100 floors and deafeat the final boss. All this is done by it’s evil creator manipulating the technology of the virtual world. Kirito and his supporting cast level up and get stronger skills and weapons and ultimately defeat the enemy!
In this virtual world many characters lived out their lives as if it were their real lives and formed relationships and some even got married. This isn’t much different than MMO RPGS in real life in which people spend years adventuring with their characters daily, form relationships and many have even gotten married through meeting in them! This anime resonated with many as they were able to relate to it and it spawned other anime’s like it such as Accel World, Log Horizon and Hi Score Girl which is not virtual reality but it is based on the gamer life.
Accel World is about a boy who frequently get‘s bullied at his high school and finds an escape from reality by logging into a cyberspace. His skills gets the attention of another person who then introduces him to an Augmented Reality MMO fighting game. A whole plot develops from there on and they go on to uncover a great mystery of that world.
Accel World has similarities to Sword Art Online, but one uses Augmented reality and the other Virtual, and in real life both technologies are used in gaming and could be the future of it.
A completely different anime, but in the same topic of gaming is HI Score Girl. It’s about a boy who doesn’t excel in anything at his local school but has exceptional skills with games at his local arcade. There he enjoys to show off his skills at street fighter and other competitive games until a girl shows up out of nowhere and starts defeating everyone including himself. From that moment on a rivalry is born to see who is the best at many other competitive games such as final fight, Mortal Kombat and virtual fighter. These anime show the gamers life in anime form, but there’s also anime adaptations from hit video game’s such as Persona 5!
Persona 5 took over the video game world like a storm when it launched. It’s catchy jazz music, amazing artistic anime style, relatable characters, addictive gameplay and deep mature story about the dangers of society stole the hearts of millions of gamers. It revived the traditional JRPG format by modernizing it and yet keeping it old school at the same time. The phantom thieves of hearts became pop culture icons and were adapted into an anime which has a new episodes coming out soon. A lot more can be said about this game but I’ll cover it in another blog post.
Gaming's influence on pop culture and especially anime is more apparent than ever. So many rich stories, great characters and amazing worlds of video games are winning the hearts of movie goers and anime fans alike bringing demand of adaptations of video games. This blend between these forms of media will make the future of the video game industry even brighter!
