Earlier this year, at Otakon and AnimeFest! 2011, I had the chance to screen Tekken: Blood Vengeance, the 3D CGI animated feature film that's an official canon part of the Tekken game franchise. Written by Dai Sato of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Eden of the East fame, it's in the same visual vein as Vexille or the Appleseed feature films.
Now, after being screened in a limited theatrical run and at conventions, the movie's been released for English audiences both as a standalone DVD and on Blu-ray Disc in a bundle along with new versions of Tekken Tag Tournament.
Tekken is hardly the first example, or even the most obvious, of the way video games and anime cross-pollinate. Street Fighter, one of the more durable game franchises around, has been through any number of adaptations. Disgaea, .hack, and Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~ all had video games as their inspirations, although the final products vary wildly in quality. And Tekken itself even received an animated adaptation back in the Nineties, although it was something most people did their best to forget about.
Plus, any number of anime have been in turn back-adapted into video games. The Ghost in the Shell continuum became the inspiration for several PlayStation and PSP games; Samurai Champloo spawned its own beat-'em-up; and Fullmetal Alchemist now even has its own iOS card game.
Based on my own conversations with both video-game and anime fans, though, there's not as much automatic crossover in the audiences between those two as there might seem at first. Rather, the crossover between the two is typically a one-way street: there's a great many anime fans who are also avid gamers, but not as many avid gamers who also automatically pick up on anime. This effect is obviously more pronounced in the West, since it's easy to be a gamer without ever coming into contact with a single game that's also an anime crossover property. No fault of their own, mind you: if they haven't already ...
[Source: About.com]
No comments:
Post a Comment