Wow, I can’t believe Dark Void didn’t just fly off the shelves.
Capcom was probably the worst offender, but Hudson made Bomberman dark, gritty and shitty with Act Zero and Namco made Ace Combat: Assault Horizon with QTEs and a NATO bootlicking plot, and gave Ridge Racer to FlatOut developers Bugbear to turn into a Burnout ripoff with Unbounded. Many such cases!
I played through the first three Onimusha games for the first time recently and you can see the beginnings of Capcom’s Westward push in Onimusha 3 from 2004. The first two games are incredibly Japanese. The main characters are directly modeled after Japanese actors, the games take place in the Sengoku period and most of the named characters are actual historical figures and the stories are full of Japanese melodrama, especially the second game where characters will cry as they monologue about their traumatic backstories, their dreams, etc
Then you get to the third game and there’s a clear push for more general international appeal. The intro cinematic has motion capture done by Donnie Yen and in addition to Takeshi Kaneshiro returning as Samanosuke from the first game, main character duties are split between him and Jean Reno as Jacques, a modern day French soldier/agent/guy with trenchcoat who becomes involved in the plot when series villain Nobunaga Oda finds a way to bring his demonic army through a time portal to modern day France.
Compared to first and second game it’s very clear the game’s storytelling tries to emulate Hollywood blockbusters, specifically Roland Emmerich movies (Jean Reno was in 1998’s Godzilla 🤔). The scene where the Genma invade Paris looks like it’s from a disaster movie and Jean Reno’s character is a recent widower with a young son who does not get along with Jacques’ new girlfriend
The Onimusha games were produced by Keiji Inafune, who was also the main driving force behind Capcom’s attempt at appealing more to Western tastes. The first two games contain trailers for their sequels while 3 contains a trailer for Shadow of Rome, Keiji Inafune’s first go at building a new franchise from the ground up for the Western market. It failed to sell in the US and the sequel apparently became Dead Rising instead
As a Mega Man fan (Inafune was the steward of the franchise until he left), I apologise.
I actually liked all three games, and the third one might’ve been the most entertaining one. It was just really fun to see Capcom awkwardly trying to turn their incredibly Japanese samurai action game into something that would appeal (more) to Western gamers.
Their guesses as to what American audiences would like are also just fascinating. “Jean Reno? Paris? France? Americans think those are cool, right? Wait, I got it! Gladiators in Ancient Rome!”
I kind of want to check out Shadow of Rome at some point now 🤔
I greatly enjoy learning about and trying to figure out misconceptions about America from artists who aren’t. It’s like a mirror. Mirrors are distorted reflections (or a smart phone camera, an originally accurate depiction that gets fed through the digitally “enhanced”/altered filter and is no longer an accurate depiction).
Except, it’s genuine. There was a real team of people trying to figure it out and based off what America puts out into the noosphere this is the result. It’s a way to get an outside perspective. But for whatever reason I find it kinda funny when they get stuff wrong in a way I can’t figure out or have to put work into figuring out.
Alternatively: that game where the president is in a mech. Those devs totally understand. Amazing parody of us.
Capcom’s guesses weren’t completely off the mark. With regards to the Rome thing, you had the precedent of popular things with an antiquity setting like the God of War games and The Gladiator with Russell Crowe. With Onimusha 3, Jean Reno was a somewhat popular actor and Paris was a modern Western city
The thing is that none of those would be the kind of extremely cynical, safe choice you’d make if you were looking to pander to US audiences, which makes them interesting
If you want to see an extremely depressing case of a Japanese developer trying to capture the Xbox bro audience, look no further than Quantum Theory from Tecmo which is a painfully bad Japanese copy of Gears of War by the creator of Fatal Frame
Okay but the CGI movie that played before the onimusha 3 main menu was so fucking sick wasn’t it???
Also I really liked Shadow of Rome, maybe I was the American hog being pandered to