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Chinese entertainment — and to a lesser degree, East Asian entertainment generally — is dominating Western markets. Their products appear to be organically favored by Westerners. The Chinese-made video game Black Myth Wukong was released this week and is now sitting on Steam’s top 10 list for concurrent playercount and user favorability. It sits next to Elden Ring, a Japanese-made video game. The Chinese-designed 2020 Call of Duty Mobile game has made ~4bn lifetime revenue and has 60,000,000 monthly players; a Western-designed Warzone attempted to dethrone it this year and is unanimously considered a failure, losing most of its playerbase in the first month. Genshin Impact and PUBG mobile are other highly popular mobile games led by Chinese studios. Tik Tok is the most used social media company and is a Chinese product. League of Legends (130 million monthly active) is Chinese. Final Fantasy and Lost Ark are the most popular MMORPGs this year, Japanese and Korean respectively. Korean shows are increasingly popular in the West (and have actually slanted Korean tourism in favor of female tourists), and I don’t need to note anime and manga.
What explains this? Wukong in particular appears to be a genuinely loved game, and it makes no overtures to Western culture — it is firmly Chinese in story, music, and art design. IMO there’s likely American propaganda floating around against Chinese entertainment (billions in revenue on the line which compounds), but despite this the products are favored. So I feel safe saying that their products are better. So what has led China, and East Asia generally, to make better entertainment than America and Europe for Western audiences?
Elden Ring is basically a video game adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen, a German opera that takes 3 days to conduct and is centered around Norse mythology. Its primary themes are largely centered around European medieval alchemical concepts, it's fantasy aesthetic is western-style dragons, and its dominant architecture and clothing styles are so European that just about the only asian-aesthetic character in the setting is an obviously evil and subversive outsider.
It's like the least-Weeaboo game to point at as an example of Asian cultural dominance. Miyazaki is a Europhile if anything.
Elden Ring was literally written by G.R.R Martin. The Souls Games (which Elden Ring is the spiritual conclusion to) clearly take inspiration from Berserk, which itself is heavily inspired by western works.
It is the least Japanese game there is.
The only thing George wrote for Elden Ring is his name on the cover and incest in the dlc.
Kidding, not Kidding. From Software doesn't do plot, or narrative. The one game where they tried to consciously write was Sekiro and it can clearly be seen that they can't really pull it off. (I will await for inevitable arrival of people that will claim that I'm wrong and Miyadzaki is a genius). Currently playing through Wukong slowly and what I've seen from first 3 chapters is miles above what From Software released in last 10 years, combined.
George wrote the back story for the world, and there's clearly a lot of consistent world building. It's not a very detailed plot, but there are lots of fun small details about stuff like Rot and Madness that make the world feel real.
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