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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.
I've actually never heard this interpretation of the plot of Elden Ring. Can you please elaborate on this?
You can see it if you sort of squint at it, since the loss of the titular ring and the fall of the gods of Valhalla have loose parallels in the Shattering and the subsequent destructive wars waged by Marika's children against each other. But that's stretching things. It is true, though, that Elden Ring has hardly any Japanese or Asian influences in it and is in its core sensibilities a thoroughly Western game. This is not really anything new since FromSoft has done this before and to even greater extents; they also did Bloodborne, which as a Gothic Victorian game with a Lovecraftian story could not be less Asian if they'd tried.
This sentiment I'm seeing is such a weird one. What even is "Asian" or "Japanese" here? The way people are speaking it's as if it has geisha women walking in woden sandals and gongs then it's "Japanesey" and if not then it's Western. Culture and the world did not end in 1800. This entire sentiment belies a denial and ignorance of the much more interconnected nature of modernity. People in Japan take influence from things outside of Japan now. What else can they, or anyone else, do but grow in such a way or choose to be an ossified cultural taliban? They were blue jeans. They eat hamburgers, and listen to rock music. And it's all 100% Japanese. Japan makes "western" fantasy and has done so for generations since the early days of D&D being translated over and the game Wizardry getting popular (in Japan).
I'm reminded of when I read a short story by Haruki Murakami about a couple robbing a McDonald's. And the author made an amusing account of the cashier being so shocked and confused by being held up at gunpoint in Tokyo at 1 am under charge to give up dozens of burgers that she didn't know whether to keep "that McDonald's smile." Which doesn't exist in, say, America. It hit me that here is this very American seeming thing but it's very much by and for the Japanese here, and of course McDonald's is just a much a fixture of modern Japanese life as the subway is. The same as childhood karate might be for an American. That's modernity for you.
Also what's a asian vs western game here for that matter? Japan in particular has been a mover and shaker of video games since pretty much the beginning. Arguably Japan more or less made the console a thing. Video games and computers are, again, one of those things made after 1800s. There's cross pollination here. If video games made in Japan by Japanese people are not asian game then what is? Touhou coded exclusively in Ruby?
I'd quibble and say that us Americans made the console (Atari and Fairchild), the Japanese just figured out how to make them a sustainable business by learning from our mistakes.
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Thank you. I was circling the comments in this conversation preparing to write something similar.
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