Years of schooling in composition left me with absolutely no sense of proper grammar, structure, and only a passing familiarity with proper spelling, but I did come away with a good sense of how not to seem like a jackass in an opening. The golden rules: don’t open with a question and don’t start with a definition. These rules can be broken only when absolutely necessary. Like now for instance!
How many of you have heard of X-Blades?
For clarity’s sake, X-Blades is a third-person action game in the Devil May Cry mold and it looks like a parody of Japanese videogames that you might see on The Simpsons. It stars a young woman sporting knives, blonde hair, and enormous eyes/breasts. She wears some string and tiny scraps of cloth over her privates and kills monsters in a fantasy land where it is apparently always dusk. Her name’s Ayumi. Of course it is! It's a videogame so overfull on cliché that it can’t possibly be real. But it is, and it actually seems fairly inoffensive, a potentially good way to drop a few hours between games that you actually give a damn about. Thing is, though, every time I’ve seen screens or footage of X-Blades something has just seemed off. I know that isn’t the most journalistic statement in the world but there’s no other way to put it. It’s just wrong, off-putting, something rotten inside of its seemingly pure trope-soup.
The reason X-Blades seems so peculiar, I think, has to do with where it’s from. The game, despite appearances, isn’t Japanese. It’s developer, the appropriately named Gaijin Entertainment, is Russian. It isn’t that there’s anything specific wrong with X-Blades — well, maybe Ayumi’s ridiculous design — but that the game suffers from a cultural Uncanny Valley effect. It seems that, when one culture tries to emulate another’s game design, the result is repellant. Take Japanese attempts at the first-person shooter, like Coded Arms. Even beyond it’s questionable PSP control, it’s lacking in the feel inherent in Western FPS design. Or how about the long-forgotten PS1 RPG, Shadow Madness? Even with Ted Woolsey steering that ship, Crave Entertainment’s attempt at making a “Western JRPG” fell flat on its face.
This isn’t what you’d call a scientific observation, dear reader. But still good food for thought.
Related links:
TVTropes' "Woolseyisms"
Crossing the Uncanny Valley
The Uncanny Valley: Tomb Raider and Lara Croft Are Starting to Freak Me Out
Video of the Day: Judah Friedlander Explains the Uncanny Valley
