I mean I personally love anime stuff and I’m a major Touhou fan but I know how tightly associated an anime aesthetic is with sexualized children. And a lot of people feel icky when it comes to that and I don’t really blame them. The Persona series is one of my favorite things of all time and yet there’s a ton of weird gross stuff in it. Sexualized teenagers, a romantic relationship with an adult teacher, etc. I guess I’ve just been numb to it since it’s so prevalent in anime styled media.
Whereas Expedition 33 has adult characters who act like adults, which is kinda rare for this style of game. So in all, I don’t really blame people for steering clear of anime aesthetic JRPGs yet enjoying games of a similar genre with adult characters. Also consider how Final Fantasy 7 is so beloved and also portrays adults (except Yuffie I guess).
Yeah, I’ve enjoyed Persona, I beat 5 twice. But before even seeing this discourse I commented to friends how nice it is to have a good RPG game about adults having adult feelings and having adult problems (for the most part, obviously Maelle is still a teenager). There aren’t enough video games in general with that dynamic, but especially turn-based RPGs. So, that alone makes E33 refreshing.
I actually think a lot of it is simply that many adult Westerners just bounce right off anything anime or anything overtly Japanese-styled in general. They just don’t vibe with it and they find it annoying, melodramatic and cringy, reacting kind of the same way an average Western moviegoer would react to a Bollywood movie
I mean I could go into any anime themed shop and within milliseconds I could find images of schoolgirls flashing their underwear. I’ve been to Akihabara in Tokyo a bunch of times and the weird horny aspects of the scene comingle everywhere. Like to the point I would not go to Akihabara if I took family to Japan. And I mean it’s definitely gotten more mainstream in the past 15 years like with Persona being massively popular, anime like MHA and Demon Slayer. But to people who are still outside to the scene they’re still gonna see weird sexualized stuff very quickly.
That’s something very endemic to anime/manga and it’s a massive barrier for a lot of very reasonable people. And yeah there’s probably a lot of unfounded sentiment where they unfairly dismiss the entire aesthetic as cringe and childish, but there’s a lot of reasonable people who are turned away by the frankly weird horny vibes and I simply can’t blame them.
I mean I personally love anime stuff and I’m a major Touhou fan but I know how tightly associated an anime aesthetic is with sexualized children. And a lot of people feel icky when it comes to that and I don’t really blame them. The Persona series is one of my favorite things of all time and yet there’s a ton of weird gross stuff in it. Sexualized teenagers, a romantic relationship with an adult teacher, etc. I guess I’ve just been numb to it since it’s so prevalent in anime styled media.
Whereas Expedition 33 has adult characters who act like adults, which is kinda rare for this style of game. So in all, I don’t really blame people for steering clear of anime aesthetic JRPGs yet enjoying games of a similar genre with adult characters. Also consider how Final Fantasy 7 is so beloved and also portrays adults (except Yuffie I guess).
Yeah, I’ve enjoyed Persona, I beat 5 twice. But before even seeing this discourse I commented to friends how nice it is to have a good RPG game about adults having adult feelings and having adult problems (for the most part, obviously Maelle is still a teenager). There aren’t enough video games in general with that dynamic, but especially turn-based RPGs. So, that alone makes E33 refreshing.
I actually think a lot of it is simply that many adult Westerners just bounce right off anything anime or anything overtly Japanese-styled in general. They just don’t vibe with it and they find it annoying, melodramatic and cringy, reacting kind of the same way an average Western moviegoer would react to a Bollywood movie
I mean I could go into any anime themed shop and within milliseconds I could find images of schoolgirls flashing their underwear. I’ve been to Akihabara in Tokyo a bunch of times and the weird horny aspects of the scene comingle everywhere. Like to the point I would not go to Akihabara if I took family to Japan. And I mean it’s definitely gotten more mainstream in the past 15 years like with Persona being massively popular, anime like MHA and Demon Slayer. But to people who are still outside to the scene they’re still gonna see weird sexualized stuff very quickly.
That’s something very endemic to anime/manga and it’s a massive barrier for a lot of very reasonable people. And yeah there’s probably a lot of unfounded sentiment where they unfairly dismiss the entire aesthetic as cringe and childish, but there’s a lot of reasonable people who are turned away by the frankly weird horny vibes and I simply can’t blame them.