My current campaign is intended to be laser-focused on European mythology and folklore, so I'm trying to keep Asian and American influences to a minimum.

However, one of my back-burner projects is a campaign setting intending to try and emulate the world-design and narrative tone of the Souls series (King's Field, Demon's Souls, and Dark Souls primarily).

That ends up being an interesting case of cross-pollination. Those games are Japanese products, but their primary influences are western fantasy, including old-school game books like Fighting Fantasy and Steve Jackson's "Sorcery" series. There's also a big influence from European mythology. For example, the cosmology of Dark Souls I is substantially a re-interpretation of Hesiod, with the Gods given Celtic-sounding names and the Titans replaced by dragons. (The final boss of the game is almost literally Zeus, lightning bolts included). There are Japanese influences on the Souls series as well, but the biggest one, Berserk, is itself liberally borrowed from European history and aesthetics. The result ends up being a western fantasy filtered through the lens of a Japanese cultural eye.

For my own setting, I'm probably going to be stripping out some of the more typically Japanese concepts, particularly Shinto ideas about purity and corruption that are a recurring theme in those games, so I don't know how much my own end project is going to owe to Japanese ideas, versus the originally western ideas they pulled from.

It also flows the other way too. In alot of anime you see alot of western touches.
D&D via Lodoss War had a heavy influence on Japanese fantasy that continues to this day.

Quote from: Omega on November 09, 2022, 02:52:26 AM

Quote from: jeff37923 on November 08, 2022, 08:12:15 PM

And Klingon cosplay totally isn't an offshoot of anime cosplay.......

Star Trek cosplay was probably the originator of all other cosplay.

But well before that cartoon and TV themed halloween masks/costumes were a thing.

Star Trek may have been the first to show people that this sort of stuff could be fun. Though I'd be really surprised if there were not some Lord of the Rings costuming going on well before that at conventions.

It is the Otaku Ouroboros!

Quote from: Omega on November 09, 2022, 02:01:00 PM
It also flows the other way too. In alot of anime you see alot of western touches.
D&D via Lodoss War had a heavy influence on Japanese fantasy that continues to this day.

Even more: many Japanese see comics and animation as American/Western things.

Well my hatred for all thing anime weeb otaku or whatever is no secret, but let me tell you about my first experience with such:

So J comes back from okinawa when his enlistment contract is up and he brings all these comics that are essentially strange light-tier cartoon porn that you have to read backwards (like 3 attempts to make sense of it b4 i caught that, you have to do it backwards) and some vhs tapes. He is all "this is great stuff" and pops in an anime called something like "Chojen, legend of the overfiend" which is about a guy that chops off his pecker and replaces it with an alien worm which gives him super powers, one of which is to explode people when he ejaculates into them.
       

From that moment forward the presence of anything otaku weeb or anime sends me automatically to yellow alert, shields up, but if i see your typical anime girl  especially with those "precious moments" proportions of face and head I go to red alert, power to the forward weapons, helm plot a course for that crytpo-pedos anus and prepare size 10.5 steel toe torpedoes....victory is life, today is a good day to die, victory or valhalla....and then I'm done, my blood is up, I'm Lee at gettysburg and this is our finest hour. Fix bayonets.

Yes I suppose I am a reactionary. Now I've had some people claim this is me being racist, I disagree, it has nothing to do with race, I would never have worked for the Japanese or went to their island if that were the case. Last one to hint such worked at pharmacy giving flu shots where she complained that we hillbillies do not see race, because part of her job is to ask the race of the customer getting the shot and everyone in kentucky says "hell american i guess" and gets offended at her for asking...because thats how we were raised, you do not have to like or even visit blacks or koreans or whoever in this or that city but if they are attacked by say china or russia then YOU are attacked, and you are all brothers in both christ jesus first and under the flag of american nationalism second....this was a problem for her, and my reaction to anime makes as evil as nathan bedford forest to her.

Quote from: tenbones on November 08, 2022, 03:41:05 PM
As someone that is part Japanese and lived there - I don't associate "anime" with Japanese influence or even actual "real" Japanese culture per se. It's a pop-culture artifact that is as much an industrial product of Japan consuming post-war American cartoons and regurgitating the form back at everyone. I don't have any proof of this, but I'm betting Americans consume more anime more intensely than the average Japanese person. Age demographics are likely part of this. I know there is a very very healthy industrial channel in Japan for teaching animation and art for the express purpose of churning this stuff out out for international consumption.

That makes sense. Japanese pop culture influences probably extend across all of Asia. Mangas are a huge thing in Thailand, for example, certainly more so than here in Europe. The Chinese, meanwhile, have a truly massive donghua (animated film) industry, which is certainly influenced by Japan, but often focuses on specifically Chinese themes such as wuxia/xianxia.

Quote from: Slipshot762 on November 10, 2022, 02:11:53 AM
Well my hatred for all thing anime weeb otaku or whatever is no secret, but let me tell you about my first experience with such:

So J comes back from okinawa when his enlistment contract is up and he brings all these comics that are essentially strange light-tier cartoon porn that you have to read backwards (like 3 attempts to make sense of it b4 i caught that, you have to do it backwards) and some vhs tapes. He is all "this is great stuff" and pops in an anime called something like "Chojen, legend of the overfiend" which is about a guy that chops off his pecker and replaces it with an alien worm which gives him super powers, one of which is to explode people when he ejaculates into them.
       

From that moment forward the presence of anything otaku weeb or anime sends me automatically to yellow alert, shields up, but if i see your typical anime girl  especially with those "precious moments" proportions of face and head I go to red alert, power to the forward weapons, helm plot a course for that crytpo-pedos anus and prepare size 10.5 steel toe torpedoes....victory is life, today is a good day to die, victory or valhalla....and then I'm done, my blood is up, I'm Lee at gettysburg and this is our finest hour. Fix bayonets.

Yes I suppose I am a reactionary. Now I've had some people claim this is me being racist, I disagree, it has nothing to do with race, I would never have worked for the Japanese or went to their island if that were the case. Last one to hint such worked at pharmacy giving flu shots where she complained that we hillbillies do not see race, because part of her job is to ask the race of the customer getting the shot and everyone in kentucky says "hell american i guess" and gets offended at her for asking...because thats how we were raised, you do not have to like or even visit blacks or koreans or whoever in this or that city but if they are attacked by say china or russia then YOU are attacked, and you are all brothers in both christ jesus first and under the flag of american nationalism second....this was a problem for her, and my reaction to anime makes as evil as nathan bedford forest to her.

I am sorry that was the first exposure you had to Japanese pop culture. It would be like having your first exposure to comic book films being one of those knock-off hardcore porn parodies. What you saw was some of the more explicit stuff that Japan can offer. Not a good way to be introduced to it.

I personally don't have anything Japanese pop culture in my games.

BUT,

I HAVE been toying with the idea of a campaign that fashions itself using tropes and concepts from Japanese console RPG's (JRPG) as a throwback to the 16-bit era. Some of which has already been morphed back into tabletop games already. These are pulled from the Retro Phaze rpg (kind of a mesh of OD&D and JRPG tropes), but they give a good idea:

1. Points of Light: Taken to the extreme. In many of the 90's games, there was usually some cateclymic event, and now there are only, say, a dozen settlements in the entire world (towns, cities, maybe a metropolis). City-States, basically. Humanity huddles around these points of light. Everything else is ruins and wilderness filled with monsters.

2. This is THE Quest: The main antagonist isn't trying to take over a kingdom, or even a continent... They're usually trying to destroy the world for X reason. Many older JRPG games utilize the Law versus Chaos tropes of fantasy. They could be the Lord of Chaos, a power-hungry Emperor that assaults Heaven and Hell, a physical manifestation of Chaos itself, or an eldritch alien being attempting to consume the lifeforce of a planet. A campaign is the defining story of that world. Much like Pathfinder adventure paths, or many of the 5E books, your characters are saving the world. Once finished with this campaign, the next campaign takes place in a new world.

3. Boss Fights: Boss fights should be more than just a group of characters beating up on a monster. Usually, boss fights in JRPG games feature gimmicks, or extra strategy. Maybe the boss's henchmen heal him. Maybe they have special attacks that do crazy things (like steal a spell from the Wizard to use), or it has a second form. One of the bosses in Final Fantasy VI had the ability to hide inside it's shell; if you attack it during this time, it immediately counterattacks with a special attack.

Again, a lot of the JRPG tropes have made their ways into newer editions of D&D... and then overused (I mean, how many world-ending events is Forgotten Realms going to go through?)

Quote from: Rhymer88 on November 10, 2022, 06:13:39 AM

Quote from: tenbones on November 08, 2022, 03:41:05 PM
As someone that is part Japanese and lived there - I don't associate "anime" with Japanese influence or even actual "real" Japanese culture per se. It's a pop-culture artifact that is as much an industrial product of Japan consuming post-war American cartoons and regurgitating the form back at everyone. I don't have any proof of this, but I'm betting Americans consume more anime more intensely than the average Japanese person. Age demographics are likely part of this. I know there is a very very healthy industrial channel in Japan for teaching animation and art for the express purpose of churning this stuff out out for international consumption.

That makes sense. Japanese pop culture influences probably extend across all of Asia. Mangas are a huge thing in Thailand, for example, certainly more so than here in Europe. The Chinese, meanwhile, have a truly massive donghua (animated film) industry, which is certainly influenced by Japan, but often focuses on specifically Chinese themes such as wuxia/xianxia.

Exactly. And the anime/manga cultures of those locations look nothing like the weird Weeb-culture of America. What's even weirder, are the Weebs here that think it IS that way over there. Don't get me wrong, that whole waifu/chibi marketing thing is real... but the mass consumers over there generally do not dress/act like that.

The worst aspect is the pre-eminence Weebs place on anime as representative of "Japanese culture"... It's like people into Warner Bros. cartoons running around talking in a faux-NYC Bugs Bunny accent and locally talking about "American Culture" with his friend talking like Elmer Fudd as if it's serious.

Of course to the Weebs reading this - YMMV. But let's be clear here... "Japanese Influence in Your Campaigns" has a orders of magnitude different meaning to *most* older gamers than anime. But I'll freely admit anime is a thing... it rubs me wrong as being representative of the much larger scope of the question.

Quote from: Slipshot762 on November 10, 2022, 02:11:53 AM

From that moment forward the presence of anything otaku weeb or anime sends me automatically to yellow alert, shields up,

Thats well past idiotic. Its like watching one porn movie and swearing off all movies ever and running around declaring all movies are porn movies. So far off the deep end you've come right back around hit yourself in the ass. Ive seen this sort of stupid before.

Have a look at anime like Record of Lodoss War. Or go back and watch the old Speed Racer or Starblazers anime. These things used to be pretty common. And so on. Robotech, much as I dislike it, is another one. There were also like dozens of anime adaptions of classic books. Heidi was one recall. Another was Earthsea.

And some adaptions are hardly recognizable. But at least entertaining like the Lensman movie and series or the Captain Future series. Probably others just never heard of.

Quote from: World_Warrior on November 10, 2022, 07:24:24 AM
1. Points of Light: Taken to the extreme. In many of the 90's games, there was usually some cateclymic event, and now there are only, say, a dozen settlements in the entire world (towns, cities, maybe a metropolis). City-States, basically. Humanity huddles around these points of light. Everything else is ruins and wilderness filled with monsters.

2. This is THE Quest: The main antagonist isn't trying to take over a kingdom, or even a continent... They're usually trying to destroy the world for X reason. Many older JRPG games utilize the Law versus Chaos tropes of fantasy. They could be the Lord of Chaos, a power-hungry Emperor that assaults Heaven and Hell, a physical manifestation of Chaos itself, or an eldritch alien being attempting to consume the lifeforce of a planet. A campaign is the defining story of that world. Much like Pathfinder adventure paths, or many of the 5E books, your characters are saving the world. Once finished with this campaign, the next campaign takes place in a new world.

Reminds me of the old Zero Punctuation joke about how every JRPG eventually comes down to "teenagers using the power of friendship to kill God".

I do like the idea about "points of light" though. Fewer settlements in the campaign world mean more time you can devote to developing and fleshing them out.

Quote from: ForgottenF on November 10, 2022, 02:45:52 PM

Quote from: World_Warrior on November 10, 2022, 07:24:24 AM
1. Points of Light: Taken to the extreme. In many of the 90's games, there was usually some cateclymic event, and now there are only, say, a dozen settlements in the entire world (towns, cities, maybe a metropolis). City-States, basically. Humanity huddles around these points of light. Everything else is ruins and wilderness filled with monsters.

2. This is THE Quest: The main antagonist isn't trying to take over a kingdom, or even a continent... They're usually trying to destroy the world for X reason. Many older JRPG games utilize the Law versus Chaos tropes of fantasy. They could be the Lord of Chaos, a power-hungry Emperor that assaults Heaven and Hell, a physical manifestation of Chaos itself, or an eldritch alien being attempting to consume the lifeforce of a planet. A campaign is the defining story of that world. Much like Pathfinder adventure paths, or many of the 5E books, your characters are saving the world. Once finished with this campaign, the next campaign takes place in a new world.

Reminds me of the old Zero Punctuation joke about how every JRPG eventually comes down to "teenagers using the power of friendship to kill God".

I do like the idea about "points of light" though. Fewer settlements in the campaign world mean more time you can devote to developing and fleshing them out.

That was literally just about every JRPG for many years. In fact, that pretty much sums up Earthbound 100%. I like the idea of it, and some of the branching genres within JRPG's... but it would definitely get old if it was all set in the same world (see my Forgotten Realms comment above). But having a specific campaign length, and doing a new world each time? I could get behind that. It also helps when said world usually only has 12-15 towns in the world.

And, yes, fewer towns also means having more ideas to make them unique. Starting in the mid-90's, JRPG games really started to make their locations have unique features. Unlike original Final Fantasy 1, towns were no longer carbon copies. Final Fantasy 6, for example had the frozen town of Narshe, with its steam pipes feeding heat to the homes; Zozo was a city full of bad guys and monsters, like some chaotic evil version of Kowloon. Then you have a place like Vector, which looks pulled straight out of Metropolis, or Figaro Castle, which can descend under the desert sands when threatened.

Here is the thing though, people confuse anime the storytelling medium with anime the cultural representation. To say anime is like saying "book" or "movie", not like saying "a slice of life view into Japanese culture" because that is how weebs and otaku come into being. For Americans, it would be like saying that the Die Hard movies are commonplace representations of everyday life in the USA - a weeb would probably believe this.

There is good anime and bad anime.

I like hard science fiction, which causes me to gravitate towards the Gundam anime franchise. Now with all the Newtype bullshit and giant stompy robots, a lot of the Gundam shows also deal with things like propellant load and delta V requirements for space craft (including giant stompy robots). Now each anime must stand on its own and even the Gundam franchise has its stinkers (I'm looking at you, Mobile Fighter G Gundam). So take each one on its own flaws and merits.

I don't necessarily hate hentai, but I'm not exactly a fan of it either. In my late teens a couple of friends in my gaming group were obsessed with anime, and they would often get me to cart them around in my car looking for anime, under the pretext that we would play RPGs later, only for them to immediately start watching them at my house and never get around playing. At least half of it was just weird tentacle porn. Eventually got me put off by anime as a result.

Not exactly a fan of JRPGs either, despite getting into RPGs through them. All of them were basically story driven railroad adventures with lots of XP farming in between "quests" that were basically there just to advance the story in a linear fashion. The moment I was exposed to cRPGs and other computer games, I dropped consoles like a bad habit and J"RPGs" with them, and never looked back.

It wasn't until relatively recently that saw a couple of animes again (Goblin Slayer and Gate come to mind, maybe others) while hanging out with a friend. But it's still not exactly my thing.

Quote from: Omega on November 10, 2022, 12:55:14 PM
So far off the deep end you've come right back around hit yourself in the ass. Ive seen this sort of stupid before.

Yeah, I'm like that, I do that a lot. Can't be helped.