Darkpen

@DystopiaX: No... I think he's just taking a racy and far-too-subtle comment I made and is either missing the point... or is missing the point and then missing that even further.

edit: here's what I said:

@david3cm said:

Their ignorance and hate is why I love the bombcast. I know it sucks when they talk shit on things you like, me being from Canada I feel some flak every now and again, but personally since I have zero interest in JRPG's I love when they shit on Final Fantasy.

I'm mildly reminded of that holocaust quote that goes something along the lines of "first they came for the ____, and I did not protest. Then they came for the ____, and I did not protest, [...] and when they came for me, there was no one left to protest for me."

But that's just my mind wandering. Like the Bombcast! Butchering quotes and make leaps, aw yeah.

I don't see how this has to do with a gaming podcast talking about a long-running jrpg, either.

@themightymonarch: What the hell? What are you even talking about? I think you're either lost, or I've lost you, or both.

@ick_bop said:

@Darkpen:

"Boy, I sure wish I could shit on Patrick some more, but he hasn't done anything to offend my internet sensitivities, what can I do? OH! I'll make up some completely untrue shit and act all outraged over it! Yay, racism and the holocaust!"

Yeah, I'm the child.

Nice generalizations. A for effort.

@FateOfNever said:

@Darkpen: Then I would say you probably never should have used the word in the first place. I really don't think very many people would actually draw the conclusion that complaining about the faces all being the same would be like being racist. I on multiple occasions have complained about Nomura's characters all looking the same and no one's ever accused me of being racist. It's not just their faces though. It's their faces and their hair (when everyone has amazing, feathery, spikey hair, everyone looks like they're trying to look like each other) and their clothing and their personalities (in the same game not every character will have the same personality, but if you look at FF7 and most of the games he's been involved with since then, characters all feel the same.)

I get where some of the style comes from though, Japan loves their somewhat 'wild' clothing styles and everything. When, as a society, they have to dress a certain way most of the time (between business suits, school uniforms, traditional clothing, so on, so forth) the urge to go big with their style when they have the chance to, I get it. Not everyone goes that way with it, but when people do, I get it. I've seen enough of it even just attending a school with uniforms. When you put that into character design, however, and it ends up on more than 50% of the characters in most of the games a company has put out, but the world around them isn't equally like that, it gets old. If that makes sense. That sentence started to get away from me some.

I guess I look at it like this - in The World Ends With You the zippers and buckles outfits make sense to me. The world around them encourages it. The characters visit clothing stores that are themed that way, they are building this up as a world, or at least a city, where that kind of clothing makes sense to me. Or if you designed a game that had a very heavy sort of "emo"/"hot topic"/"whatever you want to call it because I feel like there is a better way to describe it but I can't tihnk of it" aesthetics to it, it would make sense. When you make a world where normal people don't walk around wearing buckles and zippers that much but the all of the main characters go really far out with their clothing, and this happens for sixteen years of games, it gets really old. Especially when it doesn't feel like the style of the characters or the clothing or the personalities have evolved or changed that much over the years.

I think people would have the same complaints if, say, Final Fantasy games for the last sixteen years all have the majority of their cast looking like Greasers. Or if every character for the last five games all looked like samurai, or ninjas, or storm troopers, or heavy goths, or whatever. When you're stuck with one style for so long it starts to feel like Nomura just doesn't have any range in his design. It starts to feel like he has a style, and he has something he likes to do with his style, and he doesn't ever want to do anything else with that style. But that has more to do with him liking a particular clothing style for his characters.

Mmm. The problem is that when I look at the Final Fantasy series of the past decade and a half, I don't see Nomura, but instead I see FF9, FF11 Online, FF12, and any other number of spinoffs or variants that weren't involving Nomura, so I personally find the whole issue absurd to begin with. But I certainly see what you mean, and it has a lot to do with frill over function. When I look at even early Nomura stuff, like FF8, sure, there are belts and zippers, but its within practical means. There's an argument that someone could make about him being a bad character designer, but then you have to begin asking just how much influence he actually had in their design when looking at the credits and released concept art that is clearly not drawn by Nomura.

The larger problem that I think is blinding everyone is just how long 13 was in development hell and in the presence and minds of the gaming public, causing fatigue with people needing someone to blame. The FF diehards will blame Motomu Toriyama, while the uninformed blame Nomura. The ubiquity of Nomura's touch on various products was a point of embarrassment to even himself, as revealed in an interview a few years ago.

If Nomura was listed as art director for each of these games, that'd be one thing, but he's not. He gets that credit in the startup because he clearly holds some serious sway, or at least the company has abused him to that degree.

Anyways, that's all I can think of.

@ick_bop: ...18:50? What in the world are you listening to? What kind of time stamp is that?

Re-listening to that part, you're right, as someone ELSE in the thread already pointed out, he's referring to the text in the intro, not actual character art.

Well excuse me for misinterpreting that small bit. It doesn't change the absurdity of his rant, and the thread still stands.

Congrats on debunking me on that, though. Too bad you're such a child about it.

@themightymonarch: Aw man, I was waiting for someone to call me out on the holocaust quote, though I hope my point wasn't lost on you. To take one's pitiful bullied suffering, only to jump onto someone else's the moment the attention is taken away from you? Elementary school stuff. It was only in response to the canadian, but the lack of backbone about it is certainly troubling.

One of the charms of the podcast (or any gaming podcast) is fleeting thoughts such as that, and would have been chalked up to being a podcast, but here? So serious.

@Lautaro said:

They really like to act like XIII was a massive failure that sold like shit or something, I mean the game sold well and critically did alright. Everyone is free to like what they like, my main issue is when they state fallacy as fact though. I am sure this previous sentence alone will infuriate people because I am saying something slightly negative about the bombcast so eh. To each their own.

Also considering that 13 came out nearly 2 years ago, there are other franchises that in my opinion need to take a break more than Final Fantasy - just saying.

I think the problem is just how dishonest hype can be to a review. GTA4, for instance, had a gigantic backlash, but its metacritic score will forever reflect the hype and no one will know any better without the context of that. It also doesn't help that the Final Fantasy brand has become something of a poster child for Japanese games (whereas Mario or even Metal Gear isn't viewed in the same light).

@FateOfNever: Then I apologize for not having been clear enough the first time. When I said "which is just shy of racism," I meant to imply "which is just shy of being called racist, or considered racist," rather than the direct act of racism or being actively racist. Its absurd to suggest that people who don't like Nomura's style to be racist just because of that, or infer as much. My wording was poor, but this was what I meant.

@JoeyRavn: And how's that.

@Sergio said:

Anyways, if you really want more Japanese in your video game podcasts, listen to the 8-4 Play podcast.

Like I said (though I don't blame you if you missed it in the mess of the past 5 pages), I have other places I go for that sort of talk (like the now-dead Roleplayer's Realm). I'm not going to pretend that Giant Bomb's going to change because of this thread, but it is something that's been bothering me.

@JoeyRavn said:

The use of the term "Japanophile fact-checker" bothers me a lot.

Sorry.

@themightymonarch said:

@Darkpen said:

Well, for one, the beginning of the misplaced Tetsuya Nomura hate during the past episode around the 58 minute mark.

He rants about "bigger than the logo concept art," followed by a "fuck you, god-----!"

This statement pisses me off in ways that I can't describe, especially as a fan of Yoshitaka Amano. Any average FF fan would be able to point this out, and no one on the crew is equipped to point that out.

Not to mention the attack on the aesthetic. The fact that there's no one on the show willing to rebuttal him in any capacity, or at least his incapability to offer a convincing argument for his hate, annoys me. He admits like a minute prior or two that he's not even certain if the things he hates are directly because of Nomura, but it doesn't stop him from using him as a scapegoat and beating on a dead horse.

You are criticizing Patrick for saying something incorrect when you got what he said incorrect. He didn't say that Nomura's name was bigger than the Final Fantasy logo. He said it was bigger than the Square/Enix logo.

Maybe I need to re-listen to this, but I'm confident in that his rant about Nomura included claiming that the concept art behind the logo was also Nomura's.

Which is what really pissed me off.

@FateOfNever said:

@Darkpen said:

@ick_bop said:

@Darkpen:

Patrick are just one step away from saying what's really on their minds: the faces of models that are designed off of Nomura's style, which itself is just shy of racism

Oops, you meant "almost, basically racist." Geeze, not only are you an ass, but you also seem to be suffering from alzheimer's.

You had a really hard time with critical thinking when you took your English/Lit. classes, didn't you. I can't believe you're serious.

As you oh-so enjoyed butchering my sentence, let me clarify it for you: The Nomura-hate collective hates the aesthetic that Square-Enix games "suffer" from under his visual brand of style, which is a style that ISN'T limited to simply "belts and zippers," but the homogenous nature of the CG models of the younger cast members in any games or animated films he's been involved with as a character designer. The homogeny of the faces, in turn, reflect a sense for a certain style or aesthetic in physical and facial beauty that is idealized in his style, but in turn suffer for the cultural dissonance that east-asian pop culture "androgeny" brings to western culture, where the disparity in appearance isn't as immediately clear (save just short of old men who look like lesbians, or teenage boys who look like girls).

Because of this, the Nomura-hate collective must stop short of their ambiguous "hatred" for his "style" with just bashing "belts and zippers," because to say more would risk someone else (such as yourself) from misinterpreting what I just typed above as being "racist."

If you're still misunderstanding what I'm saying, then I don't see how I could further assist you.

You are putting a lot of words in a lot of peoples mouths. Belts and zippers are a thing in his style. You are saying, between that and the first post he was pulling from, that because Nomura has a very, very distinct clothing style for a lot of his characters (something along the lines of Hot Topic) that people might not like, they're racist because actually they just hate the androgynous Japanese look to the characters? How the shit does that work?

No, there are people that have a serious problem with his art style and it has nothing to do with being afraid of his androgynous characters. Look at Akira Toriyama; he suffers from the same issue. It doesn't have to do with androgyny, it has to do with all of the characters looking the same. You can have a character that is androgynous in your cast, whatever. When seven out of eight characters in your game all look the same (regardless of androgyny) some people are bound to hate it. And that's not even getting into the clothing style that he really, really loves to put on characters.

Also, no, he's not doing a lot of misinterpreting of what you said as being "racist". You used that exact word in your original post. He can't misinterpret something when you specifically said it and implied it both at the same time.

As off topic as this is, I have to agree, though I feel like its the lack of articulation in the Nomura-hate collective that tends to annoy me more than not. Nomura's something of a catch-all scapegoat for "belts and zippers," but I feel like people like Patrick are just one step away from saying what's really on their minds: the faces of models that are designed off of Nomura's style,which itself is just shy of racism but no one dares to take that step that would lead someone to make such a leap of logic.

With everything you've said, it is not hard at all for someone to come to the conclusion that you have said that disliking Nomura's style is, more or less, racist. Which, honestly, is kind of disgusting to me.

This is amazing. You missed my point too? Wow, ok.

I'm not even talking about the androgeny. I'm not even saying that people who dislike Nomura's style of clothing on characters are racist. Holy shit, wow.

Okay, maybe I need to use less words or something:

Nomura's style is composed of two things: a manga-oriented homogenous (please look up this word for your own good) face style, and the ubiquity and oddity of both belts and zippers on clothing for lead characters. Often times, people focus on the latter, claiming absurdity. I am saying that as a collective, not individually (this is important), they stop short of criticizing the faces of "looking the same" in any deconstructional capacity lest they cause wrath and misplaced accusations of racism (such as your own).

You even MENTIONED how it had to do with how the characters looked the same. How did you miss me pointing to this specific point in my previous post? I do not understand.

@the_OFFICIAL_jAPanese_teaBAG said:

@Darkpen: I never said that I hate myself... And its not like most people care about this but I can see your point. Hmmm, I do see what you mean about Patrick.... He does need to control himself sometimes. How bad is he in this bombcast?

He's not horrifyingly bad, but its just been a very slow and gradual thing that's lead me to just make this thread out of heightened annoyance.