It’s still anime and it’s still niche. I think it will never stop being a niche thing in the West.
The difference is Arc has a better reputation in what game development respects, the gameplay and balance and that is handled with much more care, that’s why they have a rabid captive audience that will pay full price for every revision of their games even if they only add 2 extra characters and give the gameplay some little tweaks.
SNK is not like that. And they will probably NEVER have the budget to make their games look like the same level as Xrd, StrIVe or Dragon Ball FighterZ.
But I think they’re doing it fine so far, after the bitter taste of KOF XIV, Samurai Shodown looked quite good, and XV looks decent and competitive (in the mid-tier level).
I wonder how good the MAXIMUM IMPACT games did in the West. I saw many people giving them a chance. I mean, by the time it was refreshing to see something different than the same old KOF '96 sprites.
It was very Western-friendly in almost every aspect (aside from the terrible alternate costumes designed by Falcoon). It was a sort of attempt to ‘Tekkenize’ KOF and it seems it attracted a bit of attention.
But I think right after that, SNK began to heavily shift their business towards the pachinko market (thank God that era is now gone).
DBZ is the most popular anime of all time, and, well, the game look like DBZ. Like, THE DBZ everyone knows. That’s the main reason.
Xrd and StrIVe would never dream on getting that level of success.
DBZ is pretty much not just an anime show, it’s a whole separate category on its own.
Well, there’s no way we know, but I firmly believe a sprites or cel-shaded version of SF4 (let’s say, with the same character design style and proportions) wouldn’t have sold as well as the SF4 we got.
Yeah, DBZ…THE FUCKING ANIME. If westerners didn’t care about anime, THEY WOULDN’T CARE ABOUT DB!
That’s why your comment was so stupid.
I firmly believe the opposite. SF4 succeeded in spite of its style, not because of it. And it would have sold even better if it hadn’t looked like shit.
I won’t hold that against SF4 though. Cause ArcSys hadn’t basically solved the problem yet.
You know, dude, at least in Latin America, like 90% of 35-to-lower age males are hardcore fans of DBZ, and 80% of them that’s the only anime they’ve ever seen or care about (aside, maybe, from Saint Seiya for the oldest).
DBZ it’s a category of their own, there’s simply no other anime with the same level of success, recognizability or level of success in the world. You can definitely NOT take it as a sign of how popular anime is (or could be) in general.
And it goes waaay beyond its aesthetics.
Not really talking about its style. Simply its technique (3D graphics over cell-shaded).
Yeah, a more traditional anime style aesthetics could have made it too, probably. It’s mostly because of the game’s brand power and recognizability… in this case. Which is something SNK doesn’t have. I mean, many people recognize its characters for sure, but most of them don’t really care about the series.
And also most Westerns don’t care about anime either, so that would be, sort of a double don’t care?
What? That’s nonsense. It’s one of the most succesful fighting games of all time, and it spawned like 5 revisions.
Not a disappointment in the least, at least not for the general audience, it was broadly accepted.
I really don’t think so.
Your general FIFA, GTA and COD player, and that’s what normie dudes generally play, doesn’t care at all about any other anime than DBZ, and the only fighting game they care about is Mortal Kombat, not some Japanese fighters like SNK. And the more Japanese the game looks, the less they care.
Saying most of the audience was too much maybe, but SF4 officially sold more than 3.5 millions of copies, super street fighter 4, which was a really good update, only sold a bit more than half that number. Yes, it finally sold a total of more than 9 millions if you combine all versions, which could be considered a big success, except, it had the potential to do much more based on the nostalgia.
The same way, at its debut, SF5 sold less than 2 millions copies, around half of what SF4 did, at best. After 5 years, it is a bit more than 4 millions, less than half of what SF4 did in total.
Capcom lost a bit less than half of their audience with Street Fighter 4, because the success and failure of a sequel is not only on its own merits. SF4 was a success because it sold on nostalgia, but the expansions and sequels sold less because SF4 was a disappointment to casual players.
From a fighting game fan point of view, it may appear that SF4 was a huge success, and I personally enjoyed the game, even if I have plenty to criticize about it, but from a general audience point of view, it wasn’t that good.
Personal anecdotes are not as important as numbers, but I personally know several casual gamers that bought SF4 based on nostalgia, or for the youngest, based on the brand reputation. They never bought any new version or any other fighting game after that.
SF4 was ugly, lacking features of fighting games that were the norm at the time, and even features that were present in SF2 and it failed to bring people the excitement they remembered having with its ancestor.
By who ?
One piece, Naruto, Pokemon, … were huge success, even quite recently. I agree that they don’t care about fighting games. I personally don’t care about fighting games outside of street fighter, but it has nothing to do with visuals.
Breath of the wild sold more than 14 millions copies, and the characters look very anime in it, Horizon Zero Dawn a very similar game, from the same year, sold less than that with very good not anime-like visuals.
Even if people mock anime, and again, even I mock crap like Attack of the Titans, they don’t care for anime visual, it is widely accepted now.
Capcom shits the bed with every fighting game they release since SF2. Sometimes it’s a bit less, some times a bit more, but they haven’t released any game without heavy flaws since the first SF2.
While SF4 proved that there was a public for fighting games, it failed to open this genre to more people that could have been interested.
Americans? Well, Americans I don’t know, maybe Madden, but FIFA and soccer are the leading sports in the rest of the Western world, and even in Middle East and so. And FIFA is like the 5th best-selling video game series ever.
Aww, don’t get me started with Zelda. Zelda is a brand on its own… people definitely don’t relate it to anime.
There’s a big difference between “well regarded” and “hating it”. Some people did certainly hate SF4, but that wasn’t my point at all, which was that a good portion of the potential audience for this game did buy it, and didn’t like it. As those people were, in my opinion, not from the fighting game community, it was enough for them to not try any other SF4 version, SF5 or other fighting games.
In your link, out of 39 reviews, 12 are negative, 4 are mixed. I guess those are the people I was talking about.
I’m surprised you don’t consider it seriously, as you are both well aware of the flaws of the different SF games.
And also considering I did provide arguments through numbers that the legacy of SF4 is not that good. But yeah, ok as well.
So, every game that doesn’t go with your theory is an exception and it’s own brand then.
What about Mario Kart or Animal Crossing that are not cell shaded but still heavily into anime territory, they are their own brand too ? And Street Fighter is not ?
Do you happen to have any example of a game that failed because it was anime-styled ?
Whatever dude.