Typemoon 10th year anniversary
PostPosted:Thu Aug 16, 2012 3:07 am
I realize for most people the exposure to Typemoon is probably the source of the quote: "People die if they're killed" but as the company managed to went from the rising star of Japanese computer gamign (which isn't saying much) to irrelevence, I think it's a good time to reflect exactly how you can screw up some of the best assets you could get to make an Anime-ish game as the 10th year anniversary passes.
No discussion of Typemoon would be meaningful without Saber:
The most recognizable Anime girl that a franchise is built around is Hitstune Miku, but Saber would have a serious bid for #2. Commonly known by fans as simply "The King", as in "She who reigns over all Anime girls", she's best compared to the NBA star with the same title: LeBron James. She does everything you can ask for the main heroine. She looks cool, has super ridiuculous powers and yet also doubles as the damsel in distress, has a very good background story, and even has a cool theme music. But Saber is not the cutest and definitely not the sexiest of the Typemoon girls, a fact even the game acknowledges as Saber gets reduced to crying in a corner after the first round in the swimsuit contest in Fate/Hollow Ataraxia. Whether this is because Saber is either unattractive enough to be mistaken for a guy (though you'd probably have to be blind to think she's a guy, as the story claims) or that she's too cool for a girl, the King of Typemoon handily loses in the cuteness factor to several major female characters, and gets pummeled on the sexiness factor against virtually any other girl. About her only redeeming factor is that she works well in bondage/torture scenes which is why every adaptation of Fate Stay Night has the Sacred Maiden Defiled scene, which is probably Saber at her best looking sexy. Perhaps not unlike Ilya, my favorite character by far from Typemoon, she has the serious problem of looking more attractive/sexy while clothed versus not (she's fully closed in the aforementioned scene, which is why the Anime is apparently not 18+).
Now that's not a serious problem to have because there are plenty of Typemoon girls that look sexier without clothing. With Saber anchoring everything else and the rest of the girls cover the various cuteness/sexiness spectrums, Fate Stay Night broke the record for the most copies of computer game sold in Japan rather easily when it debuted. It even had plenty of legitmate elements to step out of the adult game label, so it could become a respectable series on its own, or at worst it should always be able to subsist on Saber in bondage and rest of the girls naked in the forseeable future. Except neither happened. What happened in the next game, Fate Hollow Ataraxia, is some kind of epic failure to leverage any of your character's strengths. Saber appears naked in all scenes where she's utterly unattractive in. Rin, the next coolest character and tailored made for being some kind of lesbian goddess, went the magical girl route which turned out to be utterly damaging to her fanbase as well. Sakura, the game's sexy machine, does her usual thing but nobody really cares about Sakura anyway. Ilya, the girl you can't get, is still the girl you can't get and again makes no appearance whatsoever except the game saying that she could've easily won the swimsuit competition in her older form. We would eventually get Irisviel in Fate Zero except while attractive, it's not clear how Irisivel could outsexy Sakura let alone threaten the top two girls. Even more inexplicably apparently Saber does think Irisviel is more attractive than she is, which beyond making no sense with her characterization to begin with, just isn't true anyway.
Beyond the usual character bloat there's an especially damaging character: Gilgamesh. I guess the author read the epic of Gilgamesh and thought Gilgamesh is totally cool so he must be included in every Typemoon game so everyone can appreciate how awesome Gilgamesh is. Gilgamesh seems to specialize in tying up girls with his Heaven Shackles and then do nasty things to them. The only problem is that none of the girls in the Typemoon universe has the 'divine' attribute that makes them vulnerable to Heaven Shackles (Ilya had a great quote saying all girls are basically a spawn of hell), and an ordinary human can break those as it's a weapon specifically designed to defeat beings with connection to deities. Instead we get to see repeatedly of how Gilgamesh gets to tie up the male characters who do have divine connections, and usually it's character nobody cares about. About the only thing useful he did was that he killed Ilya, which is sad and yet utterly satisfying when you see the girl who thought she's too cute to be killed actually die. I mean I can accept the addition of a completely worthless character if he does result in more girls (especially Saber) getting tied up in chains but never remotely comes close to doing so. He's a shallow character and yet not despicable enough like Ilya where you actually want to see her die horribly. He's basically a Deus Ex Machina bad guy who specializes in tying up male characters with chains, and I'm pretty sure unless you got very strange sexual orientation this isn't exactly a winning combo, and you can tell the story specifically included him just because whoever wrote the script thinks everyone should know the greatness of Gilgamesh.
Even after the 3 major Fate games ended, there continues to be spinoffs. There are enough variation of Saber with different colors that she can form her own Power Rangers squad. But honestly the only Saber that was successful was the original one, the blue one. The various different colored/personality Sabers really don't do anything better than what the original or her supporting girls did, and if you're going to try to attach the name Fate to some random stupid game at least make sure the fans are getting the version of Saber that started all this. Rin just goes ever deeper into the magical girl pit of uselessness. Irisviel is just a not-nearly-as-sexy-as-you-expected version of future Ilya, which now just occurred me always should have looked like Sniper Wolf from MGS as that's the only character who would match the rather lofty standards she has to live up to (easily more sexy than any other girl, snow motif, and looks cool while carrying oversized weapons). Instead of course now at the 10th anniversary of Typemoon's existence I think they're making yet another exact replica of Fate Stay Night, now on the PS Vita. It'll likely feature new stuff that regress the story similar to how the PS2 adaptation featured a stupid feel-good storybook ending in Saber (because she could pull anyone she liked into Avalon anytime she wanted, and yet we're supposed to feel sorry for a character who can get any man she possibly ever wanted for all of eternity any time you feel like it, never mind the character's motif is basically eternal loneliness).
No discussion of Typemoon would be meaningful without Saber:
The most recognizable Anime girl that a franchise is built around is Hitstune Miku, but Saber would have a serious bid for #2. Commonly known by fans as simply "The King", as in "She who reigns over all Anime girls", she's best compared to the NBA star with the same title: LeBron James. She does everything you can ask for the main heroine. She looks cool, has super ridiuculous powers and yet also doubles as the damsel in distress, has a very good background story, and even has a cool theme music. But Saber is not the cutest and definitely not the sexiest of the Typemoon girls, a fact even the game acknowledges as Saber gets reduced to crying in a corner after the first round in the swimsuit contest in Fate/Hollow Ataraxia. Whether this is because Saber is either unattractive enough to be mistaken for a guy (though you'd probably have to be blind to think she's a guy, as the story claims) or that she's too cool for a girl, the King of Typemoon handily loses in the cuteness factor to several major female characters, and gets pummeled on the sexiness factor against virtually any other girl. About her only redeeming factor is that she works well in bondage/torture scenes which is why every adaptation of Fate Stay Night has the Sacred Maiden Defiled scene, which is probably Saber at her best looking sexy. Perhaps not unlike Ilya, my favorite character by far from Typemoon, she has the serious problem of looking more attractive/sexy while clothed versus not (she's fully closed in the aforementioned scene, which is why the Anime is apparently not 18+).
Now that's not a serious problem to have because there are plenty of Typemoon girls that look sexier without clothing. With Saber anchoring everything else and the rest of the girls cover the various cuteness/sexiness spectrums, Fate Stay Night broke the record for the most copies of computer game sold in Japan rather easily when it debuted. It even had plenty of legitmate elements to step out of the adult game label, so it could become a respectable series on its own, or at worst it should always be able to subsist on Saber in bondage and rest of the girls naked in the forseeable future. Except neither happened. What happened in the next game, Fate Hollow Ataraxia, is some kind of epic failure to leverage any of your character's strengths. Saber appears naked in all scenes where she's utterly unattractive in. Rin, the next coolest character and tailored made for being some kind of lesbian goddess, went the magical girl route which turned out to be utterly damaging to her fanbase as well. Sakura, the game's sexy machine, does her usual thing but nobody really cares about Sakura anyway. Ilya, the girl you can't get, is still the girl you can't get and again makes no appearance whatsoever except the game saying that she could've easily won the swimsuit competition in her older form. We would eventually get Irisviel in Fate Zero except while attractive, it's not clear how Irisivel could outsexy Sakura let alone threaten the top two girls. Even more inexplicably apparently Saber does think Irisviel is more attractive than she is, which beyond making no sense with her characterization to begin with, just isn't true anyway.
Beyond the usual character bloat there's an especially damaging character: Gilgamesh. I guess the author read the epic of Gilgamesh and thought Gilgamesh is totally cool so he must be included in every Typemoon game so everyone can appreciate how awesome Gilgamesh is. Gilgamesh seems to specialize in tying up girls with his Heaven Shackles and then do nasty things to them. The only problem is that none of the girls in the Typemoon universe has the 'divine' attribute that makes them vulnerable to Heaven Shackles (Ilya had a great quote saying all girls are basically a spawn of hell), and an ordinary human can break those as it's a weapon specifically designed to defeat beings with connection to deities. Instead we get to see repeatedly of how Gilgamesh gets to tie up the male characters who do have divine connections, and usually it's character nobody cares about. About the only thing useful he did was that he killed Ilya, which is sad and yet utterly satisfying when you see the girl who thought she's too cute to be killed actually die. I mean I can accept the addition of a completely worthless character if he does result in more girls (especially Saber) getting tied up in chains but never remotely comes close to doing so. He's a shallow character and yet not despicable enough like Ilya where you actually want to see her die horribly. He's basically a Deus Ex Machina bad guy who specializes in tying up male characters with chains, and I'm pretty sure unless you got very strange sexual orientation this isn't exactly a winning combo, and you can tell the story specifically included him just because whoever wrote the script thinks everyone should know the greatness of Gilgamesh.
Even after the 3 major Fate games ended, there continues to be spinoffs. There are enough variation of Saber with different colors that she can form her own Power Rangers squad. But honestly the only Saber that was successful was the original one, the blue one. The various different colored/personality Sabers really don't do anything better than what the original or her supporting girls did, and if you're going to try to attach the name Fate to some random stupid game at least make sure the fans are getting the version of Saber that started all this. Rin just goes ever deeper into the magical girl pit of uselessness. Irisviel is just a not-nearly-as-sexy-as-you-expected version of future Ilya, which now just occurred me always should have looked like Sniper Wolf from MGS as that's the only character who would match the rather lofty standards she has to live up to (easily more sexy than any other girl, snow motif, and looks cool while carrying oversized weapons). Instead of course now at the 10th anniversary of Typemoon's existence I think they're making yet another exact replica of Fate Stay Night, now on the PS Vita. It'll likely feature new stuff that regress the story similar to how the PS2 adaptation featured a stupid feel-good storybook ending in Saber (because she could pull anyone she liked into Avalon anytime she wanted, and yet we're supposed to feel sorry for a character who can get any man she possibly ever wanted for all of eternity any time you feel like it, never mind the character's motif is basically eternal loneliness).