Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 245)

Trigger Happy
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produce proportionally more realistic avatars of human
characters. When Japanese fans got their first look at
Final Fantasy VIII there was palpable outrage, because
it seemed the characters had been “Westernized”: no
longer the cute, deformed people of FFVII but
longerlimbed and more “adult”-looking.
This is a widely held aesthetic preference among
Japanese gamers; in fact, it can be traced back to
physical distortions of the human form in Japanese
woodblock prints of the Edo period (1603–1868).
Jeremy Smith, managing director of British developers
Core Design, confides that feedback from the Japanese
audience suggested that they wanted Lara Croft, virtual
idol extraordinaire of the Tomb Raider series and the
most high-profile icon of Western gaming, to be more
“mangafied”—that is, for her body to conform more to
“deformed” standards. But Lara remained herself—
still deformed, of course, but in a somewhat more
subtle, and stereotypically Western, chesty-and-
waspwaisted fashion. By contrast, the most successful
Western games by far in Japan at the time of writing
are the Crash Bandicoot series. Crash is a cartoonish,
wide-eyed, spiky-haired orange marsupial with an
enormous head and toothy grin. He is already
“deformed,” and fits in nicely.