Like I said in a previous post, the lip syncing as it is is rudimentary enough that it could probably reasonably pass for some other language. Often their mouth flaps don't even match to English speech. Complex, intricate cinematics are few and far between. It's less of a big deal than people realize.
Hi, Kilrogg!
That's all fine. Again, the problem is when overzealous Westerners aim to prematurely paint the game in a certain light, whether that be positive, or negative. I am way more down to hear those positive and negative viewpoints from the actual Japanese public, not some guy on Era who decided the game was problematic six months before it came out.
Personally, I wasn't following much about the game beyond it looking pretty. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt until release. I just want people to be educated, not silence Japanese critics who had problems with it, and then they can make their own opinions.
and most of the criticism was coming from japanese and asian diaspora. people refer to us as 'westerners' whenever it's convenient so we can be dismissed as ignorant pearl clutching white people and refuse to further engage with what is being said. we are those 'particular groups, ethnicities, or cultures'. we also have perspectives that lay aside someone who was born, raised, and educated in japan and never moved anywhere else. no one writing critique of ghost of tsushima's themes and narratives did so out of some misguided belief the game would be terribly received in japan, they did so precisely because it wouldn't be terribly received in japan.
wow it's almost like all of those things suck too and have contributed a lot to furthering very toxic things in culture that endure even today! i don't really see why it's worth bringing up in this thread though? like we can all agree on that?
Exactly how I feel. I love some media that I have huge problems with.
I mean people in this thread like Nocturne and AIZO are posting some well thought out, reasonable arguments but go head with your shitty hot takes
Yeah... I'm in a similar boat. Again, I'm still early in Act 2, so things can change but... I really don't think this game is trying to glorify samurai. Like yes, it paints them as educated warriors who are ultimate badasses but it constantly CONSTANTLY calls out the privilege inherit to their nobility. One of the very first characters you meet is constantly calling out Jin and saying that he is out of touch with regular people. My reading on it is that samurai are cops who think they are doing things to make the world a better place and a majority of people who don't know any better agree with them, but there are plenty of people, especially people who lack social, political, and financial capital in the world that see Samurai to be as much of a problem as the Mongol invaders are. Jin's central conflict isn't just the whole honor vs. no honor thing, it's him finding out that the samurai "code" he is so attached to uses "honor" as a veil to justify doing whatever the hell they want. I have found that part of the story incredibly poignant so far.
I mean by and large, discourse around the game I've seen has been positive because people enjoy the mechanics. But I really haven't seen many folks who have much to say positive about the story and tone, and most people seem to actively dislike it. Again, could be the circles I follow. Also, TLOU2 is an unfair comparison lol. No game in recent memory has had quite the ride when it comes to the discourse with that game.
There's not always a consistent way to know who the person behind the keyboard is. I could enter old Ghost of Tsushima threads and give you a ton of examples of what I'm referring to, but I'm not going to spend my time doing that just to put a bunch of people on blast (which is against the rules, anyway). If you're Japanese diaspora and you find aspects of GoT problematic, then I'm not here to tell you you're wrong, so I guess we're cool? Keep on keeping on. As you say in the second part of your post: I am not speaking to you.
because it's a story about japanese exceptionalism. china fell, korea fell, but japan? japan stood strong. and japan owed that to the samurai - a samurai. this is the sort of propaganda that was disseminated by the imperial japanese government to justify the vast militarization of the country. japan needed to be strong, supported by a modern samurai of moral virtue, in order to resist foreign influence. it's important in general to note that the attempted mongolian invasions tsushima is about were politicized heavily by imperial japan - the infamous 'kamikaze' suicide bombers were named so after the storm that sunk the mongol fleet. reframing the story of tsushima into, as a previous poster put it, some east asian thermopylae (itself very fraught in how it's deployed in politics here) against a foreign horde plays very heavily into a nationalist narrative of 'invincible japan'.
They weren't speaking modern Japanese at the time either. Better get Sucker Punch to reconstruct 13th century Tsushima dialect Japanese...
This is how I see things. The Japanese critics in the article feel like the game gets the verisimilitude right for what they think of as a samurai-era story. That's a credit to Sucker Punch getting a lot of details right. Even if the story is set hundreds of years before the samurai fiction that inspired it, Ghost of Tsushima properly matches the aesthetics, the language, and so on of those inspirations.
Interesting. That's absolutely the type of answer I was hoping for! And yeah, I knew that the samurai image eventually gets co-opted to perpetrate fascist notions of strength and nationalism. And after reading reviews prior to the game, I was totally expecting this game to be "rah rah GO SAMU-RAI" every ten seconds in my face, but I have found it thusfar to be... not that? Like I mentioned in an earlier post, many of the side quests in this game revolve around samurai essentially being cops, which means they are people who were given unmitigated power and SURPRISE SURPRISE, they abuse it and more importantly, shouldn't have had it in the first place. The most likeable character in the game for me thusfar (I am at the beginning of act 2) is pretty blatantly anti-samurai and is happy to deconstruct the notions of samurai power at every turn. I'm curious whether the game will continue to explore this in the main story, we'll see!
Ah, I remember reading reviews in this tone and laughing out loud.
that actually bugged me which is why i turned on english instead.
This is great. Props to you.
i don't want to go off topic, but it doesn't matter what Japan thinks about that movie since it was an American produced film for a primarily American audience, and the controversy was casting a white person to play a Japanese character. American movies already suffer from the lack diversity and representation.
