Differences Between Anime And Video Games

Anime and video games are two subjects that play an important role in both eastern and western popular culture. The ascension of both anime and video games into popular culture originated first in Japan, and eventually their influence spread across the globe. I’ve been engrossed in both subjects since I was young, and I believe my appreciation for both was no coincidence. Anime and video games, after all, have always felt similar to me, but why is that? To answer that question, I will consider what anime is, and what video games are. I will try to find what makes anime and video games similar, what influences they derive from one another, and how their relationship came to be. Anime and video games have continued to be so wildly successful …show more content…
Keiko Nobumoto, for example, was a Japanese screenwriter for popular anime such as Cowboy Bebop, but she also worked on popular games like Kingdom Hearts. Likewise, animator Yoshinori Kanada, who is best known for his work on Birth, one of the first original video animations to be released to the market, also worked in the widely popular Final Fantasy series. Oftentimes, possessing similar developers also lead to crossovers, in that games and anime would be made in response to the popularity of the other. The popular martial arts anime Fist of the North Star, for instance, would eventually inspire the popular fighting game, Street Fighter. Sometimes, it would go one step further than just being inspired one another, a popular video game would be made into an anime, or vice versa. A good example of this situation is the Pokemon series, which first began as a popular video game series that caused an anime to be developed using the same name and concept. Since then, Pokemon has been hugely successful for almost twenty …show more content…
This was a huge step for anime, because there was previously a fear by American producers that American viewers would not understand or appreciate the Japanese orientated elements found in Japanese shows. Thus, anime was previously marketed as American content so that sales and views remained positive. Now, the popularity of anime in western culture has grown to the point where websites like Funimation and Crunchyroll make a business of preparing Japanese anime for American consumption by releasing translations within hours of new episodes being released in Japan. Compared to the hesitation of corporations to bring anime over experienced only around twenty years back, the success of these websites shows a huge difference between the attitudes or those two