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The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

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Capcom shouldn’t cater to ideals of Western gamers

Back in May, the president of Capcom, Haruhiro Tsujimoto, told the
Financial Times that the company would no longer be making new video
game series for the West (due to their tendency to be received poorly)
and instead would only publish games in the US and Europe that are part
of their many popular long-running series.

Games like “Resident
Evil,” “Street Fighter” and “Mega Man” with already well established fan
bases would continue to be published outside of Japan, but Capcom has
been slowly relying on them more and more and has now begun to attempt
to tailor the style and presentation of these games for Western
audiences.

Two weeks ago, during the Tokyo Game Show, Capcom announced the next
game in their popular series, “Devil May Cry.” Hailed as a reboot of the
series and developed by a completely different company, Ninja Theory,
“DmC” has many fans in an uproar over why Capcom would want to reboot a
franchise with the popularity and success that the “Devil May Cry”
series has enjoyed since its debut in 2001.

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Though details about
the plot and gameplay of “DmC” are still scarce, the protagonist, Dante,
has gone through a radical design change. Instead of a character that
could easily fit into any given Japanese anime, with white hair and an
unreasonably long sword, he has been transformed into a clearly more
Western inspired design as a cigarette smoking, dark haired, “hardcore”
hand to hand fighter, a design choice that has already sparked some of
the strongest outrage seen over a game redesign in the last few years.

Though seemingly motivated by poor sales of its other recent games,
Capcom may also be a victim of a trend in video games to reboot or
change the style of a particular established series, generally with
great success. Infinity Ward’s “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” is the
most recent success story of taking an established series in a new
direction after the last seven games were based in the era of World War
Two. Setting the game in the modern era, “Call of Duty 4” kick-started
the current extreme popularity of modern first-person shooters with the
mechanics of sprinting and multiple cinematic experiences that take
place while the player is playing the game, features that are almost all
now staples of the genre.

Capcom itself had a brief run with
similar dramatic changes in a series with “Resident Evil 4,” a game that
stepped away from the others in the franchise and introduced completely
different controls, gameplay and enemy types that not only changed the
world of action games but also inspired the more recent survival horror
series “Dead Space.”

Those examples suggest that drastic changes of style always work out,
but there are dozens more that do not. Factors such as timing and fan
feedback play a large part in it, especially when it comes to series
that have begun to drag. The “Resident Evil” series hadn’t had a proper
sequel for five years before “Resident Evil 4” was released with the
goal of breathing new life into a waning franchise, and the “Call of
Duty” series had been struck repeatedly with criticism of endless games
based during World War Two. In the case of “DmC” there has been no cry
for a new take on the series or a reboot of any kind, with only minimal
dips in the fan base after the release of “Devil May Cry 4,” to signal
this change in the character and developer.

In fact, the response
to this has been mostly flat-out rejection, with a few video game
columnists and fans of Ninja Theory trying to handle damage control.
Capcom has said that they felt it was time to bring the “Devil May Cry”
series into the new decade, but if they are so keen on appeasing fans in
the West, they should have waited for the criticisms or complaints of
those fans before making such a drastic change.

The producer of Capcom’s “Dead Rising,” Keiji Inafune, said recently
that he would be studying how people in the West live so that he could
make games to appeal to them, and that’s disappointing. Japanese games
tend to be good simply because they are something different. They are a
change in the endless stream of white, brown haired men with guns
fighting aliens or terrorists, which has become the norm for numerous
games made in the West since “Halo” and “Call of Duty 4” hit the
industry like a missile. Perhaps what Capcom should realize is that the
problem with their “non-sequel” games, most recently Bionic Commado and
Dark Void, is that they simply weren’t very good, even though they
starred the white, brown-haired protagonists developers seem to think
the West wants.

Rather than trying to appease an audience they
don’t understand, Capcom should go back to the days of crazy action,
gripping atmosphere and inventive characters that made them the power
house in the industry that they are today.

Jayson Gruenwald is a senior majoring in English literature. Disagree with his take on Capcom’s latest redesign? Send comments and column suggestions to [email protected].

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