This Week in Anime

Do Game Mechanics Make or Break Anime?

Nicky
While anime acts like adding a stat sheet to a story is the bee's knees. It's not so fantastical. After all, the real world is already covered in screens. Every day, we're bombarded with notifications and numbers. Even if you think doing tasks is boring, smartphones and computer apps have made it possible to gamify almost every aspect of life. People make challenges to make them do all kinds of things like working out, doing chores, going to doctor's appointments, and even drinking enough water. Rather than exciting, consider it a way to create incentives and accountability. There's something gratifying about ticking off little boxes. Yet, I don't think it's an exciting way to tell a story.

Solo Leveling is an urban fantasy bordering a reverse isekai. Instead of the real-world protagonists coming to a fantasy world or game, Solo Leveling has "the game" appear in our world. One day, portals started popping up like real-world Oblivion gates. Afterward, people discovered they had magic powers and started forming parties raiding dungeons for cash and loot as if it were a regular freelance job. Though, I'd love to know what OSHA thinks about this.

One caveat is that once you've awakened your power, your stats and ranking are set in stone. Talk about a job ceiling!

Yet, it can also be restrictive! Leveling up, unlocking new skills, and earning rewards are exciting to experience as a player but less so as a viewer. I might as well go to YouTube and look up speedruns because it will take a lot more than "gaming" to add extra novelty to your story. Other times, it feels that referencing video games is the cheater's way out of building detailed and immersive settings. Video games are familiar and fairly standardized, so it's easier to handwave something the audience likely already knows.

I appreciate some of the care and attention Solo Leveling goes into setting itself up the way it does. Still, even that doesn't escape that much of the conceit of rewarding the audience for understanding the references and indulging the power fantasy of "winning". These are all problems that are common with many light novels and isekai. This shorthand approach to premises is something me and Nick heavily complained about in our latest isekai haul.

Dude, get a pedometer or one of those smartwatches. It won't send a giant bug after you if you don't do exactly 10k steps. It's still not as terrifying as the Duolingo owl, though.

Still, his stat build sucks! What's the point of endurance training if your HP pool stays low? The video game part might be an abstraction, but the series setting still affirms that these fixed numericals are the only thing that matters, not virtues like effort or discipline that anybody can achieve.

Many VRMMO anime also deal with the technical aspects of games; the creative and silly approach to min-maxing hooked me on BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense. As the title says,BOFURI is what happens when an average high school girl and newbie gamer, Maple, accidentally forges a game-breaking character build. After allocating all her stats into defense and becoming practically untouchable, she makes friends. She casually stumbles through high-level and hidden content, much to the frustration of the game's dev team.

While many games put emphasis on competition and winning or use gimmicks to raise the stakes, including the usual "die in the game, you die in real life," BOFURIkeeps the stakes low. It's not that there aren't exciting things happening, what with all the crazy bosses she stumbles into, but what makes Maple tolerable as an OP protagonist is that she doesn't give a lick about power or winning (unless it is fun). She approaches the game world with childlike curiosity and wonder. She is never toxic and is simply there to have fun and spend time with her friends in their big ole tree house.

That's what I tell myself whenever my favorite class/character gets nerfed. I'm sorry I was simply too powerful. They told me I had to wait five more seconds to turn those annoying Dark Knights into little imps even though there's no fix for tank cheeses in frontlines (FFXIV's large-scale PVP mode). This goes to show that balancing real games is incredibly difficult! The paperclips and rubberbands strung together by New World Online's overworked dev team are part of the joke. Still, part of why I find random video game elements lazy is the equal lack of consideration toward game design as well as the story.

Everything in video games is in service of the player, even the stuff we don't think about, like UI, the economy, and how enemies behave; they all exist to keep us pressing buttons. Games might present complex challenges, but honestly, they're designed to teach, reward, and help us succeed because the worst thing you can do to a video game is to quit playing.

The anime where the prime fantasy is AFK-ing to Yuki Kajira's excellent OST. The social aspect of games only adds to their appeal as a setting. As we discussed in My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999 last year, games are a wonderful way to meet, interact, and even cooperate with other players, sometimes leading to lasting friendships or even relationships.

I've only seen a little bit of this show, but it's interesting how quickly it goes from being a setup to make all the girls fall for you to a kind of morality play in how real relationships fail when you approach them only as transactional or another trophy to collect, a common critique towards the design philosophy of many game's romance mechanics. There is no need to put myself out there when I only have to give the right gifts and say all the right things to win people over!

True, part of what makes "gaming" stories difficult to invest in is that we know in some way that the world and the people in it are all falsehoods. Part of the fun of the first season of My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom is watching how all the characters subvert their original roles as a result of Bakarina's Bad End Dodging efforts, pushing them into becoming much more well-adjusted than the game's story would've had them. (Even if she has trouble separating her life from the game it's based on.)

Bakarina is what happens when rolling a -1 in intelligence makes your build broken. Please nerf.

Still, there's a point where the trope has become so common I'm not even sure if the "video game" or "isekai" element is necessary. Most visual novels don't have a lot of game mechanics, and even most fantasy anime have some allusions to their video game counterparts. There are many ways to approach game elements without breaking the immersion. Delicious in Dungeon is a love letter to traditional Dungeons and Dragons, but it does so well to capture the vibe of its RPG inspirations while feeling natural to the setting.

Since the focus is on food, nature is one of the major themes. Treating many of the creatures in any ol' Monster Manual as living things acting in a larger ecosystem, the Dungeon.

There's also the B-plot of the Demon King setting up challenges and tools for the Hero's Party and maintaining leadership over his demon workforce. However, all things are chaos when the princess is involved, occasionally making the game difficulty even harder for her would-be rescuers. It's a gag because it's about as stock as it can get, with much of it being a direct reference to the video game franchise Dragon Quest, a monolith in Japan, but somehow completely subverts all the tropes about captive princesses by making everyone a hostage to her antics.

Still, there are a lot of clever, deep cuts; I appreciate the anime, in particular, taking the video game aspects a step further by stylizing certain text boxes in that nostalgic NES fashion (though others are more ornate), keeping many of the non-diegetic text jokes from the manga but adding an extra charm.

I think it also shows a whole attitude about world-building and setting, even if it's all for the sake of comedy; there are a lot of ways to play on existing tropes without sacrificing all of the flavor text that draws us to them in the first place. I think there's potential for Solo Leveling to go in some interesting directions, but I think the biggest turn-off for similar stories that are done worse is the emphasis on winning. Games are their own works of art, and the prospect of winning is simply an incentive to keep playing along. Games aren't rewarding just because a nice little screen pops up when you've completed something. We play games to explore, experience, and enjoy what's been made. They're carefully crafted constructions meant to challenge, unite, and even comfort or inspire us. If every game were just about handing me victory, it wouldn't be entertaining, would it? So why do so many anime about or inspired by video games assume that winning is the only thing that matters?

By comparison, there's no strict requirement for winning or losing in real life. Everyone has their skills and privileges, but they don't determine your value as a person. You may never live up to being rich, famous, or powerful, but happiness is an achievement you establish for yourself. Only YOU can decide what's most rewarding in life. Please tell us what video game anime feels the most rewarding, and we'll sing a little victory tune you certainly can't hear. Thanks to everyone who read this whole column. You're all winners to me.