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Big thanks to Bigheart711 and TopHaZZard for the most excellent Q!
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Tom Pinchuk’s a writer and personality with a large number of comics, videos and features like this to his credit. Visit his website - - tompinchuk.com - - and follow his Twitter: @tompinchuk
Sam Weller is a writer and actor who's scribed for shows like FIRST EDITION, GEEK THERAPY, and most recently BATGIRL: SPOILED. He also really likes anime. To know what is going to happen next, follow@cravesam
I like the Fatal Fury movie and oavs >_> And Street Fighter 2: The Animated Movie is pretty good, me thinks. The Alpha movie, not so much. Haven't seen II V
I think the issue is that fighting games don't really have stories. The closest you come is stuff like you don't press the start button quick enough and you see some nonsensical cutscene that has like absolutely nothing to do with the actual game or stuff like Dead or Alive where before you start a match you might get 4 seconds of dialog that is,
"What are you doing here?"
"I shall have my revenge!!!"
"Round 1, FIght"
The stories in these game are absolutely ridiculous and border on non-existent. Anime based off of them try to take that absolute nothing and spin it into some emotional and gripping tail. I think they fall short because while you play games, you watch anime. You can have absolute crap or nothing for a story in a fighting game and nobody cares as long as the gameplay is good. I think the popularity of the game (solely based off of gameplay) leads some anime production company to believe that the popularity is because of the story.
The Mortal Kombat film is the only quality fighting game movie mainly because they realized how stupid it all was and never tried to do something dumb like tell a story not based around people beating each other up in a tournament. The story was people going to an island and having to fight in a tournament. The entire story was them fighting in a tournament and everything else was in the background and only given enough screen time to add drama to the tournament fights.
@sickVisionz:
Playing through Blazblue right now, the story and characters in this game are actually quite good. Each character has their own individual story path in a visual novel like style where you make decisions and can get multiple endings, although most are bad ends or gag reels. Eventually this all culminates in a true ending path which will be continued in the next game. The whole story is going to span at least 4 full games.
Blazblue is so anime like already, I think an adaption would go quite well.
Modern directors simply lack the mental capacity to adequately express the artistic and high minded narrative expression found within the fighting game genre, some of gaming's most deep and philosophically profound stories are represented therein.
I'll never forget when Ryu dragon punched that waterfall... Quality.
@Dream said:
Dead on .Could not agree more.Put better than i could... an probably could not type that with out my own spelling errors either :/ but i still agree non the less.
So what you are really saying is that they should make an anime based on Tekken endings.
How could this Vice Pit episode go without anyone even mentioning the Tekken animated movie? Was it bad? Yes, but I still like watching it from time to time. Plus, the soundtrack was actually badass.
As for the live-action Tekken film, I was disappointed. It felt bland.
@Fat_Magnum said:
@TopHaZZard said:
I we're all onto something here... anime movies based entirely on the cutscenes of old fighting videogames. I guess what I'm saying is:
"TEKKEN KAI"
@sotyfan16 said:
Completely agree! I guess with the speedier format it just completely passed my mind... so here's the entire thing to watch and freak out over:
@samweller999:
You are a good man. I'm surprised it's on YouTube though since it has nudity.
For the most part, fighting game animes usually fail because, as others have said, most of them don't bother with a story or shoehorn one in after the fact. For what it's worth, Mori expressed interest in making a BlazBlue anime, though it is still in the "rumor" stage right now, but there have been manga and light novel spinoffs (and the few I've seen translated have been terrible).
Might sound weird, but if there's one fighting game I'd like to see an anime adaptation, it's BlazBlue. The story is huge and the fights don't take as much space as they would.