In the world of anime, everything is potentially source material: manga, light novels, other anime (Japan is scarcely shy about rebooting its own classics), classical or recent history, and — the title implied it, didn't it? — video games. It's the last of these I have the most trouble with, anime adaptations of video games, and not because I have an inherent problem with the idea of such an adaptation. It's because I've struggled with the problem of how to talk about such adaptations in a meaningful way when my own interest in video games is far eclipsed by my interest in anime. I always feel like I'm missing half the picture.
The youngest art form
Not long ago, in a conversation to a friend, I described video games as "the youngest art form". We've only just started sussing out video games as a cultural phenomenon, let alone a medium of expression, and so the whole critical apparatus around them is also still young. What's less young, perhaps, is the critical methods brought to analyzing how something translates from one medium into another. For someone who is doing fantastic ongoing work in this department as far as how pop culture artifacts are translated between media, go look up the analyses of my colleague Scott Delahunt and his "Lost in Translation" series.
With anime-to-video-games-and-sometimes-back, I'm slightly hamstrung by my own inclinations: I'm far more likely to watch the anime of something than ever play the video game of it. Some of that is practical — the amount of time I'd need to invest in the average video game could be used to watch two, three, or four shows in toto. It's not that I look down my nose at gaming, it's that my priorities are stacked differently. My colleague Eric Frederiksen covers the field far more aggressively than I could ever hope to, and so it's through him I end up absorbing via osmosis (and late-night chats) much of what I casually know about gaming. Likewise, I keep him posted about what's new in anime. Such a division of labor seems only logical; It's a wonder a single person could assimilate even half of what's on either side of that fence.
Given how games command such attention and demand such deeper analysis, it's hard not to feel like any attempt to discuss an anime adaptation of a game is inherently incomplete without some study of the game itself. But wouldn't the same be true of any anime adapted from any other field of source material that has just as large a field of study and enthusiasm around it? It isn't that games don't deserve the analysis attention they're now getting — and it's all long overdue, if you ask me — it's that such attention shouldn't be the basis for a kind of aesthetic exceptionalism. What's tempted me to say the opposite is the newness, the not-like-anything-else-before-it-ness of video gaming.
Out with the old criterion, in with the new
When the movies were still young, and the first writings that we could call film criticism as we currently know it appeared, it was even then considered unfair to talk about the movies as if they were nothing more than high-tech children of stage plays. Things that were possible in one weren't in the other, and while a great many plays (and novels, and other things) were made into films, it made little sense to demand movies that were nothing more than stage plays. Even then there was a sense that the movies needed to be their own thing, that they deserved their own criticism — and that whenever you looked at how something adapted into film, it helped to know where it was coming from and why.
It helped, to be sure, but I'm not convinced it was mandatory. What mattered most when you reviewed a film — whether it was a film made from a book, or penned specifically for the screen — was how well it worked as a film, and not as an adaptation. Few people banked on the idea that you could assume people had read the book in question, or would do so after they left the theater. That was a convenient bonus, not the main motivator.
The same goes for any adaptation of video game to anime. Whatever one might say about video games as an art form, those discussions come in a distant second when a game is source material for an anime. All most people ever deal with is the show or movie itself, and they have to encounter that on its own terms, pass or fail.
What again gets under my skin about this whole matter is how there are things about gaming that not only don't map one-to-one to TV or movies, but to any other art form. Nonlinearity, for one; many games aren't played in any one particular fashion, but can be played through in any number of ways, with any number of goals, any number of run-throughs. (There's that damn aesthetic exceptionalism again!) Since no adaptation can truly do justice to such a thing, isn't appreciating only the adaptation like eating only the toppings on a pizza?
On one's own two feet
I've wrestled with this while taking in the anime adaptations of a number of video games that clearly depended on being replayable: Steins;Gate and Fate/stay night come most readily to mind. It even surfaced when dealing with an adaptation that was based on material that I suspected had a far more linear run-through (Bayonetta), if only because I sensed that, too, would still lose something in the adaptation process. But at the end of the day, the adaptation was all I had, and all I could go on. Did it work on its own terms? Did it tell a story I felt satisfied with?
Source material is a starting point, not a goal, and you can use a video game to tell a brilliant and inventive story as readily as you can us it to tell a shallow and linear one. Bayonetta transposed the most prominent portions of the game's plot to its own, animated them lavishly, and more or less considered its job done. It wasn't particularly deep, but it didn't have to be; its function was to be entertaining, and it accomplished that goal. Fate/stay night is now in its second animated adaptation — one for each of the game's possible play-throughs, evidently — but each time I've sat down with it, I've felt rebuffed; the whole thing feels so procedural and tedious, it's hard to imagine anyone who's not already a fan of the games bothering with it. The fact that I haven't played the games makes me question my reaction, though: are we talking about something that's genuinely critic-proof since it's for fans of the game only, or something that should stand on its own without the game but just doesn't?
But then there was Steins;Gate, easily the best anime I've yet seen that has a game as its source material. Some of that I credit back to the game itself, since the original story apparently tracks it quite closely. Without sitting down with a copy of the game and plowing through it, though, I have to take that on faith. But from the standpoint of someone with little of a need for the game and the anime to track each other closely, it scarcely matters. The end result, for me, was a thrilling and moving story with a great premise and a cast of characters I came to care deeply about. Did it really matter where it all came from?
Perhaps it does, but not in the sense that everything else must revolve around that. It matters for those of us who are students of how something is adapted from one thing to another — what was traded off, what was mixed back in, how the things that can only be found in a game were made into the things that work comfortably as a linear experience. Those are intriguing questions, and they're likely to draw the attention of as many people who don't play the games as those who do.
But they're not the only questions, and most of the time, they're not the most urgent one either. There comes a moment in any such discussion when you have to drop everything and grapple with the one thing most everyone else will face: On its own, shorn of all the things that might prop it up, is this piece of work its own piece of work? That's where I find myself starting with most any game-to-anime production, and that is more often than not where I end up, because many of the other people who'd sit down to watch it would be asking themselves the very same thing.
