July Musings: Anime Dreams

There was a time when anime was new to us in the US, when it was opening up new vistas, showing us that animation could be all these other things that the likes of Disney would never dream of. We got giant robots, magical girls, martial artists with ki blasts and Jusenkyo curses, and a window into another culture. In hindsight there was a lot that was problematic, but it had stories of love and loss, tales that challenged our notions of gender, and in some cases sex and gore that was largely unthinkable in Western animation. (Ralph Bakshi notwithstanding.)

Anime clubs and conventions started springing up, and since this was before broadband internet was really a thing, they exposed us to all kinds of anime that would’ve been impossible to find as English-speakers an ocean away from the source. We saw Combustible Campus Guardress and Elementalors, we came back week after week for Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, and we only occasionally got an enticing taste of Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball Z. I didn’t see it as a secret club that should shun outsiders, but a new and exciting thing that we should share with as many people as possible. (And another finger curled on the monkey’s paw, so that it’s now flipping the bird.)

Mike Pondsmith showed the potential for mixing anime and role-playing in the 80s with Mekton and Teenagers From Outer Space, but he was largely alone in that, and not just because Gundam and UruseiYatsura—those games’ major inspirations—were pretty hard to come by at the time. Japan had its own little TRPG subculture, but at the time it was even less accessible than anime. Everything there had an enviable anime aesthetic, even if there were relatively few games that were explicitly anime. A few American RPG publishers put out other anime games, but for a long time they were almost all mecha-themed. There were Heavy Gear and of course Palladium’s take on Robotech, plus MechWarrior and oddities like 1993’s Wooden Suits & Iron Men. For better or for worse, the first successful anime RPG that wasn’t mecha was Big Eyes Small Mouth.

I’ve written a lot about Guardians of Order, but BESM came to dominate this particular niche, to the point where if you mentioned another anime game you’d sometimes get push back in the form of the question of why they should bother if they already have BESM. It was just right for the System Doesn’t Matter philosophy of the RPG scene of the late 90s. I don’t know that the rest of the RPG scene actually was producing anything better (with the notable exception of Mike Pondsmith, who was still slowly revising and expanding Mekton and TFOS), but there were some attempts that fell through the cracks. My own efforts yielded Thrash, which in hindsight was deeply flawed design-wise, but since fighting games were a genre people were hungry for, it got me my first bit of online notoriety. My other attempts at “universal” anime RPGs fizzled out, but a few others did manage to get books out the door even during the period of Tri-Stat domination.

Tinker’s Damn isn’t great from a design standpoint, but it had a whole lot of heart. It came as a slim white paper back book, and featured a pair of mascot girls, a squirrel girl and a catgirl (who work a waitresses as cover for their jobs as gun-wielding troubleshooters). The designer did all the art himself, and while it was kind of amateurish, it nonetheless had a distinctive and cohesive feel. The game itself wasn’t amazing, but it picked its spot (more gear-oriented anime like Gunsmith Cats and Area 88) and made a good try. Apart from a few articles on their website, it didn’t get anything beyond the core book, and it faded into obscurity.

RandomAnime had pretty bad artwork (except for cover art that came from a Japanese middle school art club), but it tried to do a bit of everything anime, and it did it with gusto. Where TD only got the one book and a couple of online articles, RandomAnime had a GM screen and two supplements, Collectemon (their Pokemon pastiche) and Minionomicon(which covered a variety of topics, but concentrated on minions that characters could have).

OVA was what happened when Clay Gardener took his ideas for an RPG adaptation of Battlemaster High (an online freeform RP) and turned them into a universal anime RPG. He hired artists to do some gorgeous art, and brought his own graphic design skills to bear to make a beautiful book. The result was a game that did everything BESM was trying to do, but better and in fewer pages. Clay still hasn’t gotten around to doing any supplements for it, but he did put out a Revised version of the core rules, further refining them and giving the book a facelift with tons of full-color art from Niko Geyer.

I suspect BESM helped stunt the growth of anime-inspired RPGs in much the same way that the glut of d20 stuff stunted tabletop RPGs in general. While there’s a nontrivial crossover between anime and RPG fandoms, for a long time that crossover didn’t extend to the industry per se. There was a vocal segment of the old guard that didn’t get anime (and to be fair there’s a lot of trashy anime) and were oddly proud of not getting it. You got the occasional attempt by an established publisher like GURPS Mecha, which had mediocre art and inaccessible mechanics drawn from the particularly complex GURPS vehicle rules. Mutants & Masterminds got a prettier and broader look at anime with Alejandro Melchor’s Mecha & Manga, and Michael Surbrook graduated from statting anime characters up in Championsto writing some anime-inspired Hero System books.

When I had designed Channel A and decided to look for a publisher, I ran into the problem that precious few board game publishers seemed like they would have the faintest idea how to market to anime fans, and the RPG scene was about the same. A lot has changed, but the most important factor is the democratization of the medium, with Print On Demand and e-books making it so that you can publish a book without having to take out a loan for a print run. Today RPGs are perhaps even worse as a way to make a living, but the barriers to entry for creators are nonetheless lower than ever. The really good anime RPGs come from individual creators for whom the approval of a major publisher or distributor isn’t really a factor, people who sit outside of Wizards of the Coast or even the few other TTRPG publishers still doing well enough to have actual offices. Games like Breakfast Cult and Flying Circus show their influences while still being unique and creative, much like the better manga artists do. These kinds of games don’t (can’t) rely on the traditional TTRPG audience, but there are a lot of people out there who’ll pick up references to Dangan Ronpa and Porco Rosso more than Michael Moorcock or H.P. Lovecraft.

The indie RPG scene that Ron Edwards helped birth through the Forge did a lot of fascinating things, but for the most part it wasn’t an anime crowd either. There were some exceptions like Jake Richmond and P.H. Lee, but most of the designers that came out of the Forge had more literary inspirations (My Life With Master, Shock: Social Science Fiction) or charted new territory (Dogs in the Vineyard). While the Forge didn’t contribute a lot to anime RPGs directly, the widening of the possibilities of TTRPG design helped equip the next generation of designers with tools to make better games and better distinguish themselves. When an RPG’s rules can serve to reinforce its stated themes, a magical girl game can be more than just a generic RPG with magical girl characters, and it’s a lot easier to make a case for your game being a better option than BESM (which is back in a 4th Edition that isn’t especially interesting and hasn’t undergone any fundamental changes).

An important aspect of this sea change that I’ve had the honor of taking part in is the introduction of Japanese TRPGs to the English-speaking world. Maid RPG became the prelude to Tenra Bansho Zero and Golden Sky Stories, not to mention Shinobigami and Double Cross. While the Japanese TRPG scene has some talented and innovative designers like Ryo Kamiya and Toichiro Kawashima, the bigger thing that Japanese games brought us was a widening of possibilities in terms of themes. It was the most powerful reminder that it was less important to make a game be “anime” than to make an enjoyable and cohesive experience, yet inspirations pulled from anime can certainly be a part of that. While anime and manga can get a bit creatively incestuous at times, the better creators in the field also look outside of it for ideas. Hirohiko Araki helped birth the shounen fighting manga genre as we know it with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but he also cites classical sculpture and the paintings of Paul Gauguin as important sources of inspiration. While Japanese TRPG designers certainly aren’t ignoring Japanese media, they’re also looking at Western media—including RPGs—as fuel for their creativity.

All of these developments in anime-inspired RPGs were happening while the anime fandom was growing by leaps and bounds, to the point where it started to get exhausting at times. Manga and anime created with real passion and originality have to compete with cynical fanservice, and while there’s definitely still good stuff out there, Sturgeon’s Law is very much in full effect. It’s hard to say how much of this is just that I’m getting older, but while I don’t begrudge the kids their fun, I can’t say I like how a lot of the worst takes on Twitter come from people with anime avatars. Of course, that’s partly because while Japan genuinely is more conservative than the U.S. in a lot of ways, we don’t really see how there are in fact Japanese people fighting for progressive causes. There are Pride marches and protests for a better Japan. While my enjoyment of anime is more discriminating than it used to be—I skip over a lot of shows on Crunchyroll when they seem overly fanservicey or fascist or just stupid—I still find a lot to enjoy. Like anything else, I have to find the subset of it that works for me.

Seven Seas is even publishing the KonoSuba RPG in English. While it’s a F.E.A.R. game that probably won’t blow anyone away with innovative design—and there’s always the possibility that Seven Seas will ultimately conclude that it’s a failed experiment—it’s nonetheless an exciting new development to see a non-D&D RPG with a popular anime license in the hands of a comparatively mainstream publisher that understands anime. I have a hard time caring too much about a big picture that I have so little power to change, but I’m glad to see this little niche is proving so fertile.