Trigger Happy
produce proportionally more realistic avatars of human characters. When Japanese fans got their first look at Final Fantasy VIII there was palpable outrage, because it seemed the characters had been “Westernized”: no longer the cute, deformed people of FFVII but longerlimbed and more “adult”-looking.
This is a widely held aesthetic preference among Japanese gamers; in fact, it can be traced back to physical distortions of the human form in Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo period (1603–1868). Jeremy Smith, managing director of British developers Core Design, confides that feedback from the Japanese audience suggested that they wanted Lara Croft, virtual idol extraordinaire of the Tomb Raider series and the most high-profile icon of Western gaming, to be more “mangafied”—that is, for her body to conform more to “deformed” standards. But Lara remained herself— still deformed, of course, but in a somewhat more subtle, and stereotypically Western, chesty-and- waspwaisted fashion. By contrast, the most successful Western games by far in Japan at the time of writing are the Crash Bandicoot series. Crash is a cartoonish, wide-eyed, spiky-haired orange marsupial with an enormous head and toothy grin. He is already “deformed,” and fits in nicely.
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