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I feel like Shangri-La Frontier was written by someone who has played a lot of MMORPGs, and captured the social magic of the players working together to solve the mysteries of the game, and/or exploit the hell out of it.
If someone was to take the story of a widely played MMO, say World Of Warcraft for example, take the plot seriously, study the lore of the guilds and players and things that happened between them, weird bugs, events like Leeroy Jenkins or the famous South Park “Make Love, Not WarCraft” episode, and work that into a story, that could be a decent anime.
My friends are having me watch Shangri-La Frontier at the moment (we take turns suggesting anime to watch together) and while I’m not really enthused by the story, I will absolutely recognize how very… let’s call it true-to-life it is wrt games and gaming culture. A LOT of little details in the fictional games and how the players interact with them (like the whole kuso gaming community) really proves how well the author knows their stuff.
Also the dub is top-fucking-notch, using terms I’m intimately familiar with from the gaming sphere but have never heard from localized anime before.
Looks like this author knows ball
Goblin Slayer, NieR:Automata Ver1.1a, and Cyberpunk Edgerunners come to mind.
And take Dragon’s Dogma and the Persona animes as a template for what not to do.
Can you really call Edgerunners an adaptation? It’s a different story set in the same universe.
Depends on how you want to interpret the question. Is it about adapting the story of a specific game, or is it about adapting the setting of a game into anime form. Nier would be the former, Edgerunner the latter. Goblin Slayer is something in between. So regardless of how the question was meant, I gave a example.
Clannad or a lot of the Key visual novel adaptations. But not sure if that’s fair since visual novel are already written as good stories and they choose to have a good structure arround nagisa in the anime despite they couls choose adaptation with multiple char they made it correct only telling one good path
Now that you mentioned VNs, I remember sharing before that I would absolutely adore seeing a Tomoyo After anime.
Kemono Friends. It’s based on a shitty mobile game, and it’s target audience is kids I guess.
I was scouting it for the kids and expected to turn it off after the first episode, but it took me by surprise. Where are they, what happened in the past, who are the Kemono friends, who and why is the main character? I watched it in one go.
Also the cast of characters they encounter on their journey were bizarre and funny. And as it is targeted at a younger demographic, it’s very relaxing.
All this based on a mobile game. Weird. An adaption done right!
I would love to see a Killzone adaptation, but just the first one. The later ones all kind of sucked ass story-wise. Honestly the only parts I liked about that game was the level design and the story (such as it was). All of the levels almost seemed to be designed by entirely different people. Slums, malls, beach houses, factories, space stations, swamps… kept the focus away from the awful animations and lackluster design of npc’s. There was only one enemy and one ‘good guy’ npc that was bald. The death animations had three frames. One for being hit, one that was mid-fall, and one face down on the ground. No such thing as rag doll in that game…
The plot was intriguing, but I honestly don’t remember it. I just know there were two people that betrayed each side and it turned out to be really ambiguous about who was good or bad, both ‘sides’ had causes that anyone could relate too; however, the world building wasn’t as in depth to provide that information. I would love an anime that builds on that while using the same level design for it’s sets.
What do you mean by “game-based anime adaptation”? Like an anime that takes place in a fictional video game? An anime based on a real game?
For the former, Shangri-La Frontier has been mentioned but needs to be mentioned again. It’s super good and enjoyable and I like that the game actually feels like it could be a real game. Unlike stuff like BOFURI — which is still an enjoyable anime — the game mechanics all made sense. You don’t have Maple stumbling onto unique quests that only she finds that give her absolutely broken OP abilities and the dev’s going “oh no, who could have seen Maple becoming OP by getting OP abilities?”
Log Horizon is another great twist, where people get isekai’d into a video game and then have to deal with the fact that the game is “real” and NPCs aren’t just mindless bits of code.
Guilty pleasure goes to Sword Art Online. No, it’s definitely not perfect, but it ticks a lot of boxes for a silly fun anime about death games.
For the latter, I can’t imagine there are too many options. You have Pokemon, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, NieR: Automata V1.1a (which is really just the video game’s story verbatim), Stein’s Gate, the entire Fate and .hack franchises, and probably a bunch of stuff I don’t remember. But you also have loads upon loads of absolute CRAP too.
I keep thinking there’s a secret third option because of the ambiguous way the question was phrased – something like how seemingly half of all isekai have gaming-inspired abilities despite not being set in nor based on a video game world.
Right? I remember initially thinking “video games based on anime? Like… that Attack on Titan game?”
Well, there is that but I was thinking more like the world of The Weakest Tamer where everyone has a magical “skill” dictated by how many “stars” they have and the MC has a voice in their head that tells them things they may not know (which goes unheard by the audience but seems to chime in like a player through a screen (or maybe just a ghost)), but otherwise has no obvious tells of being a video game world. Unless you count the MC doing inventory management on the regular.
I know a Dark Souls adaptation initially sounds like a terrible idea, but it could be great if it focuses on some of the interesting characters in the lore and does not touch the player characters. I always thought a prequel to Dark Souls 2 would be perfect for a series, with Vendrick and Aldia and all that stuff.
My ideal would be a movie covering the backstory of Lautrec from the original Dark Souls. What did that guy get up to before he got imprisoned in the Undead Church?
Might also give some insight into why he does the strange things he does in the game
