Feature By

Matt Weise

In her book "Samurai From Outer Space", Japan historian/anime fan Antonia Levi coins a term she affectionately calls "the nerd hero." Anime, of course, is what the Japanese call their animation, and it often features insecure, dorky men in love stories where they are inexplicably pursued by well-meaning and sweet women. This trend began in the late seventies with anime series like Urusei Yatsura and continued into the 90s with series like Tenchi and Ah, My Goddess!. What these series offer, Levi implies, is a more reality-friendly view of romance in the pop-consciousness of modern Japanese fantasyscapes. The male protagonists are designed to more accurately reflect the mundane readers that make up their fan-base, and the result is often a gentle reconciliation between fantasy and reality, a post-modern reinvention of storybook romance that addresses more directly the anxieties of modern social life.

Interestingly, Japanese videogames have experienced a similar phenomenon, although many may not have realized it. When heavy narrative emphasis in gaming began to gain steam in the late 80s, much of it was borrowed directly from already-established anime traditions, resulting in a wide variety of storytelling styles. However, those styles were complicated somewhat by currently established trends within videogames themselves. At that time, right at the end of the 8-bit era (roughly 1989-90), games were fairly limited in their subject matter. Whatever the genre, plots involved little else than simply triumphing over adversity, and this helped shape the way more narrative-based genres such as RPGs (role-playing games) typically choose their content. In this era, Japanese RPGs were based around classical ideas of standard hero quests in which a bright, young hero triumphs over evil and wins the girl. At the time, this seemed only appropriate. After all, what better way to explore a new medium than with the earliest, most mythical, and most simple traditions of storytelling? Games like Dragonquest and the original Legend of Zelda were clear examples of this. These games established a contextual arena for much of Japan's gaming industry, and it would be a few more years until these mythical stories collided with the growing modern sensibilities of the anime that inspired them.

Enter the 32-bit era. Although throughout the 16-bit era games branched out considerably in theme and content, it wasn't until the 32-bit era that it developed the irony anime had in a self-reflective sense. Like the phenomenon of Levis "nerd hero," games finally began to subtly comment on the medium itself as well as the audience it had spawned. The result is a series of games that incorporate the modern and post-modern notions of popular anime into themselves, which includes, naturally, their own version of the "nerd hero."

Possibly the most significant (and least understood) example of the modern Japanese gaming nerd hero is Cloud Strife from Squaresoft's Final Fantasy VII. The game itself works as an excellent post-modern text on Japanese gaming in general, and no more so than in the way it handles its central protagonist.

The difference between videogame nerd heroes and the anime male leads that inspire them are that they have to exist within the tradition of classical hero narratives. The formal gameplay structures of Japanese RPGs (combat, exploration, etc.) do not offer room for a departure that would support a nerd-hero in a normal sense. After all, how do you make a character that reflects the anxieties of modern players while still satisfying the inevitable "save the world" narrative outcome? In other words, how do you make the player believe a nerd is a hero? For Squaresoft the answer is simple: lie.