I don't know why I'm surprised that
Andrew Lloyd Webber now has a game coming out for the Wii. I mean,
it's only logical that a man so shameless in self-promoting himself
in every other form of media would turn to video games eventually.
This is probably the next logical step after reality show hosting and
cannibalizing his own works for profit.
I guess it just seems weird because you
don't see a whole lot intersection between “video games” and
“musicals' on the Venn diagram of life. This is probably because,
despite increasing amounts of evidence to the contrary, the video
game demographic is perceived as almost exclusively male. And men
don't like musicals, because they're too close to opera which is
“culture” and all red-blooded men must avoid anything with a
whiff of culture about it like the plague. (This infallible wisdom
has been handed down to us by generations of gender based humor,
along with such timeless maxims such as “women are weepy” and
“men are infantile morons who are liable to hurt themselves if
unsupervised.”) It one of those things that doesn't seem like a
natural combination, like the Olympics and intelligent event
coverage.
And yet, a handful of video
game/musical crossovers do exist. Most of these come from Japan,
which is well-known for its love of gaming, theatricality, and
seriously weird shit. The earliest of these is probably Arm Joe,
a fighting game featuring characters from Les Miserables.
(The game's title is a play on Les Mis' Japanese
title Ah, Mijou!,
which translated means “Jean Valjean's Super Mega-Battle Rangers.”)
There's something bizarre and yet extremely cathartic about watching
Valjean and Javert punching the stuffing out of each other, or having
Cosette and Eponine duke it out for Marius' affections. For those of
you looking to play lesser-known characters, the game offers
Valjean's robot double, a bunny named Ponpon, and a character known
simply as “Police.” I'll bet some of the bit players on the
barricade are kicking themselves because they didn't get the cut
ahead of Ponpon and Police.
For
those of you who are lovers and not fighters, a company called Mirai
Soft has created a dating sim loosely based on Phantom of
the Opera. Dating sims are a
genre of game entirely alien to me, and this one is entirely in
Japanese so I'm still a little fuzzy on the whole plot, even after
seeing the (NSFW) trailer and reading this Let's Play of it, I still can't quite figure out what the Hell the
point of it all is. As far as I can tell, the player takes the role
of Christine who gets to interact with several other male characters
and maybe fall in love with one or more of them, even though one of
them is likely to be her long-lost brother. Oh, and have sex. Lots
and lots of sex. So basically it's a video game version of a porno,
which makes that four things the Japanese do very well. Gaming,
theatricality, seriously weird shit, porno, and androgyny. Five.
Five things.
And
that rather awkward Monty Python inspired
segue brings us to the next subject: a musical based on a video game.
The all-female Takarazuka Revue, a company well-known for being on
the cutting edge of weird Japanese shit, has developed a series of
shows based around the Ace Attorney series.
I'm not sure why they chose this particular property as the source
for their first video game based show, apart from its popularity and
that enough of the characters in it look feminine enough as to make
no difference. I suspect somewhere, someone just couldn't resist the
idea of making a big dance number around somebody shouting
“OBJECTION!”
I'd actually like
to see more video-game based musicals. The genre borrows from
everywhere else for inspiration, so why not this? We could have
Mario tap-dancing on Goomba heads, an epic villain song for Diablo, a
dramatic confrontation duet between GlaDOS and Wheatley...the
possibilities are endless.
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