A LOOOONG TIME AGO HULK AND CLAYTON HAD A
SERIES ABOUT BETTER GAMES AND WHAT NOT. ..
THIS IS SOMETHING LIKE A SEQUEL OR THE DLC EXCEPT ITS FREE.
BASICALLY, CLAYTON HAS BEEN RESEARCHING VARIOUS THINGS FOR A GAME HE'S MAKING IN THE DISTANT FUTURE, AND ANYTHING OF PARTICULAR INTEREST HE'S GOING TO TALK ABOUT IN THIS SERIES..
For those that haven't been paying attention to anime lately, we recently had the news that
Bleach for all intensive purposes has been cancelled until further notice.While no official reason has been stated, we do have
opinions (backed by very very sexy science) out their like our very own
modsquad who believe that general interest tapered off after the Aizen saga. I didn't tell modsquad much about it at the time, but I had done a little research on the topic a while ago to improve a game idea.
I could go on forever about how bad the dubbing in English was, how 500+ episodes is just stupid, how the plot doesn't make sense, how the plot had unexplained elements, the lack of true death, and the ever so rigorous amount of plot holes, but none of that was what I really focused on during my studies.
A long time ago when I first saw this series, I remember seeing Ichigo powering up for the first time, it had a sort of eerie blueish glow outline that gave the impression that Ichigo had in some way changed. The music would also cut in to kind of fill the moment, and if done right make you feel energized or excited that you are about to see something crazy. I'd like to show an example, but it seems copyright has blocked most of the good ones online...TIME FOR HULK DOODLES!
Alright, Now here's the interesting bit, depending on how big the glow was and how the moment was set we start seeing different reactions. If the glow took up the whole page and it didn't have a specific reason, I was seeing stress, annoyment, dissapointment, and exhaustion from myself and others involved with the research.
Bleach has this tendency to focus more on the talking and the fighting, so doing a large DBZ inspired power up ( Bleach would take 3- 10 seconds) for the fight was all too common... here's a DBZ clip for reference ( DBZ can take 6- 30 minutes) .
Alright, so why this sudden change in opinion? Milking the franchise
certainly had an effect, and no purpose to some of the fights would also
be another, but we weren't looking at the series. We were only looking
at some silly special effect and how it was being used.
Our conclusion was the intensity, hue, and style being the deciding factors. We never realized it in the beginning, but each of the little power ups were very very different, and the ones used during side arcs were generally less fancy then in the main arc. I'm not going to bore you with numbers, but lets say out of the hundreds of times Ichigo has done the little power up only 50 or so looked genuinely the same, or at least shared common elements. Why? because to the anime these were the moments that mattered.
Retention in games is the idea that you need key moments all throughout the game meant to revitalize the viewer. In truth this is something first created in books, later movies, music, anime, ect, and you're supposed to build, build, and build for one of these critical moments, then some kind of emotional release after ( the before mentioned excitement) . In anime and games if you never see a build and never see a moment of excitement occur, then your project is going to lose retention within the viewers and players. Eventually they'll stop playing / viewing all together. In the case of Bleach, their was a kind of
final-ness with the Aizen arc, and much like World Of Warcraft the developers tried to keep it
going afterwords with
very mixed
results.
In Bleaches case we saw the builds taking longer and longer as the side arcs continued to grow in intolerable sizes. These side arc increases were necessary because at one point the anime was a week behind the anime, and unlike south park they can't make an entire episode within a
week. So with lower quality, the need to fill time, and a serious stretching of everything involved means that less care and attention was made in that power up build, hence why certain moments made people feel excitement while in other moments disgust..
In terms of games I learned that if you ever use a power up like this, then we need two things, consistency and eventual change. At first it should be something small, whether it be a small glow or some form of attack ...it needs to have a beginning. As the game continues and we see the player change we should also see changes occurring within these basics. It could be anything from a chain of attacks like we see in kingdom hearts, a grow in the hue to envelope the player and his weapons, perhaps something that represents his current paragon status, maybe even something that is supposed to be a direct symbol of his soul, but that change needs to occur, and in between each of these changes the current form must always remain the same.
ITS ONLY IN THE STILLNESS THAT HULK LATER FEELS THE CHANGE!
