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
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.
