Luminous

An interesting question, and while the obvious short answer will always be "Someone will enjoy them", I think anime games do often fail to make it into the upper echelon of AAA gaming titles, and much like movie games, will probably stay like that. After all, Budokai Tenkaichi or Clash of Ninja will never never be Soul Calibur or Tekken.

I think the reason they turn out mediocre is because of the lack of creativity. When you are using somebody else's show, I think you have a lot of restrictions with what you can do. The story pretty much has to be the same, the characters pretty much the same, etc...With an original IP, you're free to test out new ideas or plots, but I feel that anime games are held back by the fact that most of the time they aren't allowed to experiment as much as they might like to. As a result you get games like Clash of Ninja and so forth; decent and fun games, but not necesarrily something that will always be reccommended to people who don't enjoy the anime series.

I'd like to see an anime game that could spread beyond its niche audience, and possibly work backwards to how anime games usually work, and actually get people who buy the game to sort of become interested in the anime, rather than the game being essentially fan service to the people who already enjoy the anime enough to love the game regardless. I personally don't buy games based off animes for this reason. Rather then sell well because of brilliant gameplay and intriguing plot, they can often sell just by resting on the laurels of the license.

But anyways, they fill a niche, so of course they'll keep being made, and I'm certainly not against that. I'd just like to see some flare out of these games for once; the way I so often see it from original IPs.

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