Caption / Original God
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Opera culture has never left the scene
On January 5, the 2.4 version of "Original God" was officially launched, and the new characters Shen He, Yun Wei and the replica of The Fish set off a global boom, helping it to reach the top of the multi-country best-seller list when it was launched.
In the new plot, a passage of "Goddess Splitting View" sung by Yun wei well integrates the opera elements into the game, and it is also a discussion of Chinese opera culture in the world, watching the foreigners cry at the same time, but also making domestic players shout "Renaissance", some players laughed that this is "Gothic Lolita singing Peking Opera", and some players shared this performance with the elders in the family to enjoy together.
Seeing the enthusiasm of global players for Yunpiao and traditional Chinese opera, Mihayou also specially recorded a video to introduce players to their mental journey of designing Yunpiao.
According to the video, the character of Yunyan was basically established as early as 2018, but with the continuous improvement of the attention of "Original God", the production team finally decided to combine this four-star character with the opera in a deeper way. To this end, the production team not only pulled the relevant designers to the theater to watch the performance for inspiration, but also worked hard to find a suitable opera teacher to dub Yunyan's singing segment, whether it was the original painter designing the costume or the modeler designing the action, he did a lot of homework around the opera elements.
During the design process, the production team did not use opera elements with stereotypes, but disassembled and integrated them into the worldview of the game. For example, based on the fact that Yunyan was wearing a regular costume instead of a costume, the production team decided not to use the color of the costume that was over-saturated, and designed the character actions based on the appearances, spinners, dancing guns, and punches in the opera. The production team also set Yunyi's character as a character who, although born in a traditional family to learn opera, does not reject fresh culture and is even very interested in rock and roll, and pins on her a beautiful vision of the integration of local cultures.
It is not difficult to find that in order to design a successful role, a solid technical art foundation and a rigorous production attitude are indispensable. The success of Yunying also shows us how a popular game can digest and absorb traditional cultural elements. Some traditional cultural elements that seem to be no longer popular, once reasonably integrated into the game, can bring players a "familiar freshness".
This method has often been used by overseas game manufacturers handily. In an era when the game industry was not developed enough, our cultural interpretation of games fell into the hands of others for a long time, from fighting games to Three Kingdoms games. Looking back at that period of history may allow us to better perceive how big the surprises brought to us by domestic games represented by "Original God" are today.
From the martial arts of opera to the king of fighting
In the last century, in the golden age of Japanese fighting games, Chinese characters deserved their own names, of which there were many characters based on Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. At the time, Hong Kong action movies provided countless inspirations for Japanese-style fighting games.
One of them cannot but be mentioned is Jackie Chan.
In 1983, when the red and white machine was just launched, Jackie Chan had already played his own style by relying on works such as "Drunken Fist" and "Snake-shaped Executioner". "Spartan X", released by the Japanese company Irm in 1984, was based on the movie "Fast Food Truck" starring Jackie Chan at that time.
Jackie Chan Kick Pavilion pioneered the reel-style action version of the game, creating the annual sales champion in 1985 and subsequently porting to multiple platforms, including red and white machines. Producer Takashi Nishiyama then jumped to join CAPCOM and developed a generation of classic "Street Fighter", after which he jumped to SNK to develop the "King of Fighters" series, which can be said that gold shines everywhere.
Akira Toriyama, who loves Jackie Chan movies, also added a tower-climbing chapter to his Dragon Ball comics, masruta, which is guarded by the Red Ribbon Legion, as a tribute to the game.
Jackie Chan has since become more and more active in the game world. The red and white machine features the classic Jackie Chan, developed by NOW, developer of the Takahashi Celebrity's Adventure Island series. As a late FC work, the game allows Jackie Chan to master a variety of skills, add more details to the map, and design a number of different styles of bosses, which has a lot of popularity in China.
In 1995, Jackie Chan personally participated in the recording and directing, and produced the real-life combat game "The Kung-Fu Master Jackie Chan" based on the chengjia class, which had strong traces of imitating "Mortal Kombat", and later dropped the bloody element at Jackie Chan's insistence.
Another game is Jackie Chan Stuntmaster, launched on PS in 2000. The game uses motion capture technology to inject Jackie Chan's action moves into the game. Limited to the console function of PS, the interactive items in the game scene are far less than the "furniture city" in Jackie Chan's movies, but Jackie Chan's unique signature action still makes this game circle a group of European and American fans.
Looking back at Jackie Chan's game history, it is not difficult to find that his influence on fighting games is not small. In fact, Jackie Chan himself is from the drama class martial arts, and Hong Kong action movies are also incubated from opera movies.
Hong Kong's earliest film company, Shaw Films (1958), started with the Wong Mei opera films directed by Lee Han-cheung. In the 1960s, martial arts films led by Hu Jinquan and Zhang Che rose to prominence, and their martial arts action and costume styling were still heavily influenced by various genres of opera. The "Seven Little Blessings" represented by Jackie Chan and Hong Jinbao come from the Peking Opera Drama Class "Chinese Drama Research Institute" opened by Zhan Yuan, and the "Chengjia Class" and "HongJia Class" subsequently established by Jackie Chan and Hong Jinbao are a kind of inheritance for this.
Jackie Chan's relationship with opera is, first of all, its martial arts style from the theater troupe. This style is to float, rate, and brittle according to the insider's saying, and the final martial arts effect presented to the audience is to look clean and sharp, play beautifully, and not drag mud and water. Compared to Bruce Lee's fist-to-flesh tough guy style, Jackie Chan's martial arts style is more performative, stylistic and rhythmic. In the process of continuous filming, Jackie Chan gradually created his own kung fu comedy style by drawing on the language and comedy elements of Western film lenses.
At the same time, the concept of martial arts from opera has always deeply influenced Jackie Chan, who has always insisted on difficult actions without relying on special effects, and uses live-action performances to challenge the limits of the body, which is not even understood by Western actors.
In fact, this concept of his stems from the fact that opera performance requires actors and audiences to communicate face-to-face with body language. Opera and film are just different forms, and the soul of performing for the audience is the same. Fighting games continue to strengthen character modeling, the pursuit of realistic action system (the so-called sense of blow), is also the inheritance of this kind of performance to strive for real concept. It is precisely because of his unique performance system that his film and television works radiate from Hong Kong to many countries and regions around the world, achieving such great success that it affected the creation of overseas games and animation content in the 1980s and 1990s.
Compete for traditional culture in the world of the three countries
Of course, no matter how retrospective, in today's action movies, it is still impossible to distinguish how many opera elements, and it is inevitable that the forced interpretation of opera through action movies or fighting games is far-fetched. However, the vitality of opera is not only the tradition of performing arts, its metaphysical part: costumes, movements, etc. also maintain a sufficient sense of existence in popular culture.
Even in fighting games, we can occasionally find more recognizable characters, such as the Sichuan opera character Mi Xing in "King of Fighters 14".
If we take our eyes off the fighting game, we can find more opera elements.
Take the Three Kingdoms that players are most familiar with. The glorious Three Kingdoms theme game draws a lot of inspiration from the mainland opera. For example, when Guangrong made "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" in his early years, he needed to draw the heads of many martial artists, and the production team that suffered from lack of materials found a lot of inspiration from the many three kingdoms-themed opera faces in the mainland.
An opera portrait in the opening animation of True Three Kingdoms 2
With the increasing number of warriors in the "True Three Kingdoms Matchless" series, Glory has excavated many characters from mainland folk opera stories, such as Guan Yinping and Guan Suo, who are all characters who were active in opera in the early days. The name Sun Shangxiang comes from neither the history books nor the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but from the opera Ganlu Temple, which is now a household name through the promotion of glorious games.
The glorious character design strives to have a provenance and its origin, and it is this intention that makes the glorious character have far more vitality than other Three Kingdoms games, and even once formed a certain "human hegemony". In the early years, the character design of many domestic games in the Three Kingdoms was always criticized by players for "a strong sense of vision", because there was a lingering "glorious flavor" in the character design. And the Three Kingdoms games such as "Romance of the Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition" provided by Glory can actually kill a bloody road in the domestic SLG market in a red sea, and help Ali, who is not good at games, turn around and enter the ranks of top publishers, relying on the deep foundation laid by "Glory Face" in the vast player group.
If glorious human influence is not convincing enough, we can take a more intuitive example of color.
After the popularity of the "True Three Kingdoms Matchless" series, Glory gradually laid the theme color of "Wei Lan, Shu Green, and Wu Hong" in the Three Kingdoms. Before the glory, the theme color of the Three Kingdoms has always been in a state of "competition for supremacy".
For example, in the 94th edition of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", the color configuration used by the crew is "Wei Hei (blue), Shu Hong (orange), wu green". Zhao Qingxia, the costume artist of the crew, introduced in the interview tidbits that the use of this color matching is mainly to facilitate the audience to distinguish the camp. This color scheme has also been adopted by many domestic games since then, such as "Three Kingdoms Killing" inherited this set of colors, and characters such as Sun Shangxiang in "Glory of the King" can also be regarded as a continuation of this.
In Japan, the color scheme of the three countries at that time was not uniform. For example, in 1992, the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" animated film trilogy, which was planned by Shinano, adopted the color scheme of "Wei Hong, Shu Lan, and Wu Huang", and the animated version of "Hengshan Guanghui Three Kingdoms" used the banner of "Wei Huang, Shu Lan, wu green" (the color of the game version is different and not uniform).
No matter how the color of others changed, At that time, Guan Yu of Japan was uniformly dressed in green clothes, and the "green hat" was indeed popular from the 94th edition of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms". The process of Guan Yu's "greening" can also be clearly observed in the head portrait of the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" of the glorious dynasties.
In the end, the glorious Game of Three Kingdoms put an end to the dispute over the color of the theme. Today, this color scheme is even regarded by some gamers as some kind of "traditional culture" based on historical facts.
But if you really want to look through history, the military uniforms of the Three Kingdoms period did not have such a color matching tradition. Cao Pi dai Han stood on his own, and it is said that to follow the five virtues doctrine should be Tude instead of fire virtue and follow yellow, which can also be seen from Cao Wei's name "Huang Chu". Liu Bei regarded himself as the orthodox Han room, and naturally continued the red color of yan han. The situation in Eastern Wu is more complicated, and it can also be seen from its era name from "Huang Wu" and "Huang Long" to "Chi Wu" and "Shen Feng", which can also be seen in Sun Quan's constant swing of his own positioning.
Of course, this can only be explained after the establishment of each of the three countries. Cao, Liu, and Sun were nominally Han subjects before the emperor, and naturally they mostly followed the Han military system. Labeling the forces of various countries in different colors is itself something that began to become popular after the rise of video games, and it is the history of video games "creation".
Even if it is glorious, in the "Peerless" to follow the theme color, in the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" still use a more rigorous color matching, such as Liu Bei's image has always been the red-hot Han orthodoxy.
Through the glorious example, we can see that traditional culture is not monolithic, but constantly changing in the process of cultural dissemination. Everyone can add their own content to pop culture, and in the end, classics that haven't been washed away over time become "traditional culture."
With its many years of deep cultivation of the culture of the Three Kingdoms, Glory can even turn the theme color that did not exist into a "tradition". This is a revelation for all gaming practitioners. Instead of lamenting that "the best Three Kingdoms games have been done by Glory", it is possible to imagine that shaping culture through the medium of games can be promising. The influence of today's games is enough to shape a generation's perception of the world.
But the shaping is not graffiti, just as the premise of glorious reversal of color cognition is a sufficiently elaborate character design. Without this foundation, who cares about its coloring scheme? It can be seen that if you want to gain the right to speak in culture, the first step is to personally plunge into the long river of traditional culture, so that you can become the person who understands the tradition, and others will listen to your interpretation.
epilogue
Kung Fu movies, fighting, and the Three Kingdoms game are just one component of pop culture. Even if we look at the leopard in the tube, we can find that the opera never leaves the scene, but transforms into different elements and infiltrates the popular culture. In this sense, Mihayu's character design actually grasps the correct posture for reshaping culture. It is the continuous progress of the domestic game industry, represented by companies such as Mihayou, that gives our game designers the confidence to use materials from the global cultural library to design the characters in their hands.
Culturally inferior people practice fundamentalism because they fear the destruction of their fragile culture. The first step in cultural self-confidence is to dare to take out their own cultural elements to integrate creations. Those voices that require traditional culture to be carried away unchanged are essentially only creative barrenness and creative laziness.
More than 20 years ago, when the most glorious period of fighting games was created by the Japanese people with a character representing a civilization, making Japanese games popular all over the world. 20 years later, mainland developers will design characters with the same idea, and can also make overseas players like characters full of Chinese elements, which is the best way for us to use the medium of games to export culture.