Samurai, ninjas, and the various guys they wear with them have always been a popular element in the field of video games, and the footprints of these island violent elements have traveled throughout the world, from "Tenji" and "Ghost Warrior" all the way to "Ren Wang" and "Only Wolf". However, in recent years, the most pure taste, the most elaborate style, from geographical objects to cultural landscapes have perfectly presented the medieval Japanese game, but it is "Soul of Tsushima" produced by the American production team Docker Punch.
The joy of the Japanese resisting the Mongols in American games can happen, not because the Americans who make the game have any suspicions, but because the young people who have undergone the cultural output of the sword and blade in their childhood have grown to the age of mastering the right to speak and deciding on product projects.
Sword and Sword Film is a genre film that takes the cold weapon fighting of samurai as the main content, and uses high-frequency battles and bloody shots to provide sensory stimulation for the audience. Born out of Japan's already thriving period dramas, he incorporated elements of a large number of Hollywood Westerns and gradually defined his own characteristics by adding a variety of interesting commercial content.
Unlike the Hong Kong kung fu films of the same era, sword and sword films rarely appear in dazzling recruitment scenes, and the victory and defeat of the battle can often be seen in an instant, but the large-scale shots such as the head, bloodshed, and amputated limbs are not concealed. The use of B-grade film elements gives the sword blade a congenital spread advantage. Therefore, when Akira Kurosawa and Tosshiro Mifune made classic works such as "Seven Samurai", "Spider's Nest Castle" and "Heart Stick" famous internationally, sword and sword films ushered in their heyday in the late 1950s.
In the crazy era when selling all the idle land in Tokyo could buy the United States, as a genre of film, the sword film had unprecedented success in the Japanese film market and became a classic case of cultural export. The Italian film "Red Dead Redemption" is a remake of "Heart Stick", and after creating a new genre of "macaroni Westerns", it even had to compensate Akira Kurosawa for 15% of the total box office. "Kill Bill" is also considered a tribute to "Shura Xueji", and even the latter's theme song "Shura Flower" was used by Quentin in his own film.
Just like the Japanese people at that time were desperate to speculate in stocks and run businesses, in the most popular years of sword and sword films, almost all Japanese commercial film companies wanted to share a piece of the samurai story, and for a time, the narrow screens throughout Japan were full of swords and swords, and blood flowed all over the ground.
Fierce competition and optimistic market environment have spawned a large number of good and uneven sword and sword films, including "Cut belly" that criticizes Japan's feudal system, and "The Great Killing Front", which uses fierce realistic lenses and black and white pictures to map the Japanese student movement, and naturally there are also "Humpback City", which has a relatively ordinary plot but still shoots 26 long films in a row.
If you go to sword lovers today for some movie guides, you will most likely receive business card recommendations such as "Rashomon" and "Tsubaki Sanjuro", but my personal favorite is the "Wolf with The Belt" series adapted from the manga of the same name in the 70s.
Unlike most sword films of the same period, "The Wolf with the Belt" has no complex literary drama and profound humanistic content, lacks the morbid beauty of those "rain and wind blows" in the exotic culture of the island country, and does not deliberately highlight the chivalrous spirit of the samurai class, telling only the story of a prominent samurai who embarked on the road of revenge after experiencing the tragedy of annihilation.
However, in terms of playing, the "Wolf with The Belt" series can be called the culmination of the entire sword and blade film genre, the film from the beginning to the end, almost all of it is a one-to-many fierce battle, the protagonist worships a knife "to see the god and destroy the god, see the Buddha to kill the Buddha", the shot is fierce, the knife is fatal, with the wild and uninhibited blood spatter performance, so that the plasma, severed limbs and other large-scale shots almost run through the film, making people bloody, can't help but be addicted.
Soon, however, the prosperous prosperity ushered in the end, the destruction of Japan's economic mythology with the sword and blade film to decline, with the kurosawa Akira, Mitoshiro, Katsu Shintaro and other sword film characters one after another, this popular film genre also gradually faded from the screen. You can only get a glimpse of their past glory in the film history miscellaneous talk and some game works that have a deep sword and blade film complex.
At the preview meeting of the high-energy video game festival a few days ago, "Yellow Spring Road" made a real-machine demonstration and announced the trailer. As a horizontal action game, "Yellow Spring Road" uses unique black and white graphics and clean cold weapon battles to convey its cold temperament to the public, and thus gained the expectations of many players.
Rather than being a side-scrolling action game that pays homage to Akira Kurosawa's films, Yellow Springs Road is a sword-and-blade film that can be "manipulated." The game uses pure black and white film filters throughout the game, and when forced into the edge of the board by the enemy's sharp attack, there will even be white scratches on the edges of the screen after multiple screenings of the film.
Game scenes such as wooden bridges, private houses, stone walls, and haystacks are like sets in the studio to create the Edo period full of life. The low-precision picture of black and white tones makes up for the lack of modeling details while further enhancing the stylization of the game, with the fixed camera position and horizontal view of the upper point, giving people a wonderful experience of "sitting in front of the screen and playing the game".
The combat system of "Yellow Spring Road" pays tribute to the basic logic of the sword and blade blade military attack section from the design core level - how to kill the opponent efficiently. In the game, the protagonist Hiroki can't release the "Tianxiang Dragon Flash", nor can he rub the "Chaotic Snow MoonFlower", and can only do simple slashing, poking, picking, dodging and blocking.
In battle, stopping the enemy's deadly sword blade in time and paying tribute with a sharp counterattack is the only means of victory. When the player completes the week, the game will also open the "shocking" difficulty of "hit or die". At this time, the game's test of the player's standing back and reflex arc is more like the mental duel between two swordsmen on and off the screen, and from the heavy pressure brought by the game's low fault tolerance, it reveals several "cruel heart" philosophies in kendo soldiers.
epilogue
Shakuhachi, knives, and buckets, images that used to be associated with death and blood may never disappear in popular culture. With the change of the times, their forms of presentation have changed from the ordinary "water gull stream" to the "flying sword" and "one slash" with full screen light effects, but the "fatal beauty" contained in the cold glow still exudes a common attraction to each generation.
Of course, this attraction probably did not originate from any specific national spirit, after all, whether it was Yang Guo or Musashi who danced with the autumn wind and the swaying bamboo forest, the scene was really too handsome.