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alpaca-clouds · 2 months ago

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Let's Talk About Media Adaptations

So, if you are in certain fandoms on tumblr, you will know the outrage-machine of the purists of a variety of media, as they rage about the adaptions of that media. Obviously I mostly will see it happen in Castlevania, given it is one of my main fandoms, but it happens a lot. Now we have Devil May Cry in terms of games, and some people clearly were also unhappy with the Tomb Rider adaption. And of course, when it comes to books to movies and books to TV shows, this is a tale as old as the medium of moving picture existing. "The book was better!"

But I want to talk about adaptions today, and why in most cases you really cannot do a faithful adaption of anything and hav the resulting show or movie not suck. (Same in the other way around, by the way. Games based on shows or movies tend to suck a lot too.)

I will mainly focus on video games, given that most of my main fandoms are video game and video game adaption related. But let me start with this.

Different kinds of media have different strengths and weaknesses.

Books are incredibly dense when it comes to the amount of information you can convey, and allow the writer to give the readers a fairly deep look into the inner world of a character. However, certain things tend to not work as well in books as in visual media. Action is probably the best example. There is very few writers who can write an engaging action scene on page.

Movies are obviously a lot better in regards to doing exactly that. They also can do a lot of visual and audio tricks to convey emotions and other aspects of the story better. Even a hack story can become really engaging with the right soundtrack and a good cast (or alternately good animation).

TV shows obviously can do many of the things movies can do, just that they have a lot more time to tell the stories, while though generally also having less budget so in some cases being forced to be a bit more creative.

Special note: Animation obviously can be even creative and can play around with animation styles and unreality a lot easier than you can do with actors.

Comics and manga kinda thread the line between book and movies. They are a lot denser once more than a movie in terms of information conveyed, but a lot less dense than books. They can do action a bit better than books, but not quite as good as movies. And other than movies they generally will allow you to go into the thoughts of characters, without it breaking the immersion.

And then you have games, that generally have a much stronger focus on player agency. Obviously this is very dependent on the gaming genre. Action games often do not have that strong of a story, but are really strong in player agency and engagement. CRPGs are stronger in terms of story, but engage the player very differently. it should be noted, that for the most part, the player character in action games does rarely struggle a whole lot and does usually not get very much of a character development arc, because they exist to push a power fantasy - and this is absolutely fine for this kind of medium. And no matter the game, a lot of worldbuilding is often not interwoven naturally into the game's story, but either told through text found inside the game or through booklets that came with the game (this happened a lot in older games).

As I said, I want to focus mostly on game to movie/tv show adaptions and the other way around.

Let's first talk about movies or TV shows that get their own games. Now, yes, there are some really great standouts in this regard that exist by now. But all in all, I would argue that a lot of license games tend to come down to one of two types: A very generic game of gaming genre XY (platformer or hack-n-slash are probably the most common, though with some games we also have very generic shooting galleries) that basically just glues IP characters over the "generic" character of this genre. Or a 1-to-1 adaption where the player gets send through a very liniar retelling of the movie/show plot, while having a very basic fight system that got copied from another game and rarely is very engaging or thematic.

Again, there are exceptions. I personally do have a lot of love for the Rocksteady Batman games - though they are more adaption of the comic than anything else - and I freaking love Alien Isolation. But I think this in general is the reason why a lot of people do not like IP based games.

Now, the other way around we obviously have different problems.

A lot of games derive their engagement from allowing the player freedom to act. While I absolutely get that people will like characters in action games, most people will not play those games for the characters or story, but for the gameplay loop being engaging. Let me take Hollow Knight for example - especially as it is a Metroidvania with a ton of lore that technically is there and is fascinating. However, a lot of this lore is told in a way that it is implied or hinted at, and then gets solved through a lot of youtube videos.

Now, I can think of a couple of ways to adapt Hollow Knight as a comic or animated series. And while I would aruge that a lot of the lore could be kept somewhat intact (though then gain, Hollow Knight also has the big advantage of being a single game so far, so it did not get a whole lot of chance to contradict iself), you obviously could not adapt the game as is. The main character is not that much of an engaging character, and also even with the fairly simple character designs, adapting something that is going to be 90% action would not also get boring after a while (the more action you have, the less it feels is at stake in every sequence) but also would just be too expensive to animate.

You would need to fudge around with perspectives and all that to make this adaption - and it would most likely result in some people being pissed on it.

And again, Hollow Knight is a single game so far (because I do not believe that Silk Song will show up, until I can buy it on steam). So the lore is at least fairly consistent.

I said it before, and I will say it again: Castlevania could never have been adapted into anything interesting, because there is just not a whole lot of story and characterization in the games - and what there is, is often alos not very good, or at the very least has aged terribly due to employing tropes that have overstayed their welcome a long time ago. And while I played most of the CV games, I did not play a whole lot of DMC, but I had a friend who was hyperfixating on those, so I do know that an adaption there would have suffered from overly relying on Dante's POV (due to his arc generally not being the most interesting, as he exists as a player power fantasy) and due to the lore that does exist being convoluted. And again: Some tropes that have not aged gracefully at all.

Though, instead of defending all those adaption choices that were made in these two series, let me talk about the old gaming franchise that I played since my teens, am super nostalgic about, but that everyone is struggling to adapt - even though there have been a couple of attempts. Resident Evil.

I do not think that I will tell anyone anything new when I say: The Anderson adaptions kinda suck as adaptions and also are not good movies. Mind you, I love those things to bits and have watched them so often, because they are camp and I do like Mila Jovovich. But... They are neither good movies nor good adaptions. Though I will generally agree with my roommate: While the characters from the games showign up are very OOC for the most part, at the very least the movies do surprisngly well with capturing the feel of the games. But still, not good adaptions.

The animated adaptions also are not very good, mainly due to their messy storytelling. And while the newer Netflix liveaction adaption had some good moments and worked as its own thing, it did not feel like Resistent Evil at all, because it was missing the entire Campiness that makes a large chunk of the franchise.

However, I absolutely do get that RE is hard to adapt. For the same reasons those other two franchises are: The games are messy and contradictive in terms of lore, there are a lot of badly aged tropes, it is mainly action, and most of the characters are very, very one dimensional stereotypes. Heck, there is a story why RE7 and RE8 took a new main character - and I would argue that even Ethan is not that engaging as a protagonist.

See, to tell an engaging story, you need main characters that do fail, and that do come across hard times - which generally speaking in most action games the main characters do not really do. Because basically all you as a the player do is "go through game and kill everything you see". Which is just not an engaging story, once you remove the fact that it is you - the player - doing those things indirectly through your control of the main character.

So, no matter which RE game you would want to adapt, you would probably want to put in more of a character arc for Chris or Leon or Ethan, than they actually have in the game. Moments were they struggle both physically and emotionally, and need to interact with other characters in a more emotionally intimate way than they ever do in the games.

You would also need to just clean up the lore that right now is confusing to say the least. Sure, you can probably somewhat get away with "virus makes all sorts of different zombies because scifi", but you may want to hold back onto some of the later introduced ideas of the game series.

I have no doubt that you absolutely could tell an engaging story that would work from the building blocks the games give you. But you would need to change the characters and change some of the lore at the very least, to make it engaging to a general audience, most of whom still will not have played the games at all.

And, you know, while people complain about the adaptions of CV and DMC, because the writers dared to make them ABOUT something in terms of themes... Look, if someone told me to make a show adaption of RE, I probably would very much go into the entire angle that kinda already presents itself of: "government funds immoral research for weapons and companies will gladly do it because capitalism - and it then becomes a conspiracy". This is a plot the games already have, but that really would make for a great through line if you made a show based on this.

#video game adaptation #video games #media #book adaptation #movies #tv shows #animation #adaptation #action games #castlevania #devil may cry #resident evil #hollow knight

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