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re: Question to Teran regarding Monkey Island


Fantasy should stay with its classic roots I think. Elves, orcs etc, and maybe the weirder fantasy style like the newer Final Fantasy games. Otherwise we could also give "Super Mario Bros." the fantasy genre and that would dilute the whole genre. When I played Monkey Island I never thought of playing a "fantasy game".

As for the cartoon genre: I think Monkey Island 3 might be considered cartoon because of its distinct graphic style. Monkey Island 1 and 2 are just "handdrawn 256-VGA-graphics" which always look a bit cartoonish.

Edit:
Now I remember that I had thought of removing the fantasy genre from Doom as well, because for me its clearly a SciFi/Horror genre (space station, demons from hell, big bad guns, zombie soldiers and scientists etc).

re: re: Question to Teran regarding Monkey Island

Final Fantasy games are Sci-Fi/Fantasy hybrids and tending towards more surrealistic views (at least FFX did, and has even some cartoony aspects thrown in for good measure [think cactuar and others]). Elves and Orcs are Tolkien fantasy and should not be thought of as the de facto definition of fantasy. Presence of magic is quite good pointer that something belongs into fantasy genre as do spirits and the like, undead and pretty much anything that can't be given some form of realistic explanation (none of these are requirements for the genre, though). Of course, cartoons are wholly different case in when to interpret them as fantasy or not and may require closer scrutiny than most other works.

And what is classic fantasy really? As far as I know, it's fairy tales from who knows how many centuries back when no-one had even heard of Orcs and Elves were these wildly varied trickster/malevolent spirits.


Anything _cartoony_ usually makes it difficult. But since cartoon was removed from Monkey Island, that isn't an issue anymore for it. And Monkey Island is much more realistic in its visual style than Mario games are, except for some expressions that are _clearly_ cartoony (and no, there's no limitation by the size nor amount of colors, its humor is done in cartoony fashion and that's that).


Do not be mistaken that fantasy doesn't exist in lighter amounts than fullblown dragons, magic and whatnot. Also, Monkey Island is as much fantasy as the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and I'm pretty sure you consider them as such, and if you don't... well... I don't know what to say.

Anyway, I don't think the things I mentioned in the earlier post can be categorized as realistic either. Far from it actually. And I'm pretty sure you don't want the games to be labeled as surrealistic or abstract either, which I think them to be even less. Or in the same category as Tetris for example, which I have little idea what the game would be like then.

Fantasy/Sci-Fi come into play when something unrealistic is being depicted. Cartoons are a visual style to accomplish the same and require more obvious content to have either Fantasy or Sci-Fi also applied to them.

Obviously we're suffering from the lack of definitions here as well (in how many cases have I now stated that when pointing out things I didn't agree with?). But what I can see is that a lot of adventure games get treated as some form of special kind of game genre that isn't ever much anything else than adventure, especially the older adventure games.

Anyways, if we're to follow this "classic fantasy" idea, then I would demand RPG is only applied to real RPGs, and there aren't many of those either. And for most other genres as well, so we'd have plenty of games then that don't touch any of the genres because they aren't enough close to some highly picky definition of them. GRAW wouldn't be Sci-Fi for example.

It would be so much easier if the genres could have a value added to them (like I've suggested for tags), so we could give Monkey Island Cartoon 1/5, Fantasy 2/5, Adventure 5/5 and whatever else we could think of. But we can't, so it ends up as cartoon fantasy adventure.

So if the game doesn't get fantasy and/or cartoon in it, we should treat it as historical game (you know, pirates and all) or give it some other descriptors that I can't think of right now.

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To summarize this rant, again with the things I already said in the first post:
* Voodoo magic & curses = Fantasy
* Undead pirates = Fantasy
* Murray = Cartoon-y (and fantasy if you want)

Added the fantasy genre back to those MI games I edited.

We indeed need a definition about some genres. But not such a broad one that you could apply genres like fantasy to over half of the game entries.

Your proposed method of giving genre nuances (cartoon 1/5) is interesting. But as long as that is not possible to rate so, I would only give and mark those genres that get at least 3/5 in a category.

RPG suffers from this as well and we can't do anything about it. But I would rather label games with types and genres when they have any noticeable amount of it in there, simply to avoid that they're not "forgotten" to be part of that type/genre. And fantasy being added to so many games is only because there _are_ so many games that are part of it. Like there are so many manga/cartoon games. Or FPS/Shoot 'em up games. Many shoot 'em up games actually lack Sci-Fi genre even though you're clearly flying with some space interceptor craft and shooting aliens and whatnot down. Or even those where you're flying in some planet's atmosphere.

For cartoon games I strongly recommend not adding Sci-Fi or Fantasy in majority of cases simply because they don't fit that very well, in them the elements that consists of either need to be more clearly pronounced than in other cases, simply because cartoon (especially the humorous or more abstract kind) often blur the line quite a lot. If we do that, then it shouldn't be that difficult. And I'm pretty sure you aren't so stingy about adding Sci-Fi to games with even one talking robot or A.I. running around and not much else, they _do_ belong to that genre, but it shows how downplayed Fantasy genre's presence is.