With the addition of a Japanese faction to EA’s Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, staff here at Big Game Box were curious as to how our friends across the other, other pond were taking it. Suffice to say that we were surprised.
At time of writing, the Hell March 3 trailer for the game in question had over 500,670 views and 27,578 comments on video-sharing site nico nico douga – uploaded under the title gaijin ga souzou shita totetsu mo nai nihon ga detekuru geemu (’a game with a preposterous foreigner-envisaged version of Japan’). We’ve provided a few selected comments for your perusal below:
“Holy shit, we’re awesome!”
“Expect nothing less from the country of technology!”
“Oh shit, there go our state secrets!”
Reception on Japanese internet forum 2ch seems positive overall, with some users likening EA LA’s over-the-top depiction of Japan in Red Alert 3 to From Software’s depiction of America in presidential mech action game Metal Wolf Chaos (and if you haven’t heard of that, you owe it to yourself to see this).
It’s not all good news, though - Korean site CNB News reports on a Korean politician’s condemnation of the game’s 15+ classification for its glorification of Japanese militarism, alleging that the classification board had not taken the historical issues between the two nations fully into account when making its decision.
Some of us wonder whether a game with sonic dolphins and bionic war bears should be taken all that seriously.