Ask John: Why Don’t Console Game Cut Scenes Get Turned Into Movies?

Question:
I am always amazed at the quality of the traditional & CGI anime cut scenes in many of today’s video games. Why do the game companies not spend a little bit more to flesh out the cut scenes in to full fledged anime selections? I would think fans of the specific games and anime in general would be interested in owning completed versions of such great works of animation.

Answer:
I imagine that it’s simply too cost prohibitive to turn video game FMV sequences into full length features. The console video game market is a multi-million dollar industry, with a massive amount of money spent on the production of individual game titles. Within this budget is a certain allowance for the production of anime and CG rendered “cut scenes.” Because these sequences usually account for only a tiny fraction of the game’s entire running time, it’s possible to lavish unusual amounts of time and money on them because they are so short. An excellent example is Sony’s Ghost in the Shell Playstation game. While an average 30 minute OAV uses roughly 7000 cels, Production IG used 7500 cels to produce only 10 minutes of anime for the game. If this was extended to a full 30 minute OAV, it’s easy to imagine that it would cost more than 3 times as much to produce as a typical anime of the same running time. Another excellent example is the Satoshi Urushihara designed animation sequences in games from the Langrisser and Growlanser RPG series. One look at the lush detail and smooth animation quality of these brief opening animation clips should be enough to convince a viewer that a full length anime production of this quality would be simply prohibitively expensive and time consuming to create.

The same can probably be said of CG rendered movie sequences. The Final Fantasy: Spirits Within movie reportedly cost $137 million to produce. The Metropolis anime film reportedly cost $15 million to produce. Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, the highest grossing movie ever released in Japan, reportedly cost $19 million to produce. Based only on statistics, it’s simply illogical produce a full digital animated film that earns back less than the gross of a cel animation film produced for as much as 10 times less. Overspending on 10 minutes of animation to be included in a console game that will sell a million copies at $60 each is much more acceptable than overspending on a feature animation that will hit theaters at under $20 (in Japan) per ticket or sell on home video at $60 to probably less than 50,000 consumers.

In some cases, the animation produced for a console game is released separately. The limited edition version of the Playstation strategy RPG Harukaze Sentai V-Force included a VHS tape of all its anime cut scenes. The deluxe, limited edition version of Guilty Gear X Plus for the Japanese Playstation 2 included a bonus DVD featuring 5 minutes worth of original anime created exclusively for the deluxe set. And the Japanese Playstation saw a supplemental Space Cruiser Yamato game disc that included mini-games as well as all of the animation sequences from the two Playstation Yamato RPGs. Unfortunately, these examples are the rare exceptions as it’s very uncommon for the movie clips in console video games to be released separately. Even in cases when such a release seems natural, such as Konami’s two Dancing Blade games- which are more accurately described as anime OAVs released on a console system instead of laserdisc than actual video games- no such releases ever actually make it to print. I can only guess that in most cases a full release of video game FMV sequences is just too costly to be feasible, and in cases when a home video release would be easy, the market potential is simply not strong enough or large enough to guarantee successful sales.