what does “weeaboo bait” even mean here? i feel like it’s a fallacy to imagine that the target audience for “anime trash” is the anglophone international audience. sure maybe it’s genre, it’s low culture, but i think the more salient point is it’s a different low culture from what we get domestically which results in a lot of undue denigration and exaltation.

and frankly i’m not convinced a game must innovate in its mechanics to be artistically valuable. at its worst, this vision of innovation just results in gimmicks that provide the player with a novel experience at the expense of creating any particular meaning or more complex emotional response.