Recently fans in Japan were polled regarding which Nintendo video game franchises they wanted to see adapted into anime and the results were surprising, to say the least. While it’s worth noting that this poll skewed towards the younger side, with 55% of respondents being 19 or younger, and another 25% in their 20s, the order of the top five results is still shocking.
Coming in at the number five spot is a game that lit social media on fire upon its worldwide release in 2019, Fire Emblem: Three Houses. For a good few months (if not longer), it was impossible to be anywhere near the anime community without hearing about what people were doing with their characters or what routes they were pursuing.
Voted into the number four spot, we have the indie darling developed by Toby Fox and released on the Nintendo Switch in 2018, Undertale. While I haven’t personally played Undertale myself, I know lots of people who do and have been regaled with stories about the mad sense of humor in this game. I wasn’t aware that the series had gained enough popularity in Japan to rank this high on the list, but it honestly doesn’t shock me that much.
Getting into the top three, we come to our first real surprise of the list… The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. While it’s possible that the fact the game is going to be six years old in only a matter of weeks played a factor in the game’s inclusion on this list, it does seem strange that a Nintendo franchise that feels tailor-made to be adapted into a beautifully animated story wouldn’t rank at the top spot of this list.
Working our way up to the runner-up on this list, the number two spot belongs to Xenoblade Chronicles, which just released a new game this past summer (which likely helped it a bit in this poll). Finally, we get to the top franchise that fans in Japan want to see an anime adaptation for. Have you guessed what it is yet? If you figured out that the number one franchise that Japanese fans want to see turned into an anime is Splatoon, well, winner winner, chicken dinner for you!
That’s right, according to fans in Japan the title that they want to see animated the most is the bizarre (I mean that as a compliment) third-person shooter which first launched in 2015. While this might sound like a random choice to have at the top spot, the franchise has been going strong for almost a decade now and just released a new version in September 2022, so it might not be quite as off the wall as you might initially be thinking.
If I were able to go back in time and make one anime-related alteration to the space-time continuum, I would have made it so that the video game Lunar: Silver Star Story got a full-story television anime adaptation at the height of its popularity. Why am I bringing this up? To illustrate, I understand fans’ plight as year after year passes and their favorite stories coming out of Japan aren’t adapted into anime. Keep hoping those hopes though fans, one thing that I’ve learned about this crazy industry that we love to follow is that you can never say never. If we can get another season of Spice and Wolf after the author explicitly said it would never happen, we can get a Splatoon anime someday.
Source: SoraNews24
