The Use Of Anime In Slot Games Posted Jun 22, 2021
Online gambling continues to take the world by storm. And one of the most successful games to make the transition from brick-and-mortar casinos into the virtual world is the humble slot machine.
Slot machine simulators have even begun to carve out their own corner of the online gaming market, beyond the realm of real money betting. More and more people are playing slots online for cash prizes but also for casual gaming and entertainment value.
With competition so voracious, slot operators need to continuously offer new and exciting themes to attract players to their sites. We stumbled across titles like, “Larry’s Lucky Lobster” and “Willy’s Hot Chillies” as well as official movie themes (and the comparatively mundane titles) of “Mad Max Fury Road” and “A Nightmare On Elm Street”. Anime style games have also not been overlooked.
Anime, broadly speaking, refers to animation coming out of Japan. It includes a huge range of material aimed at vastly differing target markets but there are some defining characteristics that are often included:
- Out-there hairstyles, often in bright colours.
- Anime characters are known to have oversized expressive eyes.
- Exaggerated reactions and/or emotions. Anime characters’ faces are sometimes animated to deform into emoji style representations of their normal faces.
- Traditionally, anime places an emphasis on the art style and quality. This differs, for example, to Disney animation where movement is prioritised.
- Limited animation techniques reuse common parts of the frames so only certain elements are animated to move. Japanese animation, sometimes for efficiency but often as a stylistic choice, uses these techniques.
- Anime is sometimes classified into genres including kodomo (children's), shōjo (girls'), shōnen (boys') and several more aimed at adult markets.
- In western animation, the norm is to mock up storyboards of the film and have voice actors record their parts before the animators get to work. This way they can scrub through frame by frame to accurately synchronise mouth movements. Anime is done art first; animated fully before the actors come in to dub the voices over the film. This is why even in native Japanese, some anime can have imprecise lip syncing.
Anime’s impact on western culture has left its mark on pop music, fashion, film, art and notably, video games.
The hugely popular and long running anthology franchise, Final Fantasy, drew inspirations from anime in both character design and plot. In turn there have been several Final Fantasy anime series produced as a result.
Naruto, originally a manga series (the comic print parallel of anime) and later an anime series has a string of successful video game releases in its repertoire.
One of the biggest anime franchises going is the Dragon Ball Multiverse including the Dragon Ball Z series and feature films. A slew of video games have been released with the first dating back as far as 1986. Perhaps the fans’ and critics’ pick might be the 2018 title, Dragon Ball Fighter Z.
It might also surprise the less informed anime aficionados that the Pokémon series and movies are also considered anime. And we don’t need to give the Pokémon games much of an introduction either. From the original Gameboy games to the ubiquitous Pokémon Go, the success of Pokémon merchandise and related products has been unprecedented.
Never to miss a beat, some online casinos saw the success of the anime fandom and incorporated it into the design of some of their games.
Here are our top five anime slots with real money prizes for you to try your hand at today:
