Science Fantasy

“There's something terribly weird about the standard fantasy setting – not least of which the fact the phrase "standard fantasy setting" can be uttered without irony.” - Zero Punctuation.

The Standard Fantasy Setting is very common in MMOs. Perhaps too common, though I suppose I have to give a pass to Lord of the Rings Online, seeing as JRR Tolkien essentially invented most of what we now think of as the SFS. I would argue that Robert E. Howard and those that followed in his footsteps form a kind of parallel evolutionary track, and what later fantasy settings haven't borrow from Tolkien they've often borrowed from Howard, Fritz Lieber and Michael Moorcock, amongst others.

(Of course there's also any number of earlier works that have had an influence on the genre as well - Arthurian legends, Beowulf, the Greek myths and the Thousand and One Nights, and all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh - but I think it's fair to say that the modern concept of the standard fantasy setting originates with Tolkien etc.)

There's nothing wrong with this in itself – sometimes a work will so define a genre that those that come after more or less have to take something from it – in every post-apocalyptic book, movie or game from now until the actual apocalypse there will be at least a sliver of Mad Max, just as in all Western fantasy settings there's going to be something of the writers I've mentioned.

But what about Asian fantasy settings?

That's not intended as a rhetorical question, because I don't know the answer. I have a good grounding in western fantasy literature and gaming but I can't say the same about what comes out of Korea (or Japan.)

I've been thinking about this because Requiem feels very much like a standard fantasy setting from that part of the world, featuring several elements that are as characteristic of Asian fantasy games as Elves and Dwarves are of Western fantasy. The towns have a steampunk aesthetic, and there's references to laboratories, cloning and DNA in the quest text. There are monsters armed with flamethrowers, and one-seater biplanes for quick travel. Swords and armor notwithstanding, and allowing for the presence of mages throwing fireballs, Requiem's setting is arguably more sci-fi than fantasy; at least in comparison with the standard (western) fantasy setting, where the tech level rarely goes beyond the medieval, or the Renaissance at best.

I've seen a lot of this in other games, and I have to wonder if there's some common origin point for Asian fantasy in the same way that just about all western fantasy can be traced back to Tolkien/Howard. I'd speculate that it comes from Final Fantasy, because that's the example(s) of the style that I know best. On the other hand, I'm somewhat aware that that series didn't actually incorporate some of these elements until Final Fantasy IV (?) and I'm very aware that I simply don't know enough about Japanese (or Korean) gaming history to be sure that Final Fantasy was the first to do so. For all I know the actual source of all this is one of those games or franchises that's absolutely massive in Korea while remaining obscure to most western gamers. There's quite a few of those.