Grabbing someone's attention while simultaneously providing useful information about a game can be a difficult task, especially when you only have a fraction of screen space to do so. This week, we'll be chewing over several banner advertisements for Luminous Arc, tallying their strengths and, more often than not, shortcomings. Join us past the break for more site ads from both ourselves and Atlus.
"Star-tatted (chest) banner"Passion-red robe. Christmas ornament earrings. Metal garter belt.
Atlus uses the animated transitions of this Penny Arcade Flash ad to beckon any gamers who've enjoyed the company's other niche titles with manga-styled artwork. Vanessa, one of Luminous Arc's Witch antagonists, anchors the fifteen-second slideshow with a chesty pose. She has a few compelling characteristics -- heterochromic eyes and a huge, rune-carved scythe, for example -- but it's safe to assume that she was chosen for this banner for her "sex appeal."
The advertisement doesn't even attempt to mention the selling points that first attracted us to the title when it was announced months ago. An SRPG that makes heavy use of the DS's touchscreen? Support for online battles? The humorous approach to localization that Atlus is known for? These are all features that we'd take time out of our day to learn about. The banner comes off as more run-of-the-mill than run-out-and-get-it.
Though the other Luminous Arc ad on Penny Arcade's front page shows off a lot less bosom, there's still very little that indicates any depth beyond Shibano Kaito's character designs. The game's story can be quite serious, actually, questioning religious faith and following the maturation of a young soldier, but none of that is hinted at with either banners.
In Atlus' defense, this isn't a symptom that only Luminous Arc's advertisements suffer. We've seen plenty of ads for other great games that similarly fail to catch the spirit of their product.
We came across two more lackluster Luminous Arc banners marking the pages of 1UP, and found another annoyance that ground our gears:
If you can get over the steps these banners have taken to not sell Luminous Arc, it's a remarkable game that's well-worth your interest. Even with all the other SRPGs that're due to hit Japan and the states later this year, there are plenty of distinguishing features that separate this title from the rest, as we've noted several times above. Keep an eye out for Luminous Arc this August 14th.
[Update: The portion regarding the 1UP ads is not replicable on all machines. Thanks, Covarr!]
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_thumbnail.jpg "Dragon Quest IV")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-29-2007 @ 4:23PM
Covarr said...
Except I checked the ads in question at 1up and I'm not seeing those artifacts. They must have corrected the problem.
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7-29-2007 @ 6:18PM
yanipheonu said...
I like the girl with the broom and the hat and the white hair. Very cool design.
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7-29-2007 @ 7:06PM
ikiryou said...
1UP is pretty lackluster when it comes to getting the latest DS game data out. They're just now jumping onto the Doki Doki Majou Shinpan hype machine. I'm not sure when they'll ever post the latest ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat scans or Konchuu Wars [!] trailer link. They seem to wait for whatever's popular as opposed to throwing something new out there and seeing what happens. No sense of adventure.
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7-29-2007 @ 8:44PM
NeoteriX said...
For what it's worth the first luminous arc ad piqued my interest enough for me to google the game to see what it was actually all about. =D
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7-29-2007 @ 11:16PM
raycosm said...
1up doesn't seem to acknowledge my existence, I have an account and all, but I don't have a user page (raycosm.1up.com doesn't exist in their system)
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7-29-2007 @ 11:36PM
JC Fletcher said...
HEY LOOK ANIME STUFF might have worked when people were watching M.D. Geist on the Sci-Fi channel and begging for Dragon Ball Z to be translated, but now that we're actually familiar with the form, we no longer take anime-ness as a selling point.
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7-30-2007 @ 6:42AM
OrochiTabris said...
This strikes me as a bit of an overreaction to advertisement practices that aren't unusual (as already mentioned in the article).
Sure, you could cram a ton of information into a banner ad, but how many people will actually care to read it? The best way to hook a user is through visuals, so I see nothing wrong with their approach. The only ads I've ever taken notice to (whether I've clicked or not) are those that caught my eye, and rarely due to text.
These aren't like commercials on TV, where they have 30+ seconds to actually talk about the product. A banner ad either gets us interested before we scroll past or it fails. I actually don't like banner ads with lots of information, especially if they're animated, flashy and lengthy. It's just distracting, sometimes bordering on obnoxious.
As for not informing users, I don't think that's the point. The ads are like announcements, in this case announcing that developer/publisher has a new game coming out. You want information? Click on the ad. They WANT you to click anyway, they're trying to attract you to their site, so explaining all you need in the ad would risk defeating that purpose.
I'm surprised this is considered an issue, really, with Atlus or anyone else. I'll take the minimalist approach over something flashy and obnoxious any day. The sample from Penny Arcade is the perfect amount of animation, any more and it starts to push it, I'll probably scroll past before it finishes. As long as the link provides information about the game I see nothing wrong with it.
In Atlus' case this usually takes you to a game site (apparently localized from the Japanese site) with about as much information as you could ask for without a downloadable version of the manual, plus some neat extras (promo art, design sketches, wallpaper, maybe some translated mini-comics). More than adequate, in my opinion.
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7-30-2007 @ 9:01AM
jadenguy said...
i'll be honest too, the ad would have gotten me to find out more about the game. in fact, i /think/ it was an ad that originally sparked my interest, though i usually read the seven or so pretty much ninty bloggregator sites, so i probably read the description or whatever. well, regardless, if i find the character art appealing, that tells me that they the creators cared about the art, something i find very important in gaming, even/especially 2d. though the art doesn't have to be sexy to get my attention. it can be a compelling lead male or a powerful but mysetious lead female. or just something i don't expect. regardless, good art tends to cling to good games.
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7-30-2007 @ 9:36AM
Eric Caoili said...
#4, #7, $8:
i can see where you guys are coming from, and i'm sure many people would agree with you that the ad accomplishes its goal of interesting the reader handsomely.
for some (i.e. me and maybe no one else), though, the character art isn't enough. lots of games have great character art, but many of us, as JC (#6) mentioned, have become desensitized by the hundreds of "cool Japanese designs" that've been trotted in front of us in the past, only for them to turn out to be crap games when they're released. so it takes more than sketches of a fetching female or big-ass weaponry to convince us the product is worth our time.
sure, there's not much space to jam in all the information we want, but wouldn't it be nice if the ads at least mentioned Luminous Arc's genre? or even what console it'll be appearing on?
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7-30-2007 @ 2:08PM
OhJustSomeRandomGuy said...
I'm in total agreement with posters 4, 7 and 8.
Yeah, the game has a ton of great features. But if a game's 15 seconds of animation that just constantly scrolls info points, I'm NOT clicking. I know everything now (if I even bothered paying attention.) I don't need to visit your site. Kthxbye.
It seems like you're coming from the older school of advertising, Eric. All this banner ad needs to do is get you over to the main site, where all that information is. The ad is, in my opinion, a good blend of eye-catching, and minimalism.
If this was a print ad, I'd agree with you, it needs all that information. But it's not. It's just gotta grab you and get you to click, and as the majority of people who commented on the ad have pointed out, it did just that.
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8-01-2007 @ 11:25PM
w3b_gh0st said...
Welcome to Japan 2.0...I mean, America.
I've become extremely disgusted with the way the Japanese culture has slinked its way onto western shores over the past two decades and enticed an entire generation of consumers to buy up the aesthetic-obsessed (and shallow) paradigm of a disposable society.
Sure, there are some profound works of Manga/Anime and the artwork can often be impressive but the western world is being sold the table scraps of a society that sells *used* young girls' panties in vending machines to perverted old men (I'll just leave the whole Hentai/Tentacle Porn issue well enough alone).
Though South Park's exaggeration of "Japan wants to bomb Pearl Harbor again" message was over-the-top, the sad fact is, we're looking at a cultural invasion that promotes crap like this 12-year-old girl with double-D's advertisement.
I wonder how long it's going to be until English speaking countries deliberately transpose their L's and R's to accommodate more softcore porn-vertisments to western youth?
No wonder girl gamers are fewer in numbers. Old dirty bastards like Itagaki (DOA) and his kind (see: huge-boobed witch above) sure have done their best to alienate and objectify anything with a vagina because reality wasn't too kind to them growing up as sexually frustrated Japanese boys.
This stuff's really gotta stop. It was cute 10 years ago but now it's just obnoxious.
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9-04-2007 @ 3:40PM
jadenguy said...
but at least they didn't give us fatty fast foods and a growing waistline as we have to pretty much the rest of the world. so we're even with them?
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