Japan, The Devil’s Head Is Not Really This Big

In upcoming action game El Shaddai, a pre-fall Lucifer guides players. He’s got God on speed dial and looks cool. Now, he’s big-headed and “cute”. Oh dear.

Game characters Lucifer and Enoch have been remade into Japanese-style hipsters, complete with rad hair and trendy threads. Now they’ve been re-made into large-headed toys by Namco Bandai. Large-headed characters regularly appear in Japanese video games, manga and anime.

Take Konami’s Jikkyou Powerful Pro Baseball, which is one of Japan’s most popular baseball video games. The characters have giant noggins — hence why some Westerners referred to the series as “Big Headed Baseball”. But why?

“They [the developers]abandoned any hope of their product resembling reality, and instead made the characters stubby little man-like objects,” Tim Rogers wrote in Edge back in 2006. “When graphics got better and it was possible to make players who looked closer to real, the developers found that players reacted negatively to the more realistic player models. They didn’t feel the same ‘warmth’.”

It seems to be for that same “warmth” that Bandai cuted up El Shaddai’s cool characters with big heads.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is loosely based on the Book of Enoch. By “loosely”, I mean that cell phones do not feature in the Book of Enoch. Neither do cute-looking big headed man-children with enormous eyes.

そんなフィギュアで大丈夫か？「El Shaddai – エルシャダイ -」のフィギュアがバンダイより発売決定！ [シマゾウ・レポート][Pic]