Discussion Main / Wutai

I see this page linked from others comparing it to Ruritania, Bulungi and Qurac (basically fictional places that mashes up multiple cultures to create a fictional one).

This page seems to imply that it's about the only "Asian" location in the entire Medeival European setting. Can we get this cleared up?

Perhaps one of the main inspirations for this trope's popularity is the now-often-overlooked Wizardry series. You know: one of the two Western RP Gs (the other one being Ultima) that had a particularly big impact on early Japanese RP Gs?

Perhaps inspired by the original Oriental Adventures supplement for AD&D, Wizardry had Ninja and Samurai in the series from the beginning (as "advanced classes"), despite the world(s) mostly resembling pseudo-Tolkienesque swords & sorcery lands. AFAIK, this is the first ever example of this trope in videogames, and it certainly predates a very similar class system in Final Fantasy I.

Unfortunately, I don't have much experience with the very early Wizardry series enough to comment on an actual Wutai-like location, but I'm guessing there's one at some point in the early series. (It was a bit before my time. My first computer RPG was Ultima 7 (1992) and I discovered Wizardry 1-6 later via a nice CD compilation. But then Lands of Lore came out and I was too distracted by the at-the-time very pretty graphics to go back to Wizardry I.) But the classes exist.

So any village/country/continent or whatever that is modelled of Japan is automatically in any work of fiction no matter how accurate/no mishmashed and contain other separate countries, Becomes Wutai. Isn't this just far east!

Digression:

• Arguably, the rest of the FFVII world would be a more modern version of Japan and not a European society.
  • Japan was so influenced by American culture after World War 2 that modern Japan may as well count as a western nation.
    • Let's call it somewhere in between. It's certainly an odd place politically in many ways.