Your Favorite Video Games Will Always Be Influenced By Manga

In the heart of Brooklyn, there is now a devastatingly gorgeous manga panel from Jiro Taniguchi's Ice Age: Chronicle of the Earth hung on a gallery wall. I can't tell you what it says--I fear my scant familiarity with Japanese doesn't extend to literacy in kanji--but I can tell you what it portrays: a cityscape consumed by nature. A lush tangle of vines and trees reclaiming the Earth from its disastrous, mettlesome inheritors. While I doubt this panel and manga are the first time this kind of image has cropped up, it certainly feels like a progenitor to many similar visuals across the years. Your mind might jump to I Am Legend, the Will Smith-led feature film about a post-apocalyptic New York City, for example. My mind jumped straight to Nier Automata's city that's been lost to time, as well as The Last of Us' many dilapidated small towns and US metropolises. Though I went into the Brooklyn Museum's new Art of Manga exhibit already curious about what connections the form might have to games, it became quickly apparent that manga has always been in conversation with other mediums, influencing everything from anime to gaming. The Brooklyn Museum, located right near Prospect Park in …

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