5. Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a portal fantasy in which a young boy named Oliver travels to another world from his home in Motorville, a small town based on a suburb of Detroit that’s filled with classic 1950s Americana. The game’s characters and environments were designed by Studio Ghibli, so Motorville’s cars, houses, and grassy lawns surrounded by white-picket fences are infused with color and charm. Every character in the fantasy world of Ni No Kuni has a counterpart in “our” world, so Oliver is frequently tasked to returning to Motorville to help people by solving puzzles and fighting enemies. Through these transitions between Motorville and Ni No Kuni, Wrath of the White Witch suggests how a child’s imagination might create an entire sprawling fantasy world within a small American suburb.
4. Final Fantasy XV
According to its developers, Final Fantasy XV was partially inspired by a road trip down California’s famous Route 1 coastal highway. Not only can you take the wheel of a stylish convertible to enjoy the scenery of the American West, but you can also stop off at various diners to take in the Formica counters and shiny chrome jukeboxes while picking up recipes for burgers and fries slathered in ketchup. While the game’s landscapes reflect the beautiful natural environments of California, its inhabited areas reflect the state’s cultural diversity, and Eos is home to cities inspired by locations as far-ranging as Shinjuku and Havana.
3. Pokémon Black and Pokémon White
Each of the mainline pairs of games in the Pokémon series is set in a region analogous to a location in the real world. Pokémon Black and Pokémon White take place in the Unova region, which is loosely modeled on New York. The center of Unova, the thriving Castelia City, is much larger than any city previously seen in the series. Castelia City is filled with skyscrapers and boasts a bustling harbor, as well as a festive boardwalk entertainment district in the nearby satellite city of Nimbasa. During their journey, the player can also get a taste of American-inspired desert highways and city-sized airports. In addition, the Unova Region marks a major landmark for the Pokémon series – this was the first pair of games in which characters could have darker skintones and Afro-textured hair.
2. Silent Hill 2
The setting of the iconic survival horror game Silent Hill 2 is Silent Hill, Maine. As a mid-sized resort town that sprang up around the scenic Toluca Lake, Silent Hill is lovingly modeled on small-town New England, with picturesque pine forests framing a charming central business district. Thick mist rises from the surface of the lake as the heat of the day cools in the evening, creating evocative vistas of telephone poles emerging from a sea of fog.
If you linger too long in Silent Hill, however, you may start to notice that the town isn’t doing too well – many of the stores in the strip malls are closed, the hospital and other public buildings are slouching into genteel decay, and odd graffiti has been scrawled on the tarps and fences surrounding abandoned construction sites. There is, of course, also an underground cult whose activities have linked the town to a hellish nightmare realm. As the game’s tagline reads, “Every town has its secrets,” and Silent Hill’s secrets are pure Stephen King.
1. Earthbound
One of the reasons why the quirky 16-bit RPG Earthbound has managed to secure such a strong hold on the imaginations of generations of gamers is the vibrancy of its setting in Eagleland. Your hero Ness, a boy destined to save the world with psychic powers and a baseball bat, grew up in a modest wood-frame house on the outskirts of the small town of Onett. Onett has a burger joint, an old-fashioned arcade, and a handsome public library, as well as wide streets and sidewalks large enough for Ness to navigate on his trusty bike.
Once he sets out from this pitch-perfect Steven Spielberg movie set, Ness travels around Eagleland to visit an outdoor market filled with hippies, an indoor mall filled with bored teenage employees, a seedy nightclub hosting the Blues Brothers, and a compact version of New York City that becomes a neon-lit wonderland after dark. Ness’s adventure even takes him to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the famous “Pink Palace” of Waikiki. Far from being a whirlwind tour of the United States, Earthbound offers players countless incentives to spend time in each town seeing the sights, talking to the locals, and discovering the stranger aspects of American life as seen through Japanese eyes.
Digital Fantasy Diary 