Meet the star of Lost Planet 3

It’s pretty clear that Capcom and developer Spark have no idea why those of us who liked Lost Planet 2 liked Lost Planet 2. So they have instead decided to tell a linear story (side quests excepted) about blue collar busywork along the corridors of Hoth. The busywork — I presume this will become shooting at some point — apparently stretches over fifty years, because the game opens with an eighty year old man pinned in rubble reminiscing about stuff that happened fifty years ago, at which point you’re playing Lost Planet 3. While I’ve been chipping ice off things, unsticking frozen valves, and enduring the three loading screens it takes to get to the guy who gives me the quest to kill 20 spiders, I’ve been pondering why Lost Planet 3 has the hero it has (pictured). What went into the thinking for a character design like that? How does a game made by a developer here in the Valley and published by a company in Japan settle on that dude? Then it hit me:

He’s a combination of Toshiro Mifune and Nicolas Cage! He’s the uncanny marriage of Hollywood and Japan. Kurosawa would be proud. Or creeped out.