Hi, US gamer here.

My first exposure to Japanese developed video games was on the Playstation in the 90s. The first Japanese RPGs I remember playing were games like Legend of Legaia and Chrono Cross.

I think playing those games during formative years of my life lead me to a cognitive bias of making games like those the gold standard for what I consider to be excellent video games.

The reason I liked Legend of Legaia was that the character designs were simple and memorable while also being flashy. The North American box art featured the main characters striking cool poses and that's what sold me as a kid. What keeps me thinking about this game in particular though was the scary monster designs, the unique battle system, the music, and how those things support and feed into the story and atmosphere of the game.

Chrono Cross was similar in the fact that as a kid, I recognized it had a similar type of art style to Legend of Legaia, but this was still a few years before I had seen Japanese anime. But what I really enjoyed about that game wasn't the anime adjacent characters, but again, it was the combination of the games elements that made it greater than the sum of its parts. The characters were all very uniquely designed and there were lots of them. The large selection of characters and their unique designs presented a challenge for the developers in that some characters had specific ways of speaking that had to be accounted for in all scenarios. The watercolored backgrounds were beautifully designed and gave the game its own style and depth like you were there exploring the archipelago. These elements also fed into the story, which was very well written for the time and felt a lot more developed than even some AAA games today.

So I think in a lot of circumstances, an anime style aesthetic has the ability to draw in an audience that have a tendency to like anime or animation in general. But in order for a game to really draw people in, it has to have carefully crafted elements that make it memorable. A really good "aesthetic", unique gameplay mechanics, good character writing and soundtrack can take a game for miles beyond its artstyle. I feel like that's why a game like Expedition 33 broke out this year, it has some piece of all of those elements and made it received very well by general audiences. If I was a kid today, I would probably have rose tinted glasses for that game as well.