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 New York City, is currently home to the Art of Manga exhibit. Curated by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere--whose love of manga stems from early exposure to French graphic novels and reading Astro Boy at a seminal age--the gallery features a beautiful selection of Taniguchi’s work, as well as select other notable mangaka (manga artists and authors) of outsized influence. This includes Rumiko Takahashi, best known for her work on Ranma ½ and Inuyasha, Eiichiro Oda, the renowned creator of One Piece, and Hirohiko Araki, whose gorgeously styled illustrations from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure are among the exhibits crown jewels.
In total, the exhibit draws from the work of 10 mangaka, evenly split between male and female authors of varying popularity and prefectures of Japan, and explores different kinds of subject matter including inner-city living and queer life. This was essential to Rousmaniere, As she explained, "If I had featured fewer artists, the exhibition would not have been as powerful; We might not have gotten across the incredible range of these artists and the power of the line that they employ." The Art of Manga exhibit, evidently, needed to be big.
And big it is. At its center, there is a reading room with bookshelves full of manga related to the artists spotlighted in the exhibit. Whole walls are adorned with iconic illustrations of some of the manga (a particularly poignant scene from One Piece comes to mind near the exhibit's end), but some of the highlighted art is also quite grand. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, for example, is the subject of what Rousmaniere calls "the heart of the exhibition:" a 12-panel composition called "There is always a Traitor." The work consists of a series of life-sized panels of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s Stand users assembled in tableau, with each panel towering over the average visitor and making the cast out to be even larger than life than they typically are. Or as Rousmaniere puts it, Araki's "2D figures are in fact 3D, and jump from the page into our imagination."
"What I adore about Araki Hirohiko is his versatility and his ability to embrace new challenges, be it life-size painting or lithography, fashion, or music. He has no bounds on his imagination and I think this is what makes him and his work so vital," Rousmaniere extolled.
A little ways away from that massive installation is a smaller piece from Araki that might look strikingly similar to many gamers. In it, many characters from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure stand huddled up on what appears to be a bus. The distinct juxtaposition of the cast's bright colors and exotic patterns against the drab gray of the bus interior cuts an imposing image. To the eye of your average RPG player, like me, the ensemble might look eerily close to that of a Persona game.
If you’re anything like me, you probably can’t look at Araki’s work without immediately drawing connections to Persona, a beloved RPG series from Atlus that touts, among many other things, an impeccable sense of forward-thinking fashion and style on par with the closets of characters like Jotaro and Jolyne.
But that’s not all they have in common. The two also share a penchant for the supernatural and mythological, and both casts can summon powerful beings in battle. In the manga of JJBA, these forces are known as Stands, but in the world of Persona, they are called … well, Persona. The creators of the Persona games have never outright confirmed the influence of JJBA on the production of the series, but their lineage feels like an unspoken truth.
Manga's influence on games doesn't begin or end there, either. The mangaka of Dragon Ball, the late Akira Toriyama, literally helped sculpt the visual identity of both the Dragon Quest series and Chrono Trigger, two early successes for the companies that were then known separately as Square and Enix. Beyond that, it feels like the sensibilities and attitudes of these games and that era of RPG--the fascination with small-town living and domesticity for example--owe something to the genial nature of Toriyama's characters and the warm fantasy tapestry he helped to create.
Alternatively, much later RPGs feel like direct descendants of Berserk, the late Kentaro Miura’s manga, which has been a huge influence in the rise of dark fantasy. Miura's bleak fantasy epic has long served as a muse of sorts for a whole class of character in the Final Fantasy series, and has also been a major touchstone for From Software’s oeuvre like Dark Souls and Elden Ring.
Of course, manga has also paved the way for anime, which often reimagines and reinterprets manga and has made global phenomena of many works, such as One Piece. One Piece has become one of the best-known brands since its anime adaptation enraptured the world, and now there are One Piece nights at baseball games! I can’t walk to one of my local trains without seeing a plush of Chopper in a neighbor’s window or a straw-hat ornament on a passerby's bag. And when you see Oda’s art on display in Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit, including an illustration that explicitly features Nami and Usopp playing video games featuring some very familiar caricatures, it’s easy to see why the series and its cast have inspired such awe across the world and artistic mediums.
The camaraderie between Luffy and his friends, which serves as the emotional core of the series, is aspirational and has seemingly served as the template for one of gaming’s more recent band of oddities. In an interview with Crunchyroll, the newest head of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio (and longtime writer) Masayoshi Yokoyama admitted that the cast of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, the game that transformed the brawler series into a turn-based RPG, was molded after Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates.
Yokoyama told Crunchyroll at the time, "To me, Ichiban is basically Luffy. And around him there’s Zoro and Nami and basically the rest of the party, you know? One Piece’s party composition was on my mind so much during writing that it was a massive influence." It feels like Yokoyama's only scratching the surface with that comparison too. As two long-running series that often painstakingly shift perspectives to illuminate struggles against unfair systems and institutions, I don’t think it’s the only way that the two are alike.
Even if it is indirect, or I guess roundabout in this case, manga's force has become increasingly undeniable over the years. Rousmaniere shared, "When I was in Japan in the '80s, everyone was reading manga. I was studying archaeology and the archaeologists mostly all read manga. Manga captures the zeitgeist of a moment that other forms do not in a tangible, and not fleeting, fashion." As it's bled into anime with increasing success, manga's influence has only grown. Now it is, per Rousmaniere, "in Barnes and Noble in the US, in Waterstones in the UK, and in airports around the country." It's everywhere.
Though the Art of Manga exhibit may not overtly draw attention to the forms’ ties to games, there is one outstanding reference to the modern gaming landscape that’s hard to ignore. Before you enter the exhibit, right outside the entrance to Brooklyn Museum’s gift shop that is now itself adorned with manga-inspired merch and paraphernalia, there is an army of gashapon ("gacha") machines that visitors are encouraged to play. I clocked everything from Digimon to My Hero Academia and more among the capsule-sized toys and charms that players could pull.
"Many people watch gamers just as I enjoy watching visitors and museum workers choosing their gashapon at the front of the store," Rousmaniere shared, drawing an interesting line from her enjoyment of seeing people turn their fascination with manga into a literal keepsake to how one might enjoy watching a streamer try pulling a legendary roll in a gacha game like Genshin Impact. That gashapon machines, whose mechanics have become the basis for countless popular video games in the last decade, just so happen to be halfway between manga and gaming makes their prominent inclusion here quite serendipitous.
My big takeaway from the Art of Manga exhibit? Art goes beyond frames and borders, touches other artists and mediums outside of itself all the time, and continues spreading regardless of genres, nations, or any other manner of restraint. In some ways, you can draw an incredibly clear line from manga to games, like Araki's work and something like Persona. In other ways, the influence might be felt but not obviously seen. But it's always worth exploring other forms and, for instance, walking through a gallery like this one and interrogating where it all might stem from.
Brooklyn Museum's Art of Manga exhibit runs from October 3, 2026 to January 31, 2027.