CHARACTERS FROM OTHER GAMES APPEARING IN NONE FANGAMES

Cameos? Love 'em. Great stuff. Need more. :D

You cheapen the experience of your idea in order to ride the coattails of something more popular and well known. It's a bad idea, in most cases.

There are notable exceptions, such as featuring very veiled cameos (such as the FF1 tombstone that reads "Here lies Erdrick/Link"), or having a cameo from another game you've made (like Tales of with character costumes).

If you plan on going the Kingdom Hearts route, then it's an awful idea. Not only do you sully your own work, but you most likely wipe your ass with the original work too (just like Kingdom Hearts! Fuck Kingdom Hearts.)

EDIT: The method Liberty describes can be okay too, as long as the characters are not mentioned by name and bear a passing resemblance to their "real" counterparts. What I mean is that sticking the character there outright is dumb. Generally I would avoid having cameos of things you don't own/are not associated with.

Yes, I agree that you need to make it belong. This is why you need to use it very carefully and thoughtfully. Sure, you could have Aeris talking to Cloud in a bar called "Goblin's Bar" for all I care, but unless your game was very FF inspired it probably wouldn't work, and as a player I would appreciate it only on the level of a cheap joke.

As an aside, yes, if your game is built entirely around the idea of cameos and references then go wild. Hero's Realm is a perfect example of this type of game.

As a person who cares most deeply about immersion, world building and character design, I feel that using characters you own (and are immediately relevant/familiar upon the game's release) is the safest bet for direct cameos, but on average, and in terms of what I would personally do, using non-direct cameos is the way to go. Running into a famous video game character in a house is distracting. Imagine if you were 4 hours into a Skyrim session and you ran into Link. It would be like driving at 60 K and suddenly grinding to a halt. On the other hand, when you encounter Mai'Q the Liar in an ES game, it works, because Mai'Q inherently belongs within the world of the Elder Scrolls.

The Tales of cameo costumes/bosses are a practically perfect example of obvious cameos done right. They are usually very hard to run into and involve the player specifically seeking them out, which is what you want. The player would, 99.9% of the time, never encounter them on a first playthrough, so they wouldn't fuck with their perception of the game. But someone playing the game to find everything, who is probably someone that loves the developers work, would greatly appreciate a cameo.

I would say that, objectively, a direct cameo inherently cheapens the game world. You are presenting the player with a situation that doesn't compute, it's immediately, noticeably wrong. Again, it depends on the world/game you want, but if it's anything that's meant to draw the player in and immerse them then I'd steer clear. What if, for example, someone appeared in One Piece with a Devil Fruit power that someone else had, or a Devil Fruit eater was able to swim? It would hurt your impression of the world, because it instantly registers as "does not belong" to the player. (granted, Oda would no doubt find a way to make it work, but that's besides the point)

Hopefully you can see where I'm coming from. I just prefer very non-direct cameos that would only register with very attuned people who would really understand and enjoy the cameo/reference in question.

The good thing about this discussion is that it's got me really interested in the topic of game to game cameos. This certainly warrants research.

Oda is actually a perfect example of how to reference something in your own creative work. Literally perfect. Because like you said, the average reader won't notice the reference. Even though they aren't cameos, it's a great thing to study if you want to learn how to reference people/characters with original designs and maintain your originality.

Also I haven't heard of door-fix-it man. This is something I MUST look into.

The inclusion of Silvers Rayleigh in the early chapters was always my favourite example of Oda's preparedness. It's unreal. That character isn't remotely important for like 600 chapters after his first canonical appearance. This is one of the reasons I love One Piece- because it has more thought put into it than just "it's a shonen better have a bimbo and a guy with a big sword *cough Bleach *cough*"

So, looking at Lost Legacy, the game he mentioned, it's not just brief cameos. He's talking about having the characters actually play major roles in the game, including joining the party, those roles just would have nothing to do with the stories of their original games. Like he wants to make an original fantasy RPG, set in his own original world, except three of the eight party members will inexplicably be Aeris, Mega Man and Sailor Moon.

It's hard to imagine this being done well. Cameos are fun when they're brief and infrequent and played for laughs.