kidfenris.com

Review: Redline

2012-01-25T21:26:00.000-08:00

Anime is no stranger to excess. In fact, that’s what gave it such an advantage in decades past, when other venues of animation played it safe and boring. Yet anime goes for the wrong kind of excess all too often, losing itself in predictable violence, unvarnished misogyny, toy-fueled pandering, and, most recently, hyper-cutesy piffle aimed at the socially withdrawn. Even the few worthwhile anime creations from recent years are reserved, cuddly fare like Ponyo and Summer Wars or thoughtful snails like The Sky Crawlers. It’s been far too long since a film embraced that excess, that visceral glee and magnificent stupidity that made people sit up and notice this crazy anime thing in the first place. Redline does that.

Redline lands deep into an advanced future, though a profusion of starships and hoverspeeders hasn’t killed civilization’s fondness for cars. So there’s a circuit of combat racing that culminates in a cross-planet rally called the Redline (think Wacky Races, F-Zero, and Death Race 2000). Sweet JP, a heavily pompadoured young punk, wrecks his way into the big race after losing a qualifier to fellow human Sonoshee McLaren. The two plunge into the Redline alongside the simian cop Gori-Rider, his criminal rival Todoroki, the vicious superhero Lynchman, the odd team of the elfish Trava and the lobster-like Shinkai, the Superboins pop duo of Boiboi and Bosbos, and the previous Redline champion, a cyborg called Machinehead. Their racetrack is the whole of Roboworld, a bellicose and heavily armed planet that vows to throw its entire military at these high-speed trespassers.

That’s really all you need to know. Redline doesn’t waste your time with hard-science prattle or meaningless background. It’s too busy looking good. Strike that—it’s too busy looking fucking amazing. Director Takeshi Koike and co-creator Katsuhito Ishii hit on a strange style that recalls both Peter Chung and dark ‘90s anime, and they imbue every inch of the film with heavy shadows, beautifully animated detail, and enough sexual imagery to fill a hot-rod magazine. The backgrounds swarm with enough bizarre aliens to beggar Star Wars. Vehicles heave and rush. Explosions pulse and twist the air. Characters look gorgeously distinct without clashing. And it all meshes with a slick little soundtrack. Redline shows the seven years’ of work that went into it, and it begs to be paused and dissected frame by frame, just to properly appreciate every little touch.

Yet Redline has to slow down sometime, and that’s where it loses a little of its impact. The film opens with a stunning race and climaxes with an absolutely brilliant one, and in between lies a good 45 minutes of building things up. It’s a fairly routine story of betrayals, personal grudges, and mob conspiracies, but the stunning look brings it up to new standards. It’s a shame that the film isn’t even longer, as a few interesting points are lost in the big race. What’s the connection between Machinehead and Sonoshee, who both have high-powered Steamlight fuel? Is planet Supergrass, a pink-hued realm of sorceresses, backing Redline just to piss of the Roboworld elite? And who are those Roboworld revolutionaries, anyway?

And you know what? It doesn’t matter. JP and Sonoshee are a hero and heroine seen many times before, but they’re also cute as can be. There’s more to their little meeting than competitive sparks, and Redline shows it all instead of telling. Every character’s brought to life with great visual flourishes: Shinkai’s crustacean squawking, Machinehead’s polite menace, the tears streaming from super-sensitive Roboworld officer Deyzuna. And then you have the Super Boins and their transforming Go Nagai fem-roadster, such a preposterous sendup of sensual cartoon women that it’s hard to be offended.

In fact, Redline’s vision raises anime clichés to beautifully absurd pop-art. Highly personal animation is normally confined to short films, but Redline is a full-length indulgence of what Koike and Ishii want, whether it’s an enraged dog-man racer or a string of sexual metaphors that stretches all the way from a destructive infant-monster to a bright pink finish line. For someone who worked on director Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, Koike emerged with surprisingly upbeat tastes. He shares none of Kawajiri’s trademark Issues With Women, and Sonoshee’s inevitable team-up with JP isn’t as sexist as it first appears. For that matter, the film’s overlying conflict sees the feminine Supergrass society vex, defeat, and literally shatter the edifice of a phallic, warlike, and comically male-dominated dictatorship.

It all turns Redline into a rapid-fire rebellion against the grim and brutish animation that Japan bred throughout the 1990s. For all of its explosive energy and manly overtures, it's a joyful rush that rarely dips into gruesome territory. The race even discards its air of macho, competitive techno-fetishism in the grand finale, when JP and Sonoshee stick to something more important. It nicely caps the film’s mockey of cynical, violent entertainment, thereby resisting mockery itself. Yes, the ending is silly. So is the rest of Redline, if you haven’t noticed.

Redline’s voicework diverges a bit between the Japanese and English tracks. Takuya Kimura’s a friendlier JP than Patrick Seitz, and Yuu Aoi puts in a little more energy than Michelle Ruff when it comes to Sonoshee. On the other hand, Liam O’Brien pulls off the better version of Frisbeee, JP’s mechanic and co-conspirator. Special credit also goes to Derek Stephen Prince for making Deyzuna sound a lot like Brak from Adult Swim’s The Brak Show. The dub script does suffer from some strangely anachronistic profanities, though. It’s never on par with Angel Cop, but it’s jarring to hear racers of the distant future merrily call each other cocksuckers.

It’s sad to think that Redline might arrive too late. The film already flopped among Japanese audiences, and perhaps it won’t become a cult favorite in the West. It lacks the cynical bite of Akira or the existential tones of Ghost in the Shell, and it doesn’t enjoy the barren playing field that helped both films back in the 1990s. The average geek is no longer impressed by the simple idea of weird cartoons from Japan.

But there’s still hope. No matter the era, Redline is amazing to watch. It looks like nothing else ever animated, and its visual depths reject anime’s nastier elements. Koike and Ishii captured the right sort of excess with Redline. If enough people give the movie a chance, they just might capture it again.

Little Things: The Guardian Legend

2011-12-14T20:10:00.000-08:00

It’s very hard to find an NES game with a decent story—or any story at all, for that matter. Many of them have premises, introductions, motivations, conversations, and perhaps a theme or two, but rarely does an NES title assemble a fully coherent and vital narrative. The Guardian Legend, Compile’s amazing shooter/RPG hybrid from 1989, certainly doesn’t. Yet it has all the story it needs.

With only a screen's worth of expository text, The Guardian Legend hurls a transforming jet-android woman at a planet-size asteroid headed for the Earth. Once the heroine (in her spaceship form) breaches the big rock’s outer defenses, she’s greeted by a harsh message.

“If someone is reading this…I must have failed," confesses the narrator of The Guardian Legend’s meager backstory: the asteroid, Naju, housed a proud and civilized race before it was overtaken by some deep-space menace. The message’s author was the only survivor of this attack, and he or she mounted a last-ditch attempt at destroying Naju from within. After explaining just how this can be accomplished, the author closes with a haunting reminder: "I hope this message will not be read by anyone...It will mean that I have failed."

It’s a simple introduction, swiped from any number of films and novels where a final desperate message sets the stage for some horrific danger, but it’s particularly effective in The Guardian Legend. It’s a game without much background, and the heroine herself is never properly named during the adventure (she’s dubbed “Miria” only in the Japanese version’s manual). This brief missive accounts for most of the game’s dialogue, and in that minimalism lies power. Accompanied by the somber chirps of the soundtrack, the message lays out a bleak challenge and makes sure you know that your only real ally, someone who actually knew what to do, has been dead for a long time. You’re all alone in this.

Well, not quite. Venture into one of the adjoining rooms, and you’ll meet Compile’s mascot Randar, who sells you weapons and never stops smiling. He offers no further reassurance, but the big blue corporate icon makes Naju and The Guardian Legend just a little less forlorn.

Might Have Been: Nuts & Milk

2011-11-22T22:22:00.000-08:00

[Might Have Been tracks the failures of promising games, characters, and companies. This entry covers Hudson Soft's Nuts & Milk.]

Nuts & Milk has a small place in the equally small history of video games. It made the rounds as a simple maze-based game on various Japanese computers, but when Hudson remodeled it for the Famicom in 1984, Nuts & Milk became the console's first title released by a third-party publisher. Considering what else was fighting for space in the Famicom’s early years, Nuts & Milk wasn’t a bad game—it just had an unfortunate title for English speakers.

When one stops snickering and actually plays the game, Nuts & Milk reveals itself as an entirely harmless imitation of early ‘80s arcade culture. Players control Nuts, a pink blob who traverses levels of planks, pipes, and brick in search of his girlfriend, Yogurt. To properly rescue her, Nuts much collect all of the fruit in any given stage while avoiding his rival Milk, whose blue skin apparently brings instant death to Nuts and his kind. And Nuts must do this in 50 different levels, harried by multiple clones of Milk.

It’s all very simple, but it’s not quite as cleanly programmed as appearances suggest. Just like Donkey Kong and its legions of single-screen imitators, Nuts & Milk works against the player in many little ways. Nuts has trouble jumping when he's on wooden floors or against a wall, and a lot of his fruit-gathering solutions involve properly calculated falls. Particularly frustrating are the springs that bounce Nuts up to greater heights, but only if the jump button’s pressed at exactly the right nanosecond.

The game also looks very much its age, though there’s some appeal in the characters. Nuts and Milk are early examples of the blob-with-eyes design trend that would mold countless characters and corporate icons in the Japanese game industry of the 1980s. The finest little touch comes when Nuts falls from a decent height and lies immobile for just a moment, with a look of perfect befuddlement on his barely extant face.

There are few bonuses in Nuts & Milk. As in Donkey Kong, Hudson offers A and B games, but the only difference is the presence of hot-air balloons (which kill Nuts) and helicopters (which award points) throughout the stages. The real extra is a level editor akin to that of Lode Runner. It’s rather easy to use with a stock controller, and the basic tools of Nuts & Milk provide some clever layouts. The game also gives you a “ROUND ERROR” if you try to trap Nuts and his foes in some twisted, unwinnable 8-bit hell. Hudson wanted this to be a happy game, so don’t make it anything else.

Nuts & Milk was never released in North America, perhaps because it seemed basic and cliché by the time the Nintendo Entertainment System launched in 1985; indeed, games like Nuts & Milk became downright ancient with the advent of Super Mario Bros. If Nuts & Milk was to have a place in the NES lineup, it would’ve come in the first wave of titles, alongside Kung Fu, Clu Clu Land, Wrecking Crew, and, of course, Donkey Kong. A renamed Nuts & Milk could’ve had early Nintendo owners across America spelling profanities with bricks and pipes.

Yet Nuts & Milk went no further anywhere in the world. Hudson re-released the Famicom version for cell phones and the GameBoy Advance, while the game’s often found in those 1000-in-1 pirate game consoles hawked at mall kiosks. There has been no sign of a Nuts & Milk sequel.

There is, however, this curious blue blob seen in Mickey Mousecapade, a mid-'80s NES game developed by Hudson (and published in the U.S. by Capcom). Give it feet, and you’d have Milk. Even if it's not the same character, it’s still a sign of how rapidly the NES library evolved. Fifty single-screen levels became a meager offering by 1987, and one game’s main villain could easily be another game’s lowly stooge.

Tape Test: Twilight of the Cockroaches

2011-11-04T18:56:00.000-07:00

[Tape Test covers notable anime available in North America only through old VHS releases. This installment looks at Twilight of the Cockroaches, released by Streamline Pictures in the 1990s.]

“Franz Kafka Meets Roger Rabbit,” proclaims the cover of Twilight of the Cockroaches. It almost fits. Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? this odd half-anime film from 1987 has live actors next to cartoon characters. And like Kafka’s "The Metamorphosis," it’s…uh, it has roaches. Well, humanoid roaches. Even though Kafka’s story wasn’t necessarily about a roach. Oh well. I sympathize with whoever had to describe Twilight of the Cockroaches in a short tagline, and the Kafka one has a sharper ring than “Watership Down With Roaches” or “A Bleak Anime Version of Joe’s Apartment.”

Life is pleasant for the roaches in the bachelor pad of one Mr. Seito. They frolic amid dirty dishes, they swim in the toilet, and they fly where they please, all without Seito caring a whit. They have roach politicians, roach nightlife, roach class prejudices, and a roach holiday that commemorates a tragic loss of roach life. And if this isn’t an obvious enough allegory for the Japan of the 1980s, there’s even a meretricious morning-news show run by roaches. But the bugs aren't accurately insectile blattella asahinai. These roaches are largely humanized anime characters with antennae, an extra set of arms, and glovelike flippers where their hands should be. Fables about mice or rabbits get semi-realistic animal heroes, but biologically accurate roaches don't appeal to viewers so much.

All of this glorious roach opulence isn’t enough for Naomi, a 19-year-old (insect years, I assume) roach girl. She’s bored with her milquetoast fiancé Ichiro and generally discontented with the roach lifestyle. So she’s quite intrigued when a strange roach named Hans arrives at the Seito pad.

Hans brings the placid Seito roaches stories of his home, where roaches are systematically hunted and exterminated by humans. And no one’s more fascinated by it than Naomi, who likes Hans for his grim demeanor as much as his square-jawed German manliness. So when Hans departs for his native land like the dutiful soldier he is, Naomi follows. And she finds the adventure she so vaguely pined for. Hans and his fellow roaches live an apartment where a fastidious woman hauls out bug spray and shoes to rain death upon her unwanted tenants each night. She’s also lonely, and so, it seems, is Seito. And they’re neighbors. And so destruction is sown for the hedonistic roaches who in no way represent 1980s society.

Director Hiroaki Yoshida meant Twilight of the Cockroaches as a message for modern Japan, and it's a pretty simple one. Yet another tale of creatures undone by materialism and ignorance, it veers into muddled, cautionary terrain without much in the way of solutions. The film’s at its most enjoyable when parodying the relationship between humans and ancient pests: the roaches of Hans’ army are militant in their defense of roach life, right down to a marching anthem about roach birth rates. Yoshida's mixture of live-action and animation is hardly as smooth as Roger Rabbit (or even Cool World), but there's a much greater thematic divide between the silent, towering live-action actors and the scurrying, babbling cartoon critters. Yoshida also adds a brief stop-motion interlude in an attempt to make the film even stranger.

Aside from the talking feces, Twilight of the Cockroaches goes exactly where one expects. The roaches’ world crashes down all around them, the humans show no compunction, and there’s an uplifting little epilogue. Naomi’s affections for Ichiro and Hans are resolved, albeit in a strange way that wouldn’t work with human characters—or any vertebrates, for that matter. Still, the scenes of roach genocide have an undeniable impact, and the film has at least one genuinely unnerving moment when Naomi wanders into a roach motel. She’s stuck on a glue floor among slowly dying bugs, who thrash and starve in a shadowy grave. Nothing deserves to die like that.

Twilight of the Cockroaches received its U.S. theatrical release and dub courtesy of Streamline Pictures, and it has the usual round of competent actors reading occasionally bizarre lines. Rebecca “Reba West” Forstadt plays Naomi, and she considers it “my most bizarre role.” It’s a fair dub, though there's always the Streamline-fueled suspicion that the script's been needlessly altered.

DOES IT DESERVE A PROPER DVD RELEASE? Yes. Twilight of the Cockroaches may be routine beneath its partly animated surface, but that surface is something unique. What other films wring pathos from a roach shitting on a human’s face? What other films have bizarre, pseudo-fascist songs about the enduring roach race? What other films try to make you happy that a single roach can spawn an entire colony? Not very many, that's for sure.

Tape Test: The Awful Truth

2011-11-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

I haven’t done much with Tape Test. With this week’s installment, I’ve put up only three entries in as many years. There’s a reason for that: everything is awful.

I should explain further. When I started Tape Test, I looked forward to writing about the various VHS anime that’s not yet available on DVD; I even had a stockpile of cheaply acquired tapes for starters. Of course, I knew that most of them would be mediocre, as the overwhelming majority of anime is, but I was convinced that I could find something interesting to say about each and every one of them.

I was wrong. There are indeed a few notable anime creations only released on VHS in the West, but the majority I’ve found are awful in the worst way: they’re hackneyed, boring, and completely devoid of valid entertainment. I realized a while ago that I didn't need to write thousand-word pro bono excoriations of DNA Sights 999.9, Explorer Woman Ray, Ehrgeiz, Ogre Slayer, Genesis Surviver/Survivor Gaiarth, Dragon Century, Raven Tengu Kabuto, Blue Sonnet, Luna Varga, Akai Hayate, AWOL, Grey: Digital Target, The Legend of Kotetsu, Roots Search, or the 1996 remake of Hurricane Polymar. Many of these I remembered all too well from that unfortunate time in my life when I was willing to watch just about any remotely promising anime the local Blockbuster or comic store had up for rental. I sat through Dragoon ten years ago, and I’m not doing it again. Not for free, anyway.

And that's what happened to Tape Test. As any critic could tell you, it’s not the worst of it that gets you. It’s the banal and unremarkably terrible.

Dreaming is Free, Games are Not

2011-10-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

I haven't collected games in a while. I was into it thick and stupid for a few years when I lived in Ohio, because that's how your early twenties usually go: you want everything you didn't have when you were a teenager, and you finally have enough money and free time to enjoy it all. I gave up collecting upon realizing several things: most games weren't worth owning, I was just as content with emulating them, and amassing a huge library would turn me into the sort of person who regularly posts on forums like Digital Press and Atari Age without self-awareness or contempt. Yet I remember what it was like to visit flea markets and mom-and-pop stores, picking over crates of old NES games just in case there was a rare title or, better yet, a prototype of a canceled game.

Well, that's exactly what I dreamed of last night. I was at a flea market, in a game vendor's stall that had inexplicably sprung up in the ruins of a gas station. I was looking over a massive bin of NES cartridges. I was also telling myself that I was over this, that I didn't collect games any longer. But a small part of me still said "What if there's an unreleased game in all this? What if it's something no one's ever heard of before, like that Sunman thing? You can preserve it and put it online so everyone can play it! You'll be famous in a small niche of the Internet." So I kept looking, albeit with a slow, feigned casualness. Me? Oh no, I'm just glancing over these old Nintendo games out of passing interest. I'm not a huge nerd or anything. Not me, never.

Then another shopper, roughly my age, wandered up to a section of the bin I hadn't yet checked. He pulled out a cartridge and yelled in excitement, and I knew he'd found something amazing.

He held it up, and it was indeed rare: an NES game based on Operation Dumbo Drop.

I was left standing there, wondering just what lesson I'd been taught. Had I lost out because I hadn't been a good and devoted game-scavenging nerd? Had I let this previously undiscovered piece of history fall into the hands of someone who might never share it with the world? Did I even care that a game based on Operation Dumbo Drop was possibly lost forever? What if it was actually a good game, some unexpectedly decent piece by Natsume or Compile or Aicom?

But mostly I was left wondering if my dream was somehow rooted in fact. Was an Operation Dumbo Drop game ever announced for the NES?

No, it wasn't, but someone else asked about it. Perhaps this dream isn't mine alone.

The Dark Side of Captain Commando

2011-10-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

Captain Commando was a veritable chameleon among game mascots. As mentioned in a recent feature at 1up.com, the Capcom icon started off as a box-art pitchman and went through two different designs in the 1980s. It wasn’t until 1991 that Capcom finalized his look with an arcade beat-‘em-up.

Captain Commando is a typical enough outing in the Final Fight tradition. The eponymous Captain and his three Commando assistants pound street thugs and monsters, and it's dressed in a futuristic style inspired by manga superhero tales and old serial adventures like Captain Future and Lensman. It’s also pretty mild as the violence goes. Sword-wielding enemies can cut the Captain in half, and the mummy commando, a.k.a. “Mack the Knife,” causes foes to disintegrate into skeletons when he defeats them. That's about it. These scenes were removed in the Super NES version of Captain Commando, and there wasn’t much to take out.

There’s nothing in Captain Commando to suggest that Capcom’s underlying vision for the game was a bloody procession of sadism and gruesome deaths. For that, you’ll have to read a promotional comic that Capcom made.

The first five pages of this comic were run in Capcom Illustrations, a 1995 collection of arcade-game artwork. Those pages are likely the work of company artist and Captain Commando planner Akiman, and the empty word balloons suggest that the project was never finished. A two-volume Captain Commando manga was released in 1994, coinciding with the Super NES version, but it seems to be a different production.

Our story begins with news of unrest at some scientific facility, and this alarms fully clothed passersby as well as couples engaged in pants-free leisure (remember to read these panels right-to-left). The suit-wearing man in the crowd looks like an older version of Captain Commando, and it’s the closest that this comic comes to including any of the game’s heroes. This is all about the bad guys, folks.

The broadcast cuts to footage of the facility interior, where some unfortunate guards are slaughtered by the forces of Captain Commando end boss Genocide (“Scumocide” in North America). If you look closely at the bottom-right panel, you’ll see one of the game’s “Z” enemies slicing a guard in half. On the lower-left, Genocide snaps off another guard’s head, the first of several unpleasant sights in this comic.

Genocide, realizing that he’s on TV, seizes the last un-murdered guard and bites part of his head off. An adept public speaker, Genocide’s able to keep talking through a mouthful of brains and skull fragments. Meanwhile, the lab’s surviving employees are rounded up by Genocide’s yellow-hooded flunkies, who are all known as “Wooky” in the game.

Flanked by two “Carols,” Genocide confronts the lead researcher of the facility. One might assume this bespectacled scientist is important, but he never appears in the game. A displeased Genocide orders one of his Wooky underlings to show the good professor that they mean business, so the Wooky grabs a hostage by the head and... ewww.

The assembled thugs laugh while the professor winces in disgust. This scene is made slightly more unnerving by the fact that Wookies are the lowest-rung enemies in the game. They’re punching bags that are barely even dangerous in groups. It’s like seeing a grown man decapitated by one of those little blue slimes from Dragon Quest.

This horrifying display causes the next guy in line to lose his nerve, and he points an accusing finger at a fellow hostage. The absence of dialogue leaves no clue as to who this blonde woman is or why her identity creates a little question mark over one Wooky’s head. Perhaps she’s an undercover agent. Perhaps she knows whatever secrets Genocide wants. Perhaps she’s Rachel, the daughter of the president of Sercia. The close-up suggests that she, like the professor, is a significant character, but she doesn’t appear in the game either.

Snitching on his comrade doesn’t do this poor sap any good, however. It only attracts the attention of one of the Carols, who electrocutes him with her prod-like daggers. Or maybe she’s shocking him with her embrace. Then again, a close look reveals that the current is arcing out of her ass. That’s somehow a fitting conclusion to this story.

So ends this preview of a Captain Commando comic that was perhaps never completed. It raises the question of what other violent, officially endorsed manga may exist for Capcom games, which rarely traipsed into Mortal Kombat territory. Is there a Street Fighter II comic where M. Bison mercilessly executes captive scientists? Is there a Final Fight comic where Rolento and Andore Jr. dismember innocent Metro City pedestrians and laugh at their screams for mercy?

Then again, a comic like this isn’t such a surprise. By their own admission, Capcom’s artists are regularly inspired by violent manga like Fist of the North Star, Battle Angel Alita, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, and even Apocalypse Zero. A brain-devouring giant is par for the course in the first volume of Battle Angel Alita, and murder by electric ass would be an unspectacular sight in the pages of Apocalypse Zero. Strange as this comic is, it's a good look beneath the surface of many a Capcom game.

Little Things: Wonder Boy in Monster Land

2011-10-07T17:52:00.000-07:00

Wonder Boy in Monster Land may have a title both generic and silly, but it’s an important game in the history of Westone and their biggest series. The original Wonder Boy went through the motions of a rudimentary platformer (and spawned Adventure Island along the way), but 1987’s Wonder Boy in Monster Land slowed the pace while adding weapons, armor, shops, and other RPG-ish features. And so it started the franchise’s climb toward the fantastic Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap and Monster World IV.

Another thing about Wonder Boy in Monster Land: just about every foe has a death animation. Most side-scrollers of the NES and Sega Master System didn’t bother with this; enemies exploded, flickered, or flipped off of the screen upon dying. Wonder Boy in Monster Land, on the other hand, gives each defeated creature a single-frame demise.

The most striking one comes from the mushrooms that amble toward Wonder Boy in the early stages of the game. At first, they look sedate and dutiful.

Then Wonder Boy stabs one, and its face changes to a look of pure agony. The creature’s final half-second on Earth is spent in tearful horror, gazing not toward Wonder Boy but out at the player. Or perhaps it’s looking at the vast spectrum of all it'll never be, at everything it longed to do with its brief fungal existence. A glimpse of a life unfulfilled torments this mushroom soldier, who couldn't even be a Goomba in Super Mario Bros., just before it vanishes from the world, leaving behind nothing but the stink of regrets. And a shiny coin for Wonder Boy.

Many other enemies in the game have little death throes, but nothing so memorable as the mushroom underling. And Wonder Boy? He doesn’t react at all. As I pointed out years ago, Wonder Boy is a bit creepy.

The Really, Really Lost Street Fighter

2011-09-29T14:51:00.000-07:00

One good thing about liking Street Fighter is the knowledge that you can ignore just about every movie and TV series it inspires. After all, the games themselves don’t acknowledge any of them; not the hysterically awful live-action Street Fighter: The Movie nor the hysterically awful USA Network cartoon it spawned. The only exception is 1994’s Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. It’s quite stupid, but it was Capcom’s own project. They had money to spend on it, the experienced Gisaburo Sugi (Night on the Galactic Railroad, Touch) to direct it, and the advantage of video-game nonsense always going down easier as animation. And it paid off. Sort of. Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie is still the best anime inspired by a fighting game, even if that means next to nothing.

Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie was also close to Capcom’s vision for the games, and so pieces of it turned up in later Street Fighter titles, particularly the Alpha series. Ken, Ryu, Cammy, and several other characters had their looks tweaked in accordance with the movie, and Alpha 2 recreates some of the film’s battles. One character from the film even crossed over: Senoh, M. Bison’s bald scientist crony, pops up in one or two Alpha endings.

There’s another piece of obscurity attacked to Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. One character, also an agent of Bison’s Shadaloo syndicate, was on the drawing boards but never made it into the film. Her absence was noted in an old issue of Anime UK, and the magazine ran a sketch of her with this description: “In the outline, she worked for SHADOWLAW [Shadaloo] and appeared on the stage in Las Vegas wearing what one Japanese source describes as ‘radical bondage gear.’” Presumably, she was inspired by the showgirls that mill about in the background of Balrog’s stage in the original Street Fighter II.

Had she actually made it into the film, the unnamed dancer might’ve also slipped into the Street Fighter games and their loosely structured canon, which Capcom makes up only when circumstances and lawsuits demand.

Or maybe the dancer and her radical bondage getup aren’t so lost. With her Bison-like hat, she bears a certain resemblance to Poison, the Final Fight regular who was changed into a guy for the Super NES version of the game. Poison’s backstory has described her as both a cross-dressing man and a fully transgendered character, and the inconsistency has started far more fan debate than it probably should have. And now Poison’s in Street Fighter X Tekken, which will stir up even more debate. Of course, Poison is a non-existent video-game character and is therefore without any gender, but pointing that out makes you a jerk.

Was the dancer a Poison cameo that Manga UK didn’t notice? Or was she just some background filler that the story didn’t want or need? Whatever the answer, she’s still the most obscure of all unused Street Fighter character, even more so than those early drawings of Dhalsim with six arms and an elephant’s head.

Phantasy Star III: Care and Feeding

2011-09-21T20:27:00.000-07:00

Game manuals are a dying breed. As the industry shifts toward online distribution and cheap packaging, manuals grow thinner and less informative. In fact, some modern titles don’t even include them. And why should they? Most of today’s games have extensive, intrusive tutorials that make manuals unnecessary. Yet there’s one important thing that only manuals have: drawings of the game’s characters telling you not to set your new purchase on fire and throw it in the toilet.

Not that today’s games have warnings like that. That sort of thing was seen mostly in Japanese releases during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when game companies felt the need to inform players of the best ways to care for the imposing technologies of CDs and game cartridges. My favorite little warning section comes from the manual for Phantasy Star III.

I don’t know Japanese well enough to fully translate this, but I’m not worried. I tried to do the same thing with a Demo Demo PlayStation cover, and someone dropped in to correct my largely wrong interpretation. So I’ll just translate this Phantasy Star III cartridge-care guide as best I can. It’ll all work out in the end.

“Thank you for purchasing Phantasy Star III for the Sega Mega Drive, which is what we call the Genesis in Japan and Europe. Observe that the cartoon characters on the right are happy. If you are not happy while playing this game, the problem obviously lies entirely with YOU and not with the people who rushed the game through development, leaving in bugs and unexplored concepts. So it's YOUR fault.”

“To turn on your Sega console, point at it and scream at the top of your lungs. Sega systems are hardened, manful devices that require verbal abuse to activate, unlike frail and sensitive Nintendo consoles.”

“Your Phantasy Star III game cartridge is made of precision electronics. It can bring good luck to a woman if she sits upon it on the day of her wedding. However, if the cartridge emits comical star effects, the bride will know only shame and disappointment throughout her marriage.”

“Do not attempt to sexually stimulate your Phantasy Star III cartridge by curiously stroking the contacts. Your Phantasy Star III cartridge has taken a vow of celibacy.”

“Do not take your Phantasy Star III cartridge out to the desert and stare at it with a look of simian contemplation while the green light of an alien sun beats down upon you and your curiously hovering game. You will find no enlightenment.”

“Do not attempt to call upon demons by soaking your Phantasy Star III cartridge in virgin blood. At best, you will summon only messy and disobedient eye creatures.”

“While superficially similar to human beings, androids can be detected by observing their eyes during a Voight-Kampff test. Note that while Phantasy Star III allows you to marry and have children, you are not permitted to do either with the android characters, as this would be an abominable crime against God and nature.”

Working Designs, Catalogued

2011-08-30T11:40:00.000-07:00

One must be even-handed when discussing Working Designs. One may say that the small software house, co-founded and led by Victor Ireland, did great things by publishing semi-obscure Japanese games and localizing them carefully at a time when few U.S. companies did either. However, you must also mention the risqué, modern-day humor crammed into Working Designs translations. You might also mention that Ireland would berate game reviewers if they complained that Baywatch jokes didn’t fit in a medieval-fantasy RPG. You must present the good and bad of Working Designs, using phrases like “controversial” and “love it or hate it” to give readers an objective measure.

Well, screw all that. I liked Working Designs. I liked the humorous dialogue changes. I liked the way they made pushover Japanese games harder and therefore more interesting for North America, though it’s a shame about Exile II. I liked Popful Mail, Thunder Force V, and Elemental Gearbolt just as well as the more popular Working Designs staples of Dragon Force and the Lunar games. And I liked watching the arguments between Ireland and everyone from GameFan magazine editors to Sega bigwigs. Right or wrong, Working Designs was damned entertaining. Atlus, Xseed, and other contemporary publishers of Japanese RPGs may be more professional, but they’re just not as marvelously dramatic.

Working Designs didn’t survive to see this age, but the company struck a 1990s vein of Japanese-RPG fans that other publishers ignored entirely. If those fans weren’t a significant force in the industry, they were at least devoted. They bought games, strategy guides, and, most importantly, all sorts of merchandise based on the games they liked. Working Designs figured this out early.

If you picked up a Working Designs game for the Sega CD or Sega Saturn, you probably found one of these brochures inside that needlessly oversized jewel case. It shills wares with a downright precious candor, inviting kids everywhere to cover their rooms and concern their parents with posters and pins and mousepads. Game companies of the 1990s sometimes offered a token t-shirt or two with their products, but that simply wasn’t good enough for Working Designs. Their games were important, and they deserved to be all over walls and backpacks.

Well, some of their games deserved this. It’s hard to imagine many fans caring about Shining Wisdom, a middleweight Saturn action-RPG, so much that they’d want a poster or a hat. The same goes for RayStorm, Iron Storm and other games that didn’t have particularly distinct designs. The Vay poster is an interesting sight, though. Free of anime-eyed characters, it could pass for some prog-metal band’s album cover.

The second page offers some mousepads, showing a shrewder grasp of Working Designs fandom. Lunar and Dragon Force get several mats each, less popular games are limited to single pieces, and Iron Storm is nowhere to be seen. Nothing against Iron Storm; it’s a good game from the Daisenryaku series, and I believe it did well on the Saturn. I just can’t see its fans spilling over into mousepad purchases. Maybe Victor Ireland will comment here and correct me.

There are a few strange omissions from this Working Designs cargo cult. For one thing, Popful Mail didn’t get any posters or mousepads, even though it’s a charming game with memorable character art. Rights issues with Sega and Falcom were perhaps at play. Also absent are any soundtracks. RPG fans ate those up in the 1990s, and Square exploited that with Final Fantasy III and Secret of Mana CDs. Working Designs didn’t.

The remainder of the catalog features every Working Designs release up to the start of the company’s PlayStation days and the launch of the SPAZ shooter label, freakish logo and all. Even the games that are sold out remain on the list, perhaps to inspire readers to rush down to their local Software ETC. and grab that lingering copy of Vay. And that wouldn’t be such a bad idea, as Working Designs releases became collectible and, in some cases, expensive in the years to come. Let’s just say that sixty-three bucks is a good price for Dragon Force.

The last page of this pamphlet features watches, an order form, and a quaint reminder of an age when people still bought things by mail. It’s also where my secret is revealed: as much as I liked Working Designs, I never really bought anything from this catalog. I considered a Lunar 2 mousepad or a Popful Mail pin, but I didn’t go through the trouble of making out a check to Working Designs.

I’m sure that plenty of fans did, as this was a publisher that cultivated a special sort of follower. Former Working Designs employee Zach Meston described some of them in a forum post:

“At the end of the 1999 E3, I walked around a corner of the Working Designs booth to find a man standing in front of the door to one of the meeting rooms. The previous day, a fanboy had literally fallen to his knees and kissed Victor Ireland's feet as Victor came out of a meeting room, so I thought this might be another fanboy waiting to pay his obsessive respects. Then I noticed the door to the room was open. I approached the man and said ‘Excuse me,’ at which point he immediately turned and speed-walked away. Figuring my halitosis had once again saved the day, I turned to close the door—and saw a second fanboy inside the room, literally peeling a Lunar poster off the wall.”

Upon moving to the PlayStation, Working Designs stopped including merchandise pamphlets with games, preferring instead to bundle loot with the games themselves. The Lunar reissues and Arc the Lad shipped with everything from cloth maps to character standees, and the giant punching Ghaleon puppet stands as one of the strangest and best pre-order items ever. It’s a trend that lasted well beyond Working Designs’ collapse in 2005. Today, hardcore Japanese games from Aksys, NIS America, Atlus, and even Konami are shipped with pillowcases, trading cards, and what one publisher trumpets as a “Super 3-D Boobie Mousemat.” That’s one place Working Designs never went.

Lost Anime: t.A.T.u. Paragate

2011-08-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

Remember t.A.T.u., the Russian pop duo that bolstered their standard-issue songs with feigned lesbian overtones? Well, they officially broke up this past March. Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova’s act ran out of steam a good five years before that, of course, and it'll survive only as long as department store music stations keep “All the Things She Said” in rotation. However, t.A.T.u. was big back in 2003, with both international hits and tabloid controversies.

And what else was big back in 2003? Anime.

The short-lived t.A.T.u. Paragate was always something of a mystery. It was an anime film starring the stage personae that Katina and Volkova projected, but the details were vague, referring to some paranormal gate that the two characters entered. Even the official website's story section had a “coming soon” label until it all abruptly closed in 2005, revealing little else about Paragate.

The swift demise of the film was likely due to Katina and Volkova cutting ties with their manager, Ivan Shapovalov. As the architect behind much of t.A.T.u.’s image, Shapovalov was the driving force behind Paragate, and he’s even credited with the screenplay. Without him, the movie died quickly. Shapovalov never answered my e-mails, so I’ll assume that’s the whole story.

But why should anyone care about t.A.T.u. Paragate, a hollow vanity project based on an equally hollow pop act? There’s one reason: Shinichiro Watanabe, director of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. Some see him as the best thing about the anime industry, and he excels at mixing music and animation. He signed on to direct Paragate’s opening, and even a t.A.T.u. song could be amazing in Watanabe's hands.

It’s not clear if that opening animation was ever completed, or if any other parts of Paragate came together. It was in the planning stages for nearly a year, reportedly overseen by directors Norio Kashima and Susumu Kudo (who, coincidentally, ended up in charge of his own Mardock Scramble anime years after Gonzo canceled theirs). No footage of it can be found today. Searching for Paragate remnants is strange at any rate, as it’s hard to tell where the official material ends and the fan art begins. Perhaps that explains why t.A.T.u. Paragate was no major loss. At the most, it’d have a nice opening.

Metal Slug 3: Funny and Gimmicky Style

2011-07-31T18:52:00.000-07:00

Metal Slug 3 barely qualifies as an unreleased game. It first arrived on the Neo Geo in 2000, and it was since ported to the PlayStation 2, the Xbox, the Wii, the PSP, and the Xbox 360. In truth, the only unreleased Metal Slug 3 is the North American version of the PlayStation 2 port. SNK Playmore prepped it in 2004 only to be shot down by Sony execs who still didn't care for 2-D action games. Metal Slug 3 made it to the PS2 in Japan and Europe, but North America saw only a few review discs made for members of the press.

No, I don't have a review disc. But I have the flier that came with it!

The flier's front shows the same art SNK used for the game’s original Neo Geo game. Drawn by Shinkiro, it's a sampling of Metal Slug 3’s attractions: hidden tunnels, angry yetis, giant eels, walking eyes (say it like Doctor Venture for best effect), and a war between the standard Metal Slug villains and a race of invading aliens. Yes, Metal Slug 3 has all of this in magnificent detail. It’s a gem from SNK's hottest creative streak, which also included Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves and SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium. Of course, SNK followed up its greatest successes the only way SNK knew how: by going bankrupt. That’s the SNK we remember.

The other side of the flier has another SNK staple: delightfully not-quite-right English. SNK was known for distinctly bizarre translations in its games, ranging from slightly off wordings to victory quotes where characters were happy as oysters and kindly gave the palm to such a crock. This Metal Slug 3 flier doesn’t reach those heights, but it offers "diverged ways" and “the new scale of the game with funny and gimmicky style.” And that’s also the SNK we remember.

Metal Slug 3 is easy to find today. Unshaken by Sony, SNK Playmore brought the Xbox version to North America in 2004, and the game is readily available in the Metal Slug Anthology and on Xbox Live Arcade. You'll find that Metal Slug 3 holds up rather well, even if its modern incarnations are missing something: an awkward translation.

Might Have Been: Zero Divide

2011-06-30T17:18:00.000-07:00

[Might Have Been tracks the failures of promising games, characters, and companies. It ran at GameSetWatch several years ago, and I’ve revived it because I still find failure much more fascinating than success. This particular failure belongs to Zero Divide!]

The first generation of 3-D fighting games aged quickly and poorly. It wasn’t just the embarrassing one-offs like Fight for Life and Criticom, either. The standard-bearing, system-selling Tekken, Toshinden, and Virtua Fighter all lasted about a year before time and sequels reduced their once-impressive polygon characters to laughable mannequins. Knowingly or not, a developer called Zoom had the right idea back in 1995: if the combatants in all nascent 3-D fighting games were bound to look like blocky robots anyway, why not just make a fighter full of…well, robots?

Zoom was quite familiar with the path that led to Zero Divide on the PlayStation. Their most prominent creation prior to this was the Genocide series, consisting of two side-scrolling, mecha-filled action games for the Super Famicom and Sharp X68000. Zero Divide takes a few design cues from Genocide 2’s large-shouldered mechs and adds all the necessary stereotypes of a fighting game. There’s a basic robot named Zero, a slightly different rival-bot named Eos, a swordsbot named Cygnus, a camouflage-painted gun-bot named Wild-3, and a feminine cat-bot named Io. Rarer archetypes edge in as well: Draco’s a mecha-dragon, Nereid is a slavering, multi-armed beast with a drill for a body, and Tau is a screen-filling robotic scorpion. And why are all of these robots fighting? They’re part of some virtual-reality attempt to expose a taunting hacker named XTAL. We'll come back to him later.

If the characters have moments of invention, Zero Divide’s gameplay is painstakingly copied from Virtua Fighter. Special attacks are done by tapping the direction pad, most of the moves are button combos, jumping sends you high into the air, and being knocked out of the ring ends your match. At least the robots can grab the edge of that ring and pull themselves back in. The game also offers a limited selection in which opponent to fight next, though you face them all eventually.

Zoom picked a decent base for their fighting game, but Zero Divide doesn’t escape the problems common to early 3-D fighters. The controls are a little too sluggish, the gameplay just a little too limited in its one plane of combat. While the difficulty curve is fair, the characters don’t have enough moves to keep things interesting through repeated playthroughs or extensive two-player competition.

Back in 1995, though, that didn’t matter quite as much, because Zero Divide was so darned pretty. Zoom crammed the game with all sorts of 3-D sights, from jungle cages to cities to abstract techno-arenas surrounded by revolving cubes and TV screens. The soundtrack also wanders in its selection of tunes. Most importantly, the deliberately artificial characters look far better than the alleged humans of the first Tekken or Virtua Fighter, and their metal panels can be ripped away in combat to show crackling circuits beneath. Battle Arena Toshinden may have been the showcase fighter of the PlayStation’s early lineup, but Zero Divide looked good long after you noticed just how stiff and ugly Toshinden’s characters actually were.

Zero Divide also gives the impression that it wasn’t rushed. Zoom had time to throw in replay options, camera changes, a three-level version of their old 16-bit shooter Phalanx, and a bonus comic strip featuring Zero and Zoom’s cat mascot (the skit is still in the English version of the game, but it's not translated). The quality of the fighting game aside, Zero Divide gave first-round PlayStation adopters a lot for their money.

One other thing helped Zero Divide stand out. Remember XTAL, the mysterious hacker who started this all-robot tournament? Well, his voice goads the player throughout the fisticuffs, and he’s the most hilariously awful announcer in a fighting game. Eclipsing Soul Blade’s overdramatic narrator and Street Fighter Alpha 3’s heated TRIUMPH OR DIE screamer, dear XTAL delivers mockery like “Hey! Your unit’s gone!” and “Wow, that really hurt!” in tones both poorly acted and densely sarcastic. A combination of used-car salesman and 1980s translation software, XTAL is perhaps the most memorable thing about Zero Divide.

With its 1995 debut, Zero Divide was nearly a good fighting game. Rough starts are normal in the genre, and Zero Divide needed a sequel to refine itself. A Street Fighter II. A Virtua Fighter 2. A Killer Inst…well, a Mortal Kombat II. Instead it got Zero Divide 2: The Secret Wish, which adds four new characters and not much else. The replay storage is larger, the moves are mostly the same, and the graphics are actually more primitive in some places. In order to run smoother, the game simplifies its look, and the result isn’t as striking as the original Zero Divide.

It was the opposite of what Zero Divide 2 should’ve been, and no one cared. Time Warner Interactive brought the original Zero Divide out in the U.S. and Ocean released it in Europe, but no publisher picked up the sequel outside of Japan. Zoom tried one more time with Zero Divide: The Final Conflict for the Sega Saturn. It looks rather nice for a Saturn 3-D fighter not backed by Sega, but it sticks with the same formula and visual style.

That ended Zero Divide’s career. Zoom went on to make Mr. Mosquito and less notable games, while the original Zero Divide went on to age much like other 3-D games from the PlayStation's first round. It can't get by on looks anymore, and its two follow-ups offer only slightly better gameplay. Today, Zero Divide’s just the fighting-game version of a band that got a little airplay back in 1995 and almost, almost made it big.

Bill Clinton vs. Guilty Gear

2011-05-29T20:53:00.000-07:00

Politicians often take on video games, but they usually stick to the big and controversial ones—the Night Traps and Mortal Kombats of their eras. Guilty Gear, Arc System Works’ fighting-game mishmash of anime and heavy metal, flies well beneath mainstream attention. It’s hard to imagine such a niche series riling politicians back in 1999, when it was still obscure even in the fighter scene. But that’s what happened.

Concerned over violent marketing that targeted children, President Bill Clinton announced a federal study of the ways that games, movies, and other media might corrupt the youth of America. The centerpiece of his evidence, according to wire reports, was a video-game ad that invited players to “kill your friends guilt-free.” That ad could only be the magazine spot for the original Guilty Gear.

The ad is relatively non-violent, aside from Sol’s contorted way of brandishing his sword. In fact, Atlus softened the tagline with asterisks and a disclaimer in the fine print. It’s a particularly mild offering from a time when Sega pasted screenshots on a naked women and Sony joked about dismemberment.

Of course, Guilty Gear harmed no malleable young minds. As an impressive 2-D game on the PlayStation, it was noticed by dedicated fighting-game enthusiasts and a few others, but that was as far as it went. Clinton’s task force may as well have examined movie-industry marketing by scrutinizing posters of New Rose Hotel.

No children cared about Guilty Gear or its ads, and that’s how things stayed. Senate hearings on video-game violence made Night Trap notorious, but there would be no inadvertent publicity bump for Guilty Gear. Perhaps that’s because Clinton never mentioned it by name. So Guilty Gear stayed on the outskirts. It resurfaced a few years later with the Guilty Gear X line, which features a cross-dressing boy nun and a guitar-slamming witch who pulls off her top in victory. Such things might’ve horrified government investigators, but no one told them.

One question remains: Did Clinton’s staff put together a blown-up display of that Guilty Gear ad for their press conference? And did they later throw it away? I’m long past the stage in my life where I’d hang video-game posters on my wall, but I might make an exception for a souvenir of Guilty Gear’s moment in the government spotlight.

Lost Anime: Gonzo's Mardock Scramble

2011-05-28T20:40:00.000-07:00

Studio Gonzo is known for several things: making lots of anime series, letting those series disintegrate by the halfway mark, and epitomizing the style-over-substance approach that bloated the anime industry throughout the past decade. Studio Gonzo is also known for playing it safe. Most of their work, good or bad, goes right for the mainstream jugular or the sadly reliable vein of pillow-molesting anime nerds. There are few true experiments in the company’s catalog, and one of them was abruptly canceled: Mardock Scramble.

Mardock Scramble began as a novel by Tow Ubukata, a prolific author rarely at a loss for some bizarre idea. His works were behind Capcom’s Chaos Legion game, Production I.G’s mystic historical anime drama Le Chevalier d’Eon, and the incomprehensible Renaissance-superhero manga Pilgrim Jäger. Unlike Ubukata’s more fanciful tales, Mardock Scramble is straight science fiction: in Mardock City, a prostitute named Rune Balot is murdered by her amnesiac boyfriend. Resurrected by the local authorities, she awakens with powers over electricity. Then she tries to bring down her killer, with only a vague conspiracy and a talking, shapeshifting mouse named Oeufcoque to guide her.

Gonzo announced a Mardock Scramble anime series in 2005 to mark the studio’s 15th anniversary. Many were skeptical of Gonzo at this point, having endured Kiddy Grade and Burst Angel and other disappointments. Yet Mardock Scramble had names behind it: Ubukata himself provided the screenplay, artist Range Murata’s disquieting sad-girl artwork suited the story, and director Yasufumi Soejima had crafted the shifting patterns of Gankutsuou, which will likely be remembered as Gonzo’s only interesting series. Apparently out to make a good impression with this prestige project, Gonzo announced that Mardock Scramble would use a new type of 3-D digital animation.

Newtype magazine previews and the above flier from the Tokyo Anime Festival give limited previews of Mardock Scramble, but they’re intriguing: a cocoon-like city, a future of strange technology, and a morphing weapon that decides to go around in mouse form. The OVA’s first and only trailer is equally austere, with actress Megumi Hayashibara reciting morbidly romantic lines while blood runs down the barrel of a gun.

This was all that the public would ever see of Gonzo’s Mardock Scramble. Late in 2006, the project was killed for what Gonzo called “various reasons.” One of those reasons was likely a matter of image. According to former Gonzo employees who saw footage of the first episode, Mardock Scramble was far from Gonzo’s usual marketable flash. It was a grim and freakish production, featuring such palatable sights as “a midget covered in breasts.” Gonzo likely knew that the series wouldn’t get on TV in Japan or North America, and that was a dangerous setback for a big-budget endeavor representing the studio’s anniversary.

Yet it was money that really killed Mardock Scramble. In an interview last year, Ubukata pointed to “the bursting of the anime bubble in 2006” as the reason behind Gonzo’s abrupt cancellation, and it makes sense. The anime industry’s North American boom was over by 2005. American companies had spent years trying to sell fans mediocre anime that no one wanted, and their market collapsed like a house of Venus Versus Virus DVDs. Gonzo had no time for unmarketable anime, not when it was about to throw a million dollars into each episode of Afro Samurai.

Mardock Scramble didn’t stay canceled for long. In 2009, Aniplex and a relatively new studio called GoHands started work on a trilogy of Mardock Scramble films by director Susumu Kudo (whose resume curiously includes the canceled T.A.T.u. Paragate anime). The initial movie, entitled The First Compression, is full of reasons why Mardock Scramble was perhaps too much for Gonzo. Balot’s background is unnerving, her rebirth leaves mental scars, and the film ends with her and Ouefcoque caught in a vicious, bloody showdown with a gang of deranged murderers. Those murderers include the above-referenced breast-creature and a man named, seriously, Welldone the Pussyhand. Ubukata wrote the original novel to highlight the problem of teen prostitution in Japan (a statement slightly shaken by the film's unnecessary shower scenes), and Kudo gives it a ruthless energy. The result recalls a hyperviolent ’90s anime OVA, but with an actual reason to exist.

It’s all for the best that the new Mardock Scramble (above) overshadows its unreleased predecessor. Gonzo’s track record is the worst of any major anime studio, and other promising ideas died on their watch (The Five Killers remains in limbo). Now beset with financial problems, Gonzo is perhaps worse off for letting Mardock Scramble get away. It was something different for the studio, but we’ll never know if it was also something better.

Trouble Shooter: Nintendo Haters at Heart

2011-04-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

The Sega-Nintendo War of the early 1990s may go down in history as yet another small-scale market squabble, but it left an impression. Uncouth as it is to compare trivial game-industry rivalries to real life, Sega and Nintendo fought a World War, polarizing the masses and reducing NEC’s TurboGrafx-16 to a cringing pocket of irrelevance. It was a momentous age, with every young nerd sifting magazines and playground rumors for the latest revelation that would see Sega or Nintendo triumphant. Friendships were tested, lifelong biases were forged, and at least one person claimed that Eternal Champions was better than Street Fighter II Turbo. And it all happened without widespread Internet access to feed the bonfires.

Yet the battle rarely bled into the games themselves. For the most part, Sega and Nintendo avoided attacking each other in their creations. Sega originally named a mustachioed boss “Mari-Oh” in Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, then changed it for the final version. Nintendo took the high road until the last years of the war, and their most savage blow had Uniracers telling players that names like "Sonic" and "Sega" were, in fact, not cool enough.

The majority of third-party developers avoided taking sides, but some couldn’t help it. Naxat buried an exploding “S?GA” logo in the code of their awesome NES shooter Recca, even though that barb went undiscovered for decades. Bart’s Nightmare, a horrible 1992 Super NES treatment of The Simpsons, snipes at Sega in mini-game where skyscraper residents toss things from windows. Among the items rained down on Bartzilla are cats, TVs, fire extinguishers…and what looks like a Genesis.

On the other side of the conflict, one game bluntly targets Nintendo and its Super Famicom. That game is Vic Tokai’s Trouble Shooter.

Trouble Shooter was never a classic of the Sega Genesis library. It’s basic and slow-paced, though strangely charming in its marriage of Forgotten Worlds and Parodius. In such a mixture, the game sends heavily armed bounty hunters Madison and Crystal (Mania and Maria in Japan) floating through levels and gunning down all sorts of slightly bizarre machines. It has the affectionate, in-jokey air of a pet project, crafted by a Vic Tokai team called Studio Uchuu Tetsujin, or Studio Space Iron Men. Reportedly irked by Vic Tokai’s support of Super Famicom games, Studio Space Iron Men hit Nintendo with a stunning assault. They stepped on the Super Famicom.

When Trouble Shooter arrived in Japan as Battle Mania, it had a surprise in store. Press Start, Right, and C on the second controller as the two heroines tear past the Sega logo, and you’ll watch a miniature Madison vigorously stomping a Super Famicom. In testament to Nintendo’s rugged hardware standards, the system appears undamaged. This isn’t in the English version of the game, though it was likely added later; Battle Mania came out in Japan several months after Trouble Shooter. In that time, Madison came to hate the Super Famicom.

No cowards they, Trouble Shooter’s developers went a step further with the sequel. Released only in Japan, Battle Mania Dai Gin Joh enhances everything about the first game: the control allows for eight-way firing, the levels are more inventive, and everything’s just faster, funnier, and better-looking. And Battle Mania doesn’t hide its Nintendo mockeries this time around. The game’s fourth stage has Madison and Crystal chasing down a mile-long assault train powered by gerbil wheels. Halfway through the firefight, our heroines encounter a fleet of caped Marios.

The flying and completely shootable Marios drop green mushrooms on Madison, just so there’s no confusing them with that other game where rotund Italian plumbers don yellow capes to fly. Also seen in the Mario flock is the ducklike Socket, titular star of Vic Tokai’s mediocre Sonic clone. Socket came to the U.S. in 1994 while the much more impressive Battle Mania Dai Gin Joh stayed in Japan, and Vic Tokai exited the game industry a few years later. Not that I believe that bringing out Battle Mania Dai Gin Joh as Trouble Shooter 2 would’ve kept Vic Tokai’s game division afloat and successful even today, with Trouble Shooter Neo and Return to Demonhead stunning players on the Xbox 360 while a Krion Conquest cartoon enchanted children of all ages and a talking plush Psycho Fox became the holiday season’s hottest toy. Not at all.

Such fervent attacks on Nintendo are now part of Trouble Shooter’s small legacy. The two games are obscure today, but those who remember them often remember that Madison detested the Super Famicom. It’s even a running gag in what little fan art Trouble Shooter inspired.

There’s an epilogue to this strange little tale, and it lies in Segagaga, a 2001 simulation RPG all about rescuing Sega itself from financial ruin. In directing the company’s game development, the player’s avatar encounters all sorts of Sega characters and inside jokes. It culminates in a battle with a rival corporation, and familiar faces from many Sega titles join the fight. Madison and Crystal are among them, representing Vic Tokai.

But why are they in the game? Did Vic Tokai co-produce Segagaga? Did someone from Studio Space Iron Men, perhaps Takayan the Barbarian himself, work on the game? Did Sega buy the rights to Vic Tokai’s catalog in some backroom deal they never bothered to announce? I don’t know. But I like to think that Madison and Crystal simply became honorary Sega characters thanks to their part in the fight against Nintendo. They certainly earned it.

Vagrant Story: The Graphic Comic Novel Book

2011-02-16T19:53:00.000-08:00

Comics based on video games are usually awful for two reasons. Most games have lousy stories to start with, and their comic versions often show artistic standards that even Rob Liefeld would find wanting. Yasumi Matsuno’s games fix the first problem: from Tactics Ogre through Final Fantasy XII, they’re on the relatively short list of game storylines that could become books or movies without completely humiliating themselves.

They could, but they don't. The comics based on Matsuno’s games are still terrible, but that's more the fault of the adaptations. Over in Japan, there’s a bland Tactics Ogre manga and an awful two-volume Final Fantasy XII project, both made with no attempt to enrich the source material. In America, we have only a Vagrant Story comic that’s barely a comic at all.

Vagrant Story is already part comic, anyway. Matsuno’s game is a PlayStation dungeon-crawler, heavy on customization and the darkly political tone that guides most of his stories. The characters are realistically proportioned (in artist Akihiko Yoshida’s strange bondage outfits), and their dialogue’s all told through unvoiced word balloons. So it feels like a comic book, albeit one where medieval-fantasy cult leaders and scheming pontiffs chatter on about sellswords and faerie tales. At the very least, a Vagrant Story comic would attract those who hastily extolled the game as true art upon its release.

Eruptor Entertainment’s Vagrant Story comic is really just a preview issue, given away at E3 in 2000, but its cover promises all sorts of camp wonder. Are main characters Ashley Riot and Callo Merlose now 1990s-style comic heroes? Will they be preposterously built vigilantes with violent, mysterious pasts? Will they pose uncomfortably while hiding their feet or hands or whatever body part the artist can’t draw? Will they scream miles of expository dialogue in mid-air as they leap at enemies? Will they say things like “Kill THIS, ya bastards!” before pulling out handguns large enough to launch short-range aircraft?

Sadly, they don’t do any of that inside the comic. It’s black-and-white, has about twelve pages of story, and consists entirely of Ashley’s internal monologue. While the Ashley of the game is a man of few words, the comic finds him narrating his visit to the city of Lea Monde. Ashley is sent there to bring down a strange cult headed by the metal-armed Sydney Losstarot, but the comic doesn’t explicitly mention this. It just has Ashley making brief references to his “Riskbreaker training” and how he’s fighting “for Valendia!” The reader is never told why Valendia should be fought for, but the game itself is also vague on that point.

The art isn't terrible for what it is. The black-and-white spreads show Ashley crossing swords with Sydney, staring down a minotaur, and dreaming of his nebulous past (and of Mullenkamp, the dancing priestess shown only in the game’s intro). The best piece is a pin-up by Michael Turner, who was then famed for his work on Witchblade and Fathom. The comic knows this and tells us that we can see a colored version of Turner's art "in the Vagrant Story one-shot coming soon!”

That one-shot never happened, as far as I can tell. Only the E3 preview can be found for sale, and there’s no record of a full-length comic being published. The comic’s back page invites us all to see more at eruptor.com, along with a special episode of The Marty Show featuring Ashley Riot himself. Sadly, Eruptor’s site is long gone, and with it the Live Chats, Hot Girls, and Webcams that the ad promises. That fine. I don’t believe any of those things involved Vagrant Story.

This anemic little book’s highlight is an interview with Matsuno. He reveals that “over half” of the game’s scenario was cut, as were computer-controlled partners for Ashley. There's a good reason to let Matsuno and his team turn Vagrant Story into the game it should’ve been, just as they rebuilt Tactics Ogre for the PSP. Square may never allow it, but I suspect we're more likely to see a Vagrant Story remake than another Vagrant Story comic.

The Lunar II That Almost Was

2011-01-22T00:27:00.000-08:00

I prefer Lunar II: Eternal Blue to the original Lunar: The Silver Star. I could attribute this to playing Eternal Blue first, which made The Silver Star seem repetitive. Yet Eternal Blue is also a shade less cliché, with better character development and an ending that cruelly toys with the player. It’s the more interesting of the two RPGs, and the same goes for its unused ideas.

Lunar II was originally going to carry over the cast of The Silver Star, and its preliminary designs reflect that. Game Arts changed plans, however, and Lunar II got a mostly new lineup of characters. Many of them, from standard-issue protagonist Hiro to gallivanting monk Ronfar, didn’t change all that much from their initial concepts. Other characters did.

One of the biggest alterations: royal knight Leo and his priestess sister Mauri are beast-people in the final game, but they were first designed as centaurs. I suspect this was changed for two reasons. One: Leo would be harder to animate during battles if he were a horse from the waist down. Two: the romance between centaur Mauri and the fully human Ronfar would’ve raised all sorts of questions.

Leo still went through more redesigns, growing less bestial in each phase. That’s his near-final look on the right. Character designer Toshiyuki Kubooka abandoned a more leonine face in favor of a snout and horn.

Kubooka also played around with several hairstyles for Lunar II heroine Lucia, none of which really improves on the final incarnation.

Here's a near-final look at Lucia, though her hair's blonde instead of blue.

The most notable piece of early Lunar 2 art is the human form of Ruby, Hiro’s tiny pink dragon companion. Nall, the yipping white dragon sidekick from The Silver Star, can transform into a human in Lunar 2, and Ruby could presumably do the same. The drawings are also labeled "Mink's human form," reflecting Ruby's original name.

Ruby never becomes human during the game, not even in the expanded PlayStation and Saturn remakes of Lunar 2, so this was as far as the whole idea went.

Game Arts probably won't revisit Lunar II again. My preference aside, the first Lunar is the favorite among most fans. It gets remade every few years to a modest reception, which pushes the Lunar name back out of the spotlight and thereby starts the whole cycle over again. But Lunar still gave us two decent RPGs—and a few curious early designs.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Mystery Woman

2010-12-16T23:31:00.000-08:00

Konami’s original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game was a remarkable sight back in 1990. It’s competent as side-scrolling brawlers go, but it was also bursting with enough animated effects and prickly voicework to convince children everywhere that they were playing the actual cartoon. When it hit the NES as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game, it because something else: an apology for that lousy earlier Ninja Turtles NES game that everyone bought.

The arcade game didn’t allow much personal creativity from the programmers. All of the enemies are straight from Turtle doctrine, and at most Konami was permitted to devise different types of Foot Soldiers. The NES version let the developer get a little more creative and throw in two extra levels with new bosses: a mutated arctic tiger-wolf named Tora and a robotic samurai named Shogun. Neither of them has appeared anywhere else in the Ninja Turtles universe.

There’s another new character who shows up in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game, and her presence is never really explained.

In the game’s second level, there's a break in the street brawls against Foot Soldiers, and a woman, bedecked in the height of ’80s fashion, rides by on a skateboard. She doesn’t attack or even notice the player’s chosen turtle. If not interrupted, she’ll pass right through the whole fracas.

Yet the allegedly good turtles can attack this skateboarding woman of mystery, who then screams and cowers. In both the NES edition and the arcade original, the game rewards this assault by giving players an extra point, though the turtles' expressions differ. In the NES game, they stare out at you, bewildered and accusing. In the arcade, they just smile. They know what they've done.

It’s a curious little addition to a game that’s otherwise faithful to its popular license. The skateboarder resembles no one from the panoply of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons and comics, making it likely that she was crafted by the developers. If not a reference to anything, she’s perhaps a remnant of earlier designs. Konami might have wanted human spectators to appear throughout the game and cringe if the Turtles flailed their way. But a skateboarding woman is the only everyday citizen in the game.

What’s strange is that Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael can strike at her. The Ninja Turtles, popularly shown as misunderstood and heroic, take a swing at an innocent woman in a prominent video game. This somehow made it to every version of The Arcade Game without anyone complaining. Disney objected to Mickey Mouse losing “lives” and Uncle Scrooge eating hamburgers, but Mirage Studios didn’t care. Considering how bloodthirsty the old Ninja Turtles comics were, this random violence might've been their idea in the first place.

Many children went through Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game without thinking about the skateboarder, but a few surely wondered just what she was doing there. During my first playthrough of the game, I almost expected the ending to change if the woman were accosted. I thought that I'd see the Ninja Turtles condemned as hideous thugs who terrorized an unarmed bystander. But there's nothing. They suffer no consequences for attacking her, and that taught us all a valuable lesson. Even in NES games, some crimes go unpunished.

Update: Tiny Cartridge picked up this entry, and a reader named Drexegar pointed out that the skateboarding woman shows up the second level of Contra Rebirth, Konami's rather excellent Contra update for the Wii.

And there she is, huddled in fear as she speeds through a crowd of fleeing businessmen and hotel maids. I'm torn between being impressed by this cameo and being disturbed by Konami's apparently decades-long effort to frighten this woman. Just let her ride her skateboard in peace, you fiends.

The Forgotten Professional Gamer

2010-11-29T12:33:00.000-08:00

The history of “professional gamers” is long and frequently hilarious, stretching from the days of high-scoring arcade champions up through the celebrity of Nintendo’s Howard Philips and the smash sensation of WCG Ultimate Gamer. Other alleged video-game experts had briefer stays in the spotlight, and one of them was Renovation’s Jamie Bunker.

Jamie and his spectacular mullet appeared in no less than three advertisements for Renovation’s shooter Gaiares, and they ensured him a special place in the halls of early 1990s game marketing. In fact, a grown-up, de-mulleted Jamie looks back on his time as a Renovation spokesman with the right sense of humor. Yet he wasn’t the company’s only professional gamer. An ad for Arcus Odyssey extolled the knowledge of one David Izat.

This Arcus Odyssey spot is obscure today, even among those who fondly remember Renovation’s Gaiares campaign. That's not because Arcus Odyssey lacked a T-shirt and pronunciation guide. It’s because David Izat looks just a little…unwholesome.

And there’s the difference. The Gaiares ad presents Jamie Bunker as average '90s guy who just really likes a particular Genesis shooter. The Arcus Odyssey ad transforms a normal Renovation game producer into a shadowy nerd-goblin whose obscene, knowing grin would strike terror into any child paging through a new Gamepro issue. Oh, he’ll teach you a thing or two about fun. So many, many things.

David Izat and Arcus Odyssey had little time to teach anyone anything about fun, as they soon gave way to other Renovation titles and less eerie marketing. This was unfair to both of them. Arcus Odyssey is an enjoyable Gauntlet-style action-RPG and one of the better Renovation offerings. And David Izat probably didn’t deserve to be turned into that game's ghoulish overseer.

Tape Test: Lily C.A.T.

2010-11-25T16:57:00.000-08:00

[Tape Test covers notable anime available in North America only through old VHS releases. This installment looks at Lily C.A.T., released by Streamline Pictures in the 1990s.]

A 1980s anime rip-off of Alien isn’t such a bad idea. No, really, it isn’t. The anime industry spent most of that decade wallowing in a mire of detailed robots, massive explosions, slavering aliens, huge-haired women, and ridiculous visual overkill, all of which would work strangely well in the sexualized and grotesque realm of Alien imitators. An anime-washed Alien might not be any better than Deepstar Six, but at least it shouldn’t be boring. And yet Lily C.A.T. is.

Unabashed in aping Alien, Lily C.A.T. finds the crew of a deep-space freighter slumbering away a long journey. Once awakened, they’re greeted by the disturbing news that two of their number are illegally aboard. Their speculation about the stowaways is swiftly thrust aside by a larger problem: some strange virus is killing them. And there's a big lineup of characters to kill. In terms of both Alien rips and space-opera anime, Lily C.A.T. has its stereotypes covered.

There’s a blonde girl with a pet cat.

There’s an unflatteringly drawn black man.

And there’s a macho, gun-toting fellow who looks vaguely like Coach McGuirk from Home Movies.

The virus soon makes its way through the ship's ranks of profoundly bland people, absorbing them into a fanged, bloblike creature. The crew’s pared down to the Lincoln-bearded Captain Hamilton, his reticent second-in-command Carolyn, a scruffy stoner named Jimmy, the above-pictured blonde whiner Nancy, and young Japanese tough-guy Hiro. The most interesting of the bunch is Dick Berry, an Australian detective with a mustache growing out of his nose.

Countless anime of the 1980s stole bits and pieces from the Alien films, mostly in the form of Gigerian phallo-beasts or pulse rifles. Lily C.A.T. doesn’t stop there. Its spaceship is little more than an animated version of Alien's Nostromo, though the film combines the all-controlling computer Mother, Ian Holm’s android Ash, and Ripley’s cat into one antagonist: an artificial feline that plots the crew’s demise and talks to a computer screen.

The monster, however, is more John Carpenter than Ridley Scott; it’s a Thing-like aberration that swallows and mutates all of its human victims. There’s also some mild lip service paid to the idea of the captain and his sub-commander growing incredibly old and resigned due to all of their cryogenic trips through space, but it’s immaterial in a movie where everyone is dispassionate toward life in general.

One thing that Lily C.A.T. doesn’t steal is a knack for suspense. The crew’s numerous death scenes are among the most boring ever seen in the frequently banal realm of Alien thievery, as characters are simply brushed aside with no dramatic impact. A perfect example arises when Carolyn wanders up to a wall and spots the slavering Thing-beast beyond it. Then the scene ends. Shortly thereafter, Jimmy steps over to the hull of the ship and disappears with the exact same unsatisfying cutaway. Most amazingly of all, the survivors often react only with mild curiosity after their comrades dissolve before their eyes.

Then again, they probably know who's going to make it out. By the end of the film, the threat of the virus is gone, and two characters escape to a planet; not because they’re skilled or likeable or interesting, but because they’re the Japanese kid and the blonde American girl.

There’s still a certain drab competence to Lily C.A.T., as director Hisayuki Toriumi had a few well-budgeted projects behind him, among them the original Area 88. The biggest names on the whole project are the artists: character designer Yasuomi Umetsu went on to make Kite and Mezzo Forte, while monster designer Yoshitaka Amano worked with everything from Final Fantasy to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. So perhaps Lily C.A.T. wasn’t a complete waste.

In North America, Lily C.A.T. got a Streamline dub, complete with a liberally translated script voiced by actors who’d later get better work in better places. Julie Maddalena’s forced to shriek constantly as Nancy, while Bob Bergen and Michael Reynolds sound bored. Which fits Lily C.A.T. perfectly.

If Lily C.A.T. is remembered at all today, it’s because the film was aired on The Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday Anime block in the late 1990s. Along with Demon City Shinjuku, Dominion Tank Police, and E.Y.E.S. of Mars, Lily C.A.T. introduced countless American kids to mediocre Japanese cartoons, which Sci-Fi had the temerity to call “cutting edge anime that’s pure power and sheer genius.” Lily C.A.T. is neither, and it was never seen again after Streamline folded. No one bothered re-licensing it in the decade that followed, not when they could buy sure-fire smashes like Best Student Council or UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.

DOES IT DESERVE A PROPER DVD RELEASE? Lily C.A.T. merits the same DVD treatment as other inane, low-effort Alien “homages” of the 1980s. Like Star Crystal and Roger Corman’s Galaxy of Terror, Lily C.A.T. should be served on a bare-bones disc and tossed into two-dollar bargain bins across the nation. Alien fans would have their cheap fix for an evening, and anime fans of the 1990s would see just how dull Lily C.A.T. really was.

In Praise of Moe

2010-09-30T18:02:00.000-07:00

The anime industry is not in a good place right now. Animators are still underpaid, studios haven’t scored an international hit in years, and Japan’s anime market is shrinking its focus to either children or over-devoted, undiscerning, fetish-addled nerds. Blame for this is often placed on moe, the art of presenting frequently underage anime girls to be fawned over by those lonesome and desperate for the innocence of youth. Moe is cute turned creepy. Moe is veiled pedophilia. Moe is blushing, gooey-eyed anime girls who look like The Family Circus run through a grotesque anime filter. In a strange way, moe is a blessing.

Consider the situation that faced casual viewers of anime as recently as five years ago, when there was no simple way to pick out the rare decent title at a glance. A lot of anime used stylistically similar character design; sometimes the eyes were bigger or the noses sharper, but there were plenty of perfectly boring and terrible series that unfairly resembled Cowboy Bebop or FLCL. For example, it wasn't easy to find the single worthwhile offering from a lineup of Cybuster, Mirage of Blaze, Z-Mind, Takegami, Sorcerous Stabber Orphen, The Dark Myth, Biohunter, Getbackers, King of Bandit Jing, Shadow Skill, Darkside Blues, Space Pirate Mito, A.D. Police: The New Files, Ninja Cadets, Eden’s Bowy, Real Bout High School, Shinesman, Tokyo Project, Vandread, Aura Battler Dunbine, Zenki, Licensed by Royalty, Blue Seed, Nazca, Dai-Guard, Nightwalker, Rune Soldier, Assemble Insert, Infinite Ryvius, Sorcerer Hunters, Saber Marionette J, Harlock Saga, Neo-Ranga, Yamamoto Yohko, Those Who Hunt Elves, Power Dolls, Doomed Megalopolis, Zaion, Bounty Dog, Hades Project Zeorymer, Geobreeders, Kurogane Communication, Queen Emeraldas, Demon Fighter Kocho, Betterman, Nuku Nuku Dash, Gunparade March, Dangaizer 3, My Dear Marie, Sonic Soldier Borgman, Space Travelers, Photon, Sailor Victory, eX-Driver, Brain Powered, Chance Pop Session, Miami Guns, Gate Keepers 21, Steam Detectives, Burn Up! Scramble, GranDoll, and Princess Rouge: Legend of the Last Labyrinth. You could make educated guesses, but most anime of that era wasn’t conclusively revealed as crap until you watched a little bit of it.

Today, moe dispels that mystery. If a new series abounds in garish, big-eyed girls gazing shyly at the would-be viewer, it’s all but guaranteed to be garbage intended for no one but devoted moe fans. There are exceptions (Gunbuster 2 and not much else), but most of the people making moe shows nowadays are the same sorts that produced vapid, boring direct-to-video chaff and cheap, ugly TV series in the 1980s and 1990s. Just as a moth’s wings bear eye-like patterns to frighten predators, the empty stares and heavy blushing of moe warn off any sensible viewers. Their message is simple: you don’t have to concern yourself with this.

Some lament the faded standards of bygone anime eras, when directors worked largely in pulp violence or silly excess. Yet for every delightfully stupid bloodbath or beautifully animated trinket, there were dozens of failures that only lured in the unsuspecting and wasted their time. Today’s anime may indeed be worse than it was in decades past, but at least it’s better about warning us.

Lost Anime: Neuro Heat

2010-08-26T11:44:00.000-07:00

Anime studios still value manga artist Masamune Shirow. No matter how much dreadful porn he draws, Shirow nonetheless contributes to all sorts of anime projects, including both adaptations of his own comics and entirely original creations. A few of these projects were canceled along the way, though they’re not to be confused with Gundress, Landlock, and other things that should have been canceled. Most of Shirow's never-made anime ideas are table scraps, but Neuro Heat stands out among his unused pitches.

In a calendar devoted to his lesser-seen artwork, Shirow describes Neuro Heat as a “3D-CG” TV series and comic that was his take on The Bionic Woman (or “Bionic Jamie” as Shirow knew it). He also paints it as a version of his own Ghost in the Shell aimed primarily at viewers outside of Japan. The show went no further than Shirow’s designs. And the comic? Well, Shirow’s far too busy drawing slimy-skinned mermaids being railed by squid-men and I-don’t-know-what else.

Neuro Heat’s art shows a team of Shirow-grade cyborg agents and mecha clustered behind the apparent heroine, Annette “Annie” Oakley (likely as much of a reference-laden pseudonym as “Motoko Kusanagi”). Shirow didn’t lie about the lack of originality: this is just Ghost in the Shell with a cheerful blonde Motoko and a mustache-sporting Batou. There’s even a redesigned Tachikoma in the background.

On the other hand, the idea of a Americanized Ghost in the Shell is intriguing, particularly if Annie were a hunted renegade, as implied by the “reward” caption next to her. Perhaps the show could examine just how an American democracy would use cybernetic technology, revealing social and political issues in the ways it differed (or didn’t) from the Japan-based Ghost in the Shell. Or maybe Annie would just wear a cowboy hat and eat a big sloppy cheeseburger while watching football on her big-screen TV.

Plans for Neuro Heat dried up around 2001, though it almost seems a better idea today. Ghost in the Shell is still popular in North America, to the point where Dreamworks recently optioned a live-action version of it. Meanwhile, modern anime studios, besieged by creepy fans in Japan, are finding more high-profile work in mainstream Western properties like Halo and Batman. With all of that going on, it’s surprising that no one’s dusted off Neuro Heat.

This is Terrible

2010-08-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

Satoshi Kon, one of the best directors in the anime field, died yesterday. I really wish this were a prank, but it's not.

Kon visited New York for a film festival back in 2008, and I was in the audience during a Q&A session. I'd been let go from Anime Insider the month before. I was already a little jaded toward the industry from writing about it for three years, but getting laid off made me truly sick of anime and everything it touched.

I came away better. Paprika was shown, clips of Kon's other films and projects were played (including this NHK piece), and he gave all sorts of interesting answers. He was a fascinating, clever man who kept taking pictures of the audience. It reminded me that as stupid and wasteful as anime is, it still has exceptionally gifted people making things worth seeing. And we won't see as many of those things now.

Spun Around Saturn

2010-07-31T18:35:00.000-07:00

I recently had my Sega Saturn modded. I’m surprised I didn’t do it back in 1998, when anyone with a Saturn was soldering a switch into the console so they could play Japanese games without some pesky region-changing cartridge. This was especially useful when it came to Capcom fighters, many of which needed the Saturn’s cartridge slot for a big ol’ hunk of RAM expansion. For some reason, I ignored this and just used a slightly unreliable all-in-one cartridge to enjoy my Cyberbots and Vampire Savior.

Well, my Saturn’s finally modified to run those games and more with the official RAM cart, as nature and Capcom intended. It’s a nice job, too. The switch is inconspicuous and fitted perfectly into the system’s battery door. What’s really interesting, though, is what my system-modding friend found inside the console.

Some spider built a little web inside my Saturn a long time ago. It's apparently more common than I ever before suspected to find bugs inside electronic equipment, and this discovery is especially amusing when I remember how fastidious I was with my Saturn back in the 1990s. I even draped a dust cover over it at night.

I only hope that the spider moved on before it starved to death or got fried during a particularly heated session of X-Men vs. Street Fighter. It also makes me wonder if any of my other game systems have bug residents. Come to think of it, my last apartment was in a basement frequented by house centipedes.

Uh-oh.

Vice: Project Slimeball

2010-07-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

There’s a lot that I like about Vice: Project Doom, a late NES action-platformer from Aicom and American Sammy. I like that it mixes its side-scrolling gameplay with driving stages straight out of Spy Hunter and shooting galleries straight out of Operation Wolf. I like the tight controls, which let you laser-whip enemies behind you, grab ladders in mid-air, sprint while ducking, and do a lot of things that many other NES games still overlooked back in 1991. I like how the backgrounds are grimy and impressively varied. And I like how Sammy’s translators had enough presence of mind to play up the cheeseball action-hero tone of the game’s hero, Quinn Hart.

Yet the translation apparently proved a little too profane when it came to an early scene in which Hart, after barking out orders to his girlfriend/partner Christy, notices that a masked superhero is spying on him.

That screen comes from a review in the June 1991 issue of GamePro, and the dialogue differs slightly from the final version.

Yes, Hart’s line was rewritten to keep him from saying “slimeball.” Did Nintendo really object to an insult that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could freely spout on TV? Or did the translators think that “slimeball” gave away the game’s later (and entirely predictable) plot twists about alien-manufactured green gel? Perhaps someone felt that Hart already came across as too hard-edged. After all, the game’s first level has his Spy Hunter car tearing down a city highway and destroying harmless blue sedans that, for all the player knows, are filled with innocent and terrified families.

A little research suggests that prototypes of Vice: Project Doom are out there. In fact, this guy found a cartridge at a game store in 2006. Nobody's shared one online yet, so we can't see if any other mild epithets were trimmed from Hart's vocabulary. Maybe he called someone a scuzzbucket.

My First Fansub

2010-06-30T19:27:00.000-07:00

The mid-1990s weren't such a bad time to watch anime. Japanese cartoons didn’t fill an aisle at Best Buy or clog all corners of the Internet like they do today, but they were conveniently infiltrating television and video stores back in 1995. I was better (or worse) off than many young anime geeks who picked through the “animation” sections at their Blockbusters. My local comic shop rented just about every new anime officially released in North America, no matter how awful it might be. This let me discover many things I could’ve done without, but it also kept me well outside of anime fan circles.

I was dimly aware that there was a large community of people peddling tapes of anime that you couldn’t find at Suncoast, but I didn’t care as long as I could freely rent Dangaioh, Gunsmith Cats, El-Hazard, Blue Seed, Urusei Yatsura, Angel Cop, and whatever else the comic store bothered to stock. Then my sister went to a comic convention and returned with one of those “fansubs.” It was Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, only this version had Japanese dialogue, Chun-Li’s uncensored shower scene, the original lawsuit-friendly character names, and a soundtrack free of Alice in Chains. It also came with a flyer listing a bunch of other tapes offered by a fansub distributor.

I look over the titles, and something jumps out at me. Why, they have the sequel to that Silent Möbius movie I oh-so-vaguely enjoyed! And it’s only $19.99! That’s a steal for something that’s only available in Japan! I’m ordering that right now!

Yes, it was a massive rip-off in several ways, though at least the tape came in a clamshell with a Xerox of the movie’s Japanese packaging. That way I could see that this thing cost about $98 in Japan, making a $20 price tag seem a bargain at the time. Of course, it wasn’t long before I ventured online and learned that a lot of fans just traded fansubs, and that most of the people who flat-out sold them charged about seven bucks per tape.

And what about Silent Möbius: The Motion Picture 2? Disappointing even back then. Silent Möbius is and always was a vapid cliché carnival about women hunting slimy trans-dimensional invaders in rainy future Tokyo, but at least the original Silent Möbius: The Motion Picture had some slickly animated battles. The second film is much slower, featuring more of reluctant heroine Katsumi Liqueur whining about the exact same things she whined about in the first movie. It also makes the mistake of humanizing the Lucifer Hawks, the other-dimensional antagonists of the series. The first movie keeps them as slavering monstrosities beyond humanity's realm, sorta like a low-caliber Lovecraft story with generic anime women instead of virulent racism. Silent Möbius 2 makes the Lucifer Hawks more like the angry, conniving demons found in just about every anime ever made, robbing Silent Möbius of what little novelty it had.

It’s a different world today. No one cares much about Silent Möbius, fansubs are so plentiful online that they overwhelm the official anime publishers, and VHS bootlegs like this are just quaintly embarrassing pieces of nostalgia. There’s certainly nothing else interesting about my blurry old copy. It was subbed by “E. Monsoon Productions,” a name that now brings up only a few lists of obsessive anime fans’ videotape collections.

The anime nerd that I was can take comfort that Silent Möbius: The Motion Picture 2 wasn’t officially released in North America until years after he paid for his pricey fansub. Bandai brought both films to DVD in 2008, redubbing the first one and unwisely not selling the two movies together. I didn’t bother buying either, as my interest in Silent Möbius had faded by then. Perhaps I knew that I’d already spent too much on it.

Depressing Game Endings: M.U.S.H.A.

2010-06-16T20:17:00.000-07:00

The Sega Genesis library boasts an estimated 47,000,000 shooters, and Compile’s M.U.S.H.A. is the best of them. It’s visually stunning even today, it's well-designed, and, of course, it's unfairly hard. From the fourth level onward, it’s a frantic battle for survival that all but forces you to exploit the game’s cheats to their fullest.

There’s even a nasty surprise after the game’s assumed final boss, as a recurring orange-and-black mecha swoops in to pelt you with one last flurry of lasers and homing fireballs.

And then it’s over. The M.U.S.H.A. mecha’s pilot, a young woman named Terri, limps out of the cockpit, and her nerve-flaying battles are finally at an end.

Well, not quite. Terri has only minor injuries, and the game assures us, with three exclamation points, that she’s just waiting for future adventures! Funny how Terri doesn’t really look like she’s waiting for future adventures, especially not any in the form of grueling, Compile-made shooters. She looks like she’s praying for merciful death to release her from the unending, robot-waged war in which she's trapped.

Or maybe she’s actually in rehab for a crippling heroin addiction, as the M.U.S.H.A. manual suggests.

Fortunately for Terri, Compile stopped making shooters around 1993, as the company landed a hit with the puzzle-game series Puyo Puyo and didn't make much else until 2001's Zanac X Zanac. Then Compile folded. This denied the world many excellent shooters like M.U.S.H.A., but at least their mecha pilots were finally allowed to retire.

Metal Storm: The Destruction of Gundam Copyrights

2010-06-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

Irem and Tamtex’s Metal Storm is an often under-appreciated marvel from the NES era. It’s a solidly designed mecha-shooter at its base level, but then it throws in the ability to reverse gravity, affecting enemies, obstacles, and the player’s M-308 Gunner robot. It’s a wonder that this idea hasn’t been ripped off countless times since Metal Storm’s 1991 debut, but then again, the game was never a huge success.

There are several reasons for that. For one thing, Irem couldn’t afford to market or distribute Metal Storm heavily. And even though the game landed a Nintendo Power cover, it didn’t catch on among a gaming press that was already inundated with NES releases.

I doubt that the M-308 Gunner itself had anything to do with Metal Storm’s low profile, although it lacks something found on most robots of its day. Everything about the M-308 Gunner makes sense until you notice that it has no head, and that big orange shape on its chest doesn't immediately register as a cockpit. Perhaps American kids just weren’t ready for a mecha without a face. Someone involved with Metal Storm’s print ad thought the exact same thing and decided that this robot needed a head. Any head would do.

So the advertised version of the M-308 Gunner borrowed a head off one of Japan’s most recognizable anime robots: the Zaku from Mobile Suit Gundam. As low-level enemy mecha, Zakus are destroyed by the truckload in various Gundam series, and by the end of the 1980s, they were almost as recognizable in Japan as the iconic white Gundam robots themselves. In America, however, no one would spot a Zaku’s head (or a Gundam-like shield) outside of a few devoted anime nerds who happened to page through a GamePro issue. Nobody at Bandai, which had canceled a Zeta Gundam NES game back in 1988, noticed this copyright violation either. They were too busy prepping Doozybots for that fall's TV schedules.

Metal Storm also might’ve stolen its name from a movie about The Destruction of Jared-Syn, but that’s another story.

Darkstalkers and the Enigma of Trouble Man

2010-05-15T22:51:00.000-07:00

There’s a special procedure to follow whenever I mention Darkstalkers. First I have to explain that the series started out as Capcom’s second fighting-game venture after the success of Street Fighter, which Darkstalkers briefly eclipsed in popularity among Japanese fans. In America, though, the monster-filled Darkstalkers never really caught on to that extent, and Capcom shut down the whole thing after three major games.

Then I have to explain that this is a terrible waste, because the Darkstalkers games are excellent. Marvelously animated and highly amusing, they shed the few realistic traces of Street Fighter and build a cartoon world where chainsaw-legged zombie rockers moon over Chinese ghost-girls, mummified kings turn werewolves into wiener dogs, and a bee-woman dies after she stings an opponent, only for her clone to burst anew from her foe’s honeycombed flesh.

Anyway, the PlayStation port of the original Darkstalkers isn’t very important. It was scheduled to ship near the system’s launch and show that Sony’s new console could handle a heavily animated 2-D Capcom fighter. Yet the game was delayed until March of 1996, a month after the generally better sequel, Night Warriors, came out for the Sega Saturn. By that point no one cared that Darkstalkers was on the PlayStation or that it had a weird, awful, and strangely catchy theme song.

Instead of the arcade game’s introduction, the Japanese PlayStation port of Darkstalkers (known over there as Vampire) has grainy footage playing along to “Trouble Man,” in which somewhat notable J-rock singer Eikichi Yazawa declares that he’s gonna be trouble, ‘cause, baby, he’s a trouble man. He proves this by accepting a challenge for a rumble. Toniiiiight. This would be nothing out of the ordinary for Japanese pop carelessly in search of English lyrics, but these lines were actually written by Andrew Gold, who’s had a storied musical career that stretches from hit ‘70s singles to the theme music for Mad About You.

Capcom removed this intro for the North American release, but “Trouble Man” clung to Darkstalkers. The song pops up in the brief credits for the American syndicated Darkstalkers cartoon, which is horrible enough to shame even its Street Fighter cousin. A longer version of “Trouble Man” also blares over the closing for the four-part Night Warriors anime series, which is just plain boring after a slightly promising first act. Someone clearly paid for “Trouble Man,” and dammit, they were going to get their money’s worth.

It was never clear why Capcom wanted Darkstalkers to have a completely unrelated theme song full of guitar hooks and nonsense, and no other Capcom fighters had anthems until Street Fighter IV’s “Indestructible.” Perhaps someone at the company just liked Andrew Gold.

When Capcom rolled around Darkstalkers 3 (known as Vampire Savior in Japan and among American kids who owned Saturns), “Trouble Man” was nowhere to be found, and the series went under not long after that. Would it have survived if Capcom had given it another theme song? And if Capcom greenlights another Darkstalkers, will it have another rousing opening number about trouble, men, and various combinations of the two? We’d better find out.

Conquest of the Bio Force Apes

2010-05-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

Is Bio Force Ape the most popular NES game never released? I'd say so. It drifted into obscurity after Seta canceled it in 1991, yet this past decade gave rise to a geek subculture that hunts down canceled games, and Bio Force Ape was always pursued. At first it was only one of several sought-after lost games, squabbling for space with Bandai’s Ultimate Journey, Capcom’s Black Tiger, and such planning-stage pipe dreams as New Kids on the Block and Hellraiser. Yet one amazing prank and its buttery residue shot Bio Force Ape to the top of the list, so much so that fans started making their own version of the game.

Then the real Bio Force Ape showed up. It appeared in a Yahoo Japan auction, and the game quickly made its way to 1up.com’s Game Night, where the public saw it played for the first time in 19 years.

And it’s amazing. Well, it’s no rediscovered masterpiece, but it’s great fun in that absurd, clumsy way that middle-grade NES games often stumbled into. There’s no question that Bio Force Ape makes the most of a game about a monkey who grows into a pro-wrestler ape and bodyslams bee-men, monstrous sumo wrestlers, and mutants with crocodile jaws for legs. It’s also technically impressive for an NES game, with a well-animated simian hero and some dizzyingly fast rides on moving platforms and mine carts. In another world, perhaps Seta released Bio Force Ape and built it into their Battletoads, with its own toy line and terrible cartoon special.

Then again, Seta would’ve needed to actually finish the game. This version of Bio Force Ape is as far as things got, but it lasts only three levels, and they’re noticeably incomplete when it comes to the enemies and overall design. It’s believed that this game was built as a demo, but someone went through the trouble of giving it a grueling final stage and a shocking twist ending that we ask the audience not to reveal.

Despite the rampantly bizarre scenes in the game, my favorite thing is the ape’s rolling move: he can drop to the ground at any point and just tumble forward at insanely high speed. It doesn’t damage enemies, it doesn’t get him past many obstacles, and it doesn’t really serve much of a purpose. It’s just fun to screw around with it. And that’s the legacy of Bio Force Ape.

Demo Demo PlayStation Predicts the Future

2010-04-24T20:25:00.000-07:00

Sony’s Demo Demo PlayStation series is less than a footnote in the system’s history. They’re very similar to the Play Play demo discs that were mailed to new PlayStation owners across Japan starting in 1995, as Demo Demo volumes are also loaded with promotional videos and playable previews. Unlike Play Play, however, Demo Demo discs were originally made for PlayStation store kiosks in Japan and, as such, they never saw public sale. They’re somewhat rare, and they were perhaps the first PlayStation demo discs ever released. They stretch back to the system’s launch in late 1994, making them relics of a time when Sony was doubtless worried that the PlayStation would flop and send their entire video-game division scrambling for new jobs at Nintendo’s Virtual Boy department.

I'll remember Demo Demo PlayStation mostly for including a playable version of Bounty Arms, yet these discs are interesting beyond that sample of my most-wanted unreleased game. True, Demo Demo volumes are bare-bones compared to the Play Play series. Play Play discs come with plenty of extras, commercials, original games, booklets, and glossy designs. Demo Demo discs just get covers with generic comics. And that's fitting, as these cases were meant to sit idly on a shelf while the disc ran in a kiosk somewhere. Sony gave Demo Demo covers to any manga artist willing to sacrifice a few panels to obscurity.

My favorite Demo Demo PlayStation cover comes from Volume 11, because it’s the only one I even remotely understand.

If this were a good website like Magweasel, I’d have a detailed translation of this comic. It’s not, so here’s a crude guess (edit: I am, in fact, mostly wrong; see the comment below). Starting on the upper-right and going clockwise, we find two girls wolfing down cake, with the brown-haired one fretting about gaining weight. Her blonde friend points out that she’s not worried about her own figure, explaining in the second panel that “games” keep her thin. I assume she’s talking about sports.

Our heroine, being none too bright, interprets this to mean PlayStation games, and the next panel sees her embracing a “Game Diet” with the help of her trusty Sony-manufactured game console. This diet presumably consists of her sitting around all day while playing Ridge Racer, Philosoma, and maybe even Hermie Hopperhead. In the last panel, she laments that she hasn’t lost any weight on the Game Diet, while the blonde girl laments the unfathomable stupidity on display.

This sort of allegedly classic humor has entertained manga readers for decades, I note with dismay. Yet there’s something charming about this little throwaway gag. Perhaps it’s the way the comic unwittingly predicts Wii Fit fourteen years down the road. Or perhaps it’s the backhanded, Sony-endorsed admission that playing video games will make you a fatass.

The Rise and Fall of Masamune Shirow

2010-03-14T23:24:00.000-07:00

[Note: this entry charts a manga author's descent into creepy porn, so it contains images that may offend some workplaces.]

Few authors in the manga industry went wrong like Masamune Shirow. True, he remains well-known in the North American anime and manga industry, largely because of comics he made nearly twenty years ago. Those comics are kept in print, and his name is invoked and praised whenever a new Appleseed movie or Ghost in the Shell adaptation arrives. Yet his reputation is a lean shadow of what it was during the 1990s, when he became one of the most popular manga creators among English-speaking fans.

Shirow started off in the 1980s with a generic spaceship manga called Black Magic, but no one was really impressed until he rolled out Appleseed, a dense tale of science and politics gone astray in a 21st-century urban utopia. It set many Shirow standards: pretty and highly lethal heroines, police-procedural stories, rampant philosophical technobabble, and incredibly detailed mechanical designs for everything from firearms to city-crawling robots. It appealed to content-starved American comic readers of the 1990s, and Shirow caught on in a big way. It wasn’t just Appleseed, either, as Shirow recycled the same approach (Women! Mechanical suits! Violence!) in better form. Ghost in the Shell added more police drama and copious lumps of artificial-intelligence ruminations, while Dominion went the opposite direction and made a silly comic about tank-driving cops in a future of pollution and terrorist robot catgirls. And then there was Orion, a mixture of space opera, Buddhist-Shinto mysticism, and concepts so insane that Shirow admitted he didn't even known what they meant.

Shirow grew even more popular with the mainstream exposure of the first Ghost in the Shell film in 1996, and it wasn’t all just because he could draw anime chicks straddling mechanized police armor. Most of the manga titles foisted on readers in the 1990s were cutesy piffle or dated pulp (completely unlike today’s scene, of course), and they were lightweight even when they were enjoyable. Shirow’s stuff was hardly of great substance, but his stories were usually driven by interesting ideas. His comics unsubtly reminded readers of this by having characters spout off reams of tangential discussion about the Gaia hypothesis, particle physics, or just how human a disembodied brain can be. It bordered on philosophy-student gibberish at times, and yet it was a blessing to any manga reader who wanted something to think about. Of course, a lot of Shirow’s appeal came from his English translators. Frederik Schodt, Toren Smith, Dana Lewis, and other members of Studio Proteus dressed up Shirow’s stories with dialogue that was memorable, funny, and about as natural as a conversation can be when a bodiless synthetic consciousness is lecturing the vagrant cyber-spirit of a government operative about the benefits and risks of non-corporeal living.

There were, however, signs that Shirow was possessed by unsavory tendencies, and no one had to hunt for them. He seemed to write at the rate of one bad decision per comic: a gooey, virtual lesbian three-way in Ghost in the Shell (which was cut from the first U.S. version of the comic), a photosynthetic, bug-winged pixie who spent a fourth of Dominion naked, and a scene in Orion where the heroine is rolled up by karma-magic, thrown into the ocean, and dragged down to the lair of octopus creatures who want to eat her excrement. Shirow had himself some issues.

That said, Shirow got better by the middle of the 1990s. Dominion: Conflict 1 rebooted the older comic as a slightly more realistic tale of tank police, and it was both endearing and devoid of off-putting attempts at titillation or Speculative Internet Philosophy 102. Ghost in the Shell 1.5 continued the original’s police-procedural storylines, minus the inexplicable forays into graphic android sex.

Just as he seemed to get over his nasty little proclivities, Shirow started up Ghost in the Shell 2. While the sequel began running in Japan in 1997, it didn’t show up in North America until 2002. In that five-year interim, many occidental fans drifted away from Shirow, seeing his new work only in terrible things like the PlayStation gun game Project: Horned Owl, the box art for the mediocre OVA Landlock, and the designs for Gundress, which might be the worst animated film ever shown in theaters.

When the first issues of Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface finally arrived, opinions differed between those who immediately hated it and those who decided it was some industrial prank staged by Shirow and Dark Horse. If the book has an overlying plot, it’s swamped by sputtering incoherence. The first Ghost in the Shell kept up a balancing act with action scenes and technological prattle, yet it all crashes to the floor a few pages into Man-Machine Interface. The grounded police work and approachable cast of Ghost in the Shell 1.5 are seldom seen, and in their place there’s merely a jumble of poorly explained future-Internet concepts and barely connected scenes involving a woman who might be a blonde and really boring version of Ghost in the Shell heroine Motoko Kusanagi.

Worse yet, Man-Machine Interface doesn’t even look good. At some point after Dominion: Conflict 1, Shirow apparently decided that computer graphics were the Wave of the Future, and he splattered all sorts of ugly, jarring rendered crap across much of his Ghost in the Shell follow-up. And then there are boob shots. Lots of them. The old Shirow was no stranger to that sort of thing, but the Shirow whose brain melted around 1996 puts it in nearly every panel of Ghost in the Shell 2, even orchestrating painful new poses just so the heroine can show her tits and ass at the same time. Compared to Shirow’s prior works, Man-Machine Interface is self-parody.

Man-Machine Interface would be the last real comic from Shirow. In the years that followed, he busied himself developing TV series with Production I.G while drawing what a polite chronicler would call “pin-ups.” I’d call it porn.

It must be pointed out that Shirow has always drawn provocative art. His manga hardly shy away from depicting their heroines in revealing attire, and Shirow’s illustrations for peripheral projects were even more risqué. Throughout his more productive years, he churned all sorts of drawings like this.

Such was the nerd-bait art of the old Shirow: perky women wearing skin-tight, high-cut outfits and sliding themselves into robotic suits bristling with miniguns and riot tasers and vented laser barrels. As the 1990s continued, Shirow’s art grew shinier and less generic in its pandering. And then he drew this.

Yes, that’s exactly what it looks like. And while it might be the most hilariously fucked-up of Shirow’s illustrations, his porn work goes well beyond Bravestarr tributes. From the late 1990s onward, Shirow has illustrated pornographic novels as well as his own collection of "Galgrease" books. The title alone should be enough of a clue.

Perhaps the problem here isn’t that Shirow’s drawing smut; it’s that he’s drawing hideous, slime-drenched smut and not throwing in any action scenes or half-interesting characters or fascinating techno-cyber-Gibson-hacker gobbledygook to even it out. He hasn’t touched a manga since Man-Machine Interface, and it’s hard to say if anyone really wants him tackling Appleseed or another Dominion book if he’s just going to fill it with glowing CG backgrounds and cyborg cameltoe. All artists change styles over time, but it’s rare for one to go from thoughtful cyberpunk manga to drawing what many a fan disgustedly refers to as “greasy banana boobs.”

Shirow’s name is his to sully however he chooses. He’s evidently realized that he needn't draw comics about his story ideas; he just pitches them to Production I.G, which has so far made two TV series, Ghost Hound and Real Drive, based on Shirow’s proposals. This leaves Shirow much more valuable time for drawing cybernetic mercenary women being violated by anthropomorphic mountain goats.

Shirow’s better creations will survive his downfall. Production I.G keeps turning Ghost in the Shell into decent anime, and most of Shirow’s older manga holds up: the first Ghost in the Shell is still intriguing, Dominion: Conflict 1 is still fun, and Orion is still delightfully bugfuck crazy. Yet it’s hard to read them without thinking of Shirow himself and just how much potential he’s squandered. Is the interesting, manga-making Shirow gone forever? We have no answer, and neither does he.

Little Things: Cyberbots

2010-02-17T00:30:00.000-08:00

Cyberbots isn’t my favorite fighting game, but it’s my favorite obscure one. It’s a mid-1990s experiment by Capcom’s talented designers, paying tribute to the orbital-war intrigue and clanking, realistic robots of Gundam. It’s full of huge, well-animated mecha smashing each other in front of richly drawn backdrops, and I’ve often wondered why it doesn’t command even a fraction of the attention given to Street Fighter and Darkstalkers.

And then I remember why Cyberbots isn’t popular. It’s far too shallow to entice the combo-memorizing players who take on fighters competitively, and it doesn’t have the marketing to pull in the anime and model-kit fans. Yes, the giant-robot collectors of the world will buy variations of the same Gundam and Mazinger figures year in and year out, but they don’t want a big plastic version of Blodia, the flagship machine of Cyberbots; its spokesmecha, if you will.

Blodia is the Ryu of the game: a well-rounded combatant and the chosen robot of the game’s ostensible hero, the gung-ho Jin Saotome. Blodia also embodies the impressive level of detail in Cyberbots. When it comes to the small touches in the game, I can’t think of a better example than the spent shells that fly out of Blodia’s arm with each punch.

Mind you, that happens with every regular punch. It’s not a special move. Just tap one of the game’s two attack buttons (I told you it was shallow), and Blodia will spew tiny casings from its elbow.

Blodia and Jin Saotome later showed up in the Marvel vs. Capcom series, gaining some hilarious, excessively damaging attacks. Still, nothing really strikes my admiration like those little empty cartridges tumbling through the air.

The Vague Search for Gu Gu Ganmo

2010-02-10T18:51:00.000-08:00

In my days at Anime Insider, the magazine would occasionally get letters from people trying to identify Japanese cartoons they’d seen long ago. Most of these requests were easily answered by pointing out semi-obscure ‘80s creations like the Unico movies, Macron-1, or Galaxy Rangers, the last of which is, shockingly, not even anime.

One stumped us, though. A reader wanted to know the name of an anime comedy shown in France in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and two major details about the show were offered: it featured a giant yellow alien bird that came to live with and irritate a human boy, and one of the show’s running gags involved the boy’s older sister kicking him in the crotch when she was riled. No one at the magazine had the slightest idea of what this show could be, and I gave up after a few Google searches revealed places offensive even in an office wallpapered with anime posters.

Years later, I looked over some of the old series represented in Konami’s shonen-manga crossover fighting game for the PSP, and I noticed a 1985 cartoon called Gu Gu Ganmo. The bird is pink instead of yellow, but everything else about it matches up. It was shown in France, it features numerous crotch-kicking jokes, and it stars a trouble-making bird of possibly alien origin.

In fact, Gu Gu Ganmo seems more popular among nostalgic French viewers than Japanese audiences. The first French-dubbed episode was uploaded here, and it reveals a fairly standard comedy in the Doraemon mold. Young Hanpeita’s pet bird flies away one morning, so his sister gives him a huge egg that she finds in the street. Soon a giant pink creature hatches out and takes up residence with Hanpeita’s family. Mostly unremarkable antics ensue as the self-centered Ganmo torments our hero by hogging the bathroom, snoring loudly, and embarrassing him in front of girls and nose-picking neighborhood bullies alike. It might not be particularly imaginative, but Ganmo found enough of an audience to last 50 episodes and get a movie deal.

As far as I’m concerned, the highlight of the show is its opening, which has all of the characters dancing on stage for no real reason. I love this sort of thing, and I wish every anime show, regardless of genre, led with some pointless Broadway-style musical number. Even Code Geass would’ve been better with a big chorus line to start it off.

As is often the case with old cartoons and the Internet, the edifying clips of Gu Gu Ganmo are outnumbered by the clips that suit someone’s fetish. This can be seen in a YouTube account dedicated to nothing but the girls of Gu Gu Ganmo farting. An entire account.

So, possibly French letter-writer, there’s your answer: Gu Gu Ganmo. I hope you found it before the farting fans did.

Tape Test: Violence Jack

2009-12-27T22:58:00.000-08:00

[This begins a semi-regular feature that examines anime available in North America only through old VHS releases. The first installment looks at Violence Jack, because you really can't start anywhere else.]

Go Nagai is perhaps the luckiest man in the whole sordid history of Japanese comics and cartoons. He rose to infamy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Japan’s manga-consuming public hungered for an author, not necessarily a good one, who would push the boundaries of comic superheroes, giant robots, and taste. Nagai was there, summoning floods of controversy with his risqué comics, and he didn’t stop with the schoolyard puerility of Harenchi Gakuen. He worked in all sorts of pulp fields, like a performance artist covering himself in robots and demons and naked women before writhing upon a huge, cheaply printed canvas. And the act paid off. Nagai’s comics sold well, and some became prominent animated series. Mazinger, Cutey Honey, Getter Robo, and other Nagai creations are now anime-industry legends.

You won’t find Violence Jack among those legends. Of course, it was successful enough to get a few dozen manga volumes to its name, and it's been relaunched about once a decade since its 1973 debut. Yet it’s never held in as high esteem as Nagai’s more enduring creations, and that may be due to the lack of Violence Jack anime. Companies took three shots at animating Violence Jack, and they may explain why no one else tried after that.

Conceived as a pseudo-sequel to Nagai’s Devilman comics, Violence Jack proved to be a muddled pioneer in post-apocalyptic manga. That apocalypse is a possibly Devilman-related earthquake which destroys most of the civilized world, leaving behind vicious remnants of humanity as well as whatever sex and violence Nagai cared to put on the page. It was likely this setting that drew in anime producers back in the 1980s, when Mad Max and Fist of the North Star brought disaster-ravaged worlds into style. Three Violence Jack OVAs were made by largely different production teams, and Manga Entertainment released them all in judiciously censored American form during the 1990s.

Perhaps noting the lack of continuity between the three episodes, Manga started their Violence Jack media blitz with the second OVA, Evil Town. I suspect Manga judged Evil Town as the most controversial of the three episodes, as well as the only one with a remotely interesting (if stupidly implausible) premise: in a city buried by an earthquake, pockets of survivors butcher each other while digging for the surface. Evil Town is also the only Violence Jack OVA put together by anyone important. It was directed by Ichiro Itano, famous for animating the whirlwind missile ballets of Macross, and written by one Noboru Aikawa. Noboru would later change his name to Sho Aikawa and work on The Twelve Kingdoms, Martian Successor Nadesico, and a series called Fullmetal Alchemist. At this point in his career, however, he was still trudging through porn and mediocre OVAs.

Itano prefers his anime gory and grim, so Violence Jack: Evil Town starts with a scruffy police officer named Kawamori gunning down a child for the heinous crime of stealing a ham. So goes life in the buried city's Section A, where politicians and cops ruthlessly strive to maintain order. The boy’s fellow ham thief seeks refuge among the stock 1980s post-apocalyptic bikers of Section B, who quickly murder him. No one quite cares back at Section A, though, because they’ve just dug a gigantic, glowing-eyed dude out of a wall.

Despite some subtle warning signs, Section A's oily leaders decide that the self-named Violence Jack is the answer to their prayers, and they show him off to the thugs of Section B during a big ol’ friendly down-home trade n’ swap. Jack grunts and stares impassively at Mad Saulus, the towering leader of section B, and his transvestite sidekick, Blue. This standoff is interrupted by the arrival of Section C, formed by women who were once raped and assaulted by the men of Section A. Here Itano and Aikawa could make a finely honed statement about the fragile nature of civilization, touching on how savagery and corruption invariably lurk within the halls of power. But no, they just show flashbacks of Section C’s women being violated.

Aila Mu, the green-haired leader of Section C, asks Jack to help the beleaguered women instead of the hypocritical rapists of Section A or the undisguised rapists of Section B. Jack’s reaction is priceless, conveyed with that crisp, expressive grace one sees so often in ‘80s anime.

Yet Violence Jack is a walking avatar of death and warfare, not unlike a Cormac McCarthy antagonist. His mere presence inspires Section B to slaughter Section A right down to the children, who no one thinks of during the carnage. Jack eventually butchers Mad Saulus and the rest of the Section B marauders, though not before the villains rape the women of Section C on the way to the surface.

It also happens that there are only two women in Section C willing to take up arms and fight for their lives. Both of them die horrifically, of course. Rikki, the blue-haired aerobics instructor on the left, gets it in the neck when she’s distracted by a man urinating in front of her. Yes, really. Maria, the woman in the track suit, meets a gruesome fate in the uncensored version of Violence Jack and disappears from the story entirely in Manga’s edited release. She’s not the only plot hole casualty introduced by this clipping, as scenes of cannibalism, child murder, rape, and graphic dismemberment are also trimmed down. The censorship of Violence Jack is a curious tale, one marginally more interesting than the series.

Violence Jack enjoyed two other anime episodes, though neither proved as recklessly horrible as Evil Town. Manga followed the first installment with Hell’s Wind, a.k.a. Violence Jack Kills a Biker Gang: Part 2, though it was the third and final Violence Jack OVA released in Japan. Now above the surface, Jack slices through a roaming gang of Road Warrior stereotypes with the help of a vengeful woman named Jun (above). Once a victim of the gang, Jun manages to wreak modest havoc among them before she meets the usual fate of being captured and tortured. It's as standard a post-apocalyptic plot as you can get, and it ends when Violence Jack murders the wrongdoers and shows a young boy that it’s important to protect your loved ones. Especially if you’re a sadistic, wild-haired giant formed from hell itself.

Manga’s last Violence Jack release was really the first of the OVAs produced in Japan. A dreary little tale called Slumking (or Harlem/Harem Bomber), it initially promises to pit Violence Jack against a major villain from the manga. Yet the titular Slumking barely shows himself; Jack merely fights a bland, headbrace-wearing thug named Harem/Harlem Bomber (above) while another of Slumking's lackeys tries to save his girlfriend and nobody else. Jack's at his most bizarrely mystical here, with characters proclaiming him an instrument of doom before he transforms into a phoenix and takes to the heavens. That doesn't keep Slumking from being the dullest and therefore worst Violence Jack escapade, though for a few seconds the English dubbing makes it the high point of the entire series.

That dub may indeed be the best thing about Violence Jack. It’s by Manga UK, known for putting together subtly British voicework with plentiful swearing and minimally rehearsed performances. Violence Jack has all of that, as characters call each other “yellow shitfuck” and "Captain Buttwipe" amid such rejoinders as “Swivel on this, dyke!” The performances are hilarious, as most of the cast spout stiff, profanity-filled lines as though they’re desperate to get out of the studio and away from this thing in front of them. Every name in the dub's credits looks like a pseudonym, though the actor playing Evil Town's Kawamori sounds a lot like Peter Marinker. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Violence Jack’s crude extremes and laughable dub have given it quite a reputation among fans of terrible anime, a reputation that I've furthered by uploading those YouTube clips. Yet there’s a sad little secret beneath them: despite its stupidity and rampant debauchery, Violence Jack is mostly just hideous and boring. For every ridiculous line or delightful scene of Jack glaring into space, there’s much more in the way of tepid pulp storytelling or drawn-out scenes of rape, torture, and God knows what else. If it weren’t for Go Nagai’s sideburns-heavy style and Manga UK’s dub, Violence Jack would be largely indistinguishable from Vampire Wars, Dark Warrior, and the rest of the disposable, misogynistic direct-to-video effluvia that sprang up in Japan’s anime industry throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In a particularly strange disappointment, Violence Jack doesn’t even have competent fight scenes. Itano shows little of his flair for kinetic action in Evil Town, and Aikawa's script is entirely devoid of tension (in contrast, Itano and Aikawa’s subsequent collaboration, Angel Cop, is horrible and yet never dull). The people behind the other two OVA episodes can't even make Violence Jack entertainingly bad, and few of them went on to better things. It's hard to say how much of the blame Go Nagai shares. He's credited only as the original author, though his Dynamic Planning studio oversaw all three episodes.

Like The Wings of Honneamise and other challenging anime art, Violence Jack provoked strong opinions. Animerica ran the following review.

The complex moral decisions of Violence Jack were lost on other critics, including GameFan Magazine’s Casey Loe.

In North America, Violence Jack was swiftly discarded. Manga Video put out the censored versions and Right Stuff the uncensored ones, but neither company brough the series to DVD. In Europe, Manga UK slapped all three edited, dub-only episodes on one disc while France and Italy saw uncensored DVD collections. An uncut special-edition DVD of Violence Jack, with interviews and a stuffed Jack figure, continues to elude English-speaking fans for some reason.

DOES IT DESERVE A PROPER DVD RELEASE? Yes, as long as you never watch that DVD all the way through, and instead stick it on the shelf for conversational value. Violence Jack may seem like a masterpiece of dreadful anime, but watching it in full is an ugly, tiring experience. It's better appreciated from afar, through clips and quotes and in-jokes that never reveal how wearisome the actual series is. Violence Jack is a creature of legend, and so he must remain.

Bounty Arms: The Demo

2009-09-26T21:15:00.000-07:00

Bounty Arms shouldn’t be anything special. It’s a PlayStation action title from Data West, a boring software publisher that rarely made actual games. This particular game also revolves around an awkward idea: anime heroines using telescoping cybernetic arms as whips, grappling hooks, and flamethrowers. Besides, Bounty Arms was canceled, and that strongly implies something was wrong with it.

For those aware of it, Bounty Arms seemed unlikely to ever show itself. Unreleased Japanese games are hard to lay hand on, and Bounty Arms is quite low-profile. Yet part of it saw an official release. In 1995, a brief demo of the game appeared on the fifth volume of Demo Demo PlayStation, Sony’s early line of discs made for Japanese store kiosks. The demo is incomplete and barely lasts for two minutes of the game’s first stage (five minutes if you take it slow), but it might be all of Bounty Arms we’ll ever play. And it’s not that bad.

Data West planned to ship Bounty Arms in April 1995, the same month it appeared in Demo Demo PlayStation. Yet the demo included here isn’t finished. That much is apparent even on the title screen, which mentions a lack of “game balance." One can’t help but catch a whiff of desperation in it, as though Data West itself is confessing that their game isn’t ready and asking you to please patiently enjoy this fine product sample.

The character-select screen presents two playable leads: the dissatisfied, red-haired, red-eyed Rei Misazaki and the blonde, ponytailed, coquettishly grinning Chris Prenacaluto (which is how I’m spelling her mess of a last name until this contest is over). While the artwork recalls a low-rung (and possibly adults-only) 1990s Japanese PC game, it’s an improvement on the washed-out illustration that Data West used in a Bounty Arms ad, and the portraits come close to giving Chris and Rei trace amounts of personality, however stereotyped. They’re identical in gameplay except for one thing: Chris wears her Relic Arm on the right, Rei on the left. It’s a seemingly pointless distinction, but it has subtle effects in battle.

The first level of Bounty Arms is a jungle raid, just like Ikari Warriors and Mercs and every other top-down arcade shooter that might’ve inspired Bounty Arms. Once Chris and Rei get going, their Relic Arms show off the game’s novel approach. Press the one and only attack button, and Chris or Rei whips her Relic Arm like a Castlevania lead, lashing out and retracting the pointy, tentacle-like appendage. The Relic Arm does heavy damage, and any bullets it strikes are bounced back at enemies. Holding down the button charges a meter at the bottom of the screen, and releasing it makes our heroines whirl their Relic Arms in huge circles of flame.

Upon running into the demo’s first robot troops, one will notice that Chris and Rei are invincible. They even damage enemies simply by walking into them, be they steel tanks, android soldiers, or creeping ground-turrets. This would be that lack of “game balance” mentioned on the title screen. Just how hard would the game be if it had damage parameters? Well, the absence of a life meter suggests that Rei and Chris could take only one hit. Considering how tough Data West’s Rayxanber shooters were, Bounty Arms could’ve been quite the soul-crusher, revered among those lunatics who don’t believe in finishing games on more than one credit.

Completely devoid of challenge, the demo can be finished if Chris and Rei just keep walking forward. That’s no fun, of course, and playing it traditionally is far more engaging. While it sounds clumsy in concept, the Relic Arm works surprisingly well. It slices through enemies, reflects gunfire, spouts flames, grows longer with each power-up, and apparently reaches across gaps (the last of these feats, sadly, can't be seen in the demo). It also presents some careful techniques. Chris and Rei stand still while whipping their Arms, but they can move while pulling back the extending metal chain, snagging enemies and power-ups in the process. Other details emerge in the way certain bullets are reflected in different ways, and some of the larger enemies can be destroyed piece by piece.

Of course, the demo is still just half of the first stage of Bounty Arms, and it’s a basic introduction that ends before it can get truly interesting. The level is straightforward, and the enemies, while varied, aren’t stocked too heavily. Chris and Rei move slowly at first (though a speed-booster icon takes care of that), and they can’t attack in one direction while moving in another. Yet the game never suffers much for that. If the stage design picked up, Bounty Arms could've really impressed, and that’s a rare quality among canceled games.

As a traditional 2-D action title from the PlayStation's early days, Bounty Arms doesn't push visual boundaries. It resembles a mid-1990s arcade game, and the designers' idea of background flair is a parrot swooping across the screen. The enemies are all comparably mundane, with most of the graphical attention reserved for Chris and Rei. They don’t have faces, but they have distinct poses for each direction they can turn, and the developers went through the trouble of giving Chris a lopsided ponytail and Rei poor choice in pants. Bounty Arms also douses itself with plenty of explosive destruction, particularly when those circles of flame fill the screen and obliterate all they touch.

The demo’s music track is a forgettable, faux-jazzy mix apparently delivered by a Data West staffer's keyboard. I get the impression that I’ve heard it before, that it might be placeholder music stolen from another Data West game. Or perhaps the tune is just that generic.

The Bounty Arms demo’s jungle crawl ends with a fight against a huge tanklike litter carried by four robots. Once it and its commander mecha are destroyed, the game stutters to a halt and presents the player with a Game Over screen starring... well, Chris and Rei’s rear ends. The women weren’t exactly dressed for combat in the first place, but their mannequin-like poses here are unintentionally hilarious. It also reveals the game’s most embarrassing secret: Rei’s wearing half-pants, a hideous combination of long pants and shorts. Japan’s anime and game industries thought that looked cool for a few months back in 1994.

Is that all there is to the demo? Perhaps not. A look at its files reveals things never seen in the playthrough: continue screens, a ravine, a huge log, and sprites of Chris and Rei using their Relic Arms to cross over pits. The most impressive hidden sight is a robotic snake boss that weaves in and out of a waterfall (and apparently has a tiny man riding in its head). It’s shown in screenshots and footage of the game, and it’s evidently the first level's ultimate boss. Perhaps that entire stage is in the demo, denied us only by some malicious scrap of coding.

I really like Bounty Arms, biased as I am. Hunting it was a side project of mine for the last five years, and I did my best to prepare for the ugly truth of the game being terrible. Yet the demo is intriguing, even without damage settings or a real boss. It’s enough just to screw around with the Relic Arms, their fiery attacks, their unintentionally nuanced methods, and their mixture of Castlevania and Bionic Commando. I was first drawn to Bounty Arms because it was the embodiment of many things I liked about games back in 1995: explosions, 2-D play, hand-drawn art, and, of course, sexy anime chicks. I kept searching because the game seemed a strange, one-of-a-kind creation. The demo shows that it’s all of these things.

There’s no blunt greatness in the Bounty Arms demo. There’s only the promise of a solid action game with a creative twist on a genre that’s usually predictable and neglected. The demo’s a unique diversion that could easily grow better, and that’s reason enough to want more of it. Over a decade after Data West left it for dead, I’m still convinced that Bounty Arms deserves to be brought to the surface.

I’m also convinced that Bounty Arms should be played by anyone who wants it. You can grab the demo right here, extracted and neatly packaged with help from Lost Levels member Carnivol. It runs fine on ePSXe and comparable PlayStation emulators, though the apologetic title screen and ridiculous ending screen sometimes don’t display properly. If my emulator is any indication, you might also have to select the woman you don’t want as your avatar. Bounty Arms is all about breaking traditions.

Important Bounty Arms Update

2009-09-21T20:32:00.000-07:00

Fuck yes. More soon.

Bounty Arms: Visual Conversation

2009-09-19T13:21:00.000-07:00

I recently rewrote my Bounty Arms article, partly to clear up errors and partly because I can’t forget about the game. There are scores of unreleased titles to obsess over, but Data West’s Bounty Arms draws my interest like nothing else. After all, I can’t think of another game that combines overhead perspectives, cybernetic grappling arms, flamethrowers, manga-eyed heroines, and strangely substandard production art.

For years my article meandered under the mistaken impression that Bounty Arms is a shooter like Ikari Warriors when the game’s really more like an overhead Bionic Commando with huge explosions. The new article is functional and curt, but it gets the point across. The point being that I want to find Bounty Arms. I’ve posted about it at Lost Levels, I edited Giant Bomb’s entry, and I even worked the game into a list of amazing unreleased things.

Perhaps a contest is the best way to drum up interest in Bounty Arms. See, I can’t translate the last name of Chris, one of the two Bounty Arms characters. Here’s the katakana for it.

The first word is, of course, “Chris,” but I’m mystified by the second one, separated from the first by a dot. The katakana comes out as “Purenakaruto,” which could turn into all sorts of bizarre phrases. None of them seems to be a typical surname, and someone suggested that the word is, in fact, just a bunch of gibberish that wasn’t supposed to be any familiar name.

So that’s the contest: come up with some interpretations of Chris’ last name and post it below. I’ll pick the one that makes the most sense (or, alternatively, amuses me the most). The winner gets a box full of crap, including games, anime DVDs, game-and-anime trinkets, and maybe some magazines. Here's a katakana chart for reference.

Dreamcast Day: Low-Effort Edition

2009-09-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

It’s Dreamcast Day, when Sega fans everywhere look back fondly on the last time their favorite company had the remotest chance for widespread success. In truth, the Dreamcast was doomed from the get-go, but it was a fun little system. And I still have the box for mine!

That’s a smaller library than most Dreamcast owners could claim, but I didn’t care for some of the console’s biggest titles, including Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia, Space Channel 5, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, and Sonic Adventure. In fact, my collection could be smaller still. Ikaruga, Soul Calibur, and Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves are all out on Xbox Arcade, and there’s no reason to keep Guilty Gear X when you’ve got Guilty Gear XX #Reload. Perhaps I’m just fascinated by the cover’s juxtaposition of Ky’s head and Sol’s crotch.

The real oddity here is Evolution 2, which I’ve played for no more than twenty minutes. Yet I won it in a contest at the Gaming Intelligence Agency years ago, and I always find it hard to sell things I’ve won.

Speaking of the GIA, this is excellent. Edit: Or at least it was.

Policenauts: Bizarre Love Triangle

2009-09-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

Last week saw a proud moment: a group of fans released a translation patch for the PlayStation version of Policenauts. Many thought that the game, a 1994 digital comic from Metal Gear Solid creator/destroyer Hideo Kojima, was too thick with detailed text for fans to render in English. Well, many were wrong.

I’m very glad to have Policenauts in a language I can understand, as I’ve wanted to play this ever since GameFan first described its sci-fi blend of near-future space colonization, drug-industry conspiracies, shooting interludes, and attempts at an anime version of Lethal Weapon.

Oh, and the New Order references. Kojima can't forget those.

The only troubling part of the game is the way Jonathan Ingram, the blue-haired Mel Gibson stand-in and main character, can grope a lot of the women he questions in his investigations. It’s played off as comedy, and that makes it all the more unnerving when women clearly don’t like Jonathan’s attentions.

Of course, the Policenauts fan’s knee-jerk defense is that the “touch” options don’t show up unless you actually move the cursor over boobs, meaning that you, the player, are the disgusting swine in all this. Not Kojima and his team. It’s not as though they actually made the game and credited a staffer with “breast bouncing supervision.” Oh no no no.

However, there’s something to be said for a game that leaves its worst moments optional and slightly obscured, making it possible to enjoy Policenauts without flicking a secretary’s cleavage. And Policenauts is otherwise enjoyable, as it has both Kojima’s characteristically thorough research and his willingness to continue stacking up plot twists well after everything’s toppled over and caught fire. That’s the good side of Kojima’s insanity, and Policenauts shows plenty of it.

The Wings of Honneamise: Royal Rape Force

2009-08-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

(Note: This was originally going to be a review of The Wings of Honneamise, but it turned into a diatribe about the film’s most controversial scene and how anyone who defends it is intellectually dishonest or just human filth. I don’t really discuss the movie in full, so I can’t call it a proper review. Besides, I’d have to rate Honneamise if that were the case, and I can’t see myself giving an “A” to the first 75 minutes and a string of profanities to the rest of it.)

Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise is often praised as one of the most compelling creations of Japan’s animation industry. In 1987, it stunned many with its gorgeous visions of another world’s first steps into outer space, and it's praised as a monument to the creative heights that animation can reach when freed from commercialism and pandering.

It’s also one of the biggest fuck-ups in the history of animated cinema. I’m not talking about the film’s finances; it did well enough at the box office and only failed to break even because it was so incredibly expensive in the first place. No, I’m talking about the film’s drastic, ill-advised, and misogynistic detour off a cliff.

Honneamise is an amazing film at first. Set in a world that’s Not Quite Our Own and looks it, the movie follows a would-be astronaut named Shirotsugh Lhadatt. Shiro’s introduced as a goofball slacker in his nation’s ineffectual Space Force, which hasn’t gone into space and, at best, only manages to get its test astronauts electrocuted by their own urine bags. One night, Shiro meets a religious young woman named Riquinni when she’s handing out alterna-world Chick tracts in the street. Her piously supportive attitude inspires Shiro to volunteer as the Space Force’s next astronaut.

What follows is a film that initially seems far from the usual anime nonsense or mainstream family-oriented schlock. For one thing, Honneamise has some of the most amazing visual world-building I’ve ever seen in a movie. The entire setting is comparable to Asian-American nations of the 1950s, but it’s re-imagined in stunning completion, from the cityscapes and vehicles down to the coins, the spoons, the clothing, the TV weather broadcasts, and the origin myths. It’s the sort of movie that reveals new things each time you watch, because there’s too much well-animated detail to take in at once.

Honneamise is also a refreshingly sedate story. Instead of pointless or gaudy imagery, it opens with Shiro reflecting on how he just drifted into the Space Force, and it follows with a fascinating montage of this alternate world’s journey toward powered flight, set to the staccato overtures of a Ryuichi Sakamoto soundtrack. From there, the movie roams through Shiro’s humdrum life. He’s no action-film centerpiece, and his days are spent clowning around with the other Space Force goons and trying to circumvent Riquinni’s strict views on romantic abstinence.

But a problem arises for our main character. In the midst of the Space Force’s efforts to put him up in orbit, Shiro loses his confidence in the program, realizing that it’ll do little to ultimately improve life in his country. He turns to Riquinni, whose house has been bulldozed by creditors, and her passive attitude frustrates him. Clearly, he is a troubled individual, carrying an inner conflict that represents the existential turmoil every member of this sad human race must confront in some way. And Riquinni, with her perpetually self-humbling views of the world, can’t really help him.

So how does Shiro deal with this? He tries to rape her.

Yep. One night, Shiro lurches, as if in a trance, over to Riquinni while she’s changing clothes. He throws her on the ground and forces himself atop her, to put it delicately. He appears to come to his senses moments before she clouts him with a candlestick. Then he makes a goofy face and passes out. Because attempted rape is WACKY!

The next morning, Shiro follows Riquinni out of the house and apologizes profusely (in the English dub, he says “I just couldn’t help myself”). To his shock, she apologizes for clobbering him upside the head, and explains that he needs to forgive her so she can forgive herself. Bewildered, Shiro wanders back to the Space Force.

There are many reasons director Hiroyuki Yamaga and Gainax put these scenes in the The Wings of Honneamise. They show Shiro’s weakness, his self-doubt, and his growing disdain for Riquinni. They demonstrate how he’s incapable of accepting the weight of the future he’s chosen for himself. They capture the savagery inherent in human nature and the necessity of overcoming it. That's what some critics say, at least.

Honneamise’s rape scene is frequently defended by fans of note. Carl Horn, an esteemed anime-industry veteran, explains in a series of Usenet posts that Yamaga was showing Shiro’s failure to grasp his own destiny and Riquinni’s inability to do the same for hers. He maintains, at length, that “Yamaga knew what he was doing.”

Translator Neil Nadelman conveys a similar sentiment here, quoting Yamaga as saying that “The assault and its aftermath was there to put the final knife into the possibility that Shiro and Riqunni could ever have a full and balanced relationship with each other. Riqunni's failure to admit to herself what Shiro had tried to do showed that there was no longer any possibility of communication.”

In the film's commentary track, Yamaga also explains that he wanted to depict an unpredictable relationship between a man and a woman, a relationship that rejects the typical movie romance. The rape attempt was effectively the first case of what anime fans would later label the “Gainax Twist,” a turn of plot that the studio often uses to screw with the viewer’s expectations or nerdy predilections.

None of these arguments really explains why Honneamise had to use a rape attempt when there were dozens of better ways to express the themes underlying Shiro’s personal downfall. The commentary track is of limited help here. Yamaga and assistant director Takami Akai, the other Gainax member on the track, discuss the buildup to Shiro’s attack on Riquinni and how it was “difficult to explain to the animators.” But what explanation does Akai offer when Shiro hurls her to the floor and mounts her? He reminisces about how he wanted to use the animation cels of the scene as “promotions or gifts” but that people stole all of the production materials showing a bare-breasted Riquinni struggling beneath her attacker. Clearly, the people behind this movie had their priorities straight.

Then there’s the aftermath of the assault, during which Akai points out that Riquinni reveals herself as a “strong woman” by completely forgiving Shiro and saying that it was her fault. So, depending on your interpretation, the film’s leading (and only) adult female character is a fundamentalist lunatic willing to immediately overlook a horrible event, or she's a woman who shows perseverance and robust spirit by BLAMING HERSELF BECAUSE SHE WAS ALMOST RAPED. Holy fucking shit.

In truth, Honneamise is ruined not just by the near-rape, but by the film’s subsequent handling of it. Following his conversation with Riquinni, Shiro finds his way to his Space Force compatriots and, in a conversation with his friend, openly wonders if he’s a good or bad person. The problem here is that Shiro, at his most troubled, seems only slightly ill at ease. He doesn’t act like a man who just tried to force himself on a woman. He acts like a guy who just cheated on his taxes or ran over a squirrel on his drive to the office. I’ve heard that one cut of the film deletes the rape scene entirely, and I have to wonder if the typical viewer would notice, because the film deals with Riquinni’s attack by simply bustling on its way through a street-sweeper chase and fighter-plane dogfights and symbolic montages that don’t seem affected by it in the slightest.

Furthermore, the movie still insists that the viewer care about Shiro in some way. He obviously isn’t supposed to be a blatant, stand-up-and-cheer hero of any sort, yet Honneamise continues to focus its story around him with the implicit assumption that he’s still an ambivalent and intriguing enough character to shoulder the movie’s conflicts. If we’re not expected to root for him, we’re still asked to stay interested in him and what he’s doing. And that’s asking a lot when the movie’s shown him trying to rape someone. When Shiro emits his message about prayer and loss while he’s in orbit, it seems rushed and inauthentic, because he hasn’t truly dealt with his actions. And neither has Honneamise at large.

Maybe, just maybe, there was a subtler, more artistically solid, and less woman-hating way to show Shiro and Riquinni’s relationship self-destructing. Yes, Yamaga, you wanted to shake the viewers and break with convention and freak the hell out of those stodgy anime-industry squares, but you did it with such a ham-fisted, sexist misfire that I’m always surprised when anyone claims to like The Wings of Honneamise without adding “except for…” and some description of the rape scene.

Yamaga apparently included the scene in his movie without anyone stepping in and objecting, and that remains a testament to just how much of a boys’ club the anime industry was in the 1980s and still is today. There might be more defense for his choices if he’d gone on to an illustrious career, but that didn’t quite happen. Other Gainax directors made their marks on the anime industry with other projects, including Hideki Anno’s Evangelion and Kazuya Tsurumaki’s FLCL, but Yamaga never again got as ambitious as he did with Honneamise. He co-wrote Gunbuster (uncredited, for some reason) shortly after, and Gunbuster is a crowd-pleasing puffball in which huge robots and girls in combat leotards save the human race, all without being raped. Yamaga also co-wrote Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, generally considered the best of the Gundam franchise, though he’s only credited with the screenplay while someone else did “series composition.” Perhaps the director ignored his suggestion that the lead Gundam pilot be nearly raped by the Zeon soldier with a crush on her. A decade after this, Yamaga returned to directing anime with the reprehensible Mahoromatic, which has everything wrong with modern anime, and the forgettable attempted comedy of Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi.

Many overlook this when praising The Wings of Honneamise. Even today, the movie is often lionized without anyone acknowledging how much the rape scene damages everything. Some reviews wave it aside or ignore it completely. Others lament the fact that Gainax isn’t going further down the path blazed by Honneamise. Gainax’s subsequent series, from Gunbuster to Nadia to Gurren Lagann, are often made with comfortably mainstream appeal. Yet even in the bizarre extremes of Evangelion, there’s nothing quite as degrading as what Honneamise does to Riquinni. Yes, anime fans, it’s truly a shame that Gainax is longer using rape as a conveniently sectionalized character-development device. You can still find plenty of awful, awful anime that does just that, but it’s never another prestigious, big-budget film that emerged just when anime needed an art-house champion.

Perhaps it seemed worthy of unrelenting plaudits to the anime fans of 1987, but I can’t believe so many modern critics ignore how Honneamise at first emerges as wonderful movie only to turn into yet another case of WHAT THE HELL, JAPAN. Stereotypes of Japan and its nationwide Issues With Women are invoked frequently, and they’d be annoying here if Honneamise didn’t uphold them. Roger Ebert mentions the rape scene in his review of the movie, linking it to the "sudden sexual violence" common in manga and anime. While I imagine some fans must have bristled at comparing such a brilliantly textured film to violent porn comics, the truth is that Ebert was on the money.

On the subject of stereotypes proven accurate, it doesn’t speak well for anime fans when they defend the movie’s marginalizing of sexual assault as a statement about the disintegration of a relationship. Only in the anime industry would a director show this by having a man try to rape a woman, and only in anime fandom would people view the results as anything but a terrible idea.

I’m bothered by Honneamise’s ugly, mishandled scene even more because the film is utterly spectacular up to that point. It’s an entrancing, wonderful tale, built from thoughtful personal moments, broad visions of a beautifully drawn world, and even low-brow comedy (I’ve heard Animal House inspired at least once moment in Honneamise). It’s unlike any other animated creation, and in my teenage years I counted it among my favorite movies; not my favorite animated movies, but my favorite movies, period.

Yes, there was a time when I liked Honneamise completely, when I thought that the attempted rape was meaningful expression that wouldn’t have worked any other way. Then I watched the movie again and again. I read the defenses of it. I listened to the commentary track. And you know what? There’s no excuse for the rape scene, and there’s no reason to stand up for it. All evidence suggests that Yamaga, in fact, did not know what he was doing. If Yamaga knew what he was doing, he wouldn’t show Shiro only mildly shaken by a brush with becoming a rapist. If Yamaga knew what he was doing, he and Akai wouldn't have considered giving away production cels of a woman being violated.

Most importantly, if Yamaga knew what he was doing, he wouldn’t use the scene to symbolize the despicable failings of one man, perhaps of all humanity, and then treat it purely as symbol. Because once you’ve shown a rape attempt like that, your film is no longer the story of a morally conflicted man and the flawed progression of the human race, framed by a quest to reach beyond a planetary cradle. It becomes the story of a man who tries to rape a woman who’s so warped (or SO STRONG) that she instantly accepts blame. It also becomes the story of a director who destroys what might have been the best animated film ever.

Southern Cross don't need men around anyhow!

2009-07-26T17:24:00.001-07:00

I watched a bit of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross the other day. In the heyday of 1980s space-opera anime, it became the middle act of Robotech’s three-show splicing job, and that’s how most kids of the ’80s recall it. I, however, do not. I watched Robotech back when the Armed Forces Network aired it in Germany, but I only remember seeing the Macross part of the series, the one with Rick Hunter and Minmay and the jets that turned into robots and jet-robots. While that’s the most popular third of the show, you’d think I’d at least have some memory of the other two. But I don't, and so Southern Cross is pretty much new territory for me. At most, I recognize some of the more ridiculous sights from Robotech's intro, like the woman in the evening gown floating through laser fire.

Southern Cross is also part of my ongoing exploration of robot-filled anime from the 1980s. Over the past few years, I’ve checked out various well-regarded shows from the era: Ideon, Votoms, Layzner, Dunbine, L-Gaim, and a bunch of Gundams. Most of them are terrible. They’re poorly animated, awkwardly written, sexistly cast, badly paced, and just plain boring. Even Zeta Gundam. Wait, especially Zeta Gundam, which convinced me that Yoshiyuki Tomino, the esteemed co-creator of Gundam, is by any standard a terrible director who cannot tell a remotely interesting story or grasp how actual human beings behave.

Lousy animation and poor writing are hardly unique to anime from the 1980s, and yet so many of these older mecha series are considered great. While I could understand if anime fans liked them with loads of irony, I’ve seen them praised as legitimate classics far too often. There are several possible explanations for this. Perhaps fans watched these tepid mecha slogs back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when they lacked anything better in the way of semi-realistic space opera with big robots (which I find plausible, since we’ve all been entranced by dumb cartoons just because they dared to kill off characters). Perhaps fans just like them because they’re not as freakish and pedophile-oriented as some modern anime shows (which I find hard to believe, since good is more than the absence of bad or, in this case, the absence of fetishy horrors). Or perhaps it’s proof that too many anime fans will watch, buy, and defend just about anything.

Anyway, Southern Cross has the same cheap look and jumbled storytelling as other series of its era. It also backs some surprisingly dull robots and spaceships, considering it was partly designed to sell toys and models. Yet I find it interesting that Southern Cross is one of the few 1980s mecha anime where the three major characters are women. Our lead is the impulsive, self-spoiled, unjustly promoted pilot Jeanne Francaix, who’s constantly butting heads with her efficient rival Marie Angel and the exasperated, by-the-book officer Lana Isavia.

Surprisingly, there’s no male protagonist for them to surround during a war between aliens and an isolated human colony, and I wonder how hard it was for Southern Cross to avoid putting in a heroic, audience-identification leading man (Tomino, to his credit, tried to build mecha series around women, but he was shot down by Sunrise). The show’s primarily about Jeanne, as she's usually pissing off her commanders, tracking a skilled (and handsome) enemy pilot, and driving her equally laid-back brigade into whatever battles she feels like fighting. Like Macross, Southern Cross is halfway to a comedy, a precursor to Nadesico, Captain Tylor, and other anime satires of the 1990s.

Unfortunately, Southern Cross is still a mecha show for toy-buying boys and geeks, so its three leads act the way that lazy ’80s anime writers thought women acted. When not piloting robots and flipping through fashion magazines, Jeanne takes baths and showers constantly, thus showing herself naked and proving that these Japanese cartoons are NOT KID STUFF. She also bickers with Lana and Marie over dresses and relationships, and all three of them are shoved toward love interests, often unrealistically, over the course of the story. That, however, wasn’t enough to save the show in the eyes of male viewers. It was canceled early, leaving the writers to hurriedly finish up a plot that was supposed to span almost twice as many episodes. Oh well.

And that’s Southern Cross. It doesn’t change my rapidly declining opinion of 1980s mecha anime, but at least it did something different.

Covenant of the Ratings

2009-07-23T17:47:00.000-07:00

Hey, there's an actual game review. I’ve spat out opinions on games elsewhere for nearly a year, but it's liberating to put together an opinion with no compromises for the sake of critical standards. Had I reviewed Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume for a professional outlet, I likely would’ve given it a slightly lower grade. Here on this website, I follow no such propriety.

Of course, the only place where I seriously review games doesn’t require ratings, and I’m grateful for that. There’s a good argument that game-review scores are pointless, reductive appendices that exist just to rile up readers who never bother to read the text of the related article. If I had to grade games for a major website, I’d stick Es and infinity symbols on them.

So why do I still use letter grades for game reviews here? Because this site is primarily an exercise in appeasing best-ignored ambitions from my childhood. Like most kids who adored videogames, I’d fixate on how Trouble Shooter landed a full run of exploding smiley faces in its Gamepro review or how Electronic Gaming Monthly never seemed to give out 10s. In fact, I spent one dull afternoon marking in ratings for every NES game in three huge Game Players volumes. Yes, I even scored games I had never played. Clearly, game review scores and I have a history, and I’m not going to abandon that for a site with no credibility to diminish.

Little Things: Duck Tales

2009-07-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

You know what I like about Duck Tales for the NES?

When Uncle Scrooge ducks, his hat stays in the air for a split second before descending perfectly to his head. That's what I like about Duck Tales for the NES.

Angel Cop: The Manga

2009-06-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

Angel Cop is rightly considered a classic of terrible anime. Released in six parts from 1989 to 1994, it perfectly embodies the violent, moronic ethos of much of that era’s direct-to-video animation. It’s even offensive in ways that most anime series never ponder. Resembling a brainless and anti-Semitic Ghost in the Shell, Angel Cop favors a near future where the thuggish members of Japan’s Special Security Force take down Commie terrorists as bloodily as possible. Then they learn, in a last-act Big Reveal, that it’s all part of a Jewish-American conspiracy to take over Japan.

It’s a horrible series, but it’s never a boring one. Directed by Ichiro Itano well after he animated those amazing Macross dogfights and written by Sho Aikawa well before he scripted Fullmetal Alchemist, Angel Cop is fast-paced drivel taken further into camp territory by a delightfully profane dub from Manga UK. Consequently, the series never goes three minutes without someone shooting, swearing, exploding, roasting alive, tripping a landmine, torturing a suspect, delivering some bizarre phrase in a masked British-Brooklyn accent, or ranting about how the Vietnam War was just a weapons test for Uncle Sam’s military contractors. It’s best summed up by this helpful compilation.

However, there is another version of Angel Cop. A shorter, lighter, and shockingly cuter version.

Not long after Angel Cop started production, it was accompanied by a manga adaptation in Newtype, Japan’s biggest anime magazine. Itano and Aikawa are credited with the original story, but the comic was drawn by Taku Kitazaki, now better known for gentle, introspective fare. Kitazaki was just starting out in 1990, and his one-volume adaptation of the Angel Cop saga is a strange assembly of soft-looking characters and grimy, Akira-style punk violence.

It’s weirdly upbeat for something connected to an exploitive bloodbath like the Angel Cop anime, with Angel herself providing a good gauge of the changes. In the OVA series, she’s a brusque, uncaring, profanity-spewing hardcase. She thinks nothing of leaving her partner Raiden bleeding in the street or of pumping a few extra rounds into a terrorist who’s already splattered across a wall. In the manga, she’s a chipper young Special Security Force recruit, throwing peace signs and not really hiding a rather obvious crush on Raiden.

Then again, the first few pages show her shooting off a suspect’s hand and beating him insensate, so in some ways she’s still the Angel that anime viewers grew to loathe.

Speaking of Raiden, he’s re-imagined here as a shades-sporting avatar of everything manga authors though was cool in 1990. At least the Special Security Force gets actual uniforms in the manga, as opposed to a dress code that lets government agents go bare-chested beneath furred jackets. Peace and Hacker, the other two major SSF agents, get slight redesigns, but they’re mostly the same: Peace wears glasses and Hacker tries to intimidate suspects by flexing his muscles. Hacker just looks less like Golgo 13 in the manga.

Kitazaki’s Angel Cop manga runs under 200 pages, so it doesn’t waste time. The anime stared off with Angel and Raiden taking on a Communist cell, but the manga skips most of that and begins by introducing a trio of mythologically named psychics (or, as the dubbed line goes, “They’re called HUN-TERS!”) responsible for grisly murders. In the anime, Freya, Ashura, and Lucifer have distinct and downright ridiculous designs: a screechy little girl, a skinny hair-metal star, and a racist, well-muscled Nordic blonde. In the manga, they’re all slender, pale-haired espers straight out of old Keiko Takemiya books, even when it comes to the once-amazonian Lucifer.

At this point, I should note that no one has translated the Angel Cop manga yet, and my Japanese skills can’t puzzle out the intricacies of whatever conspiracy runs through the story. Much like the anime, you need only know that the Special Security goons and some ominous psychic assassins are being played against each other by shady government types.

One notable change from the Angel Cop OVA series concerns our heroine’s background. It was never explored in the anime, but the manga shows Angel as a normal schoolgirl who came home one day to find her mother and little brother murdered by her father. Daddy then blew his own head off in front of her. This unfortunate development drove her to live as a nihilistic street tough, and it wasn’t until Raiden brought her around (by sticking a revolver to her head) that she found her true calling in Japan’s secret police.

Another of the manga’s key alterations arises when Lucifer and the other psychics attack the Special Security Force members head-on. An explosion leaves Raiden and Angel lying broken in the street, with Angel using the last of her strength to bathetically crawl over to her partner. While the Angel Cop anime saw Raiden severely wounded and remade into a cyborg, here it’s Angel who’s injured so badly that the government decides to rebuild her using the power of Japanese technology.

Raiden, on the other hand, comes through with only a few scratches, and he checks on Angel to find that she’s now the star of Battle Angel Alita. In truth, Yukito Kishiro started up Battle Angel a month after Angel Cop finished its Newtype run, so I imagine that Kitazaki was working more within the mold of Robocop and Eight Man. This becomes increasingly obvious as the manga continues, even if Kitazaki doesn’t try to adapt Robocop’s Jesus parallels.

Just like Robocop, Angel decides to show off her newfound cybernetic abilities by heading out and pulping a crook with her arm-mounted minigun, much to the shock of an innocent bystander. Raiden confronts her, only to learn that she doesn’t remember him or who she is. But there’s little time for recovering her identity, because Kitazaki really wants this manga to be over soon.

The psychic hunters are still at large, and Freya takes out Peace and Hacker in short order. In response, Cyber-Angel confronts Freya and casually rips her apart. Our emotionless heroine next takes on both Lucifer and Ashura at once, managing to put a bullet through Ashura’s psychic brain (this is, of course, counters what happened in the anime, wherein Lucifer killed Freya and made Ashura switch sides). Lucifer is enraged, but Raiden prevents further killings by showing up and explaining the details of the government game that’s behind everything.

I can’t work out the particulars, but there’s a huge American flag in the background. I’ll just assume that Raiden is elaborating on how the International Jewish Conspiracy controls Wall Street and Hokkaido’s tourism industries.

Whatever Raiden says, it inspires Lucifer to take off and settle the score with her handlers. Angel sobbingly regains her humanity, and then Raiden and the SSF chief confront the filthy government weasels who set them up. They don’t quite succeed, but at least the main conspirator is taken out by his superiors in cynical, you-know-too-much fashion. With the rest of the cast now dead or wounded, Angel and a vengeful Lucifer meet for one last throwdown. The whole thing ends in tears and a nighttime snowfall.

Critically speaking, the Angel Cop manga might be better than the anime, if only because the characters are less repulsive. Angel shows actual emotion, her trip through the Robocop factory adds a mildly interesting character struggle, and her relationship with Raiden is more coherent that it ever was in the anime (where she goes from ignoring him for five episodes to sucking cyborg face with him in the finale). Of course, the manga is still thoroughly banal and clichéd even for cheap ’90s comics. Kitazaki’s airy, romantic style doesn’t fit the exploding heads and gruesome deaths, and the entire work shows the careless rush of something that was rapidly finished when its related anime series didn’t prove a massive success.

There’s also the possibility that Angel Cop is just as rabidly anti-Semitic in manga form. For all I know, it could be worse than the anime. Maybe I missed a scene where big-eyed manga Angel quotes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and then vows to stop those wretched Jews from digging their money-stained fingers into Japanese soil and making matzo from the blood of the nation’s infants.

What little information I’ve found on the Angel Cop manga suggests that Kitazaki isn’t particularly proud of it. The lone volume is obscure and seldom talked about in Japan’s geek circles, much like the anime that spawned it. At the same time, the manga is bound to interest anyone who’s morbidly fond of the Angel Cop anime series. It’d be nice to have Kitazaki’s version of the story translated, just to see how close it comes to one of the anime industry’s most fascinatingly horrible sights.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years SHOCKING CENSORSHIP/IMPROVEMENT

2009-06-11T01:54:00.000-07:00

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years arrived on Wiiware last week. Some have praised it, and others have complained about paying roughly a dollar for every hour of playtime. Such are the wages of download-only titles that have overly faithful fan bases.

The After Years is a conflicted little sequel. It’s unnecessary in concept and quite mercenary in building itself from the original game’s graphics and music, yet it evokes the mood of the original Final Fantasy IV so well that I can’t help but enjoy it. It’s comparable to getting a pet that looks and acts just enough like one you had when you were twelve. You’re not the same and neither is this new creature, but the connection is there somehow.

One interesting point of The After Years concerns Rydia, the summoner who started off Final Fantasy IV as an orphaned little girl and finished it as a grown woman, all thanks to the sievelike logic of video games. Rydia didn’t wear much in the original game or its DS remake, and she wore even less in the illustrations for the Japanese cell-phone version of The After Years. Square decided to change that for Western audiences.

This is how Rydia appears on the official Japanese website for The After Years.

And this is how she appears in the official art for the game’s North American release.

I refuse to pretend that the changes aren’t for the better, as Rydia’s frilled metal bikini now resembles actual clothing. It’s not the sort of thing you’d wear into caves packed with slavering beasts, but I learned not to demand adroit realism from Final Fantasy a long time ago.

Of course, we could always go back to the Rydia art that appeared in Nintendo Power’s first Final Fantasy IV feature in 1991.

We probably shouldn’t.

Little Things: The Legendary Axe II

2009-05-23T18:58:00.000-07:00

The Legendary Axe II is strange among action-game sequels. While the first The Legendary Axe is a brightly colored exercise in dull clichés, the second one is a grim creation, full of shadowy castle halls, foreboding music, and bizarre, quasi-Gigerian imagery. For a side-scroller that stars a generic warrior in a speedo, it’s a rather eerie game. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the ending.

After finding his way through a stage of unexpectedly futuristic paths and buglike robots, the sparsely clothed Prince Sirius faces down his evil, throne-stealing brother and the monstrous creature that lurks within the usurper. Overjoyed, Sirius climbs up to his throne, laughing as a haunting staccato plays and robed figures emerge, presumably to welcome their new king. Suddenly, one of them throws off her cloak to reveal a scimitar-wielding woman, and she leaps toward a horrified Sirius. The game pauses with her in mid-jump, the scene fades, and the credits roll.

It’s an appropriate way to cap off a bleak game, though it surely made players wonder just who this assassin was. The only female character mentioned in the manual is the princes’ mother, Queen Grace, and she’s not a likely candidate. Is this interloper some disowned relative of the royal family, an ally of the fallen Prince Zack, or just some hired killer whose appearance speaks to the unending struggles waged among the corrupt and powerful? Or is this a cameo by Flare, the damsel-in-distress from the original The Legendary Axe? She had purple hair, after all.

No one really knew, and we all moved on to other games and other hobbies. Upon returning to The Legendary Axe II years down the road, I figured that the ending was just a quick and simple twist on the developers’ part. There was no answer.

Yet everything fell into place once I saw this entry at Hardcore Gaming 101. It reveals something very important: in the Japanese version of The Legendary Axe II, the assassin is completely naked. For the sake of easily offended readers, I have chosen to pixelate the image.

It all makes sense. The player-controlled prince goes through the entire game in nothing but a thong, while the evil prince wears a suit of gold armor. By shedding his inhibitions and taking pride in his nearly uncovered body, our hero is able to wrest the throne away from his fully garmented rival, whose sartorial airs speak of repression and vain opulence. However, the new king is not willing to strip completely upon his victory, leaving him vulnerable to an enemy who is.

Both nudist propaganda and a clever turn on the fable of the naked emperor, this finale was hidden from American children by a bit of old-fashioned game censorship, as the assassin received a swimsuit that’s far too bright for a dimly colored game like The Legendary Axe II. Now the truth can be known: those who wish to rule must be willing to bare themselves to their kingdom. Purple hair is optional.

A Norse God’s Own Prototype

2009-04-21T23:51:00.000-07:00

Prototypes might be my favorite video game subculture. In this edifying realm, fans with too much free time root through early builds and pore over advance screenshots in search of things that were changed before games were released. Most of this archeology focuses on older titles, but I’m not going to wait when it comes to Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, a game I absolutely love. I’m going to turn up speculative trivia while it’s still fresh and pointless.

This screen made the rounds when Covenant of the Plume was announced, and Wikipedia still has it on the game’s page. The curious part of it lies with the characters. The shadowed figure at the center is Wylfred, the one in orange-red armor is Ancel, the mage in the gray hood is Lockswell, the purple-clad girl is Cheripha, and the blue-haired soldier is a generic warrior. The portrait shows Ailyth, Wylfred’s infernally supplied assistant, chattering about the Norse underworld or feathers.

I’ve played through all three branches of Covenant of the Plume’s main quest, and there’s no point where all of these characters appear on the same map. At the risk of spoiling a plot twist, Ancel leaves Wylfred’s company before Ailyth, Cheripha, and Lockswell come along. I’m also fairly certain that the scenery here is from a courtyard that isn’t shown until the third or fourth chapter, when Ancel’s not around. The Seraphic Gate brings together all of the game’s major characters in a frivolous bonus dungeon, but its architecture looks nothing like that paved garden area.

So there’s one entry for the records of divergent early screenshots. And one for proving that I think too much about Valkyrie Profile.

Memories of Anime Insider: ME AND GOKU

2009-03-27T21:43:00.000-07:00

It's time for me to talk about Anime Insider, a little magazine that shut down this past Thursday.

I was an associate editor at Anime Insider from August 2005 to May 2008, spanning issues 25 through 58. I previously wrote some dull Livejournal entry about my time at the magazine, but I can summarize all of it by saying this: I enjoyed working there, no matter how dumb it was. And here's what I remember most about my time spent on an anime mag at the height of the manga/anime/Japan-crazy bubble.

Best Cover: Issue 50, far and away.

For our 50th issue, the company higher-ups surprised us all by paying for an exclusive illustration from Gainax. Rei, Asuka, and the cake were drawn by Fumio Iida, an artist who’s worked on a staggering variety of animation, from the original Macross movie to that Little Nemo film to Gurren Lagann (plus Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates). I also like how Rei’s head obscures just enough of the magazine’s name to possibly make it “Anime Insidious.”

My second favorite? I liked the front of issue 46. Most of the magazine’s covers used backgrounds of subtle patterns and bold colors, but this one slapped on the white space to imitate Rolling Stone.

Seldom did we use concept covers, and I think our imitation music mag came together nicely, even if the Beck kid’s eyes are strangely off.

My favorite cover artwork would be this Cowboy Bebop piece from issue 20. It was another illustration made especially for Anime Insider, though you'll also see it preserved in a recent book of Toshihiro Kawamoto’s art.

The overall cover isn’t as striking as the openers that the magazine had in its later years, but I’ve always been a fan of Kawamoto’s style. Besides, Faye and Spike are observing proper trigger discipline with their firearms, and we were all about setting good examples for the republic's impressionable youth.

My Favorite Feature: The more I think about it, the more I like that BEST ANIME EVER list we did for the 50th issue. It was a gimmick, but it was also a pleasant change of tone for a magazine that frequently sidestepped any real opinions. of course, it prompted plenty of complaints about our exclusions of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z.

My Favorite Feature That I Wrote: A “lost anime” piece from issue 58, which went to press just before I got laid off. It was an ancillary project of mine for some time, as I spent time tracking down the details on a bunch of canceled anime, rounding up obscure production art, and chatting about Ulysses 31 and Lupin VIII with some DIC executives. It was the most challenging feature I had to write, and that made it the most fun.

Best Contest Entry: That contest trumpeted on the cover of issue 50 was a haiku challenge. Some of the entries were quite clever. Some were, I hope, elaborate trolling.

No, it didn’t win.

Biggest Mistake That I Made: Someone in the public-relations pipeline told us that the name of a city from Ergo Proxy was spelled “Romd” in the official English-language version of the show, so I plastered that spelling all over an Ergo Proxy feature. Then the show came out and spelled it “Romdo.” It wasn’t truly my fault, but boy, did I feel stupid. I kept a post-it with ROMD on it tacked above my desk for years afterward.

Memorable Interviews: Ron Perlman, who was great and friendly and totally cool about calling some jittery nerd reporter on the phone. Kouta Hirano, who chuckled along with his publishers and then said “video games” when I asked him his favorite hobby (which he lists as “beating off” in his Hellsing manga). Seiji Mizushima talked about his favorite hats. Tomoki Kyoda confessed how he’d rather be watching the World Cup than going to an anime convention. Dai Sato explained how Eureka Seven was like Teletubbies, and then Shuhei Morita explained how he didn’t rip off The Matrix with the ending to his Kakurenbo short. I also dug the interview where a company representative said that otaku should be crossbred with plants so they could give off oxygen and thereby contribute something while they’re just sitting around. I was asked not to print that.

Best Fan Art: Anime Insider's readers, young and old, sent in all sorts of artwork over the years. A lot of it was amateurishly charming, like this mock-up cover.

One particular submission still stands above the rest, for it was the standard against which all other bizarre reader creations were judged. That benchmark was a girl’s vision of herself as Goku’s “sexy new wife.”

Farewell, Anime Insider. Good or bad, you were the American anime subculture’s sexy new wife for eight years. I’m glad I was along for even part of the ride.

Miyazaki's Travels Beyond Gulliver

2009-03-03T23:37:00.000-08:00

It’s easy to overlook Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon. Toei really tried to make this 1966 film, known in Japan as Gulliver’s Space Journey, an international hit, but it fared poorly in American theaters and stayed quite obscure throughout the age of VHS tapes. A cheap DVD release crept out in 2003 from Catcom, which bundled the film with the Fleischer brothers’ better-known 1939 Gulliver’s Travels movie and shipped the result to a handful of Half-Price Books outlets around the country. Once again, few people noticed it.

The cover hardly suggests an unappreciated landmark in animated cinema, yet Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon is an intriguing study. On one hand, it’s a routine, unchallenging kids’ movie about a boy named Ricky who joins an elderly Gulliver and some animal friends (and a pompous toy soldier) for a trip to a far-off planet called the Star of Hope. There they meet a race of bizarre semi-humans and save a princess from robots gone mad. On the other hand, it’s a visually remarkable film. Toei was clearly aiming to establish their children’s fare as a success outside of Japan, and Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon takes more inspiration from bleaker, stranger European animation than the Tezuka-derived imagery of its Japanese contemporaries. From its alien landscapes to the jagged, windup-toy inhabitants of the Star of Hope, the movie often has a haunting, surreal quality that clashes with the somewhat cartoonish heroes. Perhaps that’s why it didn’t win over too many kids.

The DVD release of Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon slipped by many, but Let’s Anime took a detailed look at it, while one kind soul uploaded a few clips from the movie. Among them is the memorable montage of "Rise, Robots, Rise," which makes a sudden, nightmarish switch from smiling little Rocky and Bullwinkle automatons to an army of stovepipe-legged robot fascists stomping on human faces forever.

There’s another reason to check out Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon: it was supposedly the first film truly influenced by a young Hayao Miyazaki, who’d go on to co-found Studio Ghibli and polish up anime’s public image worldwide (he’d also borrow the floating island of Laputa from Gulliver’s Travelers for his own Castle in the Sky). A possibly apocryphal story has it that Miyazaki, despite being a lowly and uncredited animator who'd worked on only one other Toei film, changed a climactic scene in Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon. The original script painted the people of the Star of Hope as doll-like creatures cast out by their own mechanical creations, but Miyazaki wanted to take the idea further, and director Yoshio Kuroda let him animate a new ending.

Even if the tale of Miyazaki’s creative coup is a fabrication, it’s not hard to see his influence in this scene. There’s a jab at dehumanizing technology, of course, and the princess, upon reclaiming her true self, brings to mind Clarisse from Miyazaki’s The Castle of Cagliostro. They’re both pale, gentle spirits to be rescued and shepherded through their first independent steps, all quivering gazes and confused innocence.

This raises a troubling question or two. While Miyazaki never intended it, Clarisse is often viewed as the start of the moe fan base, that cuteness-fetishizing movement that’s currently ruining Japan’s anime industry by heaping praise and money upon mediocre shows about goo-goo-eyed cartoon preteens. Can we trace this odious cult back to the Star of Hope’s princess? Is every freakish, pedophile-courting modern moe series really the result of Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon?

No, of course not. Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon is just a creatively animated kids’ movie, an example of Toei’s early steps onto the cosmopolitan stage, and, perhaps, a look at Miyazaki’s first true professional creation. At this writing, Catcom’s DVD can be had only through a single seller on eBay. As you can see, the picture quality is crude, with “IMAGE CALIBRATION” even flickering on the screen five minutes into the film, but it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get another chance to own Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon on DVD. For this scrap of history, it’s well worth the trouble.

Nobody's Fantasy V

2009-02-21T20:26:00.000-08:00

I recently started playing the Game Boy Advance version of Final Fantasy V. Since I’m not in the mood for writing long pieces about the game’s creatively structured ending or its backhandedly sexist treatment of pirate leader Faris, I’ll just put up some Final Fantasy V postcards I stumbled across a while ago.

I’ve never been a fan of that extremely big-eyed look found in some anime and manga. Even before it became a tool of the unwholesome creepy-cute "moe" revolution, I preferred slightly more realistic characters in any cartoon that wasn’t a comedy. Yet I’m not about to shun Final Fantasy artwork, not when Square Enix had some artists from their Gangan comic collections draw the Final Fantasy V cast dressed in the game’s various job-related outfits.

The first postcard comes from Eita Mizuno, artist for the moderately successful Spiral manga series, and I think it shows all of the characters in their default “freelancer” outfits. It’s a bit of a cop-out for a game that revolves around turning the party members into knights and summoners and mimes. Still, Mizuno clearly played the game enough to known that Bartz, the brown-haired hero, is afraid of flying. He’s clinging to Galuf while Lenna happily sits atop her dragon, Krile looks on cheerfully, and Faris stares with mild disdain at Bartz’s aviatophobic tantrum.

Takeshi Fujishiro writes and draws Nagasarete Airantou, a dreadful manga series about a boy marooned on an island where clingy, fetish-coded girls fight over him. Yet his take on the Final Fantasy V cast is the least saccharine of these three postcards. Galuf’s a monk, Krile’s a black mage, Lenna’s a white mage, and Faris is clearly wondering why her knight regalia doesn’t include quite as much armor as Bartz’s does.

And now we come to Karin Suzuragi’s postcard. Suzuragi is best known for drawing manga in the Higurashi series, which mix squeaky-cute characters with blood-soaked murder. Unsurprisingly, Suzuragi's version of Final Fantasy V is also disturbing. Lenna and Faris are the very picture of modern moe: huge eyes, rampant blushing, and jarringly sexualized imagery, as we see in Lenna’s skin-tight dragoon bustier and otherwise childish appearance. The reddest cheeks are given to Faris, who’s clearly not pleased with her skimpy dancer’s outfit. Yes, Faris, you’re a pirate captain who spent decades posing as a man, and now you have to make up for it by being thoroughly shamed.

It brings to mind a telling quote from Akari Uchida, director of Rumble Roses: “You Westerners, listen. Eroticism is not only about nudity. That is part of it. You know, there's this character Anesthesia. She's like this Latina nurse character. Imagine that she's forced to wear a schoolgirl uniform and has to do the limbo dance. And she's so embarrassed that she's blushing. That is Japanese eroticism.”

Yes, women are sexy when they’re humiliated. You disappoint me, Suzuragi, and that disappointment is not mitigated by passable drawings of Krile as a monk, Galuf as a summoner, and Bartz as a red mage. I’ll see you and Uchida in detention.

This Is Not My Beautiful Wife

2009-02-20T15:58:00.000-08:00

We cannot help but notice that many older anime fans have grown cynical about the industry that once so enchanted them. “Anime sucks now,” they will say, apparently speaking with the wisdom that comes from forging one’s anime geekery in an age of plenty and profit. These people are charlatans to a one, and they can be unmasked by a simple question: was anime any better ten years ago?

Answer: No.

That said, perhaps we simply aren’t going back far enough. Let’s ask another question. Was anime better twenty years ago?

Answer: Still no. And don’t try to argue that Dog Soldier is an unfairly terrible representative of 1989. We know better. Back then, money was spewing from the perpetually engorged Japanese housing bubble, and all the anime industry made with that money was a bunch of Dog Soldiers.

But maybe we’re still short-sighted. Let’s head back to 1979, when, as we hear from people who were alive and functionally self-aware then, anime was a wondrous cavalcade that didn’t make its fans embarrassed to be seen watching it. Was anime better thirty years ago?

Answer: Oh God, we’re just making it worse. Ever wonder how a terrible show like Mobile Suit Gundam got to be popular? It was by competing with stuff like this.

Then again, this is awesome, especially when that guy sticks his head into the frame at 54 seconds. You must be a good show after all, Daltanius.

So there’s the real answer. We have only to wait another three decades, and then all of today’s shitty anime will seem kitschy and charming through the fog of ironic nostalgia. So long, anime industry. We’ll see you in 2039.

Thanks For Whomp 'Em, Too

2009-01-22T23:54:00.000-08:00

So long, Seta. And may flights of Bio Force Apes roar thee to thy rest.

You too, Jaleco. Thanks for all the box art.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Swear Together

2009-01-14T01:32:00.000-08:00

I’m still enjoying Tactics Ogre. By all standards of logic, I shouldn’t. It’s a tremendously dated game compared to its modern strategy-RPG descendants, and it shows in the fixed-view maps, the un-cancelable moves, and the fact that the Tactics Ogre version of level-building involves staging practice battles where your troops just whack each other for twenty minutes. I still like it.

In fact, Tactics Ogre has led me to understand why I enjoy Yasumi Matsuno’s games in general. The storylines play some part, as they’re freshly harsh and depressing, sometimes to the point of breast-pounding bathos (here I’m thinking of the scene where a dying pirate leader cries out that she’s going to see her dead husband and bringing their unborn child with her). More than that, though, is Matsuno’s habit of capturing something that RPGs rarely strive for: a constant reminder that you, the player, are an insignificant speck.

Most RPGs, regardless of origin, give the player an entire world to explore, usually as a dramatically simplified globe with about a dozen cities or so. Even in smaller games that span only a few fantasy kingdoms, the story will confine itself to those borders, rarely hinting that there’s a planet beyond them. Yet Matsuno games, from Ogre Battle to Vagrant Story, always paint a broad picture, making it clear that there’s a vast and complicated world going on out there, with churning political struggles and brutal warfare, and that the main character’s tale, however compelling, is just a scrap of it. Even Final Fantasy XII, part of a series that traditionally lets the player map out several continents, stuck to a small stage of a few warring nations.

It’s not just the realistically confined setting, either. Like other Matsuno games, Tactics Ogre builds up an elaborate background of cultures, nations, and reasons for all of them to hate each other. There’s an in-game encyclopedia entry on every faction and major character in the game, and their histories often stretch past Tactics Ogre and into the eight-part Ogre Battle franchise that will never be properly finished. Some RPGs, the Suikodens among them, play in deliberately limited scenery just as Matsuno’s games do, but they don’t flesh out their surroundings nearly as well.

So that’s part of why I like Tactics Ogre. Another part lies in the dialogue. It’s bland and filled with errors, but the translators, much like the Final Fantasy VII localization team, went batshit insane with power once they realized that Sony allowed actual profanity in PlayStation games. It's especially common in exchanges between the heroic Denim's touchy sister, Kachua, and his murderous friend, Vice.

I’ve yet to see them invoke “fuck” for Tactics Ogre’s blend of medieval insults, but Kachua gets called a bitch about 87,000 times by the end of the second chapter.

The Not-Really-Lost Ghost in the Shell Scene

2009-01-03T19:48:00.001-08:00

A lot of kids discovered anime in the 1990s, but I was an unusual case. I wasn’t introduced to it by Sailor Moon or Ronin Warriors or the discovery that those Robotech episodes I’d caught years ago were pulled from three different and unrelated shows. I knew anime existed and I’d seen Akira on the Sci-Fi Channel, yet it wasn’t until I picked up a magazine called GameFan that I realized Japanese animation was a wide and frequently awful subculture.

One could run an entire website about GameFan’s idiosyncrasies, but it gave me an excellent introduction to anime. The magazine’s Anime Fan section was initially written by one Casey “Takuhi” Loe, who was both articulate and reasonably critical about things. Most anime reviewers of the day were either burned-out husks from the previous decade or apologists who loved anything up to and including Violence Jack, but Casey knew enough to describe anime thoughtfully while upbraiding the terrible releases (which came fairly often) and recognizing the guilty pleasures.

It was through Anime Fan that I first learned of Ghost in the Shell. In the March 1996 issue of GameFan, Casey ran the above image alongside a list of the U.S. theaters carrying the movie. That’s where the mystery arises. I’ve seen Ghost in the Shell many times over the years, and this shot of heroine Motoko Kusanagi, naked and underwater, appears nowhere in the film itself. Motoko is shown submerged in two scenes: one in which her bare android frame is assembled, and another in which she’s wearing a full diving outfit. Neither has her regarding a glowing, unseen object in her clutches.

The easiest explanation would classify this shot as promotional artwork cooked up by Production I.G before the film’s completion. Still, the imagery is strange for a simple promo shot; the overlapping bubbles and unclear background make it rather messy, and Motoko’s proportions look like something captured from a quickly glimpsed frame of animation. What’s more, every other piece of Ghost in the Shell promo art was either a direct grab from the film or some obvious illustration.

I doubt the image comes from a deleted scene. Animation is more expensive to finish than basic live-action footage, and studios usually don’t color and complete animated scenes that aren’t guaranteed to make it into the final product (the exceptions being rare and high-budget cases like Disney’s The Black Cauldron or Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time). Even if it were from an earlier cut of the film, a yanked clip would likely be included as an extra on the DVD or re-inserted in the new 2.0 version of Ghost in the Shell.

In conclusion, I have no real answer, and I have only Casey Loe’s old Anime Fan column to thank. Years distant, it’s still making me care too much about Japanese cartoons.

Why, Yes, I Do Like MST3K

2008-12-20T21:45:00.000-08:00

I recently decided to play through Tactics Ogre, that 16-bit strategy-RPG full of grids and medieval-fantasy politics and chipper little character sprites gasping in horror at the sight of their own entrails. I didn’t do this because it’s the second game directed by Yasumi Matsuno, whose work I’ve never found disappointing. Nor did I do it because I’ve had the PlayStation version for eight years or because it’s worth sixty bucks on eBay, meaning that I should either sell it or use it for something. And I didn’t even decide to play it because it’s crammed with Queen references. No, I’m going through Tactics Ogre because it has a mage named Donald Presance.

Yes, Donald Pleasance, the talented actor known for his roles in You Only Live Twice and The Pumaman, phonetically inspired a useful exorcist who joins the player’s group two hours into Tactics Ogre. I’m sure that, if he were alive today, Mr. Pleasance would find this rather amusing and would not sue anyone. Especially not Mr. Matsuno, who’s had an apparently difficult time since he quit directing Final Fantasy XII two-thirds of the way through.

The Sky Crawlers: Coffee? I Like Coffee! And Smoking!

2008-12-18T16:30:00.000-08:00

Here’s the important thing about The Sky Crawlers: among Mamoru Oshii’s movies, it sets a new record for going from zero to basset hound. Oshii puts his favorite dog in just about every film for which he holds the reins, and he makes sure that a basset hound shows up around the five-minute mark in The Sky Crawlers.

As for the rest of the movie, it’s Oshii being Oshii. There are many, many staring contests and lengthy silences endured by the cast of glum, perpetually teenage pilots in some vague alternate version of World War II’s European air war, with enough coffee and cigarette references to invite comparisons to Coleman Francis' classic The Skydivers. The pace eventually quickens and leads to some impressive CG dogfights, but it’s still an Oshii movie through and through, and anyone who wants their alterna-WWII story without frequent pauses (and sub-pauses) can safely head for the door.

But I'll stay. I like Oshii’s style, and I liked The Sky Crawlers. In fact, I like it more each time I think about it. There’s a refreshingly emotional edge to Oshii’s usual stilted tone this time around, and it ties in well to every broader theme in the story. Oshii doesn’t wimp out when it comes to the finale, either, and that’s always a plus for me. I’ll give it a proper review, with stolen screenshots and a pointless rating and everything, once I sort out my opinion.

However, I was surprised to learn that Oshii intended it as a crowd-pleaser. He reportedly vowed to quit directing if The Sky Crawlers wasn’t a success, and yet I can’t imagine anyone making a movie like this with the intent of winning over the typical movie-goer. It may lack Ghost in the Shell 2’s ridiculous quote competitions, yet it’s still slow, depressing, and a lot of other things that a lot of people won’t like. While I hope I’m wrong about that, the audience around me seemed less than enthused. Someone in the theater was snoring twenty minutes into The Sky Crawlers, and as I walked out after the ending (stay through the credits), a knot of kids in front of me spoke loudly of how the film was heavy-handed, how it had no point, and how Oshii “used to be good.” All this at the movie’s New York premiere.

I’d like to see The Sky Crawlers do well, not least of all because Oshii always looks like the unhappiest man on Earth whenever he’s on camera. I doubt he’ll really quit, and he should know better by now. Countless live-action directors learn to accept that their most honest creations will never be mainstream hits, as they have the luxury of a market that makes off-the-radar movies profitable and rewarding. Yes, non-biographical animated films have it tough in the indie sector, but it’s where Oshii’s future most likely rests, basset hounds and all.

Valkyrie Profile Per Hour

2008-12-18T16:27:00.000-08:00

I don’t plan on regularly extolling my column at Anime News Network, but last week’s edition may be of greater interest than usual, as it features my lengthy impressions of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. The short version: I digs it. It’s the first RPG in years that I’ve played through in its native Japanese, and only the promise of a North American release in March keeps me from starting up the import version again.

There is, however, one major problem with the game, and I mentioned it only casually in the column. That problem is Wylfred’s double ponytail. Koh and Yoh Yoshinari do amazing characters designs, so I’m at a loss to explain why they made an otherwise respectable hero look like the Valkyrie Profile version of Tails from Sonic the Hedgehog. No one likes Tails.

Wylfred’s hairstyle can only be redeemed if he has some secret attack that involves him whirling his ponytails around like a helicopter, lifting into the air, and dive-bombing an enemy. Perhaps that shows up if you beat the game’s bonus Seraphic Gate twelve times without dying and use items only when the game’s timer shows a multiple of three in the minutes column. That would be less annoying than what the game already requires of you in order to recruit certain characters.

I Accuse Everyone

2008-11-30T16:37:00.000-08:00

When Valkyrie Profile: The Accused One was first announced for the DS, I took issue with the official illustration that showed Lenneth, heroine and best-adjusted of the franchise’s three valkyries, with her dress blowing up in the air. I was joking. Mostly.

Little did I realize that an uproar was exactly what tri-Ace wanted, as proven by a Sofmap store in Akihabara becoming the scene of self-created advertising controversy last week. Clerks pointed out that the game’s official art seems to show Lenneth without due undergarments, as Tiny Cartridge reported from Akiblog, a site that sometimes conjures up an amusing story amid headlines like “Highlights of Kannagi Vol. 6: Armpit! Small Boobs! Thighs!” Apparently this is in line with "Not Wearing," the Japanese anime-nerd scene's collective terminology for fictional women who appear to be going commando but maintain a lingering sense of mystery about their lower regions. Yes, they're that specific about the practice. There can be no hope for these people.

Congratulations, tri-Ace. You’ve taken a game heroine who was once a bastion of dignity and reduced her to the same level as any other hand-drawn schoolgirl hiking up a skirt as she turns flat, viscous eyes on a socially backward expanse of Akihabara regulars. Fortunately, there will be far less of this when Valkyrie Profile: The Accused One comes out in North America next March, even if they’re calling the English version “Covenant of the Plume."

And in case you're wondering: Yes. She does. Don't ask how I know.

Dignity: Death and Rebirth

2008-11-17T22:07:00.000-08:00

Square Enix's The Last Remnant arrives this week, and the anticipation for it is guarded at best. It's an ambitious game in design and marketing, as it fashions elaborate open-field battles thronged by humans (wait, they're called mithra), newtlike mages (qsiti), four-armed cat-people (sovani), and other creatures whose species I can't pronounce, all while trying to sell itself to unconvinced Americans just as much as the RPG buyers of Japan. Previews have been kind, at least, and it received two 10s from Famitsu, the Japanese magazine so esteemed that no one would have paid attention if it had given The Last Remnant only one 10. Two 10s, however, are the Famitsu equivalent of a B+ from a genuinely critical publication.

There are cracks in this acclaimed façade, of course. The game's use of the Unreal Engine 3 has sown lag and other visible shortcomings, and the gameplay is the creation of Akitoshi Kawazu and other designers from the SaGa series, which is highly experienced at pissing potential down its collective leg. The story carries a stale aroma, too, though it's not so much the tale of a determined hero out to uncover secrets as it is dialogue like “There's something about that guy.” In this case “that guy” is the Conqueror, a grumpy old man who wears robes dyed red with the blood of his slain enemies. It's the stuff of anime parodies, not the company that once brought us Final Fantasy XII's uncommonly elegant localization.

Yet there's one reason to look forward to The Last Remnant, and her deceptively silly name is Emma Honeywell.

Emma's the leader of an influential clan in The Last Remnant's world, and she serves as a maternal companion to another supporting character, the British-sounding David Nassau. More importantly, Emma looks exactly like you'd expect a 41-year-old warrior to look in a stylized medieval realm. No chainmail bra, no bared midriff, no unrealistic nonsense (that's all for the antagonists). And, as early clips reveal, she's not some sweetly deferential matriarch. Yes, the efficiently dressed older woman of battle is a cliché in fantasy circles, but it's a cliché that video games should jump on a little more often.

It may be that Emma's the sacrificial mom of the piece; her quote mentions protecting her liege city with her life, so perhaps she's here just to throw herself on the blood-red villain's sword and motivate the rest of the heroes. I only hope she'll raise the bar on her way down.

Valkyrie Profile Update: People Draw Things

2008-09-07T22:12:00.000-07:00

As Valkyrie Profile: The Accused One's slightly delayed October release approaches, let's all take a look at the work of Yoh (a.k.a You) Yoshinari. He's not just the co-designer of the characters in the original Valkyrie Profile and The Accused One (and some of Valkyrie Profile 2's cast). He's also active in the anime industry, where he's designed monsters for This Ugly Yet Beautiful World and mecha for Melody of Oblivion, both of which are C-list Gainax series. Fortunately, he entered more prestigious circles by crafting the robots in Gainax's recent and generally awesome Gurren Lagann.

Yet Yoshinari does some of his best work as an animator, as shown by this clip collection (or a MAD, as they call it in Japan). Yes, I know that fan-made music videos of any source are typically the filth of YouTube and proof that no one under 20 should be permitted online, but this particular video shows off one of Yoshinari's key talents: he blows shit up real good. Even a terrible show like Mahoromatic looks fun when you've got Yoh Yoshinari handling explosions.

Koh Yoshinari, Yoh's sibling and his collaborator on the Valkyrie Profile art, is an animator as well. I'm all but convinced that Koh is Yoh's older brother, but some sources seem to think that Koh is Yoh's twin sister, even though the Valkyrie Profile artbook shows that they were born three years apart. Until I get some direct, official word on this, I will choose pronouns carefully. Anyway, Koh also animates stuff, including creepy big-eyed girls and a possibly creepier rooster-thing.

On the subject of Valkyrie Profile: The Accused One, the official staff journal gives us a harrowing glimpse of how Ailyth would look when catering to the lowest form of anime fan.

This is not an emissary of the underworld, Mr. Director. This is everything Valkyrie Profile should never be.

Izuna 2: The Pandering Returns

2008-06-24T21:40:00.000-07:00

Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja wasn't my favorite game of 2007. In fact, it likely wouldn't have made my top ten if I'd bothered assembling such a thing. But I liked it enough to finish it, and it became the only game I reviewed on this site last year. So I have a reflexive interest in the sequel and the way Atlus is promoting it. They let everyone vote on which Izuna poster should be bundled with the game on Amazon.com, and the options shouldn't surprise anyone who remembers the first Izuna's advertising.

I'm not shocked by the shameless courting of base hormonal impulses, since Atlus did the same thing for the first game. I am, however, shocked by the second poster showing what appears to be, at a glance, an erect, flesh-colored phallus emerging from the water around Izuna's crotch.

A closer look reveals that it's just a knee belonging to Shino, the dark-haired girl sitting more daintily in the upper corner. Still, it's a shame that the first poster won the vote, as people who'd hang these on their walls deserve to get weird looks for reasons they never intended.

The Lunar II That Wasn't

2008-06-21T22:02:00.000-07:00

Ah, the Lunar games. Perhaps they're now archaic, but the first and best two introduced many a sheltered American kid to the ways of Japanese RPGs, including that honored convention of setting a sequel hundreds of years after the first game. Lunar II did exactly that, and it abandoned most of the original Lunar's characters in the process.

That wasn't always the plan. GameArts' original ideas for Lunar II: Eternal Blue called for the main cast from Lunar: The Silver Star to return, older and perhaps as supporting characters. That's what some early concept illustrations from Softbank's Lunar I and II artbook show, anyway. I've never seen these online anywhere, so I decided to scan them and finally get some use out of the book. I bought it in Japan during the height of my RPG obsession, after giving up on finding the Xenogears art collection.

Alex, the hero, was a kid with a harp and a fur hat in the first game. For the second, he became a lumberjack and grew one hell of a mullet, while his passive love interest, Luna, started wearing makeup.

Mia looks a lot like she did in the first game. Oh well.

Alex's fat, worthless friend Ramus, who stayed in the party for about five minutes in the first Lunar, got a monocle and cigar for Lunar II. From the look of it, Jessica didn't change much at all.

The book also has illustrations of Nash and Kyle, but they looked exactly like they did in the first game. You can see Kyle drunk and passed out in this storyboard shot. I don't know if it's a planned scene from Lunar II or an unused movie sequence from The Silver Star.

Finally, I scanned this. It could be a discarded idea for a mini-game, but that's...unlikely.

Eve no Premature Indie Fawning

2008-04-12T18:11:00.000-07:00

Last year, I held up Yasuhiro Yoshiura's Pale Cocoon as an example of what Japan's animation industry should aspire to create. That now seems quite pretentious and downright stupid of me, but I find myself standing by every single shakily reasoned thing I wrote, either because Pale Cocoon is simply that good or because Japan's animation industry has frustratingly low standards.

The important thing here is that Yoshiura's next project, Eve no Jikan, is finally coming to light. A trailer showed up at the official website, introducing what appears to be the first of several stories about a world where androids are commonplace and distinguished from humans only by hi-tech halos and bovine gazes.

It seems to be a remake of Yoshiura's nine-minute Aquatic Language short, right down to the coffee shop peopled by friendly robots. Less promising are all the ingredients you'd need for some terrible farce aimed at otaku shut-ins: a glasses-wearing kid is shown prominently, and there's a ready selection of android girls for him to get embarrassed over.

But this is Yoshiura, and I expect something closer to a detailed character study about just how cheap sentience could be in a world of humanoid machines (a real study; not that fetishy Chobits horseshit). I've yet to see a release date for Eve no Jikan, though, so it might be a while before I find out just how many doomed hopes I can throw its way.

Happy 1925, Earnest Evans

2008-01-07T19:04:00.000-08:00

I realize it's far too late to make some post recapping everything that happened to me in 2007, and that's just as well, because I decided not to write about it and ended up playing El Viento instead. I didn't like 2007 anyway.

But man, do I like El Viento. It's hardly the best action-platform game for the old Sega Genesis, but I can't get enough of all the thoroughly insane crap that Wolf Team threw into it with no regard for logic or cohesion. This delicate theme runs through the game itself, what with Al Capone driving a hi-tech tank (in the 1920s, no less) on the first level, Annet surfing on a dolphin in the fourth stage, and the second level being a Mount Rushmore maze full of trampolines and smiley-faced gun turrets.

Yet it's even more nuts in the story sequences, which are nonsensical mash-ups of Indiana Jones movies, Prohibition gangster stuff and vaguely Lovecraftian conspiracies about burbling preternatural gibbous squamous eldritch horrors from unknowable realms beyond the veils of space and time. It's also hard to tell just who's saying what, since almost every cutscene consists of a single bizarrely framed image.

This one's my favorite. It's like that picture-making minigame in Super Mario Bros. 3, but someone screwed up by landing on anime Al Capone's face instead of Annet's authentic native Peruvian belly shirt.

And that's El Viento, probably the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth best game I played last year. Happy 2008, everyone.

Outrage Trigger

2007-11-25T14:40:00.000-08:00

I finished Douglas Coupland’s Jpod over Thanksgiving. It’s pretty much a revamp of his fascinating mid-‘90s geek subculture pastiche Microserfs, but this time it’s about modern-day game programmers bouncing off each other in a series of interconnected plot threads and ersatz observations about life in this gosh-darn-kerazy world of McDonald’s and Google and E-Mail Tony Hawk Jpeg Karaoke Internet Hug Machines.

Something else bothers me. It’s not the fact that none of the book’s characters is particularly appealing or the fact that Coupland lazily inserts himself into it as part of some irksome post-post-modern folding act, or the dozen or so pages of nothing but pi digits. That’s all annoying, but what really bothers me is this self-written profile of the main character.

I've underlined the problem. Who really prefers the PlayStation port of Chrono Trigger, with its unnecessary anime video clips and loading times, to the original Super NES version? No one, that’s who. And it’s not like our hero is ignorant of 16-bit games; there’s a scene where his co-workers are screwing around with Super Metroid on an emulator, an emulator presumably capable of running the superior form of Chrono Trigger.

For shame, Mr. Coupland. If this blatantly incorrect detail is your idea of a joke, it’s still a grievous, inexcusable, and potentially damaging error that I demand to see corrected in future printings, or at least on that website. I'll start an online petition if I have to.

Scar Removal

2007-10-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

I recently started playing Final Fantasy Tactics in preparation for the enhanced, retranslated port that hits the PSP this Wednesday. It’s made me realize that, as much as I love the game, a lot could be improved with a simple, cohesive rewrite of the dialogue.

And while that’s what we’ll supposedly get with Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, I hope the localizers preserved one little exchange just before the first battle, in which the royally enlisted knight Agrias Oaks has some words with the soldiers of Prince Goltana.

No, not her beautiful face!

Her noseless, abstract, largely indistinct face. The same face that most of the other characters have, actually.

I’m always amused when authors go out of the way to tell us that a particularly tough female character is also attractive, especially when it adds nothing to the story. It’s often clumsily used in print, and when it comes to films, comics, videogames or any other visual medium, it’s much more effective to simply show the uncommon splendor of a fierce young woman or mind-controlled cyborg werewolf ninja superheroine. But some can’t leave it at that. Metal Gear Solid introduces Sniper Wolf as “Beautiful and Deadly” instead of describing her combat abilities, and, in the often grim fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin insists on telling us that Arya is indeed a pretty little girl underneath her many layers of plot-accrued grime, because God forbid that a murderous, lice-ridden tomboy should be ugly.

Returning to Tactics, I wonder why we need to know that stern, matronly Agrias there is actually Beautiful and Deadly, despite having the exact same all-but-featureless face as everyone else in the game. Did it figure into some discarded subplot about her, her knightly duties, and scars? Too bad Agrias and the rest of the game’s recruitable characters get only cursory development once they join your party, so we’ll never know for sure.

Prototypical Treasure

2007-07-14T18:53:00.000-07:00

I recently found not one, but two things that combine my overbearing fondness for Treasure games with my love of stupidly obscure trivia. From the September 1995 issue of EGM comes this preview of "Guardian Warriors," which all good Treasure nerds (and anyone who reads the lower caption) will recognize as an early version of Guardian Heroes.

What's different? Well, the game's story mode apparently has only two playable main characters, as opposed to the five available in the final game. One of those leads is Serena Corsair, while the other is, strangely enough, a white-clad version of Valgar Reinhart. He isn't playable in the final version's story mode, though he has a prominent role as the standard semi-honorable bad guy who turns halfway good once the real villains are unmasked.

And now, an early version of Alien Soldier, Treasure's blisteringly hard Mega Drive action-shooter. These shots come from the May 1994 Gamefan, back when the title had a Slab Bulkhead human hero instead of the bird-headed cyborg seen in the final.

For comparison, here's a shot of the released game's main character and one of the bosses seen above.

And here are huge scans of those Alien Soldier and Guardian Heroes previews. The shots of Alien Soldier are lumped in with early Light Crusader screens, but I never liked that one enough to compare it now. Even my Treasure fetish has limits.

The Red Star: A History in Covers

2007-04-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

I'm playing The Red Star demo. I still live in Ohio. And Acclaim is still in business.

It impresses me. I'm aware of the nicely illustrated and unsubtly allegorical comic on which it was based, but the game really sells me by marrying two old-fashioned gaming staples: shooting enemy soldiers and beating the crap out of legions of street punks. Except instead of palette-swapped thugs, I'm pounding on the fur-hatted minions of an evil URRS dictator named Troika. Yeah, the URRS. I guess calling the end boss “Joseph Stallen” would’ve been too obvious.

The cover art looks like a lazy mock-up, but hey, it’s a fun action game set in a Soviet Russia full of sorcery and high technology, and I'm going to pick up The Red Star when it hits.

A few weeks later, Acclaim goes under, and amid all the gloating of now-grown ‘80s children still bitter over Total Recall for the NES, some choose to mourn the fact that the company's gone to the grave with what might have been its best game in years.

2005

What? XS Games is publishing The Red Star for the PS2? For only twenty bucks? Sure, they haven’t set a firm date for it, but the important thing is that it’s coming and that the new cover art’s better. I bet it’ll be out soon, because the game was pretty much finished by the time Acclaim sank, right?

Right?

2006

I'm checking ebgames.com every month to see when The Red Star is coming out. And it’s always the next month. Always. But the new cover suggests that someone's doing something somewhere with regard to the game. Even if Makita's going to catch her death of cold.

But it’ll be out soon. XS Games wouldn’t screw with us. Surely we can rely on the company that published Superstar Dance Club #1 Hits and gave The Castle of Shikigami II the worst translation ever.

2007

Wow. They’re bringing it out. They even have a website and a press release. And they say it’s “available now.” So I’ll just head over to ebgames.com and…

Aw fuck. But I'm sure this will be the last delay. I just know it.

That Was Not The Way of It

2007-04-04T16:51:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t really shock me that voice actors play many versatile roles. It comes with their trade, after all, and I’m no longer amazed that Tara Strong is in Powerpuff Girls, Final Fantasy X, and Gurumin. Or that Shion’s voice actress from Xenosaga II is also Ty Lee in Avatar. Or that John Di Maggio and Phil LaMarr are in damn near everything.

But after I’d sunk over 50 hours into Final Fantasy XII, this DROPPED MY FUCKING JAW.

Consider me shocked, Keith Ferguson.

Slightly Behind the Scenes

2006-11-07T19:05:00.000-08:00

So I callously disparaged the Final Fantasy XII Collector's Edition in my last update. And then I went and bought it anyway.

As I thought, most of the extras are engaging, but not really memorable. Instead of a making-of-the-game feature, there's just a load of developer (and translator) interviews, and a half-hour “History of Final Fantasy” overview that does little more than run down the plot of each game and point out the many incarnations of Cid and the Chocobos. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't mention the god-awful Final Fantasy Mystic Quest or the planned Famicom version of Final Fantasy IV. A few interesting details pop up, but if you're a big enough Final Fantasy nerd to pay extra for a bonus disc, you're probably a big enough Final Fantasy nerd to know everything that disc could possibly tell you.

However, it's nice to confirm that Akihiko Yoshida doesn't walk around in the same medieval bondage outfits he uses in his character art. He just looks like he belongs in one of Japan's few Weezer cover bands, a proper calling for anyone.

Shining Forth

2006-10-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

Final Fantasy XII comes out this Tuesday, but actual copies have already trickled out to magazines and some rental stores. After seeing both the regular edition of the game at the office and handling the two-disc special edition at EB, I prefer the former. The special edition is metallic and regal, but the two discs are packed halfway on top of each other in a manner ripe for scratching, and an extra ten bucks is just ridiculous for a documentary and some interviews (none of which is likely to detail how director Yasumi Matsuno went nuts and left the project).

Besides, the regular edition has much nicer cover art.

The Warp Whistle

2006-08-23T17:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday saw an important event in the world of videogames and largely unjustified nostalgia. I'm speaking of the DVD release of the Fred Savage film and notorious Nintendo vehicle The Wizard.

It's not a good movie. In fact, it's not even a particularly engaging bad movie. It's really quite routine and dull, outside of a few wonderful scenes: the Power Glove's sole moment of greatness, Christian Slater and Beau Bridges reluctantly bonding over an NES, the future lead singer of Rilo Kiley falsely accusing someone of molestation in an arcade, and, of course, the insanely extravagant unveiling of Super Mario Bros. 3. Once you get past the stupid kick of seeing a film that revolves around Nintendo games, there's not much else to do, other than point out the script's parallels with The Who's Tommy and spot Tobey Maguire's first on-screen role.

But it's an important movie, dammit. If you grew up in the shadow of Nintendo and were any sort of normal kid around 1990, there was surely a moment when your ambition in life consisted of trekking across several states, meeting a cute redheaded tomboy (or being that plucky tomboy, if you were a female Nintendo brat), and taking your quasi-autistic kid brother to the fictional equivalent of the Nintendo World Championships, all in the glorious name of videogames. It may not have lasted long, but that moment was there. Don't deny it.

For those film history nerds among us, The Wizard also concluded the short trend of '80s movies that dealt with videogames as a wondrously juvenile subculture. Like Wargames, The Last Starfighter and the legendary Joe Don Baker satire Joysticks, The Wizard envisions a world where playing games, getting high scores, and beating Mecha-Turtle will somehow help you overcome your crippling insecurities and change your life for the better. As the ‘90s started up, this fantasy gave way to films that occupied themselves with the actual games instead of their broader implications. It wasn't a change for the better, perhaps because it's easier to make a cohesive film about young game nerds hitchhiking to Los Angeles than it is to turn the backstory of Double Dragon or Super Mario Bros. into any sort of decent movie.

So it doesn't really matter that The Wizard's DVD release is astoundingly bare-bones, lacking any special features, trailers, or commentary tracks where Christian Slater gets drunk while Jenny Lewis moans about the film and Brooklyn Bridge robbing her of a childhood. It's enough that the now-grown Nintendo kids of 1990 can watch their youthful ambitions played out in some Reagan-era fever dream, where a large corporation could back a film just to show off Raccoon Mario and kids could apparently catch rides across Nevada without ending up in shallow graves by sundown.

It's still a lousy movie, but I think that's the point.

Valis Returns Again

2006-06-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

For those still reeling (or laughing hysterically) over the unfortunate news surrounding the Valis series and its clearly unsafe-for-work descent into porn, here's some shred of comfort: last year, Telenet made a Valis title for mobile phones. It's a side-scroller very much in the style of the 16-bit Valis games, with a gallery of all the outfits Yuko wore during the franchise's more pleasant days. It probably wasn't much of a hit, otherwise Telenet would've made another one instead of whoring out the Valis name to a porn developer.

Cute and innocuous, the portable Valis: The Phantasm Soldier's homepage shows no signs of tentacles, violently coercive lesbian trysts, or horribly misplaced swords. Taking the current advancements of Japanese cell phones into account, I do think this could be a decent game.

But I also think that we should never, ever trust Telenet again.

Valis Returns

2006-03-25T16:25:00.000-08:00

Wow, they're making a new Valis game! Remember Valis, the 16-bit action series about a schoolgirl named Yuko turning into an anime version of She-Ra and saving an alternate dimension several times over? Yeah, the games are mostly average, but they were fun back in the days of the Genesis and TurboGrafx, when we could be entranced by a plucky female warrior, decent Castlevania-style play mechanics, and cinema sequences that used "amazing CD technology" to mimic those then-novel Japanese cartoons.

The series quietly died around 1993, but now we have Valis X (or Valis Cross, as it's pronounced) for the Japanese PC. Here's the official website.

I don't remember the original games showing Yuko with quite such large breasts or an expression that mixed drugged stupefaction with a dawning sense of terror. Still, this is an official Valis title—there's the Telenet copyright in the corner—so we should be interested. Let's look at the screenshots and see just what sort of game this is.

Yes, it's a lesbian porn game. A lesbian porn Valis game. I'd make some joke about Philip K. Dick spinning in his grave, but he never had anything to do with the Valis games in the first place. Besides, he might have even endorsed lesbian anime sex in his unhinged later years.

This sort of thing turns up all the time in unlicensed gaming subcultures, where you can find just about any porn based on just about any game. It's truly rare, though, for a company to put out fully authorized smut about their most recognizable character, and that's precisely what's happening here. Telenet was a major Japanese game developer during the early ‘90s, but the days of Valis, Cosmic Fantasy, El Viento, and all those shooters are long gone. Like an actress whose career evaporated a decade ago, Telenet's doing porn. And so is Yuko, whether she likes it or not.

That's the disturbing thing about this: Yuko doesn't seem to be enjoying it at all. If she was going about things with a huge orgiastic grin on her face, there'd be far less cause for offense. But no. We can't have harmless, consensual lesbian stuff, because Japanese porn-gamers won't buy it unless a woman is cringing, blushing, sobbing, or dying.

Telenet's actually endorsed a series of Valis X games, with four more titles that focus on other characters like Cham, Valna, and Yuko's stupid classmate Reiko getting sapphic with each other. Telenet also has the temerity to charge about $25 for every game, and they're download-only. You don't even get a DVD copy with special-edition packaging, which would come in handy when you wanted people to leave your apartment. The upside? Someone might swipe the games and slap them into a torrent for all the Internet to see. And though I normally don't promote that sort of overt thievery, people shouldn't pay money for something like Valis X, because that'll just encourage more of it.

Victory

2006-03-05T20:00:00.000-08:00

Well, that settles it.

At game shops across Japan, social retards and vapid schoolgirls alike are standing in line for the next available shipment of Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth. At every Gamestop and EB Games and doomed mom-and-pop gaming store across America, clerks are shoveling through piles of newly traded-in DS systems. At Nintendo's headquarters in Redmond, Reggie Fils-Aime is sitting dejectedly behind his desk with tears rolling down his face and bouncing off his enormous chin. The PSP has won.

A Tale of Modern Games In Two Parts

2006-02-03T19:28:00.000-08:00

PART ONE
National Console Support stocks a new model of Koyori from Sengoku Cannon. For reference, this is Koyori.

In characteristically delightful NCSX prose, the store's website reveals that the Koyori model's clothing can be removed. NCSX expects the figures to sit on hand for several months.

PART TWO
NCSX sells out of the figures within a few hours.

PERSONAL OPINION
Sengoku Cannon, being a side-scrolling PSP shooter from Psikyo, sounds cool at first, but not after you've seen the boring screenshots and read the unflattering reviews. Given the choice, I'd sooner have a Koyori figure, which could at least lie sealed in a safety deposit box until the day it's worth a grand on eBay.

Oh yeah, and buying frenzies surrounding naked toys are hilarious.

Valkyrie Profile Week: An Interview

2005-12-17T19:36:00.000-08:00

VALKYRIE PROFILE WEEK 2005 ends today, unless I come up with some sort of clever addendum that makes the whole thing worthwhile. Since I've exhausted my Valkyrie Profile merchandise, here's an interview with some of the game's voice actors.

It comes from one of the last issues of Gamefan—not the scattershot, grandly unprofessional Gamefan that Dave Halverson ran, but the Gamefan that started up after Halverson left in 1998. I never liked that version of Gamefan. While Halverson's publication maintained a good-natured aura in spite of its frequent stupidity, the second generation of Gamefan was much the opposite: surly, posturing, and fixated more on retarded in-jokes and homegrown catchphrases than games. You can see it in this interview, where Gamefan wastes time with a potshot at one of the editors when they could ask, just maybe, something about Valkyrie Profile.

In fact, most of the questions have little to do with the game. It's more like a glimpse into the actors' careers circa 2001. But you can read Megan Hollingshead's take on two of the characters she played, and her performance was easily my favorite from Valkyrie Profile.

Valkyrie Profile Week: Valkyrie Fight Tag

2005-12-16T19:40:00.000-08:00

For this installment of VALKYRIE PROFILE WEEK 2005, I'm going to plug Valkyrie Fight Tag, a homebrew PC fighter that's probably known to anyone who liked or even played Valkyrie Profile. It's worth mentioning again for the sake of the people who didn't, just because Valkyrie Fight Tag is surprisingly solid, considering that it was likely made by a crew smaller than the PlayStation game's cover design staff.
Like a lot of “doujin” fighters, it's simple in design, with three buttons, easily performed moves, and not much game balance. The programmer(s) replicate the PlayStation game's sprites really well, making them just a bit larger, and the fan-art character portraits look better than some professional game illustrations. It's all a pleasant diversion, especially for Valkyrie Profile fans.

It's not quite a fighting game based on Les Miserables, but Valkyrie Fight Tag's worth whatever download arrangement The Underdogs runs you through. A pity it's not a fully licensed tri-Ace game, or it might've ended up in the PSP version.

Valkyrie Profile Week: Another Comic

2005-12-14T19:43:00.000-08:00

VALKYRIE PROFILE WEEK 2005 continues with a look at another Valkyrie Profile comic I own. It's called “Kami to Hito no Tsumugu Uta,” which I think translates to “The Spinning Song of Men and Gods” or “The Song Cycle of Gods and Men” or something like that.

I picked it up at an Ohio anime convention, back when I still went to such things. The dealer's room had a corner entirely devoted to doujinshi. The vendor was a deceptively average-looking guy who had helpfully sorted his selection into the clean publications and the many varieties of pure porn. I walked by and saw a Valkyrie Profile book in the normal section. The art wasn't amazing, but the author had apparently cared enough to use a unique, crinkled, and antiquated-looking cover, and it caught my eye.

Then some preteen girls walked by, and the dealer started yelling HEY LADIES GET YOUR HOT YAOI CREAM-FILLED MAN BUNS COMICS HERE and WE'VE GOT HARRY POTTER AND INUYASHA FOR ALL YOUR YAOI NEEDS and other things that might sound clever if you were a recently paroled sex offender.

I looked at the slim Valkyrie Profile booklet in front of me and realized that it deserved a better home. So I bought it and left. With haste.

I thought that the comic might be horrifying filth in disguise, but it's quite straight-laced. There are no scenes of Lezard and Mystina screwing in a magical academy's broom closet or Arngrim and Lawfer exploring flowery knight love or the entire cast joining in a massive drunken pseudo-necrophilic Einherjar orgy in the halls of Valhalla. None of that.

Instead, you get two stories: one explores Lenneth and Lucian's relationship just as the game did, and the other deals with Claire, Lucian's common-law wife, as she figures out that, well, Lucian never really loved her. It's a bit on the bland side, and the art, while serviceable, is never all that impressive.

I get the idea that the author, Misuzu Fujimiya, really liked Valkyrie Profile and wanted to do a somber and faithful story about the game. It succeeds there, but I find myself of the opinion that fan fiction is better when it's just batshit crazy. Furthermore, I was disappointed to find a website run by Fujimiya, who's apparently drawing creepier stuff now.

So there's one-third of my vast doujinshi collection: a half-decent fan comic with a nicely textured cover and a reminder to avoid some or all parts of anime conventions.

Valkyrie Profile Week: A Comic

2005-12-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

In honor of the recent news about Valkyrie Profile 2, I declare this to be VALKYRIE PROFILE WEEK 2005 and promise daily discussions of the game and its related merchandise until everyone's horribly fucking sick of it.
Today, we look at Yuu Hijikata's Valkyrie Profile manga, published in 2001 by Gangan Comics, for those of you who hunt these things. While a lot of legitimate game-based manga titles are collections of short stories, Hijikata's work tries to span the game's entire storyline in two 175-page volumes. This is not well-advised, yet it's strangely entertaining to watch it all play out.

At first, it all goes well. The first book covers the initial stretch of Valkyrie Profile, introducing Lenneth Valkyrie, the Berserk-inspired warrior Arngrim, bratty Princess Jelanda, and Belenus, who was just sort of boring and got sent to Valhalla first whenever I played the game.

The comic is paced better than the typical tri-Ace story, and though much of it is a line-for-line recreation of the PlayStation game's script, some differences emerge. Lawfer, whose death wasn't shown in the game, buys it in the manga during a big dramatic face-off with Arngrim (there's gay fan fiction in there someplace), and Lezard, who's like Harry Potter grown up and gone bad, appears earlier. Hijikata's art is fairly good, and I really dig the covers, even if they can't match the illustrations that Kou and You Yoshinari did for the game.

Unfortunately, the whole thing pretty much stabs itself in the eye during the second volume. The project's editors apparently stormed into Hijikata's studio to demand that the story wrap up in five chapters, so that's what happens. After a brief scene about vampires and the introduction of Lenneth's past-life boyfriend Lucian, everything shifts into a fast-forwarded account of the PlayStation game's last act, with Lezard and Mystina and Hrist and Loki all running around as the world ends. Granted, the original Valkyrie Profile's big finale is a deus ex machina in truest fictional form, but it was never as rushed and incoherent as Hijikata's version.

The manga's a fun curiosity for Valkyrie Profile fans, although its slavish adherence to the game's plotline means that there's not much to see if you've already been through the story on the PlayStation. But hey, geek merchandise doesn't have to make sense.

Let's Talk About Radiata Stories

2005-09-13T19:49:00.000-07:00

Or let's just post some out-of-context screen captures from it.

Game Magazine Memories

2005-02-21T15:56:00.000-08:00

Those who read Electronic Gaming Monthly in the mid-90s may remember the “What Ifs” column with which the mag sometimes killed space. This section invited readers to send in witticisms on par with “What if the Little Mermaid was Ecco's Mother?” or “What if Atari decided there weren't enough buttons on the Jaguar's controller?” It was not, in retrospect, the magazine's finest attraction, but the terse banality of “What Ifs” appealed to kids and those older readers who couldn't write full-length letters.

To this day I'm not sure what possessed me to jot down some “What Ifs” of my own in late 1994, though I could blame it on being bored during Christmas vacation and unconvinced that I had outgrown video games. Whatever the cause, I sent off a dozen bon mots to EGM and promptly forgot about them, as I had Final Fantasy VI (then III) to worry about.

About four months later, someone passed the March 1995 issue of EGM2 around fifth-period German class. Once it was in my hands, I flipped to the letters section, for I suddenly remembered those stupid “What Ifs" and was gripped by a hysterical urge to see if I, a humble lad from a small Ohio town, would find my name in print.

And I did.

Yes, that's me at the bottom of the list, delivering some comedic misfires about Final Fantasy III, Mortal Kombat II, and a lesser-known, lesser-quality arcade fighter called BloodStorm, which gave rise to the Tempest gag. You see, one of her finishing moves was called the “Exorcism.” It was funny then, dammit.

This wouldn't seem a grand event today, but back in 1995, I was thrilled. With these four “What Ifs” printed, I was now a published writer. Forget that worthless short story in the school's literary magazine. This was E-MOTHERFUCKING-G-M. Yes, I was a stupid kid, and I make no excuses for it. In fact, I still feel some small surge of accomplishment when I look at the column and note that, for example, I received more space than any other contributor. Take THAT, Iain Hend! Where's your precious "Internet" now?

Of course, the issue has points of interest aside from unfounded nostalgia. For one, it's an interesting look at all of the game systems that were desperately vying for attention in 1995. With the 3DO, the Jaguar, the CD-i, the SNES, the Genesis, the 32X, the Sega CD, the slowly building culture of PC games, and the recently announced PlayStation and Saturn, it was an absolute clusterfuck. Though the two newest systems get the nicest previews in this issue (remember when Cyber Sled impressed us?), the 16-bit consoles seem to have the better libraries, thanks to titles like Ristar, Metal Warriors, Ogre Battle, Front Mission, and Comix Zone. But hey, CD-i owners could look forward to Thunder in Paradise, a multi-genre piece based on Hulk Hogan's short-lived syndicated TV series. The CD-i is seldom praised.

The year was also dominated by fighting games, and the issue dedicates an accordingly generous share of pages to Virtua Fighter 2, Killer Instinct, Capcom's X-Men fighter, and, of course, Mortal Kombat 3. The magazine's standout article is an interview with Anthony Marquez, a martial artist who provided motion-capture work for Kung Lao in both Mortal Kombat 2 and 3. It's a standard puff piece, though even Marquez weighs in on the issue of gaming violence when he submits that “parents have to take responsibility and not blame bad parenting on movies or video games.”

Yet the most intriguing thing in this issue might be a preview for a home version of BloodStorm, the mediocre, gore-filled fighter that inspired a “What If” from me. Though the game had a short run in arcades during 1994, ports for the PlayStation and Saturn were apparently announced the following year. EGM2's preview is sloppily vague, and the grainy screenshots suggest either an ugly translation or poor image quality, but it's the only evidence I've seen that BloodStorm was headed for a console. It was canceled, of course, after a Genesis version of Time Killers, BloodStorm's direct ancestor, turned out to be even worse than its arcade original.

That's about it for the April 1995 issue of EGM2. The layouts are only passable and the writing sticks to the same bland, grade-school tone that the EGM offices employed during the mid-1990s, but it has value as a study of an incredibly competitive gaming culture that may never be duplicated. And perhaps it shouldn't be.