A really long-time coming

Onto something now that I’d lightly touched on in this blog, but haven’t explored as thoroughly as my other talking points (“They were all dead. The final gunshot…” etc., etc.) due to regional exclusivity. Kantai Collection, Senran Kagura, and iDOLM@STER. Three pivotal and explosive multimedia franchises with libraries and treasure houses big enough for export to the colony of Mars… accessible to western fans by way of fanart, VPNs, piracy, and mastering Japanese enough to appease the organizers of the JLPT and the stalking green bird.

いいえ、やめろ！

I’ve tried my best to do intensive research on these franchises and have come up abysmally short. Senran Kagura is the more accessible of the three, but the others not so much. One is concerned about causing a stir online and the other is rooted in a niche that had become increasingly less niche with series like Love Live, D4DJ, K-On!, and Oshi No Ko. And since Senran Kagura has an English translation with dubbing, I’m tackling that first. And all things considered, ninja travel faster historically than ships or aspiring idols.

一番目：戦乱カグラ：

Ninja schoolgirls. Ninja schools. I swear I’ve seen this somewhere before.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In collaboration with Tamsoft and Marvelous, Kenichiro Takaki’s brainchild started life on the 3DS before hopping on different adjacent and succeeding platforms under different names depending on what part of the world the Good Lord put you on. So it’s debut title was Skirting in Japan and Burst elsewhere. But the face was the same. Moving away from cute girls do cute things cutely, this was cute girls do ninja things cutely, or kawaii kunoichi (可愛いくノ一). And not necessarily one ninja girl or ninja school. I’ve played at least one of the games, and the franchise in all its forms centers on multiple shinobi schools, typically three. You can switch between different kunoichi in between story missions and the central plot themes of the stories do not differ from a standard battle shonen. Friendship, rivalry, coming-of-age; the typical shonen tropes that have plagued the genre largely since the beginning, only this time with cute girls and enough fan service for Konata-chan to call from memory.

Fortunately, each character is given a distinct moveset, so it never feels like the same characters were photocopied multiple times. The same goes for their personalities.

Arguably the face of the entire franchise, this is Asuka (飛鳥). She’s the protagonist and naturally the one who’s story you’ll experience firsthand the most in the games. The nature of the franchise leads to multiple branching and competing timelines, some of which haven’t been replicated since Fate or the Trash Taste Dark Timeline.

(TvT) ‘Twas glorious.

Asuka and her merry band of misfits are consistent all-franchise, and embody roughly every archetype of any old battle shonen to include the pervert who caresses breasts under the guise of affection.

Yuki Suou would be pleased. (･ω･)

As for the move sets of each, every girl has her own specialty. Our girl, Asuka, as depicted in the earlier image provided is a dual-wielding swordswoman with AoE and sweeping attacks depending on whether she’s in her default school uniform or her ninja transformation. The girl aggressively copping a feel in this GIF, Katsuragi, is a power build, equipped with a pair of heavy boots. She’s a brawler above all and specializes in close quarters. Not as fast as her classmates, but with earth-shaking power, who needs speed? Next is Ikaruga, who’s fashioned like a precursor/inspiration for Satsuki Kiryuin.

Unlike the better daughter of Ragyo Kiryuin (Ragyo’s words, not mine), Ikaruga’s moveset is heavily influenced by iaido, a famous quick-draw sword technique, and one most famously used by Sekiro mini-boss Saze Jinsuke.

The last one who’s in the starting dojo is Yagyu, an eye-patched, weaponized umbrella fighter. Like Asuka, she has a variety of sweeping, AoE attacks, but unlike Asuka, the focus is less on slashing and more on striking with the umbrella being the blunt instrument that it is, with less force than Katsuragi’s landscape-changing moves.

Summarizing the whole of the franchise is a Herculean task in itself. Not all of the games are available on modern hardware without extensive emulation space. Most of the games are available in the west by way of Steam and most likely another online video game retailer that I haven’t found yet. May take some getting used to play them, but it’s not all that different from other games of this caliber, and the easiest to access, all things considered compared to the other two.

二番目：ＩＤＯＬＭＡＳＴＥＲ

Beginning as a series of rhythm games in 2005 by Namco (now Bandai Namco), it was a rare case of Japanese programmers actually using Xbox technology instead of Sony PlayStation or making the engine in-house. Going off the Wikipedia page, you begin with one idol-hopeful as the manager and gradually gain enough to build an independent tarento agency of your own as you progress. I’ve played some of the game on an emulator and the mistake I made was emulate the untranslated version そして僕の日本語は上手じゃないや to play it as is. One day, I might download a fan translation, but until then, it’s gonna sit in my SSD until I reach a level of proficiency matching a university professor on Heian period literature.

That said, fan translations (fan-lations?) exist absent of Bandai Namco’s attorney arsenal to lobby at anyone who threatens to introduce western fans to the concept of idols despite idols being well-f[きもち]king-known the world over thanks to its more well-known counterpart in Love Live!

The main difference between Idol Expert and Love You Live is that one has a more professional setting and the other is set in a high school where the main purpose was born from a desire to keep the school from shutting down and taking on a life of its own. One employs comedy, and the other puts you in the role of a producer. Is it still niche? Not really, especially with the likes of Blue Archive making you the ultimate manager of a group of schoolgirls who, according to the fandom, need serious correction. IYKYK.

If Google’s new AI feature isn’t lying to me like the rambunctious bastard it began as, then aside from the niche perception, Bandai Namco doesn’t have the cash to spend on translating–and this is where the monster mountain of bulls[moo!]t starts to rear its ugly head. I don’t run a company despite owning the threads to do so, but I know for a fact Bandai Namco does have the resources, just not the desire. A great amount of risk regarding return on investment is an easy drum to bang, but one that needs new skin stretched over it to sway the country’s worth of online artists who’ve parodied and ecchi’d and hentai’d the characters to death from not doing that so brazenly.

Whatever, it’s a primarily Japanese franchise that’s not supposed to have an international audience, but it does anyway. You’d think a mid-2000s rhythm game would make the originals semi-lost media, but Namco re-released the game for home console consumption. And based on a game of what can best be described as telephone (or Chinese whispers to the Brits reading this), Japanese netizens continually did what westerners did at the time: parody, meme, pick favorites, make references only they would know online, spread the knowledge, inspire investigators to track down the source of the jokes and to this day, without them needing to strain themselves to do so. Probably not with the first game, but after 20-plus years, the franchise is still going strong.

I haven’t the slightest idea how this girl or her contemporaries crossed oceans to become famous. My hypothetical may not hold up to snuff based on the real history of this franchise. But at least westerners can at least try to play iM@S compared to the last of these in the lineup.

三番目：艦これ

Ship girls.

Launched in 2013 and locked on Japanese URLs and accessible only on Japanese browsers (ToT), it has the same DNA as most gacha games with the player taking the role of an admiral who collects ship girls represented by cards. I can’t verify any of this because the main source of the game is unavailable outside Japan. And yet users on Pixiv belt out fanart of the characters regularly, so it’s not like it can stay there forever.

This character is based on the German U-511.

No, I shouldn’t despair. It may be locked away on a browser I can’t access, but the myriad of fanart and other such merch show that domestically, it’s audience is strong enough to transcend traditional barriers, so the owners at DMM and C2 Kikan can provide and maintain for their domestic audience. Could they have protected gaikokujin like myself getting curious enough to draft this? Most likely no, but if you’re gonna start something with even niche appeal, it’s not guaranteed to remain such for very long, especially with talented fans recreating their favorite characters and inventing OCs to interact with the timeline. Every major IP does this, it happens a damn lot.

My best assessment is “ship girl Pokemon.” I really wish I had more to say, but this one seems to be the most closed off.

Channel: DaGamingLife

This will be an ongoing experiment. So far, YouTube search results claim the most recent video (not the one linked here) is from 7 years ago, which as of the date this goes live is between June 6, 2018 and June 5, 2019. Someone has more info and I’ll give them my undying servitude if they can relay it for me.

Senran Kagura, iDOLM@STER, and KanColle, a trio of niche Japanese franchises with mountains of merch and such. Not an exhaustive list, there’s a smorgasbord more of these franchises that crossover by way of safe to maliciously horny fanart to fandubs to actual dubs that probably would only be held by Timothy Sanchez of Davao City or Prasert Woranuch of Chiang Mai. More research is needed to form a definitive edition on iM@S and KanColle, but until that can be produced, grab Senran Kagura while you can, play with a controller, my goodness Katsuragi probably squeezes nipples every time she feels them up. God help the one who moans uncontrollably when foreign hands feel her mams.

And Katsuragi-chan is the least subtle about anything.