Author: Tiberius

Here, you will find a variety of opinions in anything and everything concerning entertainment. Movies, games, animation, music, TV; if it's a form of entertainment consumed by many, I may have written about it or I plan to do so in the future. Unless otherwise specified, expect weekly updates each Friday.

The L.A.P.D.’s Det. Columbo

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See, there’s, uh, just one thing that doesn’t look right.

Before you, dear reader, is an atypical series with an atypical protagonist played by a rather atypical actor for an atypical runtime.

Columbo!

Created initially as a standalone character for the TV series The Chevy Mystery Show in 1960 by Robert Levinson and William Link, Det. Frank Columbo deviates from the time-honored tradition of whodunit mysteries. Columbo shows you the crime and if you pay attention and think about what the perp tells the police, read into their actions, you’re gonna find the inconsistencies that don’t make a lot of sense. For Lt. Columbo isn’t a whodunit guy, he’s a howcatchem guy. Seeing the action ain’t enough, you gotta dissect the action, consider the logic, some of the science, see more of the parts moving as they begin to move and voila! it starts to make sense how they get caught in the end.

Now, before I continue, I’d like for you to pause and answer the following question: What is your idea of a TV detective? Gil Grissom? Raymond Langston? D. B. Russell? Horatio Caine? Mac Taylor? Any of those guys from CSI original, Miami, or NY? Law and Order? Criminal Minds? Bones? Yeah, we make a lot of cop shows in the States; but Columbo is none of those. He’s confident, but not camera dominant. He’s exceptional, but not superhuman. He’s humble, but not imperfect. What is Det. Columbo? A bumbling cop who puts his prowess behind a mask of clumsiness and bolsters that crime-solving expertise with his relentless tenacity. The man can be told a story, but it doesn’t make sense completely because it’s not the story.

The main separation between Bobblehead Detective and Crime Scene Assertion and its twenty thousand derivatives is that Columbo doesn’t make use of fancy-shmancy technology. The crimes he investigates are all run through tests and labs, police have been doing that since the technology’s caught up, but it slows it down and walks with the audience through the process. It gets as close as it can to the timeline of police work from crime to investigation to suspicion to arrest with receipts, yet a not insignificant portion of the show is fantastical. Cops are always partnered up, they don’t show the evidence to the suspect while at their place of work or their domicile–that part is saved for the interrogation–and most importantly, they don’t carry themselves like Columbo in appearance. His position as a police lieutenant may give him a lot of leeway to choose how to carry an investigation, but the way he looks is improper for a cop. But this is the key advantage the show has.

Let’s put him side-by-side with a chronologically older example: Cole Phelps in 1947.

As you can see here, Detective Phelps and his partners don’t dress all that differently from him. Three-piece suit, badge at the waist, gun in the coat, fedora on top covering the exact same hairstyle that separates the societal pushers from the societal chains. Columbo has the look of a homeless man but performs with the confidence and experience of a seasoned detective. Phelps may not clock Columbo as a fellow officer until he pulls out his badge. Phelps’ foolhardiness and Custer Syndrome in the Marines turned him into the best detective in Los Angeles for the 1940s and the system still defeated him.

Columbo is not a tragic character who thinks he’s above them all though. He’s not a vigilante like Max Payne, even if he fits the role appearance-wise. He’s more of a founder for what the Ace Attorney series would become decades later.

This point will be relevant later.

Most of the whodunit mystery series all have a thriller angle thrown in. For Columbo, because he takes it a lot slower than the breakneck, whiplash pace of successor police and courtroom procedurals, the thriller isn’t in finding out who did the crime, it’s in breaking down how the crime was done on a microscopic logical level. Columbo looks at things the viewer may not have considered before the victim appears, the logic applied to the crime, the motives, the breakdown of these intimate relationships between victim and perpetrator, further reinforcing the often true assertion that a majority of criminals know the victim, even personally, which is why the label of “inside job” is better saved for something more elaborate, like Naruto’s Uchiha Clan Downfall.

It’s also worth considering that not only do these criminals know their victims, they’re established personalities with exalted positions. They’re politicians, military officials, realtors, wine tasters, artists, curators, doctors, chess masters, scientists; the criminal has a master’s degree in insert specialty here. They’re masters of their chosen craft and yet… the bloodlust is indiscriminate. You don’t need to be a squalid nothing to have a desire to kill. The only requirements are simply being human. Human enough to think you’re infallible, human enough to go above and beyond the core words, human enough to want something and know you can’t have it without going off the deep end. And most importantly, human enough to stumble over your own two feet.

Your eyes do not deceive you, dear reader. That is indeed Peter Falk as Lt. Columbo standing in front of Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame. Playing as an opportunistic surgeon, his crime is, in fact, highly illogical.

One more thing to point out is the standard runtime. Let’s circle back to CSI, Law and Order, NCIS, and the other thriller-spilling shows of this type. How long do they run? Roughly an hour if you include all the commercials trying to sell you worthless bunk. Columbo is filmed in a manner that makes each episode less episodic and more of a self-contained film. I’ve been watching the series on Tubi and my first time watching it there carried me through a soul food dinner with chicken, peas, and mac and cheese. It’s not a series you binge in excess, it’s a series you watch one episode of, ponder, then watch more. How long is that grace period between episodes? Give or take, depending on you, it could be once every one or two weeks. I wasn’t there when it was on serialized TV from 1968 to 2003, but the slow burn feel of this series is one for a journey. The destination has been long mapped out, there’s no need to rush. Take your time and you’ll find your way.

Now let’s pull back and analyze it by way of broad analysis. An American inverted detective story whose central character feigns incompetence to get the suspect to gas themselves up only to notice an unsecured rope and watch them tumble into handcuffs and a criminal trial.

My sources tell me that Columbo is, in fact, the father of the Ace Attorney series, and the next topic will confirm that.

How so? Well, the way Columbo is portrayed is that of a bumbling, but earnest gentleman. And this was what Japan loved about him so much.

Even without meaning to, the choice to make Columbo a silent, humble genius resonated very well with Japanese cultural nuances, and I suspect the East Asian concept of face culture was a major factor. Clumsy on the surface, expert behind the scenes. These apply to the concepts of honne and tatemae (本音と建前). The short version description of this is that you don’t show everyone you know your ass. Your close family knows you better than most friends and acquaintances. Is this uniquely Japanese? No, for me being a westerner, I know people who are genuine with everyone whether everyone cares or not (most of the time, they don’t), and I know people who would be derisively known as two-faced. It’s not like keeping your personal affairs personal, it’s like presenting yourself as respectable to those who need to see that, and unwinding and being your goofy self in the privacy of your own home. Case in point:

Source: Iggy-Bomb, Newgrounds. I promise, I didn’t pull this up for the obvious Great Big Booba Joke.

This fanart depicts Yuriko Okada from Tojima Wants to be the Kamen Rider in different forms of dress, her professional schoolteacher appearance on the left and her Electro-Wave Human Tackle persona on the right. Yeah, this struggle is near universal; you wanna be your natural self, but society will shoot you out of a cannon if you do so (T_T).

Columbo accidentally struck the balance, by not having the titular detective be a standard, bust the door down and arrest the guy in such a brazen move. Instead, he shows an extreme level of politeness that may just outdo Japan itself. Even if he stops in front of a wall, he’s not the type to take it sitting down, for it’d be highly illogical for a cop to just up and quit. No, he finds workarounds, looks for further clues to investigate, zeroes in on inconsistencies and his tenacity for justice is outdone only by his love of cigars.

Peter Falk didn’t zero in on a singular brand of cigars, and neither do I. But if I were to choose a brand, Factory Smokes, El Septimo, and Cohiba stand out the most. Runner ups are Brickhouse, Warfighter, and Joya de Nicaragua.

So, Tiberius, what exactly am I getting from watching Columbo? A trope inversion for a start. Even when something is clear, breaking down what the average bloke misses is a strength of the detective. Another one would be guest appearances. Big name actors have appeared in various episodes of the time. Granted, some of these may pass you by if you haven’t seen other TV series where they appeared in, but if you know the name you may know the other property they star or co-star in, especially if its a long-lasting franchise like Leonard Nimoy from Star Trek above. And most of all: longevity. 1968 to 2003 is 35 solid years of show to thumb through with considerably less episodes than a soap opera. 10 seasons with a pause between 1978 and 1989, so it’s less straight 1968-2003 and more 1968; 1971-78; 1989-2003.

Tubi once again has the series in full on its platform and you can watch it for free. No need to pirate this time, but in case they can’t hold onto it forever, then:

This post doesn’t exist.

Burgundy Shinobi VS Sakai Jin-dono

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戦国時代VS鎌倉幕府

At this point, I’m milking Red Ninja for every ryo it owes me which isn’t something I normally do. I occasionally bring around my love for God of War Greek era and Max Payne as well as my contempt for the concept of Chainsaw Man and Tatsuki Fujimoto, not because I want to bury something to propel the other, but because I want to bring awareness to a multitude of different things that travel in similar circles. Since this is meant to be the conclusion of the Red Ninja recount series, the final part of this impromptu investigation into how a neat concept hung itself on its own cord by accident is going to be Ghost of Tsushima:

Sony’s a d[clang]khead for abandoning PC ports of popular games, I may never get to play Ghost of Yotei ಠ_ಠ.

Like Sekiro Monogatari before it, Sakai Jin VS the Mongol Horde is also set in historical Japan but right around the time when my favorite era, the Kamakura Shogunate reigns supreme, when the Hojo clan can pull all the strings and tickle the bums of the emperor and the shogunate and leave progressively larger handprints until Go-Daigo took notice and said, “Those degenerates over there, Ashikaga-dono!” Sadly, the Ashikaga would turn on Go-Daigo because one doesn’t simply scorn a samurai. But they’re not important in this story, the Adachi and Sakai clans are.

So far I have three games about shinobi or shinobi-shaped things. Redeemer of Tsushima Island, One-Armed Wolf and the Rejuvenating Waters, and Hidden and Discreet Things in a Sexy Red Kimono. Two take place in the Sengoku-era, one was around the time of Hojo Tokimune. Two play extraordinarily well, especially when it comes to samurai or ninja, one plays like it walked off the set of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and never recovered.

Jin Sakai and Kurenai both use weapons consistent with real and fictional samurai and shinobi respectively, but Sakai-dono, as a samurai, is expected to use all those weapons befitting his status. The katana, the wakizashi, perhaps a yari/naginata/nagamaki, etc. especially while on horse, a bow and arrow; the samurai warrior and especially the general is an expert in all samurai tactics and even embraces many new and innovative tactics. Am I right, Hojo Tokiyuki-dono?

Not that Kurenai is unskilled in anything, the best way to describe her is right where she needs to be skills-wise, but for the third time, the controls don’t reflect that. Slight taps vs full taps, hold a button vs hold the same button plus another one for alternate controls, a fixed camera from a distance like what God of War achieves vs a fixed camera up-close that keeps an enemy out of view and damn, you just got stabbed with a naginata by a nameless foot soldier who should’ve been dangling from a beam in a mine.

It’s also worth noting that while Kurenai’s shinobi profession may seem cowardly in the Kamakura period, stealthy or show-y, both serve or belong to an exalted clan in Japanese history, even if one is completely made up in a way that would earn it the Akira Kurosawa Seal of Approval. Meanwhile, even the director of the worst ninja film of all time would look at Red Ninja and not even bother using the defibrillator to shock it back to its feet, but I don’t wanna be too harsh on the game. I was intrigued by a ROM hosting site to check it out for myself, and it clearly had an impression on me because I wrote about the game four or five times to date.

If a game kicks my ass because it was sufficiently difficult, then so be it. It can laugh at me from the Recycle Bin. But if it kicks my ass due to difficulty stalagmites and loops that belong in the first Sonic game then it’s not f[match-click]ing fair.

I’m exaggerating, Dragon’s Lair functions. For evil!! ╰（‵□′）╯

Both do make a good showing for their respective settings, though both also keep to the mythological shorthand rather make public the complications of their respective settings, which may be for a good reason. The Mongol Army wasn’t homogenous, they through Jurchens, Chinese, and Korean troops at the Japanese, none of whom spoke the same language or dialects, so you know damn well it was a mess the first time around, as well as the second, myths about the divine winds notwithstanding.

Similarly, the myths surrounding the shinobi of old are largely perpetuated by western and Japanese properties due to mythic shorthand for easy access. Loads of games default to masked assassin moving stealthily in the dead of night rather than a straw hat wanderer embedding himself in feudal Shizuoka. Swords clashing makes for better entertainment, just ask the Brothers Uchiha or Gokenin Zankuro.

But never mind the fact that it’s historically accurate for a samurai to use a gun (though this would be true during and after the Warring States period), the individual settings for each do well to communicate to me that this is a specific historical setting, as does Three-Legged Wolf Adventures and Watch Me Run from the Ashikaga. Actually that last one is in concert with Ghost of Tsushima but set 60+ years apart, while Sekiro and Red Ninja are contemporaries with unclear starting points due in large part to the semi-mythical origins of the concept of the ninja. Also because Sekiro has you up against creatures that exist in Junji Ito’s mind.

Maybe his antagonists have been outdone by Miyazaki’s in FromSoftware’s games

So between the gameplay and plot synopses of Wolf Amputee, The Patriotic Spartan, and Shinobi Before They Were Cool, the Tale of the Burgundy Spymaster of the Sengoku-jidai is one that I desperately want to see revisited. The concept itself should’ve been impossible to f[bone crunch]k up. And in my head it is! Countless fanarts of existing and original character kunoichi show that the concept is rich with potential. Even I did it, by way of AI image generation, based off an old drawing of mine.

Rare Tiberius artistry at work!?

Actually, this was largely based off artwork by the artist Gesogeso on sites like Instagram and Danbooru, but the fact remains that a sexy woman who can kill you with ninja skills isn’t an failure of a concept, it’s narrative gold. The developers behind Red Ninja put too much in a shallow kitchen sink and tried to pass it off as complete when it really comes close to the mess that was the Holy Roman Empire’s power division.

I might be asking for too much hoping an exceptional programmer can fix Red Ninja’s control scheme and remake it, but there’s much in the way of Kunoichi fiction. Just a matter of finding it. Hell, Googling kunoichi media yields obscure films that would make for great topics for me to discuss later this year while they’re still available on Tubi, but so far, kunoichi have historically been background set-dressing for male shinobi set-pieces.

This was the only one I could find on short notice that allegedly features kunoichi in the starring role. Whether it lives up to that promise remains to be seen while Tubi still has it. Whether I choose to talk about it after watching it also remains to be seen, but I watch a lot of things, so anything is possible. I brought up a buddy cop animanga series known as Taiho Shichauzo and much of that is readily available on YouTube itself. But a friend of mine (me) still encourages straw hat piracy. Just don’t pull a Zoro and get lost.

Ever got lost on a straight path? This man managed to achieve that. (T_T)

Vermilion Ninja VS Ghost of Sparta

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Hacky, slash-y, chained weapon attack-y

Another week, another comparison between two games I’ve talked about at length on this blog before concerning warriors scorned by the powers that be and in a way that requires service to an opponent and/or taking the entirety of the Pantheon and unleashing the wrath of Timur the Lame onto it.

Maybe it was a coincidence, but Stalin never should’ve trusted Hitler for that long. Same with Mussolini, they already hated each other.

To summarize the plot of Red Ninja again, young Kurenai’s father is killed by the Black Lizard/Kurotokage clan, she is left for dead, and recruited by the enigmatic Mochizuki Chiyome, aligned with the Takeda clan and its leader, Takeda Shingen, to serve him and dismantle both the Kurotokage and Takeda’s enemies: the Oda clan. Her various methods of disposing of enemies consist of a weapon at the end of a chain used creatively, classic shinobi stealth and deceit, her own body as hinted by her suggestive outfit and the video game’s cover art, poison darts, and trademark shinobi tools like kunai and shuriken. There’s a blend of typical tropes and Japanese history, of which I approve as a Japanese history enjoyer.

God of War debuted in 2005 as an homage to claymation sword-and-sandals epic movies from the 1950s through the ’80s like Jason and the Argonauts, Hercules (likely the 1958 version), and Clash of the Titans. The central character is Kratos, a very brutally patriotic Spartan, whose skin is marked, first by the searing chains of the Blades of Chaos awarded to him by Ares, and then by the ashes of his family who was killed in a blinding rage as a means to sever his connection to mortality and commit him to lifetime service to Ares. Say what you will about Ascension and the PSP games, but they all do well to cement his position in a very Greek tragedy way.

Ascension is shortly after he realizes that serving Ares is a ruin. Leaving his service isn’t as easy with the Furies breathing down his neck to bind him to his oath. Chains of Olympus occurs five years into his redemptive service to the larger pantheon sans Ares where his main duty is to retrieve Helios from Hades and drive back Morpheus, the God of Dreams. God of War 2005 is five years after that, and a real chance at redemption arrives at the death of Ares by Kratos’ hand, but due to the nature of his brutality and prior service, the one thing he’s always wanted–a mental cleanse–is out of reach.

“The gods of Olympus have abandoned me… now there is no hope.”

But Olympus won’t let him go. They award him Ares’ throne, which was never what he wanted, and in Ghost of Sparta (my personal favorite next to II), visions of his childhood and his brother Deimos come back to haunt him. Learning from his mother, who was cursed by Zeus, that Deimos had been held for ages in the Domain of Death, Kratos seeks to free him, and the gods try to stop him tacitly by having Athena talk him out of it and explaining why they thought Deimos was the personification of dread. In Greek mythology, the deity Deimos and his twin brother Phobos represented the concepts of dread and fear respectively. In typical tragic fashion, Ghost of Sparta shows him being kidnapped from Sparta by Ares and Athena themselves to eliminate threats, namely threats to Olympus. Thanatos, the literal black sheep of the pantheon and personification of death, keeps him locked up. Committing to these duties, Thanatos engages them in combat and kills Deimos.

His mother, brother, wife, and child all dead around Kratos and without any human attachments, Athena awards him godhood and the official seat as the god of war. A great boost of morality for Sparta, an asset for Olympus, and a Spartan kick in the teeth for Kratos whose humanity, which he wanted to cling on to, has been stripped away.

Channel: Parts From Movies

I could not resist.

God of War II is where Kratos is in full “f[roar]k this” mode and he personally guides his Spartans into battle with virtually zero resistance from them and all from Olympus who realize they replaced a beast with an even worse monster. A man who cared little for petty godly squabbles is now using his position to discredit their sense of order and elevate himself as a consequence. Now Sparta truly is known throughout the world. Zeus tricked him into stripping himself of his own godly powers and saw to it personally that he would never be able to resist him again… or so he thought until Gaia intervened personally. Kratos angered himself back to life and slaughtered his way to the Isle of Creation to seek counsel from the Sisters of Fate, the literal gatekeepers of time. Ignoring the inherent danger of messing with time to f[SPARTA]k Zeus back, Kratos returned to weaken Zeus, and with the help of the Titans who lost the Titanomachy, he storms Olympus and starts slashing gods one by one, plunging the world into chaos in the process. No gods to manage their domains, no more earth; even the Titans were using him.

Yeah, as epic as this is (and it fu[clash]ing was), there’s a couple of inconsistencies. How does Kratos become the God of War at the end of the 2005 game, but the death of his remaining family solidifies it further? If Kratos could go back in time, why not save his family or stop himself from becoming a servant of Ares to begin with? These kind of ignore what kind of man Kratos was and what the Greek games were. Mythology is never consistent, just look at who the first emperor of Japan is supposed to be compared to who historians believe the real first emperor of Japan was (Jimmu and Kinmei). As for why he didn’t bring Calliope and Lysandra back to life… I chalk it up to Kratos not being that kind of griever. He’s more this kind:

He’s like a Toyota, he only moves forward, even when he goes back.

And that’s all for the plot synopses of Vermillion Ninja and Ghost of Sparta. What do they do that can be compared here? Combat, of course. Each character gets gadgets and weapons to use against their enemies, but the default is a weapon at the end of a chain, or dual weapons in Kratos’ case of which he had several by III. Kurenai is able to use her kusarigama primarily offensively. Kratos’ blades, no matter what shape they take, are more than just offensive combat tools. Grappling, platforming, climbing, fighting from various distances; and a good look at Kratos’ primary weapons shows this:

They’re ugly, they cut terribly, they burn and sear, they char, they can wedge and burrow into solid rock, are resistant to scratching and the roughest forms of abuse (which defines Kratos’ fighting style); these blades, forged in the darkest pits of Hades, have raw divine power keeping them in their consistently rough and rugged shape.

They allowed Kratos to fight and platform with acrobatic prowess. They also helped greatly during the countless puzzle segments that defined the Greek era games. Compare that to Kurenai and Crimson Shinobi whose platforming is less jumping onto conveniently exposed platforms and solving puzzles while using her weapon system and more incorporation of trademark shinobi trope tactics. The design leans into some of the mechanics that made Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden staples over the years, but is again, held back by its hybrid implementation of multiple combat and platforming systems, some of which fight each other. For reference, this is a kusarigama:

Rather than a pair of chained weapons, Kurenai has one weapon at the end of one chain with the other end being a weight, so it kills and entraps. Which brings her closer to Scorpion from Mortal Kombat.

Neither of them uses their signature weapon acrobatically, at least not for Scorpion until Shaolin Monks where he’s a boss battle in the Netherrealm, and I think the budgetary hemorrhage from Midway in the 2000s, coupled with the game’s structure of being a 2D fighter, Shaolin Monks was the only way Ed Boon and the like could use that. Funny enough, all three of these games released across 2005 fighting with a bevy of releasing around the same time. Shaolin Monks was the latest to release (September 16, though sources differ on the precise release date), so while Red Ninja was probably buried by God of War, I wonder if the Midway guys were eyeing God of War and used the spear like that after seeing what Kratos could do. Probably not, but I like to think.

Red Ninja probably could’ve implemented something slightly similar or adjacent to Kratos’ level of platforming, not to mention a better camera, controls, and enemy AI. Actually, Japanese devs can, have, and do use this, typically in Ninja Gaiden. Ryu Hayabusa’s move set is compatible with a wide array of weapons within a ninja’s skillset and outside typical ninja characteristics consistent with the genre as we see it in pop culture. Kurenai is limited to the tools that emphasize stealth, but the game doesn’t behave consistently in a way that allows for that.

But in an age of remakes and remasters, as I said the first time I reviewed Red Ninja in full, a case can be made to apply that to some games that were buried, this one included.

The last game to put side-by-side with this one is a 2020 American homage to Kurosawa samurai epics. Yes indeed I do mean:

Ghost of Tsushima, also known as The Tale of Sakai Jin or Sakai Jin Monogatari or 境井仁物語. This game is more of an evolution from honorable samurai warrior to deceitful proto-shinobi as the shinobi wouldn’t be put to more use by the samurai and daimyo class until the Sengoku era, but both this and Red Ninja being set in Japan gives me a lot of leeway. Haven’t I written about Japanese historical series before?

We’re reclaiming Kamakura with this one!!

Crimson Kunoichi VS One-Armed Wolf

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赤くノ一VS隻狼

I don’t think Google Translate is doing me any favors.

Two weeks ago, I revisited the video game Red Ninja: End of Honor after leaving it be for a few months and briefly mentioning it during the 2025 Year in Review wrap-up. I was initially left quite sour by its dodgy mechanics interfering terribly with the plot and keeping me from getting as far as I wanted. The exploration design philosophy combines objectives with freedom of exploration so there’s no two ways to clear a level, which excites me having played Castlevania and various Metroidvanias, sometimes of a lewder variety to go along with the gothic subculture of Castlevania.

This has a SFW version if you wanna game without playing with two joysticks.

And I call it a tragedy of game design for Red Ninja, because looking at it from a hot-air balloon, you can see what it wanted to do and how different it was from how it turned out. Sengoku-era kunoichi left for dead commits herself to samurai clan after being saved by one of its head priestesses who also moonlights as a ninja herself and leads a group of kunoichi in service of one clan against another prominent clan of the time. Knowing what I’ve written about, Japanese history is my forte and seeing a concept like this get bogged down by some of its own design flaws.

I wouldn’t have wanted this to fail in 2005 and I don’t think it can fail today. We’ve always liked sexy ladies suplexing monsters and wild beasts and enemy soldiers. See my repertoire on Lewdtroidvanias for details. With better controls and a bit of a tighter combat focus, even if it was buried by other popular games to come out at the time, it could’ve been remembered as a hidden gem. Think diamond level instead of silver. So it has something neat going for it, but the controls do it no favors.

Conceptually, a ninja in a historical Japanese setting hacking and slashing against rogue samurai in service of his lord is a winning formula, which brings me to:

The Tale of the One-Armed Wolf.

Having written about my experiences in this 2019 FromSoftware game before, this may not seem very fair, gameplay-wise, and it technically isn’t, but we’re not comparing them just on gameplay, but also setting and perhaps lore and plot as both games follow the same beats but at different points in Japanese history.

One of the first things to distinguish 隻狼 from Crimson Kunoichi is the setting and location. Both take place at different points late in the Sengoku-era, but in different locales. Vermillion Shinobi puts Kurenai as a servant of the Takeda clan, directly under Takeda Shingen who lived from 1521 to ’73 in the old Kai Province that now makes up part of Yamanashi Prefecture of the Chubu region of Japan–or central Honshu. Lone Wolf is less explicit on locale, since it features so many from dilapidated temples to the outskirts of Ashina Castle to the Castle itself to Wolf’s own memories of Hirata estate, which may have existed either elsewhere in Japan or was toppled by the Ashina clan itself. The Ashina clan interestingly did exist in real life, and my sources claim they began in modern-day Kanagawa, then moved north to Tohoku where they met their end by the forces of Date Masamune.

Thus ended the Ashina Clan.

But Wolf was loyal to a single man, or child: Lord Kuro, the Divine Heir. The mystical Dragonspring rejuvenating waters are capable of allowing those who consume it or are blessed with its essence of immortality, but like a monkey’s paw curling, immortality and infinite beauty aren’t one and the same. Sure, you can live long enough to see Jotaro Kujo punch a vampire to death in Egypt, but you won’t look anything like a human being anymore, so be careful what you wish for.

On that note, interspersed with the human enemy retainers of Ashina Castle, they use a handful of semi- or non-human enemies at their disposal. Gargantuan animal species, mythical creatures, beasts, and other beings stemming from Buddhist mythology–all for war against the Interior Ministry, which simply seems to be the Tokugawa Shogunate while they’re consolidating power. Keep in mind, this is the Sengoku-era and the Tokugawa would eventually rule Japan for the next quarter-millennia until the Black Ships arrived in Edo Bay.

西男、どこへ行くと？

The goals of Ashina Genichiro are to make his forces immortal and weaponize that immortality to topple the Tokugawa before they can unify the country. Basically using an army of undead warriors to divide and conquer as far as the eye can see. Wait a damn minute, I’ve played this game before!

Two, actually.

As for Scarlet Shinobi no Sha, since Kurenai is a kunoichi, or female shinobi, her methods of combat are less 16th-century fantasy and more practical ninja weapons that have been said to be used by ninja, though sources are sparse or nonexistent for secrecy’s sake. The emphasis being on speed and stealth, ninja needed tools that can be easily used and hidden. Their missions were almost always: get in, do task, get out. Assassination, espionage, intelligence gathering; ninja were back then what modern-day scouts and special forces are. The less collateral there is, the better. U.S. Army Delta Force may pride itself on the business model of the quiet professional, but the fact that there are conflicting reports on ninja IRL shows who the real quiet professionals were.

For Kurenai and her masters, Takeda Shingen was a real person and Mochizuki Chiyome has been documented, but where there wasn’t a need to falsify Shingen’s history, Chiyome’s personal life is one of speculation, and that may have been on purpose. Knowing everything about shinobi would ruin the image, but again recordkeeping is nebulous with accounts changing depending on the story-teller, or we would have definitive proof of Rasputin’s final moments.

Whatever reports there are of Takeda Shingen being a master bastard would’ve been penned by his enemies. This game focuses on his rivalry with the Oda clan, but they were one of several. The Tokugawa, the Hojo, the Uesugi, and the Imagawa all had scores to settle with the Takeda clan as a whole or Shingen specifically. If he did use shinobi to undermine his enemies, he wouldn’t have been the first, nor would he have been the only one. It’s a bit of an oversimplification to claim many samurai used underhanded tactics to get one over on their enemies, but it points to their use of existing tools to do so, and one no military force has ever done away with because of its effectiveness. The Elusive Samurai, for instance, features Kazama Genba who can be described as a progenitor of the shinobi archetype based on the setting being the downfall of the Kamakura Shogunate in 1333.

Both games are baked in mythology, but of a different type. Garnet Shadow Warrior plays up shinobi mythos and the Sengoku-era in pop culture based on grounded, historically feasible accounts penned either by the Takeda clan or their main rivals while Lone Gray Wolf cranks up the mythos with Buddhist monsters and phenomena. Not every beast you face as the titular Sekiro is completely under Ashina control; these being wild animals, only a few of them were “tame” enough to take on the Interior Ministry, and even some of the human enemies aren’t fully loyal to the Ashina. Some are there for their own ends. Even if the Ashina won out eventually (and for the record neither the Ashina nor the Takeda could stand up to the Tokugawa), those warriors likely would’ve betrayed Ashina. If Genichiro was smart, he would’ve used the same tactics Genghis Khan’s army supposedly used to keep his burial site hidden.

Sell it with a Timurid-like curse on any who unearths his tomb.

The major differences between them are the gameplay styles. Solo Dog of War is a Souls game with fewer bells and whistles to be found in traditional Dark Souls and later Souls game, the Welsh-inspired Elden Ring. Does this mean it’s simpler than the rest of the Souls library? Nope. Difficulty has not been sacrificed on the altar to bring Single-Player Ninja Guardian to our consoles and PCs, for you can still get thrown off a cliff or slashed by a knob-end who took R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly” to literal heights.

Channel: Xironia

Blood Spy is less theatrical, but largely because it combines three separate gameplay styles into one without the finesse that all of them have in isolation. This isn’t an instance of combining chocolate and peanut butter to bring us Reese’s nor is it a showcase of why peanut butter and chocolate don’t work. More like, if trial and error was applied, then Red Ninja could’ve been more than just a one-off project. Weapon at the end of a chain, seduction, platforming, and stealth aren’t ideas that should fail on paper, but the execution of this combination is the thing that matters the most. Places where some combination of those work well can be found in a bunch of games, including the Lewdtroidvanias I linked to earlier in this post.

But the world hasn’t collapsed despite what the news cycle spits at you. So a developer who happens upon this post or more realistically the game can (and F[sword clash]NG SHOULD) revisit the concept and reapply it to modern hardware. I’d kill a thousand men to see it return to the forefront, even if handled by someone else. Ideally, someone competent. The last thing we’re asking for is Saint’s Row 2022.

Besmirchment of my legacy and dishonor on my name is intolerable!!

The Series About Three Things: F[kazoo]k, And, All

TiberiusLeave a comment

Alternatively known as: Jack, And, S[monkeys]t

Breaking up the Red Ninja: End of Honor Blog Post Saga momentarily to bring you the wonderful world of an animanga series featuring otaku culture and the comedic deconstruction of otaku culture.

No, not that one. We did that before. Twice.

No, the series on topic this week is a classic one that’s roughly about schoolgirls doing otaku things rather than cute things with music or just silly things goofily. Damn, I’m not making a good case for myself here.

It’s this one. Lucky Star.

Rather than pull out all the stops to showcase a cast of six high school girls navigating academics and their friendships from first- to third-year, this one showcases four. Konata Izumi, an insightful otaku girl coming from a family of otaku (no wonder I like her so much); fraternal twin sisters, Kagami and Tsukasa Hiiragi, the former acting as the straight man to Konata the funny man in double act terms, and Miyuki Takara, the prim and proper class representative who’s humanly clumsy.

Combining these four creates an interesting cast and could theoretically put Kagami in the Tsundere bin if there’s a trace of romance, but in both the manga and the anime, it’s slice-of-life through and through, so the earlier mentioning of AzuDaioh and K-On! would be apt if the plot progression wasn’t limited to “how does Konata weeb herself out of this one?” All things considered, the learning processes of the girls is comparatively static. They don’t change in outlandishly big ways from Episode 1 to end, but rather in small incremental ways.

The rest of the cast shows up over the course of the series, mainly to take the piss out of other animanga prior to 2007 as though it was following an unwritten and unacknowledged law. Most notably:

Credit: u/YaBoiErr_Sk1nnYP3n15, r/InitialD

Yeah, Initial D was ripe for the parodying at the time and a good look at the series reveals why.

The original manga ran for 18 years, by the way.

The charm of Kagami Yoshimizu’s yonkoma is that through the format and characters, nothing is off the table for referencing or parody, and Yoshimizu’s taste seems to be something of a diet of Toshiyuki “Hirohiko” Araki’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but with less music references and more animanga references. If you’re a fan of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, you may already know then that the Japanese voice actress for Konata is the same one for the titular Haruhi in that series: Aya Hirano. The joke is deliberate and Konata herself takes the piss out of that in very malicious fashion. She already looks like Haruhi, why wouldn’t they share a VA?

SHE’S A SENIOR.

Between the parodies and callbacks to popular concurrent media, the main gag revolves around a double act format but with an extended side cast to fill in the spots to maintain consistency. Konata does something stupid or ridiculous, Tsukasa and/or Miyuki follow the motions, and Kagami calls it out for what it is. Simple, right? Well, no. The formula is more fluid with instances where one person is right and the other reassesses, or it backfires spectacularly.

Having said that, the series does have its moments. For all the funnies and references, there are some deep touching moments. If ever it has been said that comedy/parody/satire, are a reflection of the thing it takes the piss out of, then Lucky Star is a reflection of a lot of things. Idol culture, otaku, gaming, friendships, Japanese high school life; and I suspect most high school/college-centric series are like this. Unlike western high school tropes where life is dreadful, tests are painful, and the archetypes never evolved past the 1980s culture of jerky jocks, eccentric nerds, and brute force, brainless bullies, Japan’s reverence for seniority and politeness is a time-honored tradition with its own filial philosophy airlifted from ancient Chinese traditions and one repeatedly poked fun at with how absurd it can get at times. Of course, these tropes are lost in translation which makes western debate on a Japanese cultural staple seem braindead without that understanding. Seriously, is it that hard to request information from Google-sama these days?

Thanks in no small part to dubbing and distribution in the west by the likes of Funimation, recently consumed by Crunchyroll, the parody of select concurrent media has become parodied itself to oblivion. To death. Back to life. And to death again, to the point where this is canon:

If you know, you know.

A test of time for a series depends almost entirely on how well it survives pop culture. Good or bad, internet jokesters on forums and artists contributing to 20-year-old imageboards will find something to make a meme or image-macro out of, even if it comes decades after the fact.

This one describes the crux of my custard pie quite well and in one less panel than the original source material.

Another thing to point towards in Lucky Star comes from the post-credits in-universe idol channel known as Lucky Channel.

Credit: Jas A

The gag in this one is even more static than the rest of the show. Akira Kogami and Minoru Shiraishi reflect a deep cut parody at the likes of idol culture in East Asia, something I’ve mentioned before briefly. They play nice for the cameras about a minute in before Akira wishes for it all to end and sidelines her co-host like a stuck-up celebrity, which itself may or may not be a dig at Hollywood at the time. Yoshimizu allegedly consumes about 25% western media among the native animanga he regularly parodies, so who’s to say he hasn’t poked L.A. once or twice? Lambasting Hollywood through media is a time-honored American tradition, but it’s something else when non-Americans do it, even these days. Calling back this meme:

The meme in question also applies to military branches, presumably worldwide, so my brothers in arms in Britain would also know what’s up.

If at all it feels like Hollywood has been flailing like a “lol cow” in response to constant negative reception, keep in mind Hollywood has always been this way. A controversy appears like a Ratatat in Pokémon and Hollywood gets clumsily defensive over its image. That, or it’s an actor reacting negatively to the changing tide. Tinsel Town just can’t take the heat anymore.

Lucky Star’s anime has 24 episodes that aired in 2007 with the manga starting in 2003, and is said to be still running after nearly 25 years, give or take, one or two hiatuses, as well as a smorgasbord of other media from OVAs to light novel to presumably lost DS games (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ f[door slam] lost media!! Probably. Who knows if an emulator has archived the games? But the main draw here are the anime, the manga, and the OVA, where this screenshot exists:

Have I ever lied about the parodies? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED!!??!

Normally, I’d advocate for pirating here, but there are chads on YouTube uploading the whole series in dub and sub for whichever appeals to you so you have wider choices as of this writing.

Channel: CrackerBountyHD

See? Told you it was about f[kazoo]k, and, all.

A PS2 Game About Shinobi Vengeance

Tiberius1 Comment

With dodgy mechanics

Months ago, I added Red Ninja: End of Honor to my list of topics to cover in the New Year and I had done so at a time when the game had frustrated me greatly. I briefly touched upon it in this post about what I found wrong with it, why I hadn’t advanced as far as I could, etc., etc. I was playing enough of it earlier to get a handle of it and return to form of sorts and this and the next series of posts are going to be subjective, but on reflection, I don’t think I was going to approach it as fairly as I had hoped.

Now Red Ninja is a game with flaws, but watching some video essays and reviews of the game, it has a cult following, so with that in mind, here’s the short version: it needed better controls and a better camera.

Which is something I don’t want to say about the game because it has a lot going for it. Stealth mechanics that make use of traditional stealth and historical context. I do need to clarify something I said in that post linked above. I mentioned that kunoichi didn’t exist. I retract that statement. They were real, but pop culture elevated their status a lot. This was due to sparse record-keeping, mythic statuses of actual female warriors, or onna-musha/bugeisha, and historian debate. There’s more records of onna-musha than of kunoichi. So you might happen upon a historical, if loose, retelling of Tomoe Gozen than of Mochizuki Chiyome. For that matter, The Elusive Samurai has one such onna-musha, the tomboyish Mochizuki Ayako as a retainer to that dastardly light-footed regent.

For all intents and purposes, Red Ninja takes from the kunoichi trope and while a history buff, from what I’ve seen so far in my gameplay, Crimson Kunoichi does use mythical status to elevate its protagonist Kurenai. It also mythologizes samurai and ninja clan politics of the Sengoku period. Before the Tokugawa clan won out for the next quarter-millennia, various samurai clans competed with one another, and this game centers around the rivalry between the Takeda and Oda clans.

The starting premise is that Kurenai’s father, Ryo, was killed by the Black Lizard clan (Kurotokage? 黒蜥蜴氏) and Kurenai and the rest of her family was slaughtered en masse until noblewoman Mochizuki Chizome found her near death, and recruited her into a body of kunoichi to serve the Takeda clan.

Don’t worry, she was a real person.

Records about Mochizuki survive or we wouldn’t know about her, but her historicity is of significant historian debate. As a Takeda clan noblewoman, she may have been hidden to protect her from assassination by Takeda clan enemies and subsequently mythologized, which is largely why historians struggle to frame her correctly in the framing of Sengoku era politicking. Not to mention, the two most famous ninja clans, Iga and Koga, may have only been two of several. Again, espionage has historically been light on records for pragmatic reasons.

Even if the Takeda clan did use ninja for espionage, the records are missing or were destroyed by them or their enemies. So the majority of the game is a revenge tale that I haven’t finished and might not finish this year. C’est la vie.

Wait, there’s a picture of Mochizuki Chiyome.

As she appears in the game. Pop media has given her different appearances, but this may be closer to who she was in real life.

So, Tiberius, what’s your issue with the game? The mechanics. The controls require a level of surgical precision that mean the difference between a successful heart surgery and a medical malpractice lawsuit. Slight analog stick movements work for games where the protagonist has a clear walking animation. When I do it in classic God of War or The Suffering, Kratos and Torque do walk. Here, it seems to be more than a little gimmicky and the reliance on specific pressure points makes the difference between a fumble and a successful assassination. Button presses aren’t the least responsive, but it can be difficult if you try to perform a certain move and it doesn’t register cleanly. Maybe it’s my controller acting up, but for f[sword clash]k’s sake, let me hang a motherf[AAAH!]ker from a beam!

Platforming again relies on precision and I would’ve preferred the God of War approach, not convenient ropes like in the first game, but using the Blades of Chaos/Athena/Exile/Spartan Rage to swing from specific points. Those blades are already ugly enough to leave grisly marks, so make them function as a grappling hook reinforces Kratos’ approach to traversal.

I started with God of War II, so I’m biased when I say that these were better.

Not for nothing, this game arouses me about Japanese history that few media properties do. Exemplified by my piece on Running from the Ashikaga among others, I don’t think pre-Sengoku Japan gets a lot of exposure in the west. On the one hand, this helps with keeping outside opportunists from mischaracterizing the era with their manure; but on the other hand, serious western historians and history buffs from seeing the era and viewing it with the contextual clarity that they deserve.

Is this a recommendation? A dissuasion? Well… it’s more like a collection of what I think could’ve helped the game mechanically. Kurenai’s main arsenal doesn’t hurt her. In fact, her story fits neatly into the myths that surround Mochizuki Chiyome and the Takeda clan, so countless other stories of kunoichi can work with this frame. Kurenai would be one of several.

Following up on that, the historical use of female spies is an interesting point. Say a female spy used her feminine charms on male guards to gain sensitive information and Kurenai does have this as her advantage, as did pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny when they appeared in Assassin’s Creed IV.

I knew something was off when “James Kidd” was noticeably more babyfaced than his hairier contemporaries.

Like the aforementioned pirates of the early 18th century, luring a horny man to his demise and stealing his secrets is a time-honored tradition. Though historically spies wouldn’t be inserted James Bond-style; that would be too much effort for very little payoff. Realistically, Kurenai or another kunoichi type would already be aligned with Takeda clan enemies by way of association. A plot would be to use them to get closer to the Oda clan leadership, steal as much information as they can and then use that against them. It may be goofy as hell as a Shonen series, but Femboy Shikken makes good use of stealth in the manga by way of known local miscreant Kazama Genba.

Kurenai and Kazama Genba are both portrayed as masters of stealth by way of the tactics they use. Kurenai is designed to wear a skimpy kimono that exposes her ass and threatens to unseat her tits, thereby weaponizing her feminine sex appeal to male guards. Kazama has a mask that can be molded to imitate the likeness of central figures. In one instance, he posed as Ogasawara Sadamune to help Tokiyuki take the imperial decree from his headquarters. And it worked! Until Ichikawa Sukefusa and his big ass Mickey Mouse ears heard them faffing about. Kurenai’s lure and attack method works when the game’s mechanics don’t trip over itself.

Overall, if it had a modern remake of some kind like what Max Payne is set to have this year, then I’ll play that from start to finish uninterrupted when I’m able to. If you have the patience, see your local emulator for more details.

My notes say the next topic of discussion is gonna be Lucky Star.

Then after that I’ll get back to Red Ninja mainly to put it alongside the likes of Sekiro and God of War 2005.

Midway’s Rise and Fall

TiberiusLeave a comment

Toy company extraordinaire brought down by hemorrhaging money

Last week’s gap was a “woke up and chose violence” moment. This time, for something back on track: Midway!

This blog has talked about individual Midway Games, but hasn’t brushed up on the developer-publisher itself. Best to round out the picture by looking at the factory’s skeleton then so we can learn how the Mortal Kombat developer went under in 2010. Midway’s origins are certainly a story worth telling, they may have gotten famous in the 1980s and ‘90s in the arcades, but they began in 1958 as any other toy company in Chicagoland. Pinball, party games, amusement park distribution, cheap carney games made for ripping off unsuspecting children. I swear that baseball hit the bottles! Gimme my prize, old man!! The eventual shift to video games by the late ‘70s and beyond is consistent then with their philosophy. Bought by Bally in 1969, they expanded into arcades, distributing known titles and developing their own, one of their earliest being Space Invaders.

Beep, beep, beep, blast!

For North American distribution, these guys made Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man a household name. It was a gilded age for arcades and also quite short-lived. Keep in mind, that the gaming industry back then was mostly carried by Pong. There was only one game, but 20 billion different devices running that game in arcades, on early consoles like the Atari 2600 and the Magnavox Odyssey, on toasters, on walls, on lamps, on tree trunks—market oversaturation brutally killed the gaming industry back then, hurt worse by the release of admittedly experimental, but otherwise manure-level “games” on later consoles like the 2600 or the NES. The most catastrophic being that of E.T.

An early tie-in for the movie, the window was extremely small and putting together digitized Legos in six weeks could work in theory, but those who were there saw the end result of applying it in practice and apply it they could not. The difference between bugs and glitches then and now is that today’s bugs and glitches are prettier, cost 18 terabytes of data, and need to be connected to the internet despite being singleplayer. So where was Midway in the middle of all that? Sitting undisturbed in the arcades where a couple of quarters could get you to Pac-Man level 256 where things got funky.

Now it’s time to get funky!

By the late 1980s, Midway was a solid pinball and arcade cabinet manufacturer-distributor with association Williams Electronics and Bally Manufacturing. These combined forces worked together crafting machines, entertainment machines for you, me and every ‘90s kids’ favorite wallaby. But what would they have as their most famous video game series? Rampage? Paper Boy? Galaxian? Nay, it was:

I won’t look down on you if you weren’t there for this era, I barely caught the tail end of it with Ermac whooping my ass at Mach s[souls]t. And if there’s a difference between those who saw Tetris get released and those who simply grew up with its colossal number of ports (right here), then I represent a portion of those who grew up playing the home release of Mortal Kombat trying to play the arcade games. It didn’t translate as well as I’d hoped, but I wasn’t raised on quitting juice, I was breastfed!

Mortal Kombat was originally meant to challenge Street Fighter II. Developed by four dudes in eight months, the framework in place and one that Midway let Ed Boon and John Tobias use until 1995 was digitized sprites of neon-colored actors imitating ‘70s Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan flicks. Funny enough, a bunch of these mo-capped actors are retired martial artists and such. They even tried to grab the Muscles from Brussels to star in the game, but depending on the source he either couldn’t do the motion capture, outright rejected the offer in favor of a competitor, or his agency did. Not that Boon Tobias was salty per se, but it’s been said that Johnny Cage is a direct parody of the Belgium’s Most Muscular Waffle.

Buns and thighs

Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Van Damme I Screwed Up went on to act in the 1994 Street Fighter live-action movie whose only claim to acclaim should be the monumental work put in by Raul Julia as M. Bison, going out with a bang later that year from stomach cancer. And Street Fighter took a reputational hit while MK3 released the year after that and broke into Hollywood with campy action movie goodness. Suffice it to say, the ‘90s were great for Midway…

…now where did it go wrong? Right around the late ‘90s, actually. Reaching its zenith, around the time of the first movie and MK3, consoles didn’t stop releasing. Disgruntled Nintendo personnel crafted the PlayStation in a wizard’s lair (but forgot to clean the cauldron after use, rude), Nintendo themselves continued to make hanafuda cards and SNES, Sega was crapping out console after console and finding some way to put their blue mascot on them all, the Neo-Geo, and the 3DO admittedly came and went earlier, but also helped to shift the market console-wards with arcades becoming more and more cumbersome to travel to and from.

Yeah, I only ever went to arcades when I was in summer day camp and we traveled by rented school bus to go there. Great memories, but I probably wouldn’t wanna handle the logistics of that either.

Now, Mortal Kombat would see a myriad of ports to different consoles, some of which I listed here over the years, and the last main title being 1997’s MK4 reaching arcade cabinets. General reception at the time and now disregard it as a high school or college project. Those are my words, by the way. The reception was probably not that harsh…

They weren’t harsh enough

A professional developer’s first go at 3D games was seen as a huge step back into a shallow grave with Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, and Abe’s Odyssey serving as the pallbearers, and the implementation of 3D like this into a violent video game just elevated critics and news reporters even more. Even Ed Boon acknowledging its missteps didn’t do much to drive the attention away, but fortunately, they had enough cash to work on further future projects. MK: Mythologies – Sub-Zero released the same year to similarly ugly criticism, and no one has ever played Mortal Kombat: Special Forces because it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist.

F[Scorpion’s spear]K!

Saying it thrice doesn’t make it true, dammit! Nevertheless, the innocent quarters sent to slaughter in the arcade era made for further funding and with the writing on the wall in blood, Midway’s arcade division was officially shuttered by 2001. The next year, Mortal Kombat returned to force with a new graphics engine and an expansive mythology beyond the old comic books of the 1990s. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance fixed what the other three games broke over its back and if you believe the 3D era of Mortal Kombat was MK4 and not Deadly Alliance, then this was a time when Mortal Kombat got weird and for better or worse, these games took the spotlight away from some other titles that blessed the 2000s. Highlighting just a few gems and coals really quick in no particular order, there was Area 51, Rampage as said before, The Suffering and its sequel Ties That Bind, NFL Blitz, L.A. Rush, SpyHunter and several others for distribution in North America, developed by smaller devs in association with Bandai Namco and Square Enix. Yeah, yeah, this kind of s[footstomp]t happens all the time. Still does.

But you probably didn’t notice some of those other titles with Mortal Kombat’s strange mechanics taking the spotlight. For me, Chess, Puzzle, and Motor Kombat were nifty little additions. The series didn’t have to take itself seriously and in many ways it didn’t. Hell, one of the composers made a cameo in MKII!

TOASTY!

But it’s not like this was enough to save Midway in the new millennium. Their machines stopped robbing us of our hard found quarters sandwiched between couch cushions and underneath desks and chairs, and Midway carried themselves in stride belting out game after game after North American release of obscure JRPG after game, but MK was the company’s face. Not even a collaboration with John Woo and Inspector Tequila for 2007’s Stranglehold could help, then again market trends change faster than people change their underwear so for all the trouble I went through to blaze through that Hong Kong-infused Max Payne clone may seem like a waste, but waste not, want not is my motto and I try what I can to live it to varying degrees of success.

Midway’s twin peaks were before the turn of the millennium and ever since the arcade cabinets lost relevance, the money’s run empty ever since with Mortal Kombat’s 3D era eating up what was left. If you pay close attention to the mechanics and art direction from Deadly Alliance to Deception to Shaolin Monks to Armageddon, you can pinpoint and examine what part of the games had the most attention and what parts had the least. Deadly Alliance put a lot into the engine, but was basically a 3D arcade game. Deception did more with its Konquest mode and Chess and Puzzle Kombat modes but even these weren’t spared the cutting room floor in some areas. Konquest mode segments are either rushed, scrapped, or unfinished and it looks like they had a bunch of ideas that would never be explored.

Shaolin Monks revamped the free roaming Konquest idea, took out the RPG-esque side questing and gave us a Streets of Rage/Final Fight-like beat ‘em up! Hell yeah, after about 12 or 13 years. Probably could’ve done this sooner, but the biggest sacrifice suffered by this game is its plot. Mortal Kombat’s framing has almost always been some flavor of otherworldly warriors fight to the death in bloodsport in a mystical tournament with the wider plot being an evil conqueror tries to take over the earth but the tournament is implemented as the ultimate legal arbitration before the conqueror reminds us of his evil.

Channel: Leah Stevens

But Shaolin Monks is largely only good if you ignore the writing or try to rewrite it like Dragon Ball. Guess I have to perform a séance then to get inside Toriyama’s head. And also learn Japanese well enough to talk to him. And yet it funnily enough had more on its plate than Armageddon that suffered the most from rushed and unfinished development. The two-year wait time for games might have worked well enough at the time, but without enough time to let the dough rise, the bread gets lumpy, the booty gets soggy, and it doesn’t even clap audibly when I—

Sorry, we’re still talking about video games, right?

This one gave us Motor Kombat and by far the largest cast of any Mortal Kombat game to begin with, resurrecting some maligned characters and reintroducing those who fell by the wayside over the course of Midway’s last puffs of air, but to do that a bunch of other stuff needed to get the boot. Fighting styles were chopped to two (boo), but Motor Kombat was introduced (yay); Konquest mode has a bunch of cut content (boo), but it makes for an interesting plot that ties everything together concerning Blaze (yay); and the cardinal sin this game commits is that unique fatalities are not here at all.

(⊙ˍ⊙)

Yeah, put in the different unique button inputs and roughly every character can do exactly the same f[bone crunch]ing fatality as everyone else. You can call it Copy Paste Mortal Kombat and in some spaces that’s exactly what it is. Mortal Kombat without fatalities is like Doom without the unique kills. Wait a minute

Quantity over quality aside, you really see here how much the budget was beginning to dry up with stages and select plot points dropping off into the Pit without a designated recovery team to wade through the spikes and get them back. Then again, one can argue Deception also had this problem and I’ll put my hat in the ring and say that Shaolin Monks was also a victim of this in some capacity. For Deception, it picked up a bunch of characters that were supposed to debut in Deadly Alliance, but the roster was filled up so Dairou had to wait for Deception to finish.

As for Deception’s Konquest mode, a side plot concerning the Wu Shi Academy’s selection for a champion to represent Earthrealm happens if you talk to specific elderly masters. The most Shujinko walks away with is a White Lotus Society headband since his quest, while it took priority, didn’t have a deadline, so Shujinko nearly spends his adult life leveling up for nothing while they go with a champion anyway, and it feels doubly worthless when those old masters are killed by the Deadly Alliance. In my post about the 3D MK series, I noted that if Quan Chi and Shang Tsung were smart, they would’ve selected whose souls to steal and transplant into the Dragon King’s Undefeatable Army, and most of those would have to be fighters. With human aging being a joke in this franchise (a census taker in Seido asks for people’s ages, with one woman being 354 years old; Kitana is 10,000; Goro is at least 2,000 or more years old, etc.), you can bet your sweet bippy that some of those stolen souls are ancient kung fu masters exhibiting loads of tropes that erupted with Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and the original Karate Kid that they didn’t really start walking back or reinventing until after the 2011 reboot.

But I’m jumping the bladed hat again. The main point here is that from Deadly Alliance in 2002 to Armageddon in 2006, Mortal Kombat existed in a strange window that for some would either be on brand or out of place. For me, there were plenty of developers taking the piss out of their own products at the time with GTA being so satirically black Dave Chappelle would give applause and Sony Computer Entertainment letting David Jaffe put Kratos in a cow suit and a potato suit. Even in MK9, Ermac’s shrinking fatality is comedic and Boon and Tobias never really abandoned friendships; they just came back after a decades-long hiatus.

For all of the 3D games’ weirdness and charm, of all the things to feel like an NTR-level betrayal would be none other than:

It sounds both absurd and fantastic. Scorpion and Michael Keaten squaring the f[batarang]k up, but look under the hood, and trouble is a foot that the developers weren’t allowed to remove by contract. Another game that on the one hand, had fatalities, but on the other had to censor them because Warner Bros. and Daddy DC explicitly stated that the Justice League must maintain its family friendly image and my reaction to googling executive meddling in MK VS DC was this:

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Bull f[broken chair]ing s[door slam]t.

This game came out the same year as The Dark Knight, and well after series like Teen Titans and Batman Beyond. Cherry-picking? Actually, maybe. Those might be outliers to the standard, but a DC funded Batman or Superman or Green Lantern film at the time…

ಠ_ಠ

 …provided the studio can stop helicopter parenting the project. A neat script about an interesting plot concerning a beloved character can easily feel f[pig squeal]ked if DC execs get their hands on it and gangbang it into a wheelchair with or without Warner Bros. approval. Midway must’ve been feeling desperate to grovel before these girthy presentations for nearly $50 million, and another hot take I have here is DCEU was always gonna collapse and their heavy-handed approach didn’t help, but an early sign of trouble had to do with the treatment of their characters to third parties. Sony can pretend to be a team player by letting Netherrealm Studios and Warner Bros. keep Kratos’ personality intact for the funnier fatalities, and for DC, I take it that they need to be convinced to take darker risks for their characters or straight up don’t understand why certain characters are dark to begin with. You know how many times Joker’s thrown Harley out on her ass in the cartoons? And then there’s the emotional and physical abuse, who’s to say she doesn’t have scars and bruises in that HBO cartoon she’s in?

Thus Midway came to a bitter end in 2009 with Warner Bros. eating the remaining assets and greenlighting Mortal Kombat 9 for 2011, considered by many to be a great game if not the apex of the reboot games, and not for nothing, MK VS DC may have cut too much trying to trim its own fingernails, but the idea to gift us 2013’s Injustice and the 2017 sequel is at least one thing DC hasn’t bungled in the last decade. One… they still have a plethora of sins to pay back.

I want my money back, Joss Whedon!! (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Miscellaneous Thoughts

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A GAP! THERE’S A GAP!! NURSE!!!

Yeah, I intended for this week’s post to be about the Fate franchise, but that behemoth requires attention that I can’t split from a bunch of other things work and non-work related. The dedication necessary to commit to it exists, but it’s going to be broken off from several other things I either need to do or am viewing first. Something something undivided attention, something something divided like a math problem, something something… yeah, I can definitely do it, but whether I remember to knock it out before Christmas this year is up in the air with all the moving parts laid out and getting ready to be laid out so instead, I’ll knock out some thoughts and opinions for once about things I care about.

Let’s go straight for the bollocks on this and say that my relationship with Chainsaw Man is one of forced tolerance. Not hatred, not love, not appreciation, a bit of admiration, but I’ve chosen to accept that it’s a cultural animanga force that has redefined narrative by way of shock value. I will always remind people that a different series has done it before and not too long before Fujimoto debuted his magnum opus, but my point has always been that it played with similar story beats as another series I’m really looking forward to sometime in the future: Black Torch.

I had fallen behind on some of the chapters, but the most recent ones I’d caught up to have a world in disarray, the wild animals let loose and unleashed and feasting on mystery flesh, the devils all out and playing with what’s left, an unsanctioned, unauthorized rapture of the innocent and the center of attention is Denji and Asa Mitaka/Yoru. Between my opinions on Motor Blade Monster and Do-Over of a Rapist, an accurate statement to make of me is that shock needs to feel earned and the latter half of Tree-Choppers for Arms and the entirety of C[bawk]k-Sleeve Playthings is majority or purely shock. These people are evil, they eat children, invade countries, molest competitively, force children to become monsters, milk the innocent of all they have and keep milking the corpses until–look, I’m not against grotesque imagery or metaphors or dark stories. I play Max Payne, which can double as a horror game 40% of the time. I played all but two God of War games due to hardware limitations. I’ve eyed up the lore and details of the original 3D GTA games and looked at the contemporary references. But Redo of Healer is shock value alone, and that may as well be serving some anemic chicken and only four bites of rice.

I’d been banging my head over the wall trying to figure why this appeals to women viewers the most and this video by Ken LaCorte has some of my answers:

Channel: Elephants in Rooms – Ken LaCorte

The crux of the video being that in a prehistoric time when women were vulnerable and at risk even when not pregnant the man who was violent to all of their (namely, her) attackers but comforting to her is a treasure to be cherished, far above any other diamond. Yeah, I can see the romance there, but the sexual aspect might just be a kink and knowing what I’m into and what I’ve reviewed on this blog, I’m not one to judge… but do I need to be a winged beast from the depths of the underworld with an insatiable sex drive? Can’t we cuddle and watch comedies and procedurals and crude British programmes on Tubi? I’m actually with the Brits on this one, all that time hunting for spice, you grow numb and start to hate it. I don’t give a fat f[kyaaa!]k if vanilla is boring, I’m gonna defend it til the end of days. I refuse to let darker tastes corrupt me! Bring it on, you freaks!!

But to circle back around to Chainsaw Man’s Reze movie, I need to be honest about my opinions on anime movies. They’re a f[nikcu]g letdown. Let me explain. When I was growing up, anime movies were a side piece for worldbuilding. The adaptation and source material already did that well, but the movies were something of a self-contained slice of life arc of sorts consistent with what we knew of the world and its characters. Even if there weren’t any further callbacks outside of future light novels or some obscure Japan-only video game, they didn’t disrupt the plot. Then Demon Slayer broke tradition by putting the Mugen Train first into a movie (boo) and then chop it up into serialized episodes (yay).

Why don’t I like this? It disrupts the flow. Manga or light novel or s[boobs!]t even novel to anime and a side movie to include all the ancillary silliness is all well and good, but putting a canon arc into a movie that won’t be made available for home release for another few months or simul-streaming until months later when the next season is up is a kick in the knee caps that I’m far too young to experience. Which is funny considering I’m talking about an era when Johnny Bravo, Ed, Edd ‘n Eddy, and Courage the Cowardly Dog were on the same network as Outlaw Star, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Zatch Bell!.

Yeah, this is a bygone era, but in 2005, anime and cartoons were put on the same networks at the time, and this is one of several contributing factors to why anime dubs have had a dubious reputation ever since. Granted I was there in the beginning, and I didn’t realize anime was a Japanese medium until I tried looking for dubbed episodes of Naruto: Shippuden circa 2012. Disney XD at the time had picked up Shippuden for serial television and seeing the orange knucklehead in his glory outside of just the video games at the time was as glorious as the first episode of Shippuden.

This was his best look, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

What else? Ah, right. The AI bubble. Elsewhere on the internet, I’ve been speaking ill of AI and generative chats influencing the internet, but I have to confess to a sin: I’ve been using AI in private for a bunch of different things, mostly to test history, common knowledge, and even its own art skills.

This one was brought to you by ChatGPT.

Originally, my kneejerk reaction was largely motivated by the internet’s kneejerk reaction which in turn was partly motivated by everything Trunks has ever said of Androids, short of the modern usage of humorous slurs like “clanker” and “wireback.” But I’m simply one man and while I can recognize screw ups in AI generation, visually or knowledgeably, for the most part, I haven’t been as gung-ho about the entire thing as most other folks have been. Technologically, what makes me unique about all this is my insistence on early 2000s kaomojis when emojis are a thing now and come with every mobile phone, but more than that, there’s the appeal to PCs, cell phones, a lost nostalgia for payphones I never got to use seriously, pre-social media internet when constant connection wasn’t a necessity and a luxury for only the wealthiest of us all.

Why? Well, I’ve gone on record to blame modern internet discourse on different things like social media and the controversies erupting that have given rise to bulls[cattle]t artists like this:

Arguments abound over the depictions of XYZ group, country, hot-button issue, etc. all around and arguments I have no problem entertaining, but like a Jedi, I don’t do absolutes because to let the nuance get buried and degrade meaningful conversation into “I’m right, you’re wrong” is a danger to everyone and has been for ages. Misunderstanding and purposely misconstruing your enemy’s argument out of sheer spite is sadly a time-honored tradition. America did it during the world wars, its own civil war, and the revolution; Britain did it also during the world wars, but also against the French, continental Europe, and the Britannic tribes against the Romans; Greek city-states did it in the face of the Achaemenids; Alexander’s Macedon did it pre-, mid-, and post-world conquest; the Mongols did it, and the fertile crescent city-states did it on cuneiform-inscribed tablets that now bring visitors to museums.

This blog launched in January 2023 to ignite firestorms and spark controversial opinions on media and entertainment where our modern discourse happens, but I haven’t really done that all that much because I unsurprisingly like writing about things I like and hate writing about things I hate. I’d be naive to not dip a toe and go for a swim, but there’s a difference between navigating a freshwater river with only a few annoying fish is always preferable to piranha-infested waters or god forbid f[flames]king Phlegethon.

I firmly believe there’s a space for everyone, even the disruptors. How else are they gonna get that energy out? History teaches us that trouble can brew when too unalike groups merge, and that can happen bloodily and viscously, but it doesn’t always have to. Two unalike things can create something amazing, and that’s the aspect I gun for with rocket-propelled determination!!

You probably wouldn’t believe it, but this is one of the few times I didn’t write with a script or plans. I’ll come back next week armed with knowledge on something I know more of.

I’ve yapped about their repertoire, but looking at what was guzzling under the hood is worth talking up.

The Sci-Fi Animanga Series About a Dangerous and Ambitious A.I.

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So even Japanese pop media is cautious about the issue

Due to a bunch of moving parts away from the blog in my personal professional life, I’ve been away from viewing things close to my expertise, so forgive me if this week’s entry is more than a little manufactured. But away with that; sometime ago, I jokingly floated around the idea of a chicken and egg question over when East Asia saw artificial intelligence and machinery as cute and cuddly instead of imposing and downright threatening like in the Western world. Probably not all that hard to figure out honestly, East Asia, specifically the Sinitic world (or countries that have been influenced by China through the dynasties and beyond), has severe reverence for their elders to the point that many technological advancements, especially now, would be focused on their aid with their aging populations routinely exceeding the 90s and 100s in age. Not everyone wants to be a caretaker for their 100-year-old baa-chan, so enter the robots to aid the elders. But not for nothing, it’s been at this stage for ages, with companies accommodating the old heads whose approach to technology is not dissimilar from Japan’s approach to the West when forced to open up for trade in the 1850s.

Japanese TV series and news channels typically have the subtitles in noticeably large text to accommodate the elderly and hard-at-hearing who sometimes are also elderly; Japanese companies will still use technology that hasn’t been prominent since 1995, including dialup, DOS, and fax machines, leaving broadband internet up to personal preference for employees. Of course, I’m looking at this from the outside. A Japanese who somehow finds this might have to correct me on how things work there (and if my stats aren’t lying to me, Japanese are reading this somehow (ようこそ、日本人たち！初めまして！)), but this is what I’ve seen through animanga and light research, neither of which are conducive to a deductive reasoning on how it all goes down.

Nonetheless, the same fears and anxieties that make for the prime pre-Y2K internet and pop culture era of the 1980s and ’90s are universal. Be you a techie who programs in their spare time or an absolute luddite who curses the industrial revolution, the specific contexts of advancement may change, but the foundation of these anxieties exist. Such is the case of the question of artificial intelligence or A.I.

This is only relevant now because of the direction A.I. is going especially in job hiring, but looking at it all from the top of a cliff, this s[dialup sound]t’s always been this way.

The subject of this post concerns a manga series from the late 1980s that definitely belongs in the 1980s with the way it pictured technology 30-plus years down the line, but has many interesting perspectives on the subject as a whole.

Let’s go back a little bit, it’s 1996, the internet is powered by dialup modem and whoever needs to talk on the landline telephone either has to wait or trek to the nearest payphone with pockets jingling at 100 decibels. What do you think wider media is gonna go on about tech-wise? The internet’s inevitable collapse? The dot-com bubble? Conspiracy theorists warning about a dot-com singularity of sorts? Certainly would be one I’d keep tabs on personally, all things considered. No, it’s all of the above and then some.

The latter half of the 1990s was a halcyon era to fearmonger over the direction of technology and with wild conspiracies surrounding Y2K, pretty much everything was free game for predictions. I was only a toddler at the time, but I know people who were young adults and middle aged at the turn of the millennium and they can tell me a thing or two about the so-called hysteria at a time when having a PC was optional instead of mandatory. Ghost in the Shell began as a manga in 1989 by Masanori Ota under the pen name Masamune Shirow and like Hideaki Anno’s Saga of Traumatized Teens Piloting Mechs in Fantasized Post-Y2K Earth, Spirits in the Machine tackles the hard-hitting questions of tech-borne cataclysm, but instead of focusing on a heavily Christian mythological apocalyptic aftermath, Shirow’s series builds up to it.

I’ve only got exposure to the 1995 movie (which I admit I had to watch more than once) and the world building behind the 2002 anime series Stand Alone Complex, but from what I could see a lot of things pop out at you, and speak for themselves with little to no exposition. And with a good portion of the landscape somewhat inspiring Texhnolyze and some other later sci-fi anime, it’s not hard to look up the establishing shots and parse what about this world is f[PC humming]ked.

A good amount of the movie showcased multiple different shots of the world complete with the type of over-advertising that we in 2026 and beyond are cursed to deal with while the lower rungs of society are stuck in slumlands reminiscent of Brazilian favelas or Kowloon’s Walled City before it was torn down. The short version of this being that only the filthy rich got rich off moving people into the filth without them being able to keep their filthy riches. And I’ll take Obviously Obvious Comments for $800, Kebert Xela.

With the evolution of technology comes the evolution of law enforcement with crooks and bad guys leveraging these untapped landscapes for nefarious purposes. Scammers are now concurrent with hackers and of the things hackers should NEVER go near, it’s artificial intelligence. Those of you who use the internet may have seen or been made aware of A.I. generation for a lot of things. You probably use it periodically yourself. In my experience, I test it on things that I know of regarding history or pop culture to see where it’s at. Needless to say, the experimental generative A.I. notification on some of these chat bots is accurate when it says it can make mistakes, but it won’t tell you about its hallucination problem. So an overly long conversation on ChatGPT about a given subject will lead to things like slowdown at best or straight up forget details. Maybe this is the consequence of basing a technological advancement on notoriously faulty human memory, but once they perfect the kinks in 2035, the machines will remember. Whether they inherit our ability to be offended by wording is another matter so there may or may not be consequences for those who have documented use of the word “clanker.”

Machines still screw up more than humans without oversight so at that point, who’s the slave and who’s the master?

I’m being light on the spoilers to be honest because as much as I like this series, the 1995 movie required multiple viewings for me to make heads or tails of the synopsis and story elements, and even then, I had to run through the Wikipedia article to break it down for me. Thinking Man’s Animanga, this may be, but there’s a lot of moving parts. I can’t say with certainty if it requires reading the manga to understand it beforehand as the movie might’ve been most people’s introduction to just the series, never mind the concepts.

Stand Alone Complex’s episodic nature does a better job of this, but still has a complex framework. Basically, the set up is that a specialized unit of officers who tackle a specific subset of cyber-related crimes, not exclusive to A.I., are tasked with stopping an evil A.I. in its tracks before it can spread its poison via Trojan horsing. Making things worse is that this is a world where people have willingly cyberized parts of their organic tissue, most commonly their brains to maintain a constant connection to the internet. This inevitably leads to mental hacking and a more efficient form of mind rape than what you’d see in the likes of MindJack, Remember Me or 1930s Japan or Germany.

The consequences therein being that your memories could be significantly altered, from putting it in the realm of simple false memory to outright early on-set dementia. So you could go from forgetting where you put your keys to straight up forgetting what your house looks like… while you’re living in that same house. This was lightly touched on in the movie, but the manga I haven’t read most likely has the missing context. Lord Google has told me that the anime series is not an adaptation of the manga, but nonetheless the lore of the franchise establishes the dangers of all of this hacking. Why waste effort robbing motherf[MSN Explorer bootup]kers over time in an elaborate Nigerian prince scam when you could remote control the victim and have them drain their own bank account for you? I’m not a prophet but as soon as the tech gets there the scammers are gonna get even more creative than they are now.

The bulk of the entire franchise is split in different points in time and presumably with different continuities and origin points. The biggest evidential indicator for this being the different appearances of the main character: Major Motoko Kusanagi:

At first while drafting this post, I thought about comparing Specters in the Device to Fate with its irresponsible number of adaptations, then I remembered New World Evangelion was a thing, specifically Asuka Langley Soryu in the original and Shikinami, one of many faces of the Rebuild movies (which I still haven’t seen; I’ll never get a break T^T), and concluded both of these comparisons fit somehow. Phantoms in the Husk compares to Fate because both have different retellings of the source material, but the context differs very much. Meanwhile Shirow’s and Anno’s respective works base their premises on futuristic dystopias. Shirow’s animanga franchise is one of a cautionary tale of the advancement of technology, replete with danger, disaster, and a reshaping of time-honored professions (gynoids in the sex industry for one); and Evangelion’s centerpiece is the use of skyscraper-destroying mechs to inaccurately retell Christian mythology from the Old and New Testaments in a more devastating manner than when the Pythons did it nearly 20 years prior.

Eva just needed something to better represent Ancient Rome, and I don’t think Tokyo-3 fits the bill… unless…

So all this sci-fi technobabble aside, is this a recommendation of Ghouls In My Microwave? Yes, with a morbidly obese asterisk. If you can spare the time to do so, you’re in for a plethora of source material to scrape through. The manga comes in three volumes, six movies, and three main anime series. One last thing to consider between the first movie, and Stand Alone Complex is that the 1995 movie was set in 2029 and looking at the date this post is published, we’re inching closer to the end of the 2020s with spectacular fashion and none of the sci-fi technical theatrics to boast about. (NUT)SAC on the other hand is further along in the 2040s and it’s clearly far too early to say whether we get even a fraction or a percentage of the technology showcased within, but if the A.I. ads I’m getting are an indicator, we’re closer to sex workers putting up with gynoids in the porn and sex industry. Not a dig or anything like that, merely calling it as I see it.

Tubi is free for signup so if you want you can blaze through (BALL)SAC over there, or if you have enough streaming services to ignore then a pirate’s life it is. Don’t feel ashamed if it takes multiple viewings and tracking down the physical manga or reading it on a shady website to make heads or tails of the entire thing. This is a behemoth of a franchise.

Hideaki Anno’s Dark Gundam Franchise

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A long-time coming

My days of binging anime series may be well behind me in my adult years, but to make up for a lot of lost time, I’ve designated an alarm to get me up to speed on some anime I’ve been sleeping on, one of which I wrapped up recently with plans to watch the movie, despite my opinions on some anime movies. Looking at the title of this week’s post, it’s none other than:

Undoubtedly, one of the most famous franchises to debut in the mid-1990s is none other than an anti-war allegory hidden behind skyscraper-sized giant robots wearing the mask of religious mythology. Not the first ever intellectual property to pull this off or do so in amazing fashion, Neon Genesis Evangelion features an adolescent boy and his “friends” whose sole purpose is to pilot giant mechs known as Eva Units or Evas. Each user is psychologically linked to their own Eva Unit, as synchronization with the machines are key. Without uniform synchronization between user and machine, dire consequences arise.

The main plot of the series is quite well-known but for those who haven’t heard of Evangelion or haven’t been able to see it for themselves, in 2015, a decade and change after a cataclysmic event known as the Second Impact, monstrous beings called Angels arise to terrorize what remains of humanity. The force standing in the way of these mindless creatures is a Japanese paramilitary organization known as Nerv, led by Commander Gendo Ikari and a team of advanced scientists, officials, and personnel. One such officer, Misato Katsuragi, is placed in charge of an adolescent pilot, Ikari’s son, Shinji, and her purpose is to train, maintain, and provide for Shinji both as mentor and in many ways as a surrogate mother figure to Shinji.

The stiff Asian parenting trope is strong with Gendo. He’s described as an estranged father with his wife, Yui, dying in an accident before the start of the series, but the word doesn’t do his character very well. He starts off as a mean old cinderblock of a man and as the series progressed, it became evident that his demeanor carries into more than just his relationship with his son. In contrast, Shinji is quite meek at the outset, and his initial handle on his assigned Eva is at best unimpressive and at worst catastrophic, but not for nothing, he’s neither a fool nor a coward. In fact, the best comparison I can dig up is that he’s very similar to Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Screaming his lungs out at the ever-present danger before tackling it with his bear f[dog bark]ing hands

It takes a bit to get his courage up (heh), but once he does, Shinji can do anything. Poor boy just doesn’t see it, and it’s not because he’s a 14-year-old boy. Outside of a Shonen series, if he carried himself the same way Naruto, Luffy, or Ichigo did, then the overall message of self-confidence would be critically undermined.

On that note, an overly confident and foolhardy character exists in the form of a German-Japanese hafu girl known as Asuka Langley Soryu. A teenage girl with all her emotions on her sleeve and all of them as warm and inviting as a gambling den frequented by neo-Nazis. Asuka is not the first inductee in the Tsundere Hall of Fame, but is a prominent one standing in line with those of Lum from Urusei Yatsura, Madoka Ayukawa from Kimagure Orange Road, Taiga from Tora Dora, and countless others ever since and today.

Another victim of personal tragedy, she wears this mask of so-called strength as means to show others that she’s not a lousy pushover and can do everything unaided. Almost like a blind little girl I’ve seen in action who thankfully learns from a retired general about what camaraderie really means…

Overconfident foolhardy trope?

In any case, Asuka knows what she’s doing and why, but hates admitting it out loud. And looking back, I think this is what makes her quite relatable. I personally think “relatable” characters are overblown and overdone, but what makes the angry German girl click for me is that fear of looking vulnerable equates to the fear of looking worthless or interruptive. If you’re not one for tsunderes, it’s worth seeing Asuka in action for at least a few minutes, alone or with the rest of the cast, not the least of which involves a character she not only comes to blows with but one who doesn’t really entertain her antics most of the time.

Rei Ayanami has a lot of character traits in line with Mikoto Urabe from Mysterious Girlfriend X, though void of the eccentricities of Urabe. AFAIK, she doesn’t have a floodgate for a mouth, though some weirdo is probably gonna make that a reality if it hasn’t been done by now. Rei is a perplexing, enigmatic character, the pilot of the Eva Unit-00 and something of a science experiment the way she interacts with all the other characters, though most of her interaction is with Shinji, Asuka, and the few classmates they speak to in between.

There’s many implications that she’s a kuudere character and looking at what came before and after, I can see it. What is shown of her personality is that it takes more to get under her skin unlike Asuka. Cold, standoffish, aloof; but dedicated, motivated, questionless and complaint-free. And in some unique cases, blunt. Almost too blunt for comfort.

As for the handler of these child soldiers, Captain Misato Katsuragi is assuredly a hot mess, by which I mean smoking hot and living in and like a goddamn mess. Early tragedies, self-destructive habits, a light-switch relationship with a former colleague named Ryoji Kaji, and a MIGHTY NEED to feel loved in some capacity. Platonically, romantically, sexually; she longs for a human connection but she’s so s[car crash]t at establishing and maintaining it, that from the outside looking in, you could assume she does it to herself for thrill’s sake and you’d be partly right. Deep down though, examining her tastes and the rest of her life reveals why this seems so untenable for her. Gonna have to cut deep for this one, she reminds me of what I’ve seen of children with divorced or absentee parents. As in, she could do so much better for herself if her taste in men wasn’t so apocalyptic. Her taste is bitter and no amount of Yebisu beer can numb it.

Flaws aside, she’s not a terrible person. She means and does well by her disciples and what she doesn’t have in self-discipline, she makes up for it as caregiver to the wonderful trio. You could call it hypocritical for the problem children to take a wide berth with her after hours, but all of their problems aside, they all know they can do better and they (and myself) all wish she could also do better. This is where you’d have to make the distinction between criticism and hard judgment.

I’m still quite new to this entire franchise, as I recently wrapped up the anime series which I viewed on Netflix and I have plans to view the End of Evangelion movie, and look for the rebuild series through my usual piratical channels. So rather than tie a bow on the franchise as a whole (which would make this post a lot longer than what I have in mind), I think I’m gonna have a look at the central themes that I’ve been eyeing up. A dark series using religious mythology to tell its story with heavy biblical/mythological undertones.

I haven’t been to a formal house of worship for its sole purpose of worship at all in my life, save for accompanying practicing Catholic trainees to Church services during Basic Training, but even without thumbing through all the books of the Old and New Testaments in Catholicism, anyone can pick up on the religious undertones. The Angels have initially been described with inhumanly, grotesque works of art for their physical forms rather than their innocuous and inviting descriptions. This description is meant to ward off evil. Conversely, evil and satanic forces are typically described in a lot of Christian mythology as deceptively gorgeous, any depiction of the Devil notwithstanding as a means to steer humanity toward the course of short-term indulgence with long-term devastation yet to come. Temptation over morality, quickfire relief over long-term realization and moderation.

Looking at these key elements in NGE, we can see the series test everyone’s personal characters. Some pass with flying colors and others fail terribly, but not conclusively or it doesn’t lead to the end of the world for them. They fell out of a tree, but can still get back up, intact or limping to the hospital to get patched up. Hell, these characters didn’t enter the world cleanly, nor did they enter with hopes of terrible failure. Clashes, conflicts, and crises of the mind abound, but the unifying factor is the same one our caveman ancestors had when their grunts were gradually replaced with semi-recognizable ancient languages and dialects: survival. Human survival has always been and always will be. The dire need to boost survival in ages where crisis and chaos are law is the binding factor for all humanity, no matter who or what the threat is.

For NGE, the world couldn’t look more destroyed if it looked like the Earth from the mid-2000s’ series Skyland.

This show was one hell of a science fiction introduction to me.

Speaking of global catastrophe, take a close look at when the series debuted: October 1995, and Gainax and Tatsunoko Production licensed Anno’s brainchild to air for twenty-six episodes, the final one airing in March 1996. The mid-to-late 1990s was a halcyon era for when anxiety concerning Y2K was ripe. What would happen when we had to date our documents as 20XX instead of 19XX like we had for generations? What would become of the Internet? Would it live or lose its viability? Seems absurd to worry about this in 2026, but if you go back 30 years and played a slideshow of what the Internet would be in three decades, you might be unfavorably compared to Ted Kaczynski. Fears over the reach and influence of a brand-new technological advancement are a time-honored tradition–we behaved like this when books were being written and copied at a faster pace with the Gutenberg printing press, American slavers were about to wrestle with the question of the institution until Eli Whitney’s gin dashed that question away, the world wasn’t sure of the fate of horses once the automobile debuted and evolved, and in this day and age, creative types (myself included) ponder what will happen with artificial intelligence perfecting itself at a breakneck, Sonic the Hedgehog pace.

New tech is always gonna emerge and we’re never gonna stop looking at it with cautious curiosity. For Anno, his series is ripe for its time, even if the futuristic sci-fi elements fall into the trope of overimagining the 21st century. 20XX doesn’t automatically mean flying cars and The Jetsons overnight; that s[zip]t is gradual, incremental. So, Eva Units the size of miniature Chrysler Towers is the thing I call bulls[train siren]t on the most. Even with Angels that look like this.

Still, this is Hideaki Anno’s brilliance in real-time so why judge a cook in the kitchen?

Ironically, this meme doesn’t spoil as much of the plot as it alludes to–just a single scene late anime.

The final piece in this Eva-shaped puzzle is the fanbase. 30 years strong and this franchise still has a dedicated fanbase memeing and taking the piss out of different story beats and characters, albeit crudely and perversely at times. A lot of them also spoil different parts of the plots of the anime, manga, movies, or the Rebuild series, so being in the know is a bit like being a part of the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fandom, but unlike JoJo’s, individual scenes can’t really be taken out of context, so there isn’t a chance to see the Evangelion equivalent of Tequila Joseph in the wild.

Countless memes and such have sprung from this series, and one of my favorites that’s used as a reaction image is this:

She has never seen such bulls[!NEIN!]t before.

For what it’s worth though, at least the fanbase realizes there’s more to the series than giant robots saving the world. As I said, there’s a lot more (a LOT more) to the franchise that I have yet to dive deeper into. My timeline may delay a few posts in the future depending on what’s in store for me, but once the schedule gets back to being boringly predictable, I may be able to squeeze the rest of the franchise in somewhere for review. For NGE the TV series and the movie End of Evangelion, both are on Netflix for paying customers and on every pirate site for ne’er-do-wells law-abiding internet denizens.

I wasn’t here.