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Crime Games: An Answer to the Mobster Movie

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The trifecta is complete

Before we begin, hope you all had filling Thanksgiving festivities for those who celebrate. I went through a slight hiccup with frozen food, but the other stuff was taken care of, so nothing to worry about. Now to the post.

If you’re looking at the title and thinking, “didn’t you do this two weeks ago?” Technically, yes I did. But that was about true crime, documentaries or media next to documentaries about real life crimes that have happened before, i.e. the Five Families, the Winter Hill gang, Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, and countless other criminal figures of yesteryear, all of them inspiring many of our fictional crime lords and kingpins in other media like Gus Fring and Don Eladio in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, Clay and Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy, or for this post, most of the GTA and Mafia games’ lineup of characters. These are long-running series with colorful casts so allow me to preview the short version:

If I were a documentarian, I’d put characters like Tommy Vercetti in the bin of “Amalgamation of Prior Characters Seen in Media.” And not just him; other GTA protagonists and/or GTA moments have taken inspiration from movies released in the past. Some of the games take place in a specific time period and thus take inspiration from movies released around the same time. This video from WatchMojo.com lists different examples:

Channel: WatchMojo.com

Some of these may be easter eggs, but it goes to show how many fans of [Insert Movie Here] work or worked at RockStar. Call it a tradition to sneak some of these in, but they come in full force in GTA V, coupled with call backs to older games, including but not limited to:

  • a car that references James Bond on its license plate, equipped with spy gadgets
  • the cargo train’s registration number on the front referencing the year of the PS2’s highest selling video game (San Andreas)
  • Lester listing off successful heists initiated by prior protagonists; one of those characters being recruitable for a job later in the game
  • Michael’s special ability calling back to the bullet time mechanics of Max Payne
  • and if you wanna get technical, the five-year release gap between GTA’s IV and V, also calling back to CJ’s opening lines in San Andreas

As for real-life inspirations in the GTA series, well, that’s complicated. Vice City provides the easiest example taking inspiration from 1983’s Scarface which is a remake of the 1932 movie of the same name which was about its real-life namesake, Alphonse “Snorky/Scarface” Capone.

From my research, GTA’s influences do call back to high crime eras in American (and sometimes British history), but don’t take direct inspiration from any named criminal or mobster, comfortable to let Hollywood do it for generations before developing a love-letter masquerading as a video game. Sounds like a bit of a letdown, but a series that collects controversy like Yu-Gi-Oh! cards would probably try its hardest to let the games speak for itself, hence why RockStar’s problems weren’t in the headlines until later. Gratuitous cartoon violence was still thought of at the time as limited to Hanna-Barbera cartoons, so facsimiles of someone’s granny legging it after a gun goes off, or rural folk from D[bell noise]k-Fart, NorCal going hog wild thanks to cheat codes would be unheard of in the series’ early days.

I doubt it was much the same for the Mafia series, since that one could sneak past unnoticed, and if it did, the Mafia movie comparisons were proudly warn on its chest like a veteran’s war medals. You didn’t need to convince me that Tommy Angelo was Al Capone or that Mafia II was The Sopranos. It admits that by way of the title, and in stride. The Mafia series also heavily fictionalizes real-life locales, but thankfully offers more than the New York-Miami-Los Angeles trifecta that contemporary media blows its load over. It may just be me, but as a native New Yorker, I could do with a lot less New York. If a thousand monkeys can eventually produce Shakespeare, surely it can take a greater than or equal to number of monkeys to make modern-day Amarillo, Texas more exciting. The Coen brothers achieved that with Fargo back in the day.

So getting away from the usual three, Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven’s titular city is meant to be a fictionalization of Chicago in the 1930s, during and after Prohibition. Mafia II takes place in the mid-1940s and early-50s in Empire Bay, a fictionalized version of several East Coast cities, but having the trademark Mid-Atlantic accents that later defined New York and, depending on who you ask, Baltimore. Mafia III comes right out of left field by throwing the player into the Deep South in the 1960s, stuck between the counterculture movement at home and Vietnam abroad. Specifically, it creates a more in-depth though still fictional version of New Orleans, this time known as New Bordeaux, complete with all the neighborhoods that are said to be in New Orleans, though as I’ve writing, I’d never been. I wouldn’t mind a trip though, I hear Mardi Gras is a hoot.

So while the RockStar series is content with pure fiction, the Mafia series uses history as a jumping ground. Having said that, crime games have proven to be more imaginative than just these examples; I just have a lot of expertise in this field as an avid player of both GTA and Mafia. I believe I said this a few weeks ago, but this isn’t exclusively an American or British thing. Throw a dart on a map, and the country the dart lands on may have something next to a fictional depiction of organized crime–even if it’s beat out by a more popular neighbor. Consider how the western populace learned about organized crime in East Asia or the former Soviet Union, or how crime and law enforcement probably goes back even further than Hammurabi and Babylon.

And obviously not all crime games put you at odds with the law; sometimes it’s you flashing the badge instead of blasting away at the guys who do. Followers already know about my love life with Max Payne, but I’ve definitely watched more crime drama shows and played more games where you are the law. One of the earliest games I played called back to Max Payne: may I present to you Stranglehold:

Full disclosure, I have this game (I don’t remember how I got it, it might’ve been from a bargain bin at Target or Game Stop), but I don’t recall ever finishing it. I’d play it again, but I need to check if it’s backwards compatible with the Xbox One before I try, or failing that, emulation or a YouTube Let’s Play can be found to catch me up to speed.

All I remember is that famed Hong Kong cinema director John Woo was contacted by Midway Games, makers of NFL Blitz and Mortal Kombat, to help produce a Max Payne clone with the likes of Chow Yun-fat reprising his role as Inspector Tequila from the 1992 film Hard Boiled, which I haven’t seen. Not that seeing the movie first would put me in the right head space to play the game since I started with the game, but if it helps me get an idea of who Tequila is supposed to be then it’s a good thing it’s in my long-ass watchlist because I’ve got some time to kill.

Traditionally, video games based on movies have been notoriously terrible, but some select developers have tried their best with the material given, sometimes even expanding on the formula established. I know that RockStar paid homage to the 1979 cult classic film The Warriors with a 2005 video game based on the movie, and I remember having fun with Stranglehold, so not all of them are crapshoots.

A more memorable game featuring Hong Kong-based Triad groups came out a few years later. We all know it as Sleeping Dogs, developed by the now-defunct United Front Games and published by the still-in-business Square Enix.

This one does have the Max Payne style of combat and maneuverability. In fact, it’s not comparable to Max Payne aside from the fact that both the respective protagonists are law enforcement officers deep undercover in an organized crime syndicate, but I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s meant to be a spiritual successor to the True Crime series.

Sleeping Dogs is set in contemporary Hong Kong where the protagonist, former San Francisco police officer Wei Shen is transferred to the Hong Kong Police Force to go deep undercover in the Sun On Yee. This presents an interesting dichotomy for Shen as he’s caught between two loyalties: the Triads and the law. I’d elaborate even further, but this ventures into spoiler territory and from what I recall the latter half of the game doesn’t stay as close to this as it originally set out to. This review has more insight.

Channel: The Escapist

Then there’s L.A. Noire, which I’ve mentioned at length or featured videos and articles that have mentioned it at length before, especially the development side of things.

The gist of all this would have to be that life influences culture, I guess. This all had to come from somewhere and the North Side Gang wasn’t gonna emerge from the dirt like Adam in Genesis. But it’s a generally good way to comment on contemporary society. Other times, people just wanna tell a story and whether a million people find it mediocre or one hundred start a fan club around it, the primary focus of entertainment had been fulfilled.

For crime dramas, that succeeds in spades taking home more gold than the original California 49ers. Part of the downside to the crime drama is that it’s come under scrutiny before for inspiring similar crimes, and not just the true crime genre. Violence in media is heavily scrutinized and when it’s in a video game, it’s a media circus that brings more attention than what was previously projected. I know I’ve harped on this before, but I feel that it bears repeating. Sorry to leave on a sour note, but calling back to a video put out by Alternate History Hub: the news should stop glorifying and perpetuating violence. It’s shown time and time again to do more harm than good.

Last thing, before I properly close off: I wanted to make a post about the fourth chapter of Boruto: Two Blue Vortex, but Thanksgiving preparations kept me from properly preparing the notes. I’ll try to get one out sometime in the next week, ideally before next week’s post.

Military Novels: A Recent Discovery of Mine

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Practically just started

Before we start, concerning last week’s surprise destruction of The Escapist’s video team, the YouTube channel Clownfish TV (which I’ve recommended before) uploaded a video a few days later that I contemplated dedicating a post to, but ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth it. The minds behind the channel are staunchly independent of any corporate oversight and maintain this position above all else for a better deal in the long-run. The Escapist was bought by a conglomerate which complicated things, and while the team of Kneon and Geeky Sparkles have zero love for dishonest games journalism, part of what motivated a possible post would’ve been to correct the record and clarify what actually went on… or at least I would have.

After sitting back and analyzing what the video concerned, I realized that most of the criticism was elsewhere on The Escapist site and that one’s opinions seldom influence business rules especially from the outside looking in. For me, it didn’t feel like that because the comments section was what got to me.

It’s worth noting that this tends to be the nature of YouTube communities; channels do have their dedicated base and this often leads to biased echo chambers with again very little influence on what goes on in the afflicted realm. Also worth keeping in mind was that reporting on pop culture in any capacity is merely another day in the office for Clownfish TV. Malice can’t be assumed all things considered. As for the community, the one piece of advice that works for me is to get the entire story before judgment is passed. Get all the context and then give your final thoughts.

Now for the real topic I want to write about: military novels. Personally, I’ve never been all that interested in them, and since I’ve been around on r/Army, reading the occasional news stories of controversies surrounding the special forces community in particular, I’ve held a dash of skepticism to go along with what describe as a Heroic Tit-wank in Print form. If you don’t know, special forces like Army Green Berets or Rangers, Navy SEALs, Recon Marines, Air Force Combat Controllers and all of them tend to get the Hollywood treatment more often than not. I’m not saying they don’t deserve the recognition for their sacrifices, their missions, their stories, but they’re not exactly a monolith.

For every Medal of Honor recipient of any capacity like Dan Daly or Ralph Puckett or Alwyn Cashe, there’s also these guys making fools of themselves:

Credit: Getty Images

Credit: Getty Images

Clearly, the worst or more embarrassing stories of the military’s finest aren’t reflective of everyone including the HR folks or the intelligence or signal branches or anyone else who sees it as just another job, but sometimes it gives me pause for thought. As a history buff, I do like military history as well. The Elusive Samurai motivated me to research the Kenmu Restoration and the Ashikaga Shogunate in medieval Japan, for instance, and more than once I’ve done some light research on Civil War battle orders or even the Roman Empire, among numerous other things.

Channel: Metatron

Before even entertaining the idea of the military as a whole, the movies and whatnot all seemed so cool. Call of Duty and Battlefield led the way in cinematic experiences and memorable characters. After watching some more movies, and going to basic training myself, it’s safe to say that if you’ve been in the military — any military — you’re preconceptions are going to be challenged and your newfound knowledge on how things go in the real military will ruin a lot of movies for you.

Prior to shipping, I thought the boot camp portion of Full Metal Jacket was the highlight of that movie, primarily because of the characters: Joker, Pyle, Cowboy, and Gunny Hartman all make that movie, but stepping back from that, it’s divided first into how Marines are trained (sort of), followed by an active combat deployment to South Vietnam. The greatest irony of that movie is that for an anti-war film, so many incoming recruits watch and quote it ad infinitum, and expectedly so. The actors are the highlights of the movie and if it wasn’t for R. Lee Ermey and the jelly doughnut scene, then it probably wouldn’t have the same influence as it does almost 40 years post-release.

In the veteran community, lots and lots of media is heavily scanned and scrutinized based on what we’re all taught in boot camp and when we go off to train for the occupation we chose or have chosen for us based on test scores. This explains why movies like Generation Kill and the Hollywood misfit In The Army Now are more beloved amongst veterans and servicemembers compared to something like Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, or The Hurt Locker. Even vets who’ve never deployed to a combat zone (yes, this happens, ask around) will tell you that an overwhelming majority of the time is spent waiting to do something and that something goes by exceptionally fast. Such urgency…

Also, fair warning: the military has a frat house mentality. Keep in mind the ages of the people signing up.

So I’ve been rattling on over about military/war media and the reception based on the community viewing it, but I haven’t mentioned what I’ve been reading. As I said, I hardly ever had an interest, even in passing about these kinds of things, and even over time, now that I’ve been in a military training environment, I trend quite lightly these days. You’re drilled day and night about how to properly wear a uniform and even mishaps in film can get a vet’s dander up more so than stolen valor incidents.

I try my best not to overanalyze this stuff or make a monolith or standard-bearer of military/war media since a lot of it is for the public and like a lot of their real-life units, the special forces movies tend to play by their own rules. My rule for whether I should give something a watch or a read is wide reception. Even if the community hates it, it’s not good to let those opinions overtake or form future opinions on XYZ. But so far I have been enjoying Generation Kill, and I do like Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk. Some of these I’m introduced to by proxy and they wind up being pretty good.

For Generation Kill, I went for the book first for comparison to the HBO miniseries. Nearly done with the book and the show so I might come back with some final thoughts. And getting back to controversies in the special forces community, there was one book that caught my eye. I don’t remember how I found it, but it’s called Code over Country by Matthew Cole. It’s based on the wide range of corruption and lax oversight within Navy SEAL Team Six. Once I get my hands on the book and get through reading it, I’ll try to make an effort to give my thoughts. Bear in mind, most vets and servicemembers won’t run into anything close to a special forces unit and for security reasons, most of what they do isn’t revealed until after the fact, so corroborating what I hear will have to be done by way of news reports like those featured on Military Times or its branch specific variants.

This post was kind of a misnomer all around, but before I close off, I want to make a case for the manga series Golden Kamuy.

I say this is a military series for a lot of the obvious reasons: veterans of a major war (Russo-Japanese War), active duty soldiers in uniform, commanders doling out orders by their judgment, and more. But it also takes the tropes of traditional westerns like those of the Clint Eastwood or Dances with Wolves variety.

I have a post in the pipeline regarding Golden Kamuy itself so look forward to it in the next few weeks. I’ll elaborate further on my case then.

The Escapist’s Dire Straits

Tiberius1 Comment

Bad luck for Escapist Magazine

I planned on making a post about this soon after the news came out, but I was waiting on more information relating to the news to come out. I was also busy with other real-world stuff, so if I’m able, this should be up either late Monday night or early Tuesday morning.

If you hadn’t heard yet, The Escapist’s video team resigned en masse following the firing of their editor-in-chief Nick Calandra. Nick’s firing was preceded by The Escapist’s parent company Gamurs placing impossible deadlines and goals for him and the team to meet and when he didn’t live up to those standards, he got the sack. Everyone, myself included, sees corporate avarice biting them in the ass with this since Nick oversaw a close-knit ship since most of his coworkers quit to join him for greener pastures. For more information on the situation from last week, see this video by YongYea:

Channel: YongYea

Gamurs bought the site in 2022 and seem to now be regretting their decision to axe Nick and by extension the entire video team. Some of The Escapist’s recent additions like Cold Take, Stuff of Legends, and other stuff is still available to view on the channel and seem to predate the The Escapist as told by some of the video team’s recently resigned members, but one of the major casualties out of this was the popular review series Zero Punctuation. Yahtzee explained in a stream last week that he was going to continue reviewing video games on his site, Fully Ramblomatic, which also predates ZP’s lineup in The Escapist, but whether The Escapist under Gamurs’ wing is gonna toss it for good or try something with the ZP license, I can’t say with certainty. All I know is what everyone knows about it in that Yahtzee couldn’t take ZP with him which is why he’s reviewing on Fully Ramblomatic. It might retain the Wednesday noon schedule as ZP but again it remains to be seen.

As for where it’s all going to go, the team relaunched and got back to business as usual by launching Second Wind.

https://twitter.com/nickjcal/status/1721947986735812769
Account: @nickjcal

This isn’t sponsored or anything. I’m making this to say that as a fan of ZP and of The Escapist’s other shows, like Jimquisition, the aforementioned, Stuff of Legends, Cold Take, 3 Minute Review, their livestreams, etc. that it’s terrible that the owners were so tunnel visioned that they’d axe a well-beloved member of the team, but looking at how well they bounced back into the fold on their own, I’m happy that they haven’t been too badly affected by the surprise changes.

Also, I’m putting this up as a YouTube recommendation. After the controversy earlier this year with Blair Zon of the iilluminaughtii, I expected another redacted recommendation to be controversy related or if the channel was mysteriously vanished. While I will keep my recommendation up for The Escapist until further notice, mainly as an archive, I’m also recommending Second Wind because the main video personalities have migrated their to continue their craft unimpeded.

https://www.youtube.com/@SecondWindGroup/featured

As it stands, the channel has yet to set everything up, but by December or even January, it should start looking like a proper YouTube channel so get ready for that.

Long-awaited Update

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Doing what I should’ve done about a month ago.

Hello, subscribers and tourists catching this on the fly. I’m known as the one who publishes ironically non-controversial takes on entertainment, mostly video games and animanga as of late. As I recall, the only hot takes I have on hand are these three:

1. Kratos did nothing wrong (sorta)

2. Boruto is slightly above average, and;

3. Chainsaw Man was predictable (to me)

And some others that might be expressed in the future. I’m writing to inform you all of something I should have updated everyone on in October 2023. After ten long years, I’d finally self-published my book. It’s called Dawn of Freedom. It’s a fictional crime story set in the early 2010s in New York, which was modern-day when I wrote it years ago. I’d struggled trying to navigate the publishing world and had to rewrite the manuscript multiple times, but I pushed through and saw it come to print. If you’d like to check it out, I have an Amazon link below for you.

PROOF: Dawn of Freedom https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJSWNHSG?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

Available in print and ebook form.

The Hunt for Unsung Manga

Tiberius2 Comments

I’ve come across a lot of manga series over the years, and while I don’t remember all of them, if I had something similar to My Anime List, I’d probably rank the ones I’ve read or heard of in terms of read (past tense), reading, going to read, or no interest; and based on what I’ve recommended across this blog this year, I’d say that there’s going to be a lot of series that the average manga reader has never heard of or can’t find through conventional means. However long you’ve read manga or watched some of their corresponding anime, you’ve undeniably heard of series like Naruto, Bleach, Dragon Ball, or One Piece. And you know some recent trendsetters by name: Attack on Titan, Sword Art Online, KonoSuba, My Hero Academia, etc.

But be honest with me: before reading some of my entries from this year, did you ever know about Wave, Listen to Me? Or Rokudenashi Blues? How about House of Five Leaves? Mashle? Black Torch? No? Well, that’s to be expected. Some of these have only recently gotten their well-earned press and praise and the others rode that ship ages ago. Rokudenashi, for instance, is from the 1980s and it shows.

Only JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure still looks like this.

This quest of mine to find and screen through manga we’ve never heard of or haven’t heard much about is in equal measures personal and exciting. Personally, I don’t mind much of the series that get praised online these days or even IRL, but sometimes the praise can be a bit much. Although I enjoyed Chainsaw Man, my previous excursion with Black Torch by Tsuyoshi Takaki subconsciously colored my perception of the anime. It took me a while to realize how similar they were in structure, but fortunately for Tatsuki Fujimoto, CSM is more comical in comparison. Takaki’s manga seems to have been a victim of the times.

As for the excitement, call it the general sense of joy that comes with discovering something new. And it’s not these are hard to find. Google and Bing are likely to have them indexed and sites like Mangadex may have it in the archives. As for discovering the series myself, some series were the result of accidental Google searches. Others came from digging through the Manga Plus front page or reading an article about supposedly underrated series.

This one specifically came from when I was trying to Google Do You Love Your Mom, AKA the MILF-sekai.

Alternatively, there’s online forums dedicated to discussing manga, the most common one for me being Reddit. It is worth keeping in mind that sites like this will have a younger audience (i.e. early middle school to middle high school age), so what was popular when you were graduating is gonna be seen as old by the time some of these users are your age. I’m writing from personal experience and the weight of this gap is felt for me, but hey, at least Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon still make the rounds, even through memes.

Another point to bear in mind is availability. There’s a difference between knowing the name of a series and knowing where to read it. Mangadex is a weeb’s go-to for series that are running but can’t be easily found, but there’s a chance the series in particular is available to the public in some form or another elsewhere. The only barrier in that aspect would perhaps be the age of the reader or just a trip to the local bookstore. Any Barnes & Noble employee worth their salt would know better than to let a high schooler go home with a raunchy series, but let’s be real there’s always a loophole. Grab a friend who’s older than 18 or go online like everyone else.

Going back to Mangadex, there’s no shortage there of the big four genres of Shonen, Seinen, Shojo and Josei, but if you want something 18+/hentai, then Mangadex will not help you. Even these sites have their limits, and that’s fine. Digging through a pirate site that’ll have what you’re looking for is tricky. In my experience, some pirate sites are overridden with pop-up ads that open a new tab bursting with malware, and it isn’t always when looking for hentai. Some Korean manhwa get scanned and translated into multiple languages by groups advertising these services on donation/contributor sites like Patreon, and many of the pirate sites that they end up on are all third party hosts.

Other sites like Webtoon or Toomics do host them free of all the issues that come with a pirate site, but sometimes have a string or two attached. I’m not lambasting these sites for putting walls up to entry. That’s what deserves praise. It may sound odd of me to admit to pirating while also condemning it, but I’ve been clear on where I stand on that. For some things that, thanks to the passage of time, have grown increasingly difficult to find conventionally, piracy is the most convenient* way to experience it firsthand; and I apply these same rules for series that have concluded or ongoing series that aren’t available in your region (*it’s not always reliable though).

For something ongoing, general or NSFW audience notwithstanding, if you’ve got the means to do so, it’s heavily implored that official releases are supported and as tempting as it is to head for the raw, untranslated version, I won’t act like I have the authority to stop you but for some series, unless you can read and speak fluent Japanese or Korean, I don’t recommend pulling double duty running the dialogue and speech bubbles through Google Translate. Depending on how it’s written, straight translations will contain slang and references that are gonna get lost that way. Translate has gotten better over the years, but it’s no substitute for a structured class. And finally, these languages have scripts that can and do show up as calligraphic works of art. I find it beautiful, but tracing the damn characters into Translate, especially on mobile, gets tedious quickly.

Now I’ve not abandoned or wholly used uncommon means of getting to my favorite series. I recently downloaded the Shonen Jump app on my phone and I have a tab on my computer logged into Manga Plus, and true to the title of this week’s post, I’ve discovered a new manga series that I’d like to explore further called Beat & Motion.

Take this as more of an exploration for how to discover new or underappreciated series and my experiences doing so. My method of doing so, though, is quite slapdash and haphazard, so if there’s a more sensible way of going about this, use that method to the fullest extent. Only go on sites you trust, and please use a VPN of some kind. Opera and its GX variant go a long way, but if you have the means to my recommendations come from those that I’ve seen sponsored on YouTube including but not limited to Dashlane, Atlas, Express, Nord, and Private Internet Access. I like to think everyone is in wide agreement that nothing ruins the fun of reading manga/watching anime more than when a simple mouse click puts you on a site with malware on it.

But of course remember to have fun with what you find.

Black Lagoon Motherf[sheep noises]r

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*gunshots*

This series needs no introduction. It’s famous in the animanga circle for its name, its reputation, its characters, its violence and most of all its f[Boost mobile chirp]ng swear count.

Channel: Edwin De Paz

It’s mostly famous by its anime, but it started off as a manga by Rei Hiroe in April 2002 and has run ever since in the Seinen manga magazine Gene-X, for far, far longer than the anime and its OVA ever did. The clip above (which is understandably though unfortunately age-restricted) is one I will see sometimes on YouTube or Reddit because of course. It’s badass, it’s f[monkey screeches]ng awesome, but around the gratuitous gory action is an appropriately mature story.

I don’t remember when or how I learned of Black Lagoon, but I think it was through some WatchMojo clips about anime gunslingers that introduced me to the series, and it wasn’t until I was in the middle of college that I got around to watching it properly. Before we begin describing the series, no matter your opinion on subs or dubs, I heavily implore you to watch it however you can in English. I mean zero disrespect or offense to the original Japanese VAs, but the writing of the dub makes all the swearing necessary. F[gun cocking]k hits far harder in this anime when accompanied by the sounds of a firing range in comparison.

The premise is this: in the mid-1990s, Tokyo-based salaryman 25-year-old Rokuro “Rock” Okajima and a department chief are hijacked in the South China Sea by a trio of pirates onboard the Black Lagoon PT boat and calling themselves Lagoon Company. The chief leaves Rock to his fate and he joins up with Lagoon Company’s members consisting of Vietnam vet Dutch, Chinese-American gunslinger Rebecca “Revy” Lee, and South Florida computer programmer, Benny.

As the fourth face of Lagoon Company, Rock is the glorified diplomat if Dutch is unavailable, especially since there’s an equal or greater amount of time on land than on sea, mostly in the fictional border city of Roanapur, Thailand. This base of theirs is also home to many more organized crime syndicates the world over including but not limited to Colombian cartels, Russian and Sicilian mobs, the Triads, and the Yakuza.

As for the cast of characters Lagoon Company faces, it’s quite a mixed bag. Just about everyone in the story is motivated by coin, though there’s a fair few who have their own ideals and tenets, not all of them savory or agreeable. Criminals, extremist organizations, drug lords, and general psychopaths are drawn like moths to flame.

Hiroe’s inspiration for Black Lagoon was inspired in triplicate: news reports about piracy in the South China Sea from the 1990s (hence the setting), the writing drew from a variety of influence like Stephen King and James Ellroy, filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and John Woo, and overall crime noir and Hong Kong action cinema, and other mangaka like Kenichi Sonoda who created Gunsmith Cats (another series I wish to cover one day) and Akihiro Ito who created Geobreeders.

The characters and setting are all diverse in appearance and in skillset, especially protagonist Rock who skirts by on a lack of battle sense with the powers of negotiation and diplomacy. The setting of Roanapur among other places would make the guy an ill fit since he’s not really seen as bloodthirsty as the others, but then again, the wider cast of characters is exactly that unpredictable, or (spoiler incoming) you wouldn’t really expect a guy like this to be an arsonist, would you?

Speaking of which, this speaks to the creativity of Hiroe, understanding that there’s no bog-standard look for a criminal. Some dress in suits, others are tattered, and the rest are casually dressed. The same goes for some of the child characters in the show. Conceptually, almost everything is thrown into the kitchen sink when designing a character and putting them in the story.

As for the chapters themselves, Hiroe has stated in interviews that unlike mangaka who release weekly chapters, he employs a slower approach, often taking as long as a month to release a new chapter, and normally for two reasons: to avoid burnout experienced by mangaka of several popular series still running, and also for mental health reasons. For what its worth, if the research for the series has him glued to news screens and snippets combing over crime on international waters, then it can get daunting keeping it plausible yet exciting. Or if its a series of other things that see him taking multiple hiatuses from Black Lagoon, then whatever happens, the series already gets high praise online and in real life from Japanese and western audiences alike, and not to sign a Death Note of sorts, but even in the worst case scenario, his flagship series will progress toward an ending, even if it isn’t him specifically who will finish it.

Someone will be there to finish it, with him or for him. And no matter what, Black Lagoon started with a bang and I sure hope that when it eventually ends, it ends with a f[swords clanging]ng bang.

This week’s recommendation is the YouTube channel RunJDRun.

https://www.youtube.com/@runJDrun/about

RunJDRun is the gaming channel of John David “JD” Witherspoon, son of late comedian John Witherspoon. Beginning in June 2009, he hosts Let’s Plays primarily on this channel either by himself or with friends, but also has commentary videos on video games or just in general. JD also has a podcast that he co-hosts with his friend Paul. He normally uploads daily, and like his father, he also has TV appearances and performs stand-up from time to time in the Los Angeles area.

How I Found VTubers

Tiberius2 Comments

Like most things, it was slow and steady

The topic of VTubers is somewhat old hat as of writing this so nothing I write will be new, but my posts since the beginning have mostly always been like that so structurally, nothing’s changing. As for the topic itself, others have mentioned VTubers in the past before and more succinctly so I won’t go into the history as much here. But in case you’re curious on what VTubers are, Gigguk is down below to catch you up to speed. Granted, the video is from October 2020, but all things considered the landscape hasn’t changed all that much.

Channel: Gigguk

All in all, there’s some debate over the beginning of VTubing, but it’s widely accepted that the VTuber Kizuna Ai is the one to spread the idea and popularize it worldwide. Kizuna Ai debuted in November 2016, and many more have followed, mostly of Japanese origin though several from outside Japan, notably the U.S. and U.K. have had their own similar debuts. It wasn’t until 2020, that I was exposed to many of the VTubers mentioned in the video above and the talent agencies (known as tarentos in Japan) that host them and these days many of the notable and newer ones have in some manner populated my feed.

Call me paranoid and nonsensical, but I’d never had that much trust in a machine or any such program. The irony to this was that when I was in Army boot camp initially, I was set for a military occupational specialty (MOS) that would’ve had me working with telecoms networking at the time and here I am with a man vs. technology complex. It’s not all that special, humans have always looked at the strange and foreign with suspicion, but for me it’s just irrational. When I was 16, I binged all the Terminator movies in the lead up to the great disappointment known as Terminator: Genisys and I’ve always chalked that up to the reason I look at new tech with the stink eye.

Nowadays, I don’t really mind the direction AI tech is going since most of the time we’re merely putting in silly prompts and in my case, general history questions. Could we one day mess around and find out Skynet style? Who knows? We’ve got to wait and see. For my exposure to VTubers, it wasn’t around 2019 going into ’20 that I’d gotten more exposure, mostly by proxy through the Trash Taste Podcast when the boys invited VTuber Mori Calliope to the show.

Channel: Trash Taste

And it wouldn’t be the only time a VTuber appeared on the podcast or even individually with the boys on their own channels. Speaking of Kizuna Ai, Joey had her on his channel a few years ago. Gigguk did a few rare collabs with the likes of Hime Hajime, and followers of CDawgVA, the thickest Welsh boy, are very familiar with his dear friend Ironmouse and the pathetic VTuber Rainhoe. These are all jokes, of course. Check them all out when you have the time.

I’d say that VTubers like these helped introduce me to others in my feed as well as the talent agencies that host them. As explained by Gigguk in the first video here, some of the appeal of VTubers comes from the personality themselves and/or the associated lore, other times there’s something unique that comes with VTubers especially in the realm of video gaming where you’ll find a lot of them, and the rest of the time they’re recounting humorous or embarrassing stories or otherwise screwing around. No matter how many clips I find in my feed, this one of VTuber Amano Pikamee making a JoJo reference is always a personal favorite of mine.

Channel: Giobun

But even outside the realm of traditional entertainment, sometimes YouTubers outside Japan have jumped aboard the trend themselves for a variety of reasons and purposes. Back in April, I recommended the YouTube channel Rev Says Desu for his commentary on controversies in and around the anime community, notably in online forums like Twitter. Rev himself uses a VTuber model in his videos and often due to the nature of the content within his videos, he’s normally subject to demonetization at the least and harassment at the most, largely because many of the people he puts on blast from Twitter are a minority of firebrands. Most of Twitter isn’t like that I’m aware, but this is more of a problem of popular and social media giving a lot of power to people who demonstrate that they shouldn’t have it. An age-old bugbear that should’ve been exterminated years ago.

On a more lighthearted note, the messing around, joke around, fun type of VTuber is the kind that has its appeal the world over and has inspired individuals outside Japan as well as English language options being made available for Japan-based VTubers, including but not limited to those associated with the Nijisanji and/or Hololive agencies, sometimes spawning collabs and memes especially in forums like r/Animemes or its sister forum r/goodanimemes. For a while, Gawr Gura and Watson Amelia were featured quite a bit in these subs as one example.

Creator: phdpigeon

And there’s lots more fanart and such to go around.

For my mileage, I’ve come to accept that VTubers are another arm of Japanese pop culture jumping ship and spreading to the rest of the world and rapidly. As Gigguk had mentioned in the above video, some would argue that it’s a fad, a passing fancy, but 2024 is down the street and we still have VTubers debuting these days long after Kizuna Ai helped break the mold, most likely with aid from pioneers from years before. Whatever comes after VTubers I think it’ll be a while before we see it.

This week’s recommendation is a channel known as The4thSnake.

https://www.youtube.com/@The4thSnake/about

I’ve mentioned this channel on other posts before. This channel is dedicated mainly to fighting games, their lore, and individual plot points, but takes it a step further by mentioning the plots of specific characters over the course of a series’ timeline, clarifying messy plot points, among other stuff. The4thSnake specializes in Mortal Kombat lore and collabs loads of times with another channel I’ve mentioned before: TrueUnderDawgGaming. And since Mortal Kombat 1 has been out for about a month at this point, both of them are set to capitalize on the new lore brought about by this latest installment of Mortal Kombat.

BLACK TORCH Had Potential

Tiberius4 Comments

Wasted potential sadly

Regular readers know the nature of this blog: obscure, unheard of, niche unsung series; and occasionally something popular that’s ongoing. Following that trend, I bring to you a manga that not only had a small fanbase for its duration, but was also cancelled before it could spread its wings and take proper flight: Black Torch by Tsuyoshi Takaki

I caught onto this quite early in 2017. It’s first chapter was included in a manga published by Viz Media about upcoming series at the time, and fun fact: this same manga showcase series had the first chapter of Demon Slayer in it.

Black Torch is about a young man named Jiro Azuma, a street punk who has the gift of Eliza Thornberry — talking to animals. One day, he meats a Mononoke taking the form of a black cat called Rago who tells him (with a cynical tone) that there are many more Mononoke like him who exist to cause chaos in the world. One of them mortally wounds Jiro and Rago possesses the boy, bringing him back to life and they defeat the Mononoke that killed him, only for he and Rago to be subdued by a special operations unit trained in shinobi martial arts for the purpose of tracking and eliminating evil Mononoke.

There’s some nuance to the plot. In Japanese folklore, Mononoke are perceived the same way as demons here in the West; wicked creatures who lurk in the dark and take possession of the innocent. The concept is similar in Japan, though in Black Torch, as seen in Rago and one or two other characters, not all Mononoke are pure evil. And for Rago’s case, well, he’s a cat and I think cat owners can relate to this aspect.

So let’s rewind and assess that for a bit. A demon that takes the shape of a household pet takes possession of an adolescent after he dies in a violent manner, and both the demon and the young man are recruited into a special division of demon hunters whose mission is to destroy the evil demons, sometimes working with the good ones or those not powerful enough to be a world-ending threat. Where have I heard that plot before?

You can chalk this up more so to coincidence than an outright ripoff of sorts. Black Torch ran for five volumes between December 2016 and March 2018. CSM debuted December 2018 and is still running today. No doubt you’ve seen what the community regards as season 1 of the anime. I know I did. 12 different ending themes; imagine being the accountant for MAPPA.

It’s easy to make it look like I’m jealous that a manga that tried this first failed while another one succeeded, but delving deeper into the Black Torch manga reveals why. It was more than just the framework of the manga. Yonks ago, I learned that a dispute between Takaki and the publisher were why his manga was axed so early in its run. In my research for this post, I found that online discourse has its own opinions for why the manga suffered. In animanga spaces around forums like Reddit, some believe that it was trying to copy Bleach but was about a decade late and a yen short. Others thought it was a case of style over substance. And a third opinion, by this blog called Tower City Media Video, proclaims that the second biggest killer was pacing. I’d like to go over these points, though I won’t be talking about the publication issue since most of the time that stuff is handled away from public eyes, presumably to keep the press from ruining an ongoing process.

It’s not like there’s no market for edgy manga. Bleach, Tokyo Ghoul, Chainsaw Man and even Black Torch have that approach among others, but they all do it differently. Chainsaw Man does it by having the protagonist be an orphan with missing limbs thanks to his deadbeat dad’s irresponsible debt to the Yakuza, and when the boy can’t make a dent in that he’s chopped into pieces until best boy Pochita possesses and revives those pieces. Black Torch goes more for a rug pull of sorts. Jiro lives with his grandfather who generally has the strength of other old men in manga like Golden Kamuy’s Youichirou the Manslayer or Naruto’s Third Hokage. In fact, there’s a scene in the manga where Jiro is forced to fight his grandfather who plans to kill him and then end his own life for failing to protect his grandson from the Mononoke as well as letting a Mononoke possess him, only to walk it back as a test of conviction when Jiro fights back just as hard, as explained by this Screen Rant article.

As for style over substance, this one is a bit of a stretch for me personally. There’s no shortage of good looking series that don’t have a lot beneath the surface, but that’s not a problem I recall from Black Torch in particular. Really, without the space needed to take flight, the hints that there was a deeper story than we realize are mostly lost. I mentioned earlier that it shows that this unit of shinobi is willing to work with some of the Mononoke so long as they’re harmless, but that may also hint at a sort of mutual exchange between unlikely partners. But now that the manga’s been long cancelled, who knows whether that’s the case?

The final one by Tower City Media about turtle pacing was something I didn’t notice at first, but after reading that article and looking back, if the manga could’ve done better to pick up the pace, it probably wouldn’t have been cancelled so soon, if at all. Rago the cat isn’t the only animal Jiro talks with. In the beginning, he used to have a dog that he often spoke with while washing her, and I recall in the third volume that while he was traipsing about the woods, he spoke with a snake.

I joke, but Orochimaru wouldn’t look all that out of place in a manga like this.

If any of these points are true or there’s another factor contributing to Black Torch’s cancellation, then what may have helped Takaki would’ve been to trim the fat, get a move on with the pacing, and add more character to the characters. Jiro Azuma does well enough to make himself interesting, but he couldn’t carry the manga by himself, and going back to coincidences between Black Torch and Chainsaw Man, both had their own version of the super serious stoic type, but thankfully for CSM, Aki wasn’t copy-pasted twelve times over.

For all of Black Torch’s faults, it was at least able to end with a whimper as opposed to a bang. At least it didn’t run around like a headless chicken trying to end with an overdue bang. When I bought the manga during college, Viz charged $10 per volume up from $8 from around 15 years ago, and at five volumes, $50 plus tax is cheap for a cancelled series compared to the 20-something box sets of Demon Slayer or the 72 volumes in triplicate box sets for the Naruto manga. But of course, if you want the story that did it better, it’s not too late to catch up on Chainsaw Man.

It’s a month divisible by 2 and for this month’s recommendation is Escapist Magazine.

https://www.youtube.com/@theescapist/about

Beginning as a video game journalism site by Nick Calandra in 2005, The Escapist has branched out into general media with classic series like Yahtzee Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation, Jim Sterling’s Jimquisition, Movie Bob’s the Big Picture and many more. Although they have a YouTube channel (linked above), they also have a website where their series are hosted before being made public on YouTube.

www.escapistmagazine.com

No, they’re not sponsoring me, impressive as that may be. I’m just a fan.

Good for Nothing Blues: A Delinquent’s Manga

Tiberius1 Comment

More unsung manga recs

Back into the fold with a manga that I genuinely tried to research reviews for but this time I came up short. Google helps with pages of individual reviews on different sites, but video reviews are what’s lacking. A quick search on YouTube (as of this writing) brings me to about seven or eight videos that don’t really have a great audience number collectively, only a few cracking a thousand views, at least on English YouTube; Japanese YT has more to talk about it seems. On the one hand, I want to see that change, but on the other hand, the subject matter of what I’m about to talk about in this post may highlight why this is for the best.

The manga I bring to you is called Rokudenashi Blues, known alternatively as Good For Nothing Blues.

I’ve made a small mention of this manga in earlier post (can’t remember which one), but here I’d like to elaborate on what it’s about. Created by Masanori Morita, it ran from May 1988 to February 1997 in Shueisha, spawned several OVAs, a couple of films and TV dramas with the most recent one listed having run for the summer of 2011 in Japan on the Nippon TV network.

It’s about a highschooler named Taison Maeda, a bullheaded delinquent who dreams of becoming a world-class boxer, racking up a gnarly fight count along the way. In Japan from around the late 1970s to the early 90s, the delinquent subculture is more of a lifestyle than an indicator of anything more sinister; it’s not like Japanese delinquents have ties to the Yakuza or anything else organized crime-like. Some do or did, but they’d be the outlier, not the standard. For an idea of what a delinquent is in media, look no further than Jotaro Kujo or Yusuke Urameshi.

The first discernable aspect of the delinquent is to compare them to any other student. The delinquent’s hair is loose, long, messy, or sometimes combed into a pompadour; their uniforms are loose-fitting and scruffy with unfastened buttons, and in some cases they’re elaborately decorated with kanji or any other lettering or symbolism. I’m not sure if there’s a meaning behind it; some depictions I can see relate to luck or strength, so that might be a theme with select individuals who partake.

It should also be highlighted that it wasn’t exclusively a boys thing to engage in delinquent culture — girls did it too. In contrast with their more studious counterparts, girl delinquents, or sukeban, wore longer skirts, down to the ankle, and also tended to have their hair as messy as their male counterparts. Of all the examples of a sukeban in media, the best example comes from the movie Sukeban Deka, a Shoujo manga that has climbed to popularity thanks to its live-action adaptation.

If this aesthetic looks familiar, there was a bit of a crossover between the greasers of the 1950s in the US and the punks of the 70s and 80s in the US, UK, and Australia. So keep this in mind when you come across Japanese media from the 80s or 90s; it’s a classic. Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, delinquents have fallen to the wayside while gyarus and by extension the kogal has taken over with media featuring the subculture still slated for release in the near future.

But I think nostalgia will either bring the delinquent back, or put the archetype side-by-side with the gyaru.

In Rokudenashi Blues, the protagonist Maeda and at times his friends, Katsuji and Yoneji clash with rivals first within the school and then in different parts of the Tokyo Metropolis as the series progresses, sort of like the huge fight between different middle schools in Mob Psycho 100.

The clashes with these numbskulls are weekly, if not daily, and the popularity of the delinquent’s outfit makes it easy to lose among the scuffle, but in both a character design and personality sense, there’s a few that stand out from the mold: Wajima and Hatanaka.

Wajima’s designed to be a physically imposing character. Think of your typical brawler or weightlifter body type from a beat ’em up video game. He leads one of the groups known as the Cheer Squad in the school and these guys have fought with Maeda and co. at times. Personality-wise, he’s as bullheaded and shortsighted as Maeda, at least in the beginning. I’m still reading the manga so it remains to be seen how he grows as a character.

Another one who mirrors Maeda in looks, but succeeds him in overall intelligence would be Yutaro Hatanaka. These two have clashing goals and in classic Shonen Jump fashion, he’s set up as the rival to Maeda, but unlike him, Hatanaka has a clear plan that he can recite with steps toward his final goal. Basically, what I’m saying is, he seems to be more studious and articulate with his thoughts, though when it’s time to play rough he can do it in stride. He’s a bit like Sasuke though far less brooding and more laidback compared to the energetic Maeda. It also remains to be seen how he grows over the course of the manga. I have a few ideas on the trajectory, but I want to see the surprise for myself.

The art style of the manga may also be familiar to fans of Fist of the North Star/Hokuto no Ken, and the reason for that is because the mangaka, Masanori Morita, previously worked as an assistant for the creator of Fist of the North Star, Tetsuo Hara.

This art style became the face of 1980s action manga with several mangaka taking elements from Hara’s magnum opus. It was a ground breaking inspiration for many creators over the years and according to some accounts serves as the main inspiration for characters like Jonathan Joestar and Dio Brando. Several more characters of this caliber would follow over the years, but it’s hard to say how many were developed in a vacuum or took on the shape of Kenshiro in some capacity.

I stumbled upon this manga after I remembered an article that mentioned other underrated series a few years ago and went to explore some of those suggestions for myself. In fact, on another blog, I talked about one of those series after watching it from start to finish on YouTube; it was the series House of Five Leaves/Sarai-ya Go You by Natsume Ono.

I plan on redoing it on this blog one day as I wasn’t all that proud of what I said in the last one.

Even if you’re not one for boxing or sports in general, I still give Rokudenashi Blues a solid recommendation. It’s got a lot of heart and it’s not exactly the most complex sports manga ever, but the manga focuses more so on the characters and their lives as they go (read: brawl) through school and later, as I’ve been told, through other schools. I may return with an update once I’m finished with the manga, though that’s not a fixed and consistent schedule so it remains to be seen.

The Mortal Kombat Game that Never Was

Tiberius1 Comment

Growing pains

Mortal Kombat 1 released on September 19, 2023 and continues with the new continuity left over from the last game MK11. For a recap, MK 2011 (MK9) retold the story of the first three arcade games but with twists. MK X can be considered a divergent timeline than what was seen in Mortal Kombat 4 and Deadly Alliance. MK 11 is what I personally consider a joining together of Deception and Armageddon, and the new game goes full circle.

I had the pleasure of watching the YouTube channel MKIceAndFire play the game from start to finish, I believe with a review copy. I won’t spoil too much for the game, but continuing the trend of reboots, rehashes, and retcons like a late 2010s Marvel or DC Comic there are some changes that I welcome and some I think could’ve been done better. Of those I won’t change: Fire God Liu Kang.

From 1992 to 2023, seeing this franchise evolve over the years is amazing as a fan, so in celebration, I thought today I’d take a look at the franchise’s attempts at spinoffs; and I exclusively mean spinoffs, so updates like Ultimate MK3, Mortal Kombat Gold, or MK vs DC don’t count as most of these are laid out the same as their main contemporaries and don’t do anything different from the others or if they do, not enough.

Video games spawning spinoffs and spiritual successors is a time-honored tradition. Sleeping Dogs succeeds True Crime, the BioShock series to System Shock, and several others. Generally focusing on individual characters or inventing something new comes easy to video games and Mortal Kombat does that in spades, many times over. The first success coming from 2004’s Deception.

By himself, Shujinko’s journey across the realms to gather the Kamidogu though (spoiler) under false pretenses is a solid and interesting story to follow. The boy who dreamt of great things. As an addition to the MK franchise, his story definitely stands out while also adhering to age-old kung fu cinema tropes like that of the wise old foolish master. A combining of the old and new, though he’s currently limited to the 3D era with few references beyond that.

Fortunately, there’s a spinoff that by all accounts is considered perfect. Fluidic combat, leveling abilities, a reimagining of the characters, and a great big tournament with traversable realms, along with a co-operative mode. It’s MK: Shaolin Monks.

With all that had occurred in the franchise’s history, I like to think of this game itself along with the Konquest modes of Deception and Armageddon as culminations of what worked in the past coupled with new ideas that carried these games in particular to new heights. Having said that and considering the title of this post, it’s not hard to see the struggles endured by the franchise.

With even some main games struggling at the first hurdle, some of the updated versions helped somewhat to pick up the slack and can thus be forgiven for their faults. Few games age as well as some others. For spinoffs, though, Ed Boon and John Tobias seemingly had a desire to branch out beyond the main Mortal Kombat tournament or reimagine it somehow. The ideas they had were interesting, but the execution wasn’t what it could’ve been.

Starting with the first of these, the 1997 spinoff featuring the failed Mythologies series.

The Development section of the game’s Wikipedia page states that John Tobias wanted Mythologies to be a separate series, not dissimilar from the multiple series within the Sonic or Mario franchises. The reason for this was to better flesh out and develop the individual stories of the characters far exceeding the limits of the character endings and bios. The people at Midway chose Sub-Zero as their candidate and went with a side-scrolling platformer, also not unlike the more family friendlier video games of the era, or even Castlevania.

Unfortunately for Midway, the results of these efforts were executed poorly. If they were perfect, then the shape of the Mortal Kombat franchise as of now would be different. For their efforts, Mythologies failed at what it set out to do. Awful graphics for the time (and even now), frustrating controls, confusing layout, and uninspired enemy designs, and a difficult loop instead of a curve put this game below the bottom of the barrel.

Probably would’ve been better to spend more time in the oven. That same development section of the Wikipedia article explained that the team working on this game was much smaller and the techniques used a whole bunch of green screen and overlays. Not saying that more cooks in the kitchen would’ve produced a better meal, but if the size of the dev team was the culprit than a few more hands would’ve helped. Or if not that, then the old ways that worked for the other games were still available.

Could Mythologies have been made better? Perhaps. Whatever the defining factor is that gave us the Mythologies of this timeline than whatever another timeline got, I can’t say with certainty. As a positive for that game though, the costumes and set design were true to the original character designs and it’s cool to see someone loved Quan Chi’s appearance in MK4 enough to make that his alternate costume going forward. Observe.

Not to be deterred by one failure, the alchemists of Midway sought to try again some three years later with a worse attempt at a spinoff: Mortal Kombat: Special Forces. The specter of video game development hell would have it out for Midway at this stage it seemed. The moderately-sized dev team behind MK Mythologies was unlucky, but according to this game’s Wikipedia article and this article by Gaming Bolt, the development of the game was way more trouble for subpar returns.

Comparing MK4 from 1997 to Deadly Alliance from 2002 shows that for the former, the transition to 3D was neither easy nor pretty while the latter made use of what was learned the first time around to produce a better looking product. But MK4 is a game the old heads of Midway are at least somewhat proud of for not breaking too much and experimenting with a new trend at the time. Special Forces is infamous for being so maligned that Ed Boon hasn’t acknowledged it since its 2000 release on the almost retired PlayStation and for good reasons.

The technology at the time was well outside the dev team’s scope and experience, given how much of a chore it was just to get MK4 and the subsequent Gold up and running. As for what gameplay consisted of, it was quite ambitious at the time. An action-adventure beat ’em up with a revolving door of abilities and even weapons at the player’s disposal sounded way too good to be true for a 2000 game and it unfortunately was. These difficulties mounted with distressed developers jumping ship and leaving new folks with a mess to sort through.

Of these departures was John Tobias himself. One of the two men who brought us this franchise needed to dip out and take a much needed breather, and with news of this during the dev cycle, rumors abound that Special Forces was set to be cancelled soon. But the remaining devs continued forth in this perilous journey to bring the game out and their efforts sadly did go to waste.

Never mind cooking with a missing number of cooks; this is what happens when some of the cooks leave and new cooks fill their shoes without filling them in on what they’re finishing. Needless to say, ugly graphics, bad controls, a convoluted story, and last-minute changes to who the protagonist was supposed to be, the wider MK community has little love for this game and those who are joining but don’t know about this game, take it from those who do, you’re not missing much. Deadly Alliance has more bang for your buck.

I’d already said above that Shaolin Monks was perfection as far as spinoffs go and for a while I didn’t realize that it was also supposed to have a sequel. I tried looking into this more and for games that get canned for XYZ, many of those that don’t see the light of day at least have footage for the public to gaze upon. Like Eight Days, or Sonic X-Treme or Scalebound to name a few. In my research, I’d found that a developer known as Paradox Studios (not the makers of Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron) were supposed to spearhead a sequel focusing on Scorpion and Sub-Zero with the working subtitle of Fire & Ice.

It would’ve been loosely based on the Mortal Kombat II ending to Scorpion’s arcade run where to atone for killing Sub-Zero’s brother, he vows to protect him as a savior and guardian. If you’ve played any of the recent Mortal Kombat games, there are several nods to this in a few select endings. My personal favorite being guest character Spawn’s from MK11.

Credit: MKIceAndFire

All things considered, the great focus paid to Sub-Zero and Scorpion culminating in an almost game that was canned on the drawing board makes it seem as though Fire & Ice was the one that got away. The reasons behind the cancellation had to do with Paradox Studios suffering from financial woes, as explained in this article from Game Informer. The most they could do was a concept level and character design before the project was tossed out with the bath water.

Still, the concept resonated enough for Ed Boon et al to keep referencing it some 15 years after the project’s premature death and for fans to produce a bevy of fanart and fanfics over what the story could’ve been about. Perhaps it could’ve been something like what Mythologies would’ve been with the fleshing out of other character stories; maybe the two would combine to beat down on Quan Chi only for him to be saved by one of the Brothers of Shadow or even Shinnok himself. The sky was the limit back then, and it still is. For all its faults, Armageddon was onto something with the character customization, something that made a comeback in MK11 with the different loadouts for each character.

Since the reboot in 2011, NetherRealm Studios (probably with insistence from WB Games) has been focusing on the main plot with nothing to show for a side plot to explore aside from the associated comics that most folks probably won’t realize are being released until they do some more digging. I’m hesitant to say that WB Games won’t allow a new Fire & Ice; while backwards compatibility is off the table for them, it’d help me greatly if I knew what their game plans were before I say anything. And with studios so tightlipped about projects and pitches, speculation is the best we can do until a statement is made.