Since this blog went up in January, I’ve written several weekly posts about primarily interactive and visual forms of entertainment, but the title of this post is about a form of entertainment that I don’t see most people discuss online a lot: music.
I hang around on the anime-based subreddits more so than anything music related, so these two fields collide mostly in passing than directly. The outliers here would be the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure series and anime themed around music like Your Lie in April, Carole and Tuesday, K-On!, and Detroit Metal City. Does this mean the fundamentals of the discussion are different in music? Nope.
In anime, one of the most enduring discussions is dubs or subs. Video games have the console wars, and TV in general tends to have heated debate over what show is good or if X show is better than Y. All bog standard really, and regarding music, fittingly the songs are all the same. Old people music, dad rock, new age music… the debate around music has ties to the generational gaps. In modern history, it took pioneers within an established group to form something new, and in western music in particular, most music genres were spearheaded by black Americans in history. In the 1910s and during the First World War, 1st. Lt. James Reese Europe was known as the father of ragtime music. The interwar era and after had musicians like Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Louis Armstrong who led the music world in jazz during and following the Roaring 20s; and during the counterculture, civil rights era, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Jackson 5 helped open doors for more music genres to follow.
You might know more about the last group considering the reach they’ve all had since the 1960s compared to the musicians from before. And they all tend to reflect the differences in musical genres that they all grew up with and eventually grew to develop all their own. My family is definitely familiar with a lot of these musicians and the people they inspired or even collaborated with. Being with my mom, and being one of the younger people in my family, I was normally exposed to the older musicians and such.
In the eighth grade going onto high school, I started listening to AC/DC. My friend brought over his Xbox 360 which I didn’t have at the time yet, and one of the games for the system (GTA IV) had AC/DC on the in-game classic rock radio station at the time. After that I listened to more of the band in the first half of high school and continued on to more classic rock bands by day and metal bands at night. Most often my introduction came from hearing the music in a different medium. Chief among them: TV.
Above all, AC/DC and other bands like Guns n’ Roses benefitted fairly well from commercial advertising like the video above. I discovered other bands through a variety of different media. If it wasn’t TV or video games like GTA, it was different fan projects and animations. As much as I prefer older music, it’s clearly not the only type I listen to.
Online, there’s a series of stick figure animatics called Killing Spree created by Australian animator Sam Green. Going by the name of the series, the nature of its content is inherently violent even for a stick figure animatic. Fittingly, part of the soundtrack makes use of metal as a whole, the most common soundtracks coming from the band Disturbed.
Some of the tracks from their albums were used for background music in the animations and they inspired me to look through the rest of the band’s track list when I was in the tenth and eleventh grades. By the time I was a senior, this part of my metal phase influenced most of my tastes. Some of these aspects I still have and others I’ve abandoned because looking back, it was just stupid.
Black on everything gets a bit dull after a while, but one of the more memorable moments from this point in my life was a hand-me-down Led Zeppelin T-shirt that was a good luck charm to me about 85% of the time I had it on or near me. Then I graduated and the power of luck was seemed to have been wasted in high school. It was good while it lasted, but it didn’t stop me from listening to multiple different musicians. Throughout college and even now, I’ve diversified my tastes quite a bit. Rock, metal, and grunge are my top three all around, but I have since branched out. Though, I have a line drawn at certain genres and artists.
The spotlight makes it extremely difficult to be a controversy-free figure and I acknowledge that many of my favorite rock and metal icons have been under fire for various reasons. Looking deeper at the context though, there’s a difference between a minor legal trouble and being a ginormous jerk. In the case of the God of War series, the protagonist Kratos was an a-hole, but there were things he still cared about: glory, Sparta, and his family. Musicians across different genres have courted controversy and once or twice, especially by accident, tends to be forgiven. Sure, it’s embarrassing to learn that this musician got a DUI or an unpaid parking ticket or — if the rumors are true — flushed their drugs down the toilet to avoid the police, not realizing The Police was another British rock band, as what I’d heard had happened to the Rolling Stones. Sidenote: I just googled that to see if it was true and several articles seemed to have confirmed it. Like this one below:
But some of this stuff is peanuts compared to what some other musicians have done off stage. Rappers like XXXTentacion and Tekashi 69 have been in hot water for more serious offenses like assault or trafficking, Kanye in December of 2022 sung the praises of Adolf Hitler while on a show with Alex Jones, and the less said about neo-Nazi hate music, the better.
But of course, I’m cherry picking. We each have our tastes and if I played the role of the old man yelling at the clouds any further, I’d live up to the old satanic panic narrative that followed metal bands and funny enough DND for years.
And the “ban this filth” nonsense has been around for ages, and around most aspects of media and entertainment. It’s all but lost on us now, but if you ask an old person who was there, two of the most outrageous topics of discussion would’ve either been Elvis shaking those hips or John Lennon placing the Beatles’ fame above that of Jesus Christ in the Bible Belt states.
For me personally, my mom was the one to introduce and inspire my affection for classic rock and such so she didn’t resist or protest my tastes. My grandma, on the other hand, tried at the start but she stopped when she realized some of the bands I listened to were all around her age now, and there were more important stuff to focus on than who I was listening to. Call me the oddball, but if it was hard for me to take violent video games seriously, then there was really no hope for the supposed satanic messages in Stairway to Heaven.
This week’s YouTube recommendation is akidearest. Months ago, I recommended the Trash Taste podcast and the individual hosts’ YouTube channels. This time, one of them, Joey “The Anime Man” Bizinger’s girlfriend, Agnes “akidearest” Diego, is also a content creator with a channel of her own. She began in 2014 describing different aspects of anime as a whole from associated conventions to a bunch of different tropes across many shows.
Since moving to Japan, she has continued with this type of content while also adding in different aspects of life in Japan, particularly different customs and conveniences that contribute to the culture shock likely to be experienced by foreigners to Japan. As a bonus, both Akidearest and The Anime Man have a video about their most recent trip to the Philippines.
Before I begin proper, I’m basing this blog post on on-the-fly research and my own observations. Don’t take everything I put here seriously, I am going to be wrong somewhere in here.
Nintendo needs no introduction. There’s a strong percentage that a property belonging to them has come into your possession somehow. Donkey Kong? Mario? Kirby? Pokémon? Pikmin? Maybe it was something more action-oriented like Metroid, or something a bit more obscure with a cult following?
Well, no matter how it started, it almost always goes pretty well for what started as a hanafuda card company. Even the cult classics have devotees of their own. Just try to find someone who doesn’t know about the following:
A little bit of the background: in 1983, the movie E.T. was so popular, it franchised remarkably quickly for a film released at the time. As such, Atari got the million-dollar idea to make a video game out of the property over the course of about five or six weeks. And a lesson we continually forgot even after Sonic ’06 is that games are to NEVER BE RUSHED. Nothing good comes from kicking a game out the door before it’s ready. Like a beef hamburger, you need to cook it thoroughly.
In what became a lesson to burgeoning devs at the time, E.T. for the Atari 2600 went down in history as both the worst video game in all of gaming history and a mass murderer in the video game industry, almost killing it en masse before it got a chance to grow. Developers fell off left and right with how poorly received and sold E.T. was which might as well be an ironic twist of fate. This was E.T., one of Spielberg’s crown jewels, and the aftermath of its failure proved a few things:
If the best of the best can’t take a W, then it certainly lowers morale for most witnesses
Games based on movies would go on to have the worst W/L ratio of all time
Considering Spielberg movie-based games to be released after this, it was for the better that the man quit while he was behind or we would’ve had Saving Private Ryan the game.
And no, I don’t mean World War II games which do work. I mean a game based on this movie above.
The mid-1980s were when the pool of video game developers had shrunk in record time. Then came Nintendo in October of 1985 to save the industry and breathe new life into the industry with a full library of launch titles, unlicensed games, and even to this day homebrew games. In the west, Nintendo became something of a god. They gave us the templates for nearly everything that made for great games, and as the years went on and more and more developers and studios worked with Nintendo to develop games, consoles, or distribute on their platforms, Nintendo has been running home with the gold.
In the modern day, they took the crown from Sega who abandoned console manufacturing in 2001 after the failure of the Dreamcast. Then again, to not sound like a propaganda piece for the Nintendo Empire, they’ve shot themselves in the foot several times. Censorship and a heavy push for a family friendly image turned off some of the more core players in the 1990s and 2000s for a start. Mortal Kombat’s Nintendo ports have been major misses than hits with all the blood, which can be turned off at least in Deadly Alliance, but of all the things to censor in the game, turning the blood to sweat is something I’d expect of a modern day Chinese distribution of Demon Slayer or Spy x Family.
At least Sega had the fans’ backs on this with the blood code.
Another failure was found in several of the consoles they released over the years. The GameCube was meant to be what the Switch is now, a console that can switch between mobile and home functions at will, but it wasn’t to be. The tech wasn’t there yet. By 2006, the Wii launched with high intensity motion controls that proved to be a fad at best and a nuisance at worst. Never mind the fact that Xbox tried it with the Kinect and PlayStation with the Move around the same time; the motion controls mostly worked with things like Wii Sports and other games encouraged to be played with families or with friends at parties and whatnot. Core gamers wouldn’t have been down for that, so third party devs were more likely to work with Xbox and Sony than stick with Nintendo’s wacky rules long term. Props to those who stuck it out though; we got some really creative games out of that.
The biggest one in recent memory was the Wii U, which was either worse than the Wii or better than nothing depending on who you ask. Honestly, the Wii U circled back to issues that plagued other consoles from the 90s, in the sense that the tech was too much and the devs weren’t capable of adapting to this new fangled machinery, hence why the 3DO and Neo Geo sold so poorly and had a tinier library compared to the Great Library that would eventually become modern day Nintendo. Of course, these all had their own hidden gems. Metal Slug anyone?
But the one notable blunder in Nintendo’s history that gets overlooked these days is that they technically created one of their rivals in PlayStation. Sony and Nintendo had worked with each other prior to the mid-1990s and in the lead up to the PSX’s debut console, Sony and Nintendo had been developing a game-changing console that would incorporate early 3D graphics and transition to CD-ROM technology. Unfortunately, Nintendo’s paranoia caused them to renege on an agreement and in a fit of rage, Sony made Sony Computer Entertainment as the ultimate vengeance. Basically, Nintendo is PlayStation’s father.
Despite the decades of video game development under Nintendo’s belt, their flagship series haven’t changed all that much. Even when Donkey Kong and Brooklyn’s least infamous plumber became well-known across the world, the core of their respective games hasn’t really changed since then. For as long as there’s been a Mario, there’s been a princess in another castle. Donkey Kong used to lob barrels at him, but retiring from that put him in the crosshairs of the crocodiles and King K Rule, paid for in part by the United States Marine Corps. If you don’t get that reference, watch this:
Third parties tend to get a pass when developing for a Nintendo console, but their own properties have been on the same script with almost no change whatsoever. Even the spinoffs don’t make much of a difference when they have little impact on story canonicity. I don’t mean the spinoffs from after Mario and Donkey Kong made names for themselves after the original 1981 game.
In another instance revealing how little I play Nintendo games, I can’t recall Mario making mention of saving Pauline from the ape, nor are there any mentions of the plumber dodging Donkey’s barrels. So what, did they have a professional relationship only? Because every spinoff suggests elsewise. For a franchise with 5% story, the spinoffs do a better job at fleshing all the characters out than the main games, so this is Nintendo’s fault for sticking with the same storyboard for almost 40 years.
Tennis, sports, partaking in the Olympics themselves, go-karting; if I fell into a coma and woke up decades later, oblivious to what Mario even is and I got into through one of the spinoffs, I would’ve initially thought they were all good buddies who play games together, which is probably a reference to a Nintendo ad campaign. This all being said, its a formula that works for nearly every Nintendo game. The only one I recall trying something different was Kirby with more enemies to fight, more complex plots at least during the GBA and DS eras, and callbacks to old mechanics or concepts from previous installments. And that pink round thing almost always has a score to settle with Dedede, even if things are different for Forgotten Land.
The crux in my custard here is that if they can throw more ideas at Kirby’s pink mass, then surely Nintendo has what it takes to try something else with some of their other properties. The Zelda series alone has a new idea with each release. Consider how different each Zelda game is from each other. Windwaker, Majora’s Mask, Ocarina of Time, A Link to the Past, and about 4,000 other Zelda games. There’s always variety in the story of Princess Zelda and the mute, canonical femboy.
Zelda’s tastes are exquisite and pristine.
Even if Kirby is owned more by HAL Laboratory, Zelda is a wholly-owned Nintendo property and the ideas trough is always going to that hungry pig while the rest of the zoo animals starve. Maybe it’s due to the way Japan does things (what with most companies being run by old men who loathe change), but it really isn’t gonna hurt them to try something new with the rest of their lineup. Even one-off experiments are worth the effort. No one was really feeling it at the time, but the XCOM hybrid that was Mario and Rabbids was something different. Good? Bad? Don’t ask me, I didn’t play it. But there is gameplay of it in full on YouTube and it stands as the second thing I recommend aside from Nintendo picking a different direction after almost 40 years.
The third recommendation is a YouTube channel called Ryan McBeth.
Ryan McBeth is a retired US Army platoon sergeant and expert in software engineering and development, cybersecurity, military analysis and open source intelligence. He has a lineup of t-shirts, makes videos and YouTube shorts (and probably also TikTok videos) about the military and battlefield analysis. Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started in February of 2022, he’s made videos about several aspects of the ground operations with some other stuff sprinkled on the side. I highly recommend his channel and as an added bonus, if you have any inquiries on software development or cybersecurity, try reaching out to him for that as well. And to top it all off, with YouTube being what it is regarding censorship, full length explanations and videos can be found on his associated Substack page.
This will serve as both an indictment against me, and as an explanation for what I’ve always thought about the Pokémon franchise. Before we start proper, my original notes were going to say that this was a “Late Intro to Pokémon,” but that’s inaccurate and misleading considering what I grew up with. Such a title would suggest that I had never heard of Pokémon before or bothered to look into the series itself, which just isn’t true of the rest of the franchise outside of the games. The games were what I was late to, not the anime, or the toys, or the cards. So, this post will be mostly about the games.
I say that my introduction to Pokémon is inaccurate because growing up in the 2000s meant seeing some variation of the franchise on TV through the anime or through advertising. I certainly recall tuning in to Pokémon when it was on channels like Cartoon Network, or Nicktoons or 4KidsTV alongside Yu-Gi-Oh!, but admittedly, it hadn’t really caught me the same way Dragon Ball Z did at the time. Still, it was one of the two properties with something that can be imitated in real life in the form of the card games.
If you also grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, you or someone you know probably had a booklet or folder or something similar that had a full deck of cards or more. Like Yu-Gi-Oh!, I was normally just the bystander watching some of my friends play and battle it out from the sidelines. It got the most focus in the latter years of elementary and all throughout middle school, especially during recess. For me, the allure of Shonen series was the more intense battles that could be seen through the original big three: Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach, with a special mention to Dragon Ball. I didn’t know it at the time, but the rest of the franchise went hand in hand with the anime, similarly to Yu-Gi-Oh!, so the point flew over my head on a supersonic jet.
I always thought all of this was enough to get a fill of the series, but there’s a noticeable difference between watching the show, engaging with the cards, and playing the video games; a difference I never saw until recently.
I knew how the games started for the most part: name character, choose starting Pokémon, adventure, battle. Sometime last year, I started the game on a browser emulator which as a sidenote, was not very hard to find, probably because the technology for a handheld is seemingly less complicated than that of a home console (don’t quote me on that), and I began with the first game in the series: Pokémon Red. My starting Pokémon was Squirtle, whom I advanced up to Wartortle after fighting off several wild Pidgeys and Ratatas. Then it hit me… like a wild Pidgey.
When I started this post, I was certain it was mainly about the Pokemon games’ layout and such, but it seems to be a bit more complicated than even I thought and opened up with. For all the love I give to adventure games and RPGs, some of the gripes came down to leveling up and the random fights that happened no matter what. Then again, there were other games that had this design philosophy and I remember getting far and playing most of them to completion. Naruto: Path of the Ninja, handheld versions of the Avatar games, in some aspects Genshin Impact and most recently Honkai: Star Rail. I even watched gameplay of a pacifist run of Undertale.
So, I clearly had no real issue with RPGs or JRPGs, but I didn’t start or attempt a Pokemon game until I was 23. So, what gives?
I don’t feel like leaving on a cop out answer, but the only one that makes sense to me would probably be overexposure. A franchise this influential to pop culture, media, and such that South Park can parody it, even when it just breaks ground in the west didn’t feel like there would be too much to discover by myself, which may also explain why I’ve been hugging and cheering on underrated and unsung manga like Undead Unluck, The Elusive Samurai, and one that I also discovered recently, but haven’t written about yet, Rokudenashi Blues.
But if you read all that and recalled that I’m so caught up with Naruto that I could in some aspect be the “Boruto Guy” with all the lore in just that franchise, you might also question how I can be overexposed to Pokemon but not take similar issue with Naruto and the other stuff. Why the bias? Well, first that’s a question to be asked about almost everything in life, and in context… as much as I tried to avoid it, the cop out “I don’t know” might have to suffice. Maybe the appeal wasn’t as strong for the games as it was for the 12,000 anime iterations. Unlike most of my friends at the time, I was way more of a moderate consumer of anything Pokemon compared to the other stuff that ate up my attention. Whatever a superfan of Pokemon hoped to have, I sought the same with Naruto all things considered and the free-roaming, adventure style I personally found more engaging then walking around Pallet Town waiting for the danger to find me like I mixed the paranoia pills with strong Colombian coffee.
I think it also comes down to the early Pokemon games at the time relying on the player’s imagination to fill in the blanks as opposed to what a modern Pokemon game is capable of now.
That being said, I wouldn’t say I’d want to stop trying to get into Pokemon. Googling the franchise will definitely put it in my radar in the form of banner ads down the line and admittedly none of what I bring up is bound to be a staple of the games anymore. The battles happening at random weren’t any fun in Path of the Ninja and from what I remember the furthest I got there was the Land of Waves arc. I might revisit this in the future after looking at gameplay of later Pokemon games. We’ll have to wait and see.
For this week, I recommend the YouTube channel Clownfish TV.
Clownfish TV is an independent media outlet that focuses on games, TV, animation, comics, and pop culture mainstays and staples, chief among them Disney and its growing properties. Co-hosted by husband and wife duo, Kneon and GeekySparkles, the channel makes daily videos about media at a rate of two to three a day. Additionally, they have merchandise up for sale on their own website and as of this writing, a comic strip based on dialogue spoken in the videos.
About two weeks ago, a teaser was released for the next installment in the Mortal Kombat franchise slated for released in September of this year. The gist of the teaser was that post MK 11 Aftermath, there’s a new timeline and therefore a new god because Kronika and her merry band of lackeys have been defeated or written out of history as to not muck anything up like they did the first time.
In spite of what I wrote above, the announcement doesn’t reveal much, though it still requires a general knowledge of the plot line of the games from 1992 to the 3D era of the 2000s for why it was soundly rebooted in 2011 and the timeline post-2011, both of which I think I can safely say I have knowledge in.
To set a primer, Ed Boon and John Tobias began working on a fighting video game with digitized sprites for the actors in 1991 for arcades. A small team of programmers, actors with an intermediate or advanced knowledge of martial arts, and a marketing team brought the dream to light, but with a twist: blood. Unlike other video games like Final Fight or Streets of Rage or more appropriately Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat got grizzlier with the inclusion of blood and the option to kill the opponent in the ring by dismemberment
In the era where video games were the same as children’s toys, Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, a video game released the same year as MK, were the subject of intense political debate over what is appropriate for a child to see in fictional media. You and I both know that try as one may, there’s no realistic way to imitate the exaggerated violence seen in a video game, but nevertheless the extremeness in the game led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board or ESRB.
The ESRB is responsible for the guidelines for parents when it comes to purchasing video games for their kids. When it was created, most adults rarely played video games, or aged out of it with time (not including parents), and were likely to be unaware of what was in the game. But with a specific letter marking on the cover of the box, a parent can best determine what their child can play on paper. In my experience, it takes a trusting or admittedly negligent adult to let their child get away with playing something like GTA or Call of Duty, a problem that persists even now.
Still, whatever would come out of these government hearings on interactive entertainment wouldn’t matter much to gamers and arcade goers of the time. The controversy and the marketing worked wonders that Ed Boon and Midway Games could make more sequels in the 1990s and eventually get the games on home consoles when Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance was given its’ own spotlight during E3 2002.
As for the plot of the Midway Games, the evil emperor of Outworld Shao Kahn has absorbed another realm into his empire and has his sights trained on Earthrealm. The Elder Gods put their foot down and give the realm a chance to fight back through a tournament. Over the course of a millennium, 10 consecutive tournaments are meant to take place with the last one determining the fate of the realm. Shao Kahn’s representative on earth is a sorcerer named Shang Tsung who has the power to take souls and replenish his youth. Basically, he’s immortal, and every time a fighter dies in the tournament he takes their souls, though he has different methods of stealing souls if he wants to (and he always does). The tournaments are spread out over the course of fifty years, which means theoretically someone can fight in two tournaments if they’re healthy and lucky enough to live to be that old.
MK 1992 begins at the 10th tournament, and the final boss of the game is Shang Tsung who additionally can shapeshift. I have fond memories of this levitating old man transforming into the sub-boss Goro while I was playing the game in the Midway Arcade Treasures collection.
But when he does lose, the character Ed Boon et al determines to be the default protagonist, Bruce Lee clone number 1009 Liu Kang is chosen to be the champion of Mortal Kombat. At the same time, Shang Tsung is reprimanded and demoted by Shao Kahn who decides to take matters into his own hands and becomes the final boss of 1993’s Mortal Kombat II, complete with a larger cadre of characters representing Outworld and Earthrealm.
History repeats itself and the heroes soundly defeat Shao Kahn, but the power hungry emperor isn’t done yet. By 1995’s Mortal Kombat 3, the man is desperate to have Earthrealm in his expansion pack, and at the risk of sounding like a cheerleader for several historical conquerors, Shao Kahn could’ve studied the techniques of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and militarily Adolf Hitler to learn why throwing your men at the frontlines like this doesn’t work or what worked for the defenders at the expense of the invaders, but then again, Shao Kahn has almost always been a one-track conqueror. Even a little bit of credit is too much for a character like him.
By 1997, Mortal Kombat 4 played with 3D graphics to give us another cast of ne’er-do-wells to fight. Shinnok, and his protégé Quan Chi. I admit that my exposure to MK4 is limited with the exception of some of the character endings making it to MK: Deadly Alliance’s krypt as unlockables, but one that I remember was that if playing as Quan Chi, the sorcerer betrays Shinnok and everyone else to hold infinite power. In another ending, the character Baraka takes serious issue with this and attempts to kill the sorcerer who just so happens to have necromantic powers and becomes another skeleton in Quan Chi’s graveyard, funny enough.
Quan Chi himself was written as the source of Scorpion’s woes. For the longest time, it was believed that the rivalry between himself and Sub-Zero was due to Sub-Zero’s clan of Lin Kuei warriors exterminating him, his clan the Shirai Ryu, and his family, when in MK4 it was revealed that the Lin Kuei never went after Scorpion’s wife and son. That was Quan Chi’s doing, and when the dunderhead revealed his hand in an attempt to be rid of his lapdog by transporting him to the Netherrealm, Scorpion grabbed the sorcerer at the last minute to exercise his misdirected vengeance on the sorcerer, leading into Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance.
Released in November 2002, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance did 3D much better than its predecessor and had more room to expand on existing mythology thanks to cutscenes and extra content in the game’s krypt. With a payment of a specific amount of koins, different stuff can be unlocked from pre-production art to full characters and their alternate costumes to movies and interviews with the staff and many more.
Plot-wise, the game includes an introductory movie narrated by the thunder god Raiden to a gaggle of Earthrealm warriors whom he plans to lead in a coming battle. Quan Chi survived Scorpion’s onslaught in the Netherrealm and escaped into a hidden tomb containing the mummified remains of Outworld’s ancient dragon king. To make matters worse, he teamed up with Shang Tsung and the two sought to remove the obstacles in their way to power.
By Mortal Kombat’s rules, Shao Kahn was revived which teaches you all you need to know about how seriously death is taken in this universe. It’s not like in Naruto where a reanimation jutsu can revive a character by way of a sacrifice; most of the time, characters tend to Kratos their way back into the world of the living because “I decide when I die!”
Anyway, the Deadly Alliance takes out Shao Kahn and in a ballsy move for a creative in any industry, they take out Liu Kang himself. The champion of Mortal Kombat is killed and his and other dead warriors’ souls are used to revive the mummifed army of the dragon king. If they succeed, Outworld and eventually Earthrealm will fall at their hands.
Raiden had previously ascended to the position of Elder God, but the chaos and peril unfolding in the realms coupled with the Elder Gods’ inaction to it all motivated him to relinquish this position and take charge personally. Almost every warrior died or defected to the side of evil and 2004’s Mortal Kombat: Deception begins with a new narrator.
In Deception, the Konquest mode takes the player through the past of Shujinko and his journey to recover the Kamidogu, or godly tools, to be transported to the Elder Gods. This lifelong journey introduces Shujinko and puts him at different points in the Mortal Kombat timeline. As a matter of fact, he helped Scorpion find Quan Chi in the Netherrealm and was one of the first to learn of Liu Kang’s death with further developments pulling the two in different directions with a significant point of divergence. I wrote above that most of the warriors representing the good guys died or defected, but in Shujinko’s case, spoiler alert, he’d been an unknowing tool of a greater evil, worse than anything the Deadly Alliance could ever conceive and had been hard at work performing this evil for decades until the big reveal at the end of MK: Deception’s Konquest mode.
Before Shujinko defeated his enigmatic puppeteer, Onaga had marched into Outworld to take back his army and empire by force. Raiden and the Deadly Alliance knew the dangers that would come with an Onaga victory and sought to stop it, even to the point of self-destruction (which happens to be one of Raiden’s fatalities in Deception), but it proved fruitless when Onaga was revealed to be the sole survivor when the blast eliminated everything… or so it would seem. Raiden also lived, but was so corrupted by mortals messing with reality that he set out on a new mission to strike back pre-emptively.
Following Shujinko’s victory against the dragon king, Raiden appeared before him as punishment for allowing Onaga to even get as far as he did. The intentions of either didn’t matter to the immediate consequences, nor was it important to the corrupted thunder god that he rectified his mistake. Raiden wanted blood reparations and Shujinko wouldn’t be the only one to face this wrath.
Speaking of messing with reality, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon was the first time that it would happen in the MK universe and owing to its name, Armageddon was what was at stake at the time. Every fighter in Mortal Kombat history (including maligned characters) fought each other in the realm of Edenia, in a large crater where a pyramid dedicated the realm’s protector god Argus would later rise housing a fire spawn creature named Blaze. At Blaze’s death, the victor would set off a reaction with one of two outcomes: annulment of all abilities or total extermination.
In this game’s Konquest mode, the creators of the quest Argus and his wife, sorceress Delia, designed the quest with a winner in mind, their eldest son Taven. If things went right, he and his brother Daegon would engage in a quest sold to them as a friendly competition where they’d acquire weapons and armor to defeat Blaze and become full gods instead of the demigods they are now. Thing is, they intended for Taven to win it all, but when Daegon was awoken earlier than expected, he found out about this and went on a third, unpredictable path; he founded the Red Dragon clan and spent the last few centuries finding Blaze who it’s revealed was kidnapped and hypnotized to watch over the last dragon egg in MK: Deception. Bad sense of direction? Incompetence? Bull manure? Well, it’s convenient either way that in Armageddon’s Konquest mode Daegon’s clan had better luck ambushing his own brother than he did in finding the main element in the quest.
I made this meme just now. I’m probably wrong about Daegon’s efforts here, but with what I learned this late into the 3D era, it’s still a bit weird that he put more of his time in trying to kill his brother than in finding Blaze first. It makes it even weirder knowing how technologically advance the Red Dragon clan was to perform human experiments on their own members attempting to turn them into hybrid dragons like Reptile.
Anyway, Taven fights his way to Edenia intending to defeat Daegon out of necessity before being persuaded by Blaze himself to finish the quest. At the end of this, we can conclude that Taven became a god as intended and one of the adverse affects of the quest was that instead of death or depowering, everyone got stronger and the realms remained in peril, for which Taven would have to serve as the bulwark against extinction. And so the 3D era ends in a bit of a whimper.
The developer side had several troubles to deal with themselves. Mortal Kombat successfully franchised to get an animation and toy line ups and comics, but spin-off games were Midway’s Achilles’ heel. 2000 saw the release of Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, a game that Ed Boon wants everyone to forget.
If the co-creator won’t aid the game, why would anyone else, right? Before that, 1997 also saw the release of Mortal Kombat: Mythologies which was meant to tell the stories of individual characters beginning with the one who appears in every installment: Sub Zero, but the controls, graphics, and full AMV cutscenes saw hardly any returns on investment and so they didn’t bother with another spin-off until Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks in 2005, a game with excellent beat ’em up mechanics even if the roster is quite small. A sequel to this called Mortal Kombat: Fire and Ice was in pre-production, but the only traces of its existence come in the form of concept art before the project was canned between 2006 and 2010 when Midway’s assets were sold to Warner Bros. following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
By 2011, Ed Boon and co. started again under the new studio NetherRealm Studios and redid much of the story of the first three games in Mortal Kombat 2011, colloquially known as MK9. By the end of the game, Shao Kahn was soundly defeated and in the immediate aftermath, Quan Chi and Shinnok redo this timeline’s events of MK4, but with a twist. 25 years and the old generation of characters had had children of their own, many of whom joined in the fight to not only defeat evil but to contain it.
The connecting element this time around is Shinnok’s amulet which can’t be destroyed and thus needs to be heavily guarded around the clock. The problem here is that there are saboteurs around and the new leader of Outworld, Kotal Kahn, doesn’t easily trust Earthrealm. Things don’t go as bad for them until halfway through when Earthrealm chooses not to eliminate immediate threats and dangers where they spring up, even when they would all make sense.
The saboteur in question is a character named D’Vorah, who went down in history as one of the less welcome additions to the roster in recent memory. The point of divergence here is that Shang Tsung and Quan Chi don’t form the Deadly Alliance (though there’s a neat reference in MK9’s story mode). There’s also no Onaga and Blaze despite there also being references to them both. So no Deadly Alliance, and no Quan Chi to betray Shinnok. Instead, Shinnok is summoned behind enemy lines and finally for a necromancer, Quan Chi’s ability to command the dead is explored in this timeline when he has the souls of fallen heroes who dream of taking their revenge on Raiden, who still goes dark in this timeline.
The shoe’s on the other foot now with Dark Raiden taking the plunge against evil like how Shao Kahn opted to be the final boss in the other games. This time, Shinnok’s mother Kronika and his sister Cetrion rearrange the timeline to maintain the balance between light and dark, one of the most important instances being the fallout between Liu Kang and Raiden. Once they realize this on their way to stop Kronika herself with a new cadre of friends and an army to command, Raiden and Liu Kang combined to form Fire God Liu Kang which, fun fact is how MK: Mythologies ends.
This time, their fighting chances have gotten better and with Kronika’s defeat, Liu Kang has a new timeline to oversee, which is where we are. Based on what I wrote and what I know I have a few ideas of what to expect based on what happened, but there’s no guarantee everything will live up to my predictions even slightly. The Aftermath DLC in MK 11 ended with Shang Tsung’s defeat and Liu Kang starting with the ancestor of Kung Lao, the fabled Great Kung Lao who lost favor when he was defeated by Goro in the old timeline. My first and so far only prediction is that this time, Liu Kang cheers this one on and Kung Lao’s bloodline becomes venerated instead.
After that, remains to be seen. Ed Boon’s been doing this for 30 years and has a great love and respect for his own series, often dropping hints and teasers for fans on Twitter, so we can expect further updates from him in the lead up to MK 12 or Mortal Kombat 1 as it’s going to be known as.
I have opinions on sequels named the same as the original that can best be summarized in this episode of You Know What’s Bullsh-t?!
This week, I’m recommending the YouTube channel h0ser, recently rebranded as hoser.
The channel talks about history and geopolitics in a comedic manner, often with insert country’s most common animal here as a stand in for the nation in question, painted in the country’s flag. A buffalo for the US, a bulldog for the UK, a bear for Russia and the Soviet Union, etc. An old approach to when the channel did this through countryballs method.
Those of you who want to learn more about the world, hoser is one of many sources for that knowledge.
This one is a long-time coming. One of my posts from January of this year included a still frame of a JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure episode that has since been used as one of the countless memes in many anime circles online. For those who need a refresher, it’s not the one where the character Dire feigns incompetence to catch his enemy in a move known as the Thunder Cross Split Attack. Instead, it’s the one where a character named Pesci, notable for his lack of a neck cries in excitement that someone or something took his bait. Example:
The picture I used months ago was larger than that. But swinging back to my point. I won’t be the first person to speak about the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure series, nor will I expect to be the first person to introduce it to those who haven’t heard of it or were on the fence before. But even if this is the millionth time you’ve heard or read about the series with no clear distinction on whether to see it in action, let me remove the ambiguity: I can’t recommend the series highly enough. I write this with the enthusiasm of a tourist coming back from the best vacation spot ever.
For an introduction, I’m going to try my best to spoil none of the manga or the anime. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure belongs to the long list of longest running manga series still in production while also sitting on the list of most difficult series to adapt as an anime. For context, the first chapter debuted in December of 1986 with the first volume releasing later in 1987. The modern anime series that you might see on streaming sights like TubiTV or Crunchyroll or even Toonami in the west debuted in April of 2012. There’s a reason for the nearly quarter-century gap between manga and anime and it comes from the way the manga is structured. Artistically, the manga artist, Hirohiko Araki looked more towards Greco-Roman and Renaissance art for inspiration, western fashion magazines, and during the production of the earlier parts of the manga, the days’ most popular musicians to include Michael Jackson, Prince, the Beatles, the Police, and countless others.
The manga itself is divided into nine parts or arcs that center on a different protagonist within the same lineage.
Part 1: Phantom Blood ran from January to October of 1987 and takes place in Victorian England. The protagonist is burgeoning gentleman Jonathan Joestar and the antagonist is his stepbrother Dio Brando.
Part 2: Battle Tendency ran from November 1987 to March 1989 and takes place fifty years later, centering on Jonathan’s grandson Joseph, who is far more rascally and mischievous than his grandfather. The antagonist this time is a trio of ancient Aztec beings known as the Pillar Men named Esidisi, Wamuu, and Kars.
Part 3: Stardust Crusaders ran from the same month the last part ended until April 1992 and this time the protagonist is Japanese delinquent Jotaro Kujo. It begins in Tokyo in the late 1980s, and the antagonist this time is Dio once again, but he’s come back with an upgrade, his name is capitalized as DIO, and this time he has a wider cadre of henchmen in different parts of the world.
Part 4: Diamond is Unbreakable is set about a decade after the events of the last part. It ran from May of 1992 to December 1995 and features the protagonist Josuke Higashikata. He’s also a delinquent but by the late 1990s, Japanese delinquent culture was losing favor to the emerging gyaru culture to follow in the 2000s. Still, Josuke’s not as rough as Jotaro so long as you don’t badmouth his immaculate hair.
Part 4 is also centered in a fictional town modeled after Araki’s real life home in Sendai and is thus less of a high stakes thriller than the other parts, but there is still an antagonist in the form of department store employee and serial killer Yoshikage Kira.
Part 5: Golden Wind/Vento Aureo also began the same month the previous part ended and ended in April of 1999. It’s set in Spring 2001 around the southern half of the Italian peninsula and features the illegitimate son of DIO, Giorno Giovanna. The antagonist is the mob boss of the Passione mob, Diavolo. Without spoiling much, instead of cooling down like the last part and gradually sprints into its second wind for the plot.
Part 6: Stone Ocean ran from December of 1999 to April 2003 and features the first female protagonist, Jolyne Cujoh/Kujo, the daughter of Jotaro. Its setting this time is in a Florida prison in late 2011 and the antagonist is the prison’s chaplain and protege of DIO himself, Father Enrico Pucci. This part specifically along with Part 5 suffered from a long streak of unpopularity until the Part 6 anime adaptation was announced online in April of 2021. I covered that as it happened in another blog that I started two years ago and needless to say, it was one of the rare moments of hype I’ve ever felt for an upcoming product or series continuation of the sort.
Part 7: Steel Ball Run is set in an alternate continuity and sets the clock back to the 1890s but with a different protagonist who pays homage to the original British Jonathan Joestar. It begins in the western U.S. and ran in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine from January to October 2004 before switching to the more seinen demographic magazine of Ultra Jump for the remainder of its publication from March 2005 to April 2011. The protagonist is Johnny Joestar, a disabled ex-jockey and the antagonist is the 23rd President of the United States, not Benjamin Harrison like in real life, but Union Army cavalryman Funny Valentine.
Part 8: JoJolion (the -lion pronounced the same as in “Evangelion”) was actually set during the modern day. It ran from May 2011 to August 2021 and does almost quite what Part 4 does, supplanting Sendai with the fictional town of Morioh, but uses a real-world disaster as part of its setting. In Spring 2011, an earthquake struck the east coast of the Tohoku region of Japan. It features a similarly named protagonist to Josuke Higashikata from Part 4 (who also has a distant connection to the first guy), but differentiated by way of a different kanji in Japanese, and radically different circumstances. Like the rest of the plot, this time around it’s a more complicated affair with complicated characters and motives who run into each other. As such, the antagonist isn’t easily defined and is absent for a majority of the run, at least until the end.
Part 9: The JOJOLands is the most recent edition to the JoJo saga and is still in production as of this writing. In fact, it just started in February. It’s set in Hawaii in the modern day and its protagonist is Jodio Joestar.
At the outset, this sounds like a lot to get through because it is, but the modern anime adaptation is the best representation of the events in the manga. There have been attempts to adapt it a few years after the first two arcs had concluded with OVAs from the 90s until 2002, a movie from 2007, and in the case of translations that front was even more troubled.
This is one of many examples of troubled attempts to translate the manga from Japanese to English. The problem in this case is that it wasn’t done professionally and Araki, consciously or unconsciously, hasn’t been as definitive in providing details and context until he was interviewed at different points during the production of the manga. For the panel above, which takes place in the middle of Part 4’s run, it was translated from Japanese to English in Taiwan, and the translations were so subpar that for many trying to get into the series, even illegally, had to wade through bad grammar and language until it was given a proper re-publication for the international market in the years leading up to and following the 2012 anime adaptation.
Part 5 had a similar issue back in the day as well and was a large part of its initial disdain from the community until re-publications with better translations rectified the mistakes. And mistakes would follow on even after this. Araki himself is also inconsistent with color schemes when it comes to coloring in the manga, then again, a lot of the monochrome manga is up to interpretation which explains why some characters are colored differently in the anime adaptations than their depictions in the manga.
This example was used as a meme in r/ShitpostCrusaders, but is an example of the degree of freedom afforded to publishers and distributors in the case of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Thankfully, these days it’s gotten exceptionally easier to start JoJo and however you get there, love it or not, it’ll leave a lasting impression.
The art styles of the characters, as I mentioned before aren’t the same as most manga in either the 1980s or even now. It’s art style is a bit of a beefier and more elaborate type found in Berserk, Fist of the North Star, Rokudenashi Blues, or even Yu Yu Hakusho. On reflection, it reminds me of some of the comics from the west like Martin Mystere or the erotic series Druuna, and it’s like that on purpose.
Ever since he debuted as a manga artist, Araki has looked at western styles for inspiration and just about any western artist does well for him, even the ones we learn about like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo.
In anime/manga communities, the term for someone who consumes copious amounts of Japanese media and entertainment, not always limited to manga and anime itself is known as a weeaboo or weeb for short. The term began as an insult in the mid-2000s on forum sites like 4chan and at the time anime hadn’t taken as much of a grip as it does today. Now that the internet is what it is today, the opposite end of the spectrum is the “westaboo,” a term for a Japanese person who consumes more than the doctor’s recommended weight in western comics and cartoons, which would make Araki one of the first to be described as such. And since this appears to be the case, I’d like to be the fly on the wall of a bunch of Japanese internet users having their own dub vs. sub debate on King of the Hill which I learned recently is also popular in Japan.
We’ve come full circle now!
Not limited to just appearances, Araki also looks to music for inspiration. Earlier in this post, you may recall the names of the antagonists of Part 2 are Esidisi, Wamuu and Kars. These are direct references to the real life bands AC/DC, Wham!, and The Cars. This has become one of the numerous features of the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure series since the beginning. Direct references to artists by name or characters in the books.
This is an interesting source of controversy for the series with specific artists and their estates or just the record labels that worked with them in the past getting uppity over their depictions. It’s also worth noting how complicated this gets in the case of copyright laws the world over, not just in Japan. Because of this, international distribution has had to put in the legwork censoring or altering or requesting alterations from Araki’s team to be able to distribute it in select countries. As an example, there have been more direct references to Michael Jackson and Prince as people than through characters or concepts. The reasons for this come down to when both men were still alive, they were both likely to use the courts to their advantage. I doubt Prince’s estate has kept that up since, but the Jackson family still lives and ex-members of the Jackson five for example can definitely waste that much time, money, and effort in a drawn out legal battle just to change a joke character on page 36 of the 17th volume in the manga. That’s a joke, but it’d be one hell of a read in a newspaper or on the associated wiki. Speaking of which, here’s a link to that:
One of the more iconic moments of the JoJo series comes in the supernatural abilities. Parts 1 and 2 begin with an ability known as “Hamon” or the Ripple in English. It functions as an ability that can harness a power similar to that of the sun. Its name derives from the ripples that appear in liquids and its mirroring of the sun’s power makes it an effective tool against vampires. After Part 3, Hamon is mostly done away with in favor of the Stand.
Stands are different from Hamon in the sense that they’re physical representations of one’s soul and can appear in diverse ways. The most common appearance they take is a ghostly humanoid form that stands beside its user and their powers, but can appear is different things; animals, plants, a gun, vehicles, concepts–the sky’s the limit. The only caveat is that only a Stand user can see another Stand, but they impact everyone. So you don’t have to be a Stand user to come under the impact or influence of one. For example, a Stand user who can control the weather can theoretically make it rain or snow on command. When they first debuted in Part 3, they took the names of Tarot cards and Egyptian gods before taking the names of music or musicians.
Following the successful 2012 adaptation, it’s hard to imagine western distribution of anime without JoJo, but the in-between years have a bunch of eye-catching references that a trained eye can find on review. It wasn’t until the most recent and currently produced adaptation that the JoJo’s reach became international and for better or worse, JoJo fans have taken the JoJo’s reference far beyond its roots. Copypastas, poses, iconic characters, parodies; you could sneeze and it would be a JoJo’s reference. Minor spoiler, but that’s also not a joke. On Reddit, there’s two dedicated subreddits centered around the franchise. For fanart, discussions, analyses, and announcements, there’s r/StardustCrusaders, and for memes and meme-related events, there’s the aforementioned r/ShitpostCrusaders.
As hard as it was for JoJo to make it to the west, now that it’s here, the newer debate comes in the form of where to start and how to start. Reading about that sounds absurd. If you’ve never heard of JoJo, but know that it’s divided into parts, your first thought would probably be to start at Part 1. The reason this debate exists is because different people have different opinions on certain parts. Similar to how there are beloved and reviled episodes of a certain cartoon or TV show. Some people will recommend different parts for different reasons revolving around plot and concept and others will recommend starting at the beginning, myself included, so as to get the entirety of the story.
If you want to hear it from me, I’ll start off with how I got into JoJo. It began with Toonami acquiring the license to air Part 3 in 2016 when I was in high school.
Stardust Crusaders was divided into two parts for the anime the Road to Egypt arc and the Battle in Egypt arc. In the middle of the second arc, one of the episodes begins with a character at gunpoint attempting to warn his comrades that an old enemy is back to challenge them and he does this by pointing his tongue in the shape of an arrow.
The art style put me off at first, but I started watching it and watching it even more until eventually, we reached the climax at the end of the arc. I wound up looking for it on YouTube where there are loads of videos in segments and/or playlists, and rewatching it with my fullest attention, made Stardust Crusaders one of my most favorite parts in JoJo.
That being said, the way the other parts are structured might shape your opinion on the part as a whole. As much as I recommend Part 3, I also highly recommend beginning at Part 1 and judging for yourself as you go along. The most recent part to get adapted to the anime was Stone Ocean in December 2021 which finished its batch release in December 2022. So whatever your watch pace, wherever you finish you can look at sources like Mangadex to start on Part 7. The black and white manga isn’t hard to find and recently, fans as well as the distributor Shueisha have been coloring the manga but it isn’t always perfect. All of the anime is also dubbed in English, so there’s pretty much no wrong way to get into JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Even if you begin somewhere in the middle, you can also go back to an earlier part or skim through the wiki for a better understanding of an arc or concept.
One more thing before I go:
Just about any frame in the series, anime or manga, can be used as a meme if you’re creative enough. But for the love of all things holy, do not under any circumstances consume the series through just memes. The series is tough to read or watch as it is, and out of context memes don’t help with comprehension. For the most part, those are for people who do understand the series well enough to joke about it. I recommend the wiki and several JoJo-based YouTubers who can explain it in a concise fashion if you’re lost. And you might get lost on the way.
Whether you play it or not, you likely know at least a few things about the Grand Theft Auto series: 1) it’s pretty much an organized crime simulator, 2) it’s violently comedic, 3) and the character Big Smoke exists to this day as a meme machine.
The more knowledgeable of you may also know some fun facts about the series as a whole, not the least of which involves the series’ humble beginnings. The concept of the game was under the working title of Race ‘n’ Chase with a release date set for sometime in 1997 by Scottish developers DMA Design. The original goal was top-down street racing with an added bonus of a police response that would become common for series like Midnight Club and Need for Speed.
The point of divergence for the concept was a tough-to-patch glitch. The police cars were extraordinarily relentless in pursuit of the player and most of the time, the devs couldn’t correct the issue, so instead they decided to team up with the madness and make it an action-adventure game retitled Grand Theft Auto. Across all the games, the skeleton of the objective is the same: the protagonist changes with each game, but they’re all tasked with completing a set of tasks for increasingly high payment with proportional risk to the player. As the games progress, the player unlocks new weapons, safe houses, locations, and in some cases clothing options. The police wanted level has influenced the game and others across the industry — the response is often proportional to the crime from mild disturbances having a single cop car investigating to high level crimes involving stand-ins for real life federal agencies like the FBI. Up until GTA V took away one of the stars, the military would be called for the highest wanted level of six stars all just to take you down. A look on YouTube may find you some compilation videos of the police partaking in the Darwin Awards, or interestingly analysis videos on the police in GTA games. My favorite comes from Game Theory where they experimented on whether real-life instances of brutality have been programmed into the game. In a serious tone, this is a debate best suited for a platform better equipped to make comment on it, so this is more of a comedic tone.
GTA and GTA 2 in 1999 were both 2D games despite the late 1990s being the era of the emerging 3D graphics market. Almost every developer was launching a video game with full 3D graphics with resounding success stories like Medal of Honor and GoldenEye 007 coupled with lackluster releases like Mortal Kombat 4 and what would’ve been Star Fox 2 if it came out on time.
One can argue that Grand Theft Auto III’s 2001 release was somewhat later than what was expected of games at the time as RockStar’s formula is to one-up itself with each new release and GTA III came swinging at the hip, guns ablaze. The graphics and mechanics at the time set the stage for a ginormous change all throughout the gaming industry and one of the first notable examples of GTA’s influence was the many clones, though I doubt the men in charge of RockStar cared all that much. Leslie Benzies and the Houser Bros., Sam and Dan, were busy making games and as shameless as some of the clones were, taking elements from a proven success story isn’t the end of the world. Other devs could do what they wanted while RockStar Games released, 2002’s GTA Vice City, 2004’s GTA San Andreas (which to this day is the reason the PS2 sold well over 150 million units), 2006’s Vice City Stories — one of two underrated GTA games that I talked about months ago on this blog, and one of the most expensive games at the time, 2008’s GTA IV.
Coupled with DLC content in the form of The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony expansions, GTA IV signified a change in the GTA series. The HD era was upon us and the next generation of consoles was its home. Better graphics, a more serious tone, new mechanics, and reimagined cities and locales. GTA IV’s Liberty City looked more like the Big Apple than its 3D rendition, and a lot of small details from older games have remained unchanged or were tweaked to fit the era.
As we all know, RockStar’s prize success story is that of GTA V in 2013, which reimagines Los Angeles and some surrounding areas in the HD universe, but before that, there was another HD game in the 2D style: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.
I was originally going to mention how much of a difference there is between this game and the two GTAs released before and after it, but every GTA game differs in some capacity so that would’ve been a useless metric for the game. The basic plot of this game involves Hong Kong immigrant Huang Lee who flies to Liberty City and is welcomed with violence. He arrived in the city to deliver a sword to his uncle Wu “Kenny” Lee, but things turned sideways when he was ambushed at the airport, so now he has to work to make up for the loss of the sword. Obviously, there’s more to this story and if you want to look at the series from beginning to end, The Professional, GTASeriesVideos (a RockStar fan channel), and Willzyyy are your best sources of gameplay on YouTube along with some other channels.
Now the plot is the standard, started at the bottom, now we’re here fare, but the most notable difference was that when it released in March of 2009, Nintendo allowed RockStar to publish it on the DS.
Yeah, the same company that heavily censored Mortal Kombat in the 1990s and lives and breathes by Super Mario and Kirby allowed a notoriously violent video game on one of their star handheld platforms. Granted, 2000s Nintendo was far removed from 1990s Nintendo. There was still the family-friendly image on the face of the company, but at this point Nintendo was letting the chains loosen a bit on the family friendly image by allowing Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 to be played on the DS as well. It’s a large company with a large history, run by a council of suits and while there’s nothing detailing how this arrangement came to be in detail, the main connecting element is extensive use of the touchscreen function in some manner.
This might have been part of the deal to get certain types of games on the Nintendo DS: design it in a way that the touchscreen doesn’t go ignored, and while that works well for touch games like the Touchmaster series, third parties are hit and miss. From best use to worst use in my personal experience, it’s Chinatown Wars at best, Mortal Kombat in the middle, and Call of Duty at the worst. Or rather just awkward for that last one.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the rest of that deal included a lap dance of some sort. For Chinatown Wars, it might be a good example of a game whose mechanics are tied to the touchscreen, but not necessarily dependent on that feature. Certain minigames and combat sequences make good use of the feature and it flows naturally enough into gameplay that you won’t really notice it as much half the time. Don’t quote me on this, but I don’t think this was actually the first time a GTA game was on a Nintendo system. Prior to GTA III, there was GTA Advance available for the Game Boy, and once again, I doubt attempting to research that arrangement will net me anything interesting, unless I use a time machine or the wayback machine.
Some mechanics in Chinatown Wars that use the touchscreen include filling your own bottles of Molotov cocktails at the gas station; rigging stolen cars by way of screwdriver, hotwire, or PDA hacking (sidenote: this was most likely the last time in the modern era that PDAs would ever be important in any medium); assembling the sniper rifle for certain occasions, like a story mission; and controversially, drug dealing.
Grand Theft Auto belongs to a list of media properties that courts controversy like Casanova rounding third base for the fifth time in a week, and until recently, RockStar Games themselves have been known for their controversial money maker. Seasoned veterans of the series who skipped over this game may be curious why the drug dealing specifically was a sore point for critics to look at when the game was released. Well, another part of what makes the game different from the others was the player’s direct involvement in the drug dealing. For the most part, the protagonist is merely a glorified middleman who moves things from A to B, rarely having a role in the direct purchase or sale of such things save for cutscenes.
Chinatown Wars breaks away from that and allows the player to do so in their free time away from missions and sometimes as a prerequisite to activate a certain mission. Of course, it comes with its own set of risks. Sometimes the dealers — who come from multiple different gangs and factions — meet up in locations where a police camera is. The presence of the camera can help determine whether a deal is about to be busted, but its presence also raises the prices of a certain product. Minimizing the police response by destroying the cameras is also an option, but the price of the drugs bought or sold also takes a hit. This mechanic makes more use of the high risk, high rewards system that GTA is usually known for.
And I’m certain this is needless to say, but no, video game violence doesn’t lead to real life violence. There was one incident in 2003 when Alabama teen Devin Moore went on a rampage inspired by GTA Vice City that left three people dead and put him on death row where he still sits as of writing this, but if that were the metric used to judge games based on their content, then laws around video games in the US would closely resemble what Australia has on the books which was why GTA III was banned their for over twenty years.
This guy knows how it feels.
This is the part where after reviewing a game and listing its gameplay in detail, I’d encourage you to track down a copy and a working console to play it, or find an emulator to use, but unlike Warner Bros. who practically force us nostalgic types to emulate the 3D Mortal Kombat games, RockStar’s been a big fan of anniversary releases with GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas all getting updates every ten years to correspond with the games’ respective release dates, and GTA Chinatown Wars is the same being made available on smartphones as of late. There’s also a PSP version that adds another character, the opportunistic journalist Melanie Mallard as an extra character. To my knowledge, the smartphone versions are upgrades from the original DS version so, I guess it’s a matter of personal preference.
I had both versions available to me at the time and I personally recommend the PSP version for the extra character and extra music stations alone. Admittedly, there’s no voice lines in this games, except for the DS version where the game says a short dialogue line when the DS is closed and then opened, so the cutscenes are a bit like a visual novel or, since we have precedent, the cutscenes featured in 1988’s Ninja Gaiden on the NES.
As I said, gameplay videos exist on YouTube and however you experience the game is all up to you.
A beloved, obscure anime with a bizarre lack of fanfare
The subtitle might seem a bit misleading, and it is in some manner. Thing is, I found out about this last week, but it seems that Adult Swim released a teaser in March of 2022 advertising two new seasons subtitled Grunge and Shoegaze.
Yeah, I used the same video as I teased in last week’s post. And that’s the point, this was all the evidence I could find of the new seasons. Normally, my posts are long-form, even if I do on-the-fly research (which tends to be most of the time, honestly speaking), but with so little news about the new seasons of FLCL, I couldn’t help but wonder if it did fly under the radar, which is a shame honestly. It premiered on Toonami in 2001 a short time after the original six episodes were made in Japan, and came back in 2018, during the April Fool’s joke as a promotional piece for FLCL: Alternative and Progressive later that year. The most I could find on it were a few articles and some extra videos providing analysis on the ten-second teaser.
That said, FLCL original, Alternative, and Progressive still give me something to work with. So the most I can do is write about what the other three seasons entailed, fan reception, and perhaps I’ll try my best to speculate on what Shoegaze and Grunge are meant to be, though considering the nature of the property, those names may not mean anything.
Starting with the original, FLCL (read as Fooly Cooly) was launched in Spring 2000 and is remarkably short at six episodes. On the surface, it looks like wacky nonsense that not even JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure would touch with a Stand holding a 5-meter barge pole, but fans of the series recommend watching the entire thing multiple times with a notepad nearby for some homework.
Depending on what you’re focusing on — which is its own feat because there’s a lot that goes on in just this show — you may be looking at the main character, Naota Nandaba, learn what it means to be mature while trying to speedrun childhood or you may be looking at the highlighted character, Haruko Haruhara, prepare to face off against organizations known as Medical Mechanica and the Fraternity so she can steal ultimate power from the pirate king Atomsk.
Just kidding!
Now maybe it’s me, but I’ve heard people focus on one or the other without considering that they run concurrent. Most often, I hear people focus on one or the other, likely because Naota has nothing to do with Atomsk or Medical Mechanica… except that the connecting piece between them is Haruko herself, who introduces herself to the scene by speeding on a Vespa and braining the boy with a bass guitar. The impact gives him a ginormous bump that morphs into a horn that acts as a portal for which a robot emerges from his forehead. Even if Naota isn’t directly involved with these intergalactic shenanigans, it doesn’t stop Haruko from pulling him along while some of the other people in his life come along for the ride. Hell, looking at the rest of the townsfolk, Naota might as well be out of place, which is part of the point of FLCL’s meaning as the plot goes along. I’m not saying it’s bad to focus on one aspect over the other, there’s no wrong way to interpret something, even if the conclusions you come across are different from the general consensus, but thinking one is more important than the other is a bit misleading, even if the two don’t connect directly. As an example, William Shakespeare’s play King Lear was said to be performed on Boxing Day in 1606 and a few months later the Kingdom of England successfully set up the Virginia colony after failing the first two times twenty years earlier, yet there’s no connection between them aside from the country because Shakespeare’s contributions to geopolitics and colonialism are nonexistent.
On the whole though, most fans of FLCL original have lots of love for it. The points of divergence are sharp and clear between that of Progressive and Alternative. Progressive is about a girl named Hidomi Hibajiri whose personality is a match with that if Naota, except she’s most defined by her cat-ear headphones and unlike Naota, she chooses to ignore everything. The boy at least interacted with people; this girl would honestly be mistaken as a “relatable character” by some. Off topic, but I hate how relatable has come to equal jaded and gloomy. Is it hard to relate to a smily, joyful character? I haven’t seen it in full, but the clips of Tomo-chan is a Girl that feature Carol Olston specifically are some of my favorite, and we are nothing alike.
Anyway, like Naota, Hidomi was hit by a weird woman in a weird vehicle who goes on to live with her and her mother, Hinae, as the maid and of course Medical Mechanica returns to bear its fangs. But where’s Haruko in this? Well, she’s the teacher and this time she goes by the name Haruha Raharu. Now based on that description, this sounds like a skeleton wearing the skin of FLCL, and to some, it is. It’s not the same FLCL with a hidden meaning about growing up and boyhood; the original meaning is lost without Naota anywhere to be seen. Then again, I say that this is a fallacy from a fallacy, which draws the conclusion that Naota’s story is the only thing worth focusing on while all that other tomfoolery is going on in the background. This is true, but I’m hard-pressed to say that it should be isolated as much as it is. I’m more of the belief that it’s a coming-of-age story with a challenge for the boy to overcome as opposed to two separate things that barely interact with each other.
The widespread attachment to Naota at the cost of the rest of the plot might be an attribution to the general weirdness of anime being taken as normal and so the plot with Haruko and Atomsk and Medical Mechanica and what not isn’t seen as important as a jaded young boy growing up with unreliable relationships, and I understand that argument, but I also don’t like that. Not that I think it’s a bad faith argument to emphasize the boy’s importance, but to me, it’s more that Naota Nandaba’s story, while as important to the meaning of the show, isn’t what I would call the be-all, end-all.
I also don’t think the Haruko-Atomsk plot is meant to be the main focus of the show either. A video by akidearest on YouTube explains that the director, Kazuya Tsurumaki, wanted to break the rules as much as possible when making the show.
For Alternative, it’s got a wider cast and a more sociable protagonist, Kana Koumoto, and her friends, Mossan, Pets, and Hijiri, all of whom are in the latter half of high school and all of whom are also said to lead unremarkable lives until the giant monster jellyfish shows up and incinerates everything… oh, my mistake, that’s SpongeBob. Same as before: Haruko, bass guitar, Atomsk, the whole shebang.
If you’ve been following along, you’ll notice that as we progress, the protagonists get older and older. Naota is 12 years old, Hidomi is 14, and Kana et al are around 17-18. So for the most part, everyone is growing up and whatever we can expect from Grunge and Shoegaze, slated for release later this year might follow this path or do something completely different.
Across all three of them, FLCL at least maintains the relationships theme, whether it highlights how unreliable they can be as we age, learning to soften up to people, or how hard it can be to maintain them over time. Akidearest’s video linked above shows that FLCL’s plot is a complicated mess of many things and my research on the show and this blog reflect how hard it is to understand. It’s not just a distraction, it’s a fractal distraction, or at least that’s the frame that it’s wearing.
Part of the intention of this specific blog was to look at why a lot of fans of OG FLCL don’t give Progressive and Alternative as much of a chance with a lot of them seeing clones that wear the name as a mask while also questioning the necessity of a double-sequel after seventeen or so years in naptime, but for me, this highlights a number of false conclusions about FLCL and the coming-of-age genre. I didn’t get it at the time, but when I read Catcher in the Rye in high school, I just wrote Holden Caulfield off as a spoiled brat. While I still think that, I’ve come to realize that sometimes he has a point and it’s not all about misunderstanding the world from the mind of an adolescent.
All things considered, Progressive and Alternative follow the coming-of-age model quite nicely, even in the piecemeal fashion as presented. Do I think any one of them are better than the other? That’s a loaded question for me as I think there’s an audience for each type of animation style within the confines of any given animation and specifically FLCL, but as far as plot goes, I can’t really find one I prefer to the other. I feel about all of FLCL the same way I feel about JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Everyone has criticisms for and against some aspect of it, and I’m not above that, but the connecting element for JJBA is the family legacy of the Joestar clan’s fight against Dio and his cronies or just fate itself. I don’t have a part I dislike, but I do have some that I lean more towards than most.
Similarly, there’s a lot to examine about all three seasons of FLCL so far. In isolation or association, they all do their job well enough while following different stages in life. But that doesn’t answer if I think one of them is superior. To that I say–
Cop out answer incoming: declaring preference for one over the other is complicated for me. I tend to do it selectively, and with full expectations that what I like now will be different in the next few years. So not superior to anything else, but circling back to my point about relatable characters being gloomy and dejected, I like FLCL: Alternative because of the extra cast of characters to work with than just what I see in the others as a textbook case of how not to communicate. The others are still good in their own right, though.
April 1 is a golden opportunity for a lot of people to play practical jokes on each other, and there’s often no rules as to how this can go. As long as no one gets hurt then have at it. In the case of TV, even the news likes to have their go at the festivities. Personally, I think there’s more mileage in animation which brings me to the topic of this post’s title.
Perhaps by virtue of being an adult animation TV channel, Adult Swim has a knack for partaking in the jokes and merriment of April Fools’ Day. In some cases, where the program runs from late night March 31 to early morning April 1, they’ll engage in some tomfoolery on the shows they plan on airing, messing with the schedule, or other such on-air silliness. As a bonus for them, it’s an opportunity to air shows set to debut sometime in the future.
What interests me the most of all is that this isn’t exclusive to just the Adult Swim block. In the US, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, and Toonami, all air on the same channel. CN is the primary daytime block; by 9:00 PM every night Adult Swim airs from Sunday to Friday all night, handing the reins back to CN at 5:00 AM; and on Saturday from midnight to 5:00 AM, Toonami airs.
All three have a rotating body of regular shows, some of which have gone down in animation history from Johnny Bravo, Dexter’s Laboratory, Power Puff Girls, and Teen Titans on Cartoon Network; King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force on Adult Swim; and Toonami’s had a variety of different anime, the most common ones ranging from Cowboy Bebop, to FLCL, to Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, Bleach, and One Piece, some of which are still on the block albeit in the dead of night.
Every April 1, viewers of Adult Swim and sometimes Toonami are in for any given treat. The first round of AS pranks began back in 2004 as a series of slight alterations to the channel’s shows. They were quick to do the same to Toonami and as the years went on, they got progressively more spontaneous. The tradition was still ongoing even after Toonami was canned in 2008. The Wikipedia page for Toonami describes the cancellation of Toonami as low-ratings. But I think I know what the true culprit was for that. Toonami is normally hosted by a robot character known as TOM who introduces the audience to the show and over the years the first time around, he’s gone through more than a few appearance changes through interactive events known as Total Immersion Events.
These events have been a staple of the block for years and generally involve a crisis of some sort attacking TOM’s station where he and AI partner SARA host the programming block. After the crisis is solved or averted or sometimes succeeded into killing TOM, a new appearance is adopted and the appearance of TOM 4 in 2007 was why it was axed the following year.
I wouldn’t say TOM 4’s appearance straight up assassinated the block, but it was a major contributor to the dip in viewership.
For about four years, Toonami was dead until it was revived for April Fools 2012 with a return to form. TOM 3, or in this case 3.5, returned to catch the viewers up to speed that night, by airing some old shows that have been on the block years prior, notably Fullmetal Alchemist and Tenchi Muyo. It wasn’t until a month later that executives confirmed on social media that Toonami was back for good this time.
Ever since, the April Fools’ Day pranks haven’t stopped and occasionally there’s a crossover into Toonami as previously mentioned. One of my personal favorites has to come from 2018. Being a western animation block airing English dubbed anime, the block normally doesn’t air anything in Japanese unless it’s something along the lines of an interview with a mangaka, a director, a studio in Japan or something else. Well, for 2018, not only were Japanese-dubbed anime put on the TV, TOM and SARA themselves were also given Japanese dubs, as was the logo.
Normally, April Fools’ is where AS markets the premiere of an upcoming show or a show’s next season later in the year, and for Toonami, I believe they were especially excited for this as FLCL: Alternative and Progressive were slated to air later that year. Additionally, they put on the 2004 Masaaki Yuasa produced movie Mind Game, also in Japanese, because this April Fools’ wasn’t weird enough.
This still goes down as one of my favorite April Fools’ events from Adult Swim and I was almost expecting them to do it again especially recently. Last month, they stuck it out with the April Fools’ tradition as expected and poking around on the associated subreddit, I kinda got my hopes up a bit. Part of the charm of these events is that its unpredictable. The only thing a viewer can expect from these is a deviation from the schedule and an introduction to a new show or new season of an existing show. This tradition was honored and for 2023, audiences got a taste of new show Royal Crackers and another season was confirmed for The Eric Andre Show and Teenage Euthanasia.
I was expecting something for Toonami this year, but it seemed Adult Swim took the glory. The daily discourse these days has been that of the progress in AI technology, so to capitalize on that, Adult Swim used a generative AI (think DALL-E or Midjourney) to run their programs in the early morning hours of April 1, mildly disrupting the run of Smiling Friends and putting a rerun of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. It’s hard to explain in wording or writing so have a look at the livestream from that day.
In contrast, Toonami aired the shows as normal whilst paying homage to the joke that put them back on TV. The reason I expected a 2018-style makeover was because Toonami comes on every Saturday night at midnight and April began on a Saturday, but this was more of a miscalculation on my end. Toonami began about three hours earlier than the midnight setup that it has now. Double bills are also quite rare in this regard, so while Adult Swim did give us something stupid to laugh at early Saturday morning, this wasn’t guaranteed for Toonami. Again, April Fools’ Day pranks on AS are unpredictable after all.
So the joke is very much on me, but I still think it was fun this year. Another possible double bill April Fools’ Day prank could probably occur the next time April begins on a Saturday and because 2024 is a Leap Year, the next time that’ll happen coincidentally will be another Leap Year: 2028, which is the year I turn 30. Again, this is speculation. I’m not Nostradamus trying to see what’s in the future…
Significant changes to your life are in the future.
One more thing before I end this blog post, I may have a topic for the next week that’ll throw my schedule into the fray and it concerns FLCL mentioned above. Here’s a sneak peek:
Admittedly, this was from March 2022, but I’m gonna write about it next week because I didn’t know about it at the time.
A week-long journey in rewriting a fictional storyline
Two weeks ago, I made a post in the midst of a memory lapse concerning the God of War timeline. My vague notes were misinterpreted as a detailed look at the timeline, but on reflection, I realized that it may have been more in line with making the timeline make better sense due to the plot holes as well as mythical inaccuracies. In a rough draft, I attempted to do this for the entire chronology of Greek era God of War and unweaving one thread meant unweaving another and, fittingly, this would mean further opening Pandora’s box.
Some of the points I brought up were based on The Mythology Guy’s videos on listing all the mythical inaccuracies in the series, and there are a lot. But then again, Mythology Guy did it all for fun. That’s kind of how it started for me until the script sprouted wings and flew south for the winter.
I still think it’s fun to look at all the inaccuracies in the games and at the end of the day, that’s what they are. It’s generally not that deep despite the lore built up, but I didn’t want to let it all go just like that. I do still think there are things to address in accordance with the series plot. Some of these changes might be radical enough to essentially rewrite one or more of the games, but even if we acknowledge more than a few inaccuracies (like nonexistent weapons and relics for example), there’s still a few things that need some TLC.
The length of my draft opened my eyes to how untenable rewriting six games to be more mythically accurate could get. I’ve always given the games leeway since myths tend to be based on a version of reality while also having multiple tellings and retellings over time, such is the case with Egyptian mythology, but one of the examples I think should be changed regards Kratos’ ability to kill gods. One of the most famous victims of his goals being Hades’ wife, Persephone.
As we can see from this picture above, in-game Persephone has a dark aroma about her. Wearing a dark dress, gloomy demeanor, and spoiler for God of War: Chains of Olympus, plans to use a titan to destroy Olympus in revenge for her kidnapping. Mythical Persephone was the goddess of springtime and her presence on the surface signifies the changing seasons while her absence signifies a coming winter. Changing this aspect of her isn’t a new thing for Santa Monica and it followed them well into the development of the Norse saga.
Just to clarify, I’m not trying to say fat Thor is inaccurate. His personality as a villainous god undyingly loyal to Odin is the inaccuracy. Still makes for an exciting game though.
The portrayal of Persephone as seeking vengeance against Olympus for abandoning her can be chalked up to different versions of the myths. Don’t quote me on this, but I think the version where she willingly wandered into the realm of Hades and grew an affection for the god of the underworld is a relatively recent retelling differing from the myths where she’s a kidnap victim. The kidnap victim angle works hand-in-hand with the double-cross from Olympus and makes for good villain. The point of change that I would say needed a change would be her death. For a while, I ran with the theory that she was a goddess of lesser importance, but commenters in The Mythology Guy’s video on Chains of Olympus stated that the Gauntlet of Zeus was the god-killing weapon specifically.
By this logic, Pandora’s box can grant a mortal the ability to kill god with any weapon since the sword Kratos used on Ares wasn’t all that special, merely acting as a bridge on the outskirts of Athens while the Gauntlet of Zeus bears the name and is the sole property of the king of Olympus, which would apply like the diamond rule where only a diamond can cut another diamond. In this instance, only a tool blessed by an Olympian can kill an Olympian, which also seems to be in line with the Blade of Olympus, from the Titanomachy in the games. So I’ll give the commenters in that video the W for explaining and confirming it, since this is before Kratos gets the powers to kill a god by any other means from the box of Pandora, but another point where Kratos kills a god without gaining the ability from the box or is in possession of a godly weapon comes from God of War: Ascension and the main baddies there: the Furies.
This picture also works to show that despite being a demigod, Kratos was also capable of mutilating a deity with just the blades of Chaos. And you can argue that the blades of Chaos, later Athena, later Exile are all godly weapons capable of killing gods, then Pandora’s Box would be unnecessary later unless the box is capable of making sure the gods, primordials and Olympians alike, but some of this hasn’t been confirmed, so it exists as a retcon.
There’s other stuff that, if changed, or addressed would essentially rewrite the narrative of the games. Personally, I’ve found a newfound appreciation for God of War II for the references and other heroes and characters who appear in the game like Theseus and Perseus, who have an indirect connection through Perseus’ descendant Hercules/Heracles. What I like about Perseus in this game come to the weapons on his person: the reflective shield, the helm of invisibility, the voice acting talents of Harry Hamlin who played the character in 1981’s Clash of the Titans. It’s all so good. To add to this, the point of divergence in his life comes from Kratos taking the head of Medusa instead of him which, in the myths, he was supposed to use on Cetus to save Andromeda from peril, and his quest to see the Sisters of Fate reflects the negative consequences of that in a “Rob Peter to Pay Paul” aspect.
But there’s different things about Perseus to nitpick. Highlighted once again by the Mythology Guy, the sword is the wrong shape and his boots don’t have wings as described in the myths. As for the part of him where he never sought the sisters or died in battle, I’ll leave that part alone. Additionally, before this point, Kratos encounters an elderly Theseus who works as the gatekeeper of the steeds of time, which Kratos himself pointed out was the last thing he expected out of him since Theseus was so famously arrogant and cocky. Something students of Greek mythology are also likely to point out just before the fight on one of the horses.
He’s still quite arrogant in the game, but him having decades on Perseus or even Heracles in God of War III is a strange direction for the developers to take since Perseus is the one who should be an old man instead. In the myths, their indirect connection comes from Perseus being Heracles’ direct ancestor and Heracles encountered Theseus during one of his labors. If we want to alter this slightly, perhaps have a disgruntled and elderly Perseus trade spots with Theseus who’d be obsessed with attempting to regain his fame as the founder-king of Athens.
On the subject of weird directions to take, Hobo Icarus doesn’t make much sense. In the myths, Icarus was warned by his father Daedalus to neither fly too close to the sun or the heat would melt the binding wax that holds the feathers, not too close to the sea or the water would wash away the adhesive. Failing to adhere, the sun melts the wax and sends the boy into the sea to drown and Daedalus buries him on an island.
This would make more sense if it was Daedalus seeking the sisters to see if they could do something about his son as opposed to him becoming a victim of the gods’ cruelty and being forced to work on that labyrinthine Rubik’s cube in God of War III.
In the same game, there’s the issue of the Fates. In Ghost of Sparta, Thanatos tells Kratos and Deimos before fighting them that the Fates determine the paths of everyone in the Greek world, but normally at the behest of the gods, which is also confirmed by Theseus before his own fight in God of War II as well as Lahkesis herself at her own temple before the sisters face their own ultimate fate. A major plot hole here is that the Fates meant for Kratos to beat the odds and get to the temple, but strictly state that there is no changing one’s fate. Whatever happens happens. By this point, Kratos is hellbent on angering his way to Zeus and burying him under the soil of Olympus (or what’s left of it) by the end.
But I have to ask why the Fates would bring him this far if he wasn’t supposed to win. Probably to live up to the prophecy revealed in Ascension and follow the trend of failing to avoid fate by eventually being the cause of it, coupled with Kratos never really losing those god-killing powers from the first game since the Sisters fall to him with more Olympians to follow suit in God of War III. That’s my explanation, but admittedly I’m only working with the powers of extrapolation so I know damn well I’m wrong somewhere.
Not as wrong as Heracles is with his own labors though. He claims in God of War III that he performed all twelve of them, but by my count three of them were taken by Kratos, namely the hydra, the Cerberus, and the Geryon. The first two appeared in GoW 1 as the first battle and the Challenge of Poseidon respectively. The Geryon was the teleporting monster on the island of Crete from Ghost of Sparta, which is fitting since the enemy appears in Heracles’ namesake city in the game. For reference:
Granted in the myth, it didn’t teleport and was described as a three-headed giant or a three-torsoed giant that got bodied by Heracles. I’d still keep the Heracles fight, but maybe change the lines to make the timeline a little bit more consistent than what we got. Going back to Chains of Olympus briefly, Morpheus was pretty much teased as a major figure and him being the god of dreams should have been a golden opportunity for Kratos to combat him in the hopes of getting some kind of relief from his nightmares. Just saying, the series uses the Rule of Three cliché quite a bit so why not give him a third deity to fight unless there were plans that were scrapped? Such a shame we didn’t get to see this.
Speaking of missed opportunities, God of War III has Kratos toppling Olympus in an attempt to reach Zeus. An awesome concept that honestly should have included more deities in the pantheon. We already know about the vacancies left by Ares, Athena, and Persephone, but others either made only one appearance or none at all. Why reference Apollo’s bow but omit the god himself? Or leave Artemis out of the last of the games? Would she have been too OP even for Kratos since she’s a goddess of the hunt? Well, that giant sword she gives him in the first game would suggest that she’s one of the gods you wouldn’t want to trifle with, especially since she turned one of her followers into a bear after an affair with Zeus.
Hades losing his wife to Kratos along with his brother and niece would be a sore spot of reference, and I imagine Zeus would force him to put up with it so he can lend him control of the dead in his fight with Ares, but Hades wouldn’t be the only one pissed off about that. Persephone’s mother should’ve also been there to stop Kratos. Lastly, there are Dionysus and Hestia. Admittedly, some of these omitted gods wouldn’t have any battle prowess, but with the chaos unleashed from the box of Pandora, I’d still think they’d put up a fight of some kind. Dionysus could’ve afflicted Kratos with drunkenness, Hestia and Demeter are both said to wield scepters, and Artemis and Apollo both have bows. Or if this would extend an already pretty long game, how about challenges bearing their names like the first game? Just a thought.
This is just what I think could be used to fix some of God of War’s plot holes, I don’t think they’re egregious and make the games unplayable or unenjoyable, and I understand that some concepts don’t always make it to the final product, like Atlantis getting scrapped and becoming a major plot point for Ghost of Sparta, but some of these points, when examined, don’t often make a lot of sense.
Before I move onto the YouTube channel recommendations, I want to briefly address one recommendation I made in the past. Two weeks ago, I recommended the YouTube channel iilluminaughtii because of her in-depth anticorporatist, anti-MLM documentaries, but earlier this week, it was revealed that former editors and collaborators on her channel and associated channels have dug out some skeletons from her closet.
She attempted to defame another YouTuber when one of his editors questioned the techniques of her editing team on Discord. This specific editor is a YouTuber himself and had simply asked for tips and tricks, which comes with the territory on YouTube, but when the same editing tricks made their way into a video, iilluminaughtii, or in this case Blair herself, got mad and falsely claimed plagiarism on Twitter, which others were quick to point out the hypocrisy as her channel has plagiarized other documentaries in the past.
Now there’s nothing wrong with calling someone out if you believe they stole material or even with referencing a documentary for use in a video or article you yourself are making. The points of divergence come with what Blair claimed and the YouTuber she attempted to accuse of theft. What she claimed was a practice that is common all over the site and the YouTuber she attempted to defame was Devin Stone, a real-life attorney operating in the Washington, DC area whose content focuses on real-life and fictional law cases from the trial in SpongeBob SquarePants to Better Call Saul.
Furthermore, ex-editors and such have come out on Twitter to describe Blair as a person and as a YouTuber personally and none of them have nice things to say about her. For a start, she doesn’t seem to keep a tidy dwelling and is quite accusatory as seen with the nontroversy she tried to start with an actual attorney. She’s also not a good neighbor and doesn’t always practice what she preaches, shaming and lambasting the uber-wealthy, but now that she’d found success from her own channel, she allegedly shopped for luxurious items like expensive clothing brands and cars, sometimes after publishing a video on why X brand doesn’t live up to its purported reputation.
Looking back, it was quite alarming that she could pump out so many documentaries in such a short amount of time considering documentaries take far longer to make than any given movie thanks to the research that goes into them. After what I’d heard about another documentary YouTuber, Jake Tran, I thought I’d be over hypocritical content creators becoming the monsters they sought to destroy, and I make this comparison because this was what I’d thought of with the Twitter threads and YouTube videos released this week that talk about this sort of thing amongst other YouTuber controversies as of late. But whereas Jake Tran took histories lessons as a handbook instead of a warning, Blair is doing the exact thing she often accuses real-life public figures of doing, so what gives?
I’ll still make recommendations for YouTube channels I like and I might cover the topic more in-depth in the future but I can’t make promises to the latter. I don’t really like delving into content creator drama. Personally, I stick around for the content. Online and in Hollywood there are too many examples of celebrities falling victim of their own hubris and I’ll always praise those who try their best to remain controversy-free and point people in their direction since they tend to have evidence of their services to the unfortunate, either through donations or fundraisers, but I can’t say everyone I recommend will be or remain a good person five, ten, twenty years for now. I only promise to try.
As for channels I recommend, to make up for the shortfall that came with Blair “iilluminaughtii,” I have two recommendations this time around. Yes, a two-fer! The first one is Monsieur Z.
Monsieur Z, also known as Mr. Z, real name Dean, is also a history YouTuber who delves into alternate history most of the time. His channel is a bit more frequent than that of Cody Franklin’s Alternate History Hub et al and incidentally, both have been confused with each other because of their deep voices. Politically, Mr. Z leans conservative and has some videos that tacitly or overtly criticize left-leaning and liberal viewpoints, but he’s not a primary current events channel. Most of the time, it’s looking at different points in history that could’ve gone differently like the aforementioned Alternate History Hub.
To throw a bone to Devin Stone, I’m also recommending his channel: LegalEagle.
Devin Stone of LegalEagle fame is, as I stated above a real-life attorney who often examines real ongoing law cases as well as fictionalized lawsuits in media. He’s also active on the website Nebula with other similar YouTubers, and even has courses and guides for aspiring lawyers in the US. Whether you hope to become an attorney in the US, you want to know more about the legalese we laymen aren’t always privy to, or if you just want to see how fictionalized court cases compare to real-world practices common in a court room, check out the channel. For both Mr. Z and LegalEagle, they have dedicated Patreon pages and other such outlets for which to support the work that they do, found in their respective about pages.
Also, Devin was a good sport in spite of the dubious claims made against him by Blair. If you’d like, you can look around on YouTube to hear what others have been saying. To summarize, it’s not a very good look for Blair.
Before we start, I just want to say that I think I meant for last week’s post to be about rewriting the God of War Greek Era narrative in a more cohesive manner considering all the silliness that unearths its plot holes. I’ve defended some overarching stuff since most ancient myths have multiple retellings due to oral tradition, but some specific details are hard to ignore. So, I’ll save that for a future post. This time, we’re gonna talk about the Naruto franchise, more importantly a series of video games based on the franchise that sort of went through a soft reboot about halfway through.
Masashi Kishimoto’s magnum opus, the Naruto franchise, had grown to be a smash hit since its first chapter debuted in 1999. Manga/anime fans hold it in high regard, and it’s part of that generation’s Big Three with the others being Bleach by Tite Kubo and One Piece by Eiichiro Oda. Both of which have gotten their own video games, accessories, figures and more.
With Naruto, part of me wants to say the ninja/shinobi aesthetic was what helped it explode when it began to make waves in the west, so much so that when the anime began dubbing it in English in 2005, the Japanese video games were getting the same treatment soon after. Generally, anime adaptations in Japan are promotional material for the manga, as are the manga’s associated figures, light novels, and other materials. Hence why some of us in the west are still waiting on a second seasons to anime that may never come.
The benefit of releasing in an era where shinobi were the coolest thing since an arctic winter might have heavily tipped the scales in Naruto’s favor, thus explaining the numerous video games associated with it. Specifically, the Ultimate Ninja series. Five main games following the timeline of the manga were released in Japan from October 2003 to December 2007, and ported to the west from June 2006 to November 2009. Likely due to the release of the anime and its western dub, the games loosely follow the events of the manga until they cut off and each successive game adds to the cast of characters to play as.
Ultimate Ninja 1, for instance, starts off with a small cast because it follows the story from the Land of Waves arc until the Destruction of the Leaf/Konoha Crush arc. Many of the important characters are assisting characters during fights, and mostly follow them individually as opposed to staying consistent with the manga, such as the changing around of one or more outcomes of certain battles. The Naruto wiki claims that as far as a presentation goes, critics felt that it left a lot to be desired. Personally, I was introduced to the series through a friend who had the second installment on his PS2 and later I went to buy the first game. From what I’d seen, I agreed with those critics’ statements that more could’ve been done at the outset, and the players and critics got that wish in Ultimate Ninja 2.
In 2004 in Japan and 2007 in the west, the second installment followed up on what the first game brought to the table. Continuing with the rest of the Konoha Crush arc and ending narratively with the Search for Tsunade arc. What became a bit of a trend for the series starting with this game was a game-exclusive arc that can be compared to filler or something along the lines of an OVA. Spoilers to follow: get ready.
After Tsunade is returned to the village to serve as the Fifth Hokage, Orochimaru who didn’t learn his lesson the first time he tried this malarkey has another go at swaying Tsunade’s decision. This time he as an ace in the hole. He and Kabuto were intercepted at the Training Grounds by Kakashi. At this time, Orochimaru’s arms have been sealed and so he needs Kabuto to use his chakra and perform ninjutsu. One such jutsu, is known as the Forbidden Jutsu: Gedo Mark and its main purpose is to limit its opponents.
There’s better pictures for this, I’m sure. Actually, I think it’s better to see it in action.
Sidenote, the YouTube channel in question has a full playthrough of this game among others. I recommend giving it a look.
This next arc sees Orochimaru and Kabuto to try multiple avenues at once to coerce Tsunade into reconsidering releasing Orochimaru’s arms. First, he cripples the more troublesome ninja, namely Kakashi and Naruto, then he uses Reanimation to revive Zabuza Momochi, Haku, and the Third Hokage. After the Leaf ninja find a way to release the Gedo Mark, they soundly defeat Orochimaru and Kabuto and the game ends. Seems even your video games aren’t free from filler. For my take, it’s an interesting story with a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense. I don’t doubt that Orochimaru’s hunt for the greatest Jutsu ever would lead him to unethical methods, we see this all the way until Boruto confirms that he’s been under lifelong house arrest, but even if he could inhabit another body, the risk to his health in his current state would have even him rethinking his decisions to use ninjutsu willy-nilly like that. Kabuto even says as much. Still enjoyable, and as an added bonus: Taijutsu Naruto.
The Japanese release had characters from the Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow movie.
There’s also a free-roaming mode where players explore the world of Naruto, though considering it stops at the Tsunade Search arc in canon, only a few locations are available. Nonetheless, there’s different activities that can be done with other characters or solo and some of my best memories of the game come from playing with friends at their houses, even if my skills were subpar. Now that the developers were seeing gold, they expanded on this even further in Ultimate Ninja 3.
Released around Christmas 2005 in Japan and in March of 2008 in the west, Ultimate Ninja 3 covers the entirety of Part I from the Land of Waves to the Sasuke Retrieval Mission albeit with some notable omissions, chief among them the Chunin Exam Preliminary Rounds. There might not have been a way get those into the game since the main focus is fighting, but it’s a not insignificant difference that could potentially shape the way someone views the anime if this was their first exposure to the series.
Still, there’s more characters to use, more minigames with the characters, and just like its predecessor there’s an exclusive arc that interestingly got its own OVA for promotional purposes.
Titled “Finally a Clash! Jonin vs. Genin,” the main gist of the OVA is that the Leaf Village in association with the Sand Village puts together a tournament based on a points system. Genin and lower start with one blue crystal worth one point while Chunin and up start with one red crystal worth five points each. Passing a threshold of points advances the ninja to the next round, and passing that threshold allows the victor to pass a regulation that the two villages would follow for a week straight.
It’s initially suggested that battling was the only way to earn crystals but these being physical points you can hold in your hand, you’re not necessarily limited to that kind of all-out battle. Select characters trade them as currency for favors or use them in wagers. There’s also simply looking for the crystals on the ground as they fall out of people’s pockets like change. As for the free-roaming open world element, there’s now jumping and double jumping and the exploration isn’t limited to a few locales, but it’s not the same open world that you’d see in the later Ultimate Ninja Storm series.
This one does a lot more, though I think the limitations of the hardware still did a number on this game since it compresses large arcs into a few battles. I’m not saying I want all the battles and dialogue to be redone in the game, just that a few of the important, plot battles be given theirs. Additionally, it was quite clever of them to hide the Fourth Hokage’s name as simply his nickname in the manga: Yellow Flash, but I’m not sure why he has no speaking role in the game. Something I forgot to mention when talking about Ultimate Ninja 2, that game had a notoriously difficult substitution/rebound system that made it near impossible to properly counter attacks. UN3 and up dumbed that down significantly and I praise the change.
Japanese release: April 2007, and Western release: March 2009, UN4 as seen on the cover starts in the Shippuden era and like its predecessors it has an exclusive arc that is separate from the canon manga arcs and its own open-world RPG-type game mode. This time around, Naruto is still training with Jiraiya. To conclude this round of training, he’s given prayer beads to wrap around each limb and Jiraiya uses a weighting Jutsu to alter the weight of the beads. They change color with experience and when Naruto’s beads glow red, he’s instructed to find Jiraiya who’ll take them off to conclude his training.
In the meantime, the two head to the Tree Felling Village where a girl, Aoi, is to be used as human sacrifice to satisfy a demon known as Black Shadow who lives in the caves. Naruto’s disgust with the practice results in him chasing after the girl who’s determined to go deeper into the cave. Black Shadow physically stops the shinobi, though by now his beads turn red and he’s eager to get them off so he can come back and break down the barrier Black Shadow had summoned earlier.
Before that though, he and Jiraiya gather some information on Aoi and her path as a sacrifice. As it turns out, Aoi was using a desperate though dangerous method to help her ailing mother, Tsubaki, who’s introduced at around the same time Naruto and Jiraiya make it to the Tree Felling Village. The village’s namesake is derived from a tree that blossomed flowers with healing properties. As a bonus, these flowers were a barrier keeping Black Shadow at bay, but when it was chopped down by the villagers and subsequently consumed by Black Shadow all hell broke loose. The villagers then offered an annual sacrifice to the demon to keep him satisfied.
As for Tsubaki’s and Aoi’s lineage, their ancestors were closely linked to the tree and their connects to the tree are limited to a charm with the flower petals inside it since the tree was felled. Aoi’s father died of illness and Tsubaki was on the same path; this culminated in her decision to feign sacrifice as a means of getting close to the tree within Black Shadow and using it as some sort of cure.
After the demon reveals its true form, Naruto fights it, aided by Aoi, and soundly defeats Black Shadow. Unfortunately, the leaves from the tree have long since wilted, save for one that Aoi picks up and I presume is used in tea. Then Naruto falls into a weeklong coma and at awaking, he finds that Tsubaki made a full recovery and Naruto and Jiraiya return to the Leaf Village having made a difference in this family’s life.
Afterwards, the game starts in the Kazekage Rescue arc, but ends halfway through before the Kazekage proper has been saved. I don’t have evidence to support this, but I think the game released as Shippuden was beginning. The only evidence I see is the release date being consistent with the beginning of Shippuden’s anime adaptation.
It’s pretty much the same as the other games, but with more characters, more movement, etc. But even though, the Shippuden arc leaves a lot to be desired, fortunately in the open-world game mode, there are coins known as Pieces of Memory where you can view the story of all of Part I from the Land of Waves arc to the Sasuke Retrieval Mission, so it’s not a total loss.
Naturally, you could assume that a fifth game was on the horizon to restart the first arc of Shippuden and keep it going to at least the end of the Tenchi Bridge Arc where we see Shippuden Sasuke. This was what I thought too at the time and I found out as recently as a few years ago that there was a fifth game that never made it to North America.
In the UN series by itself this is the last of the main Ultimate Ninja games until Ultimate Ninja Storm on the next generation of consoles. Do note that I’m not saying it has no English language release. When the UK was still an EU country, it was eligible for most EU ports of certain games, this being one of them, so while I managed to find an emulated version of the EU release, this game doesn’t exist outside of Japan or Europe and I don’t think my preschool level Japanese is gonna help me if I play with Japanese subtitles and audio.
This game actually is what motivated this post. Four games bear the Ultimate Ninja tag all released on the PS2 and the fifth one was never made for fans from the Americas. What’s the reason for this? My closest source again comes from the Naruto wiki and it can be boiled down to time constraints and dubbing issues. I can’t say with certainty as I have no evidence that this is the case, but I’m at least somewhat positive that the release dates and the evidence in the games is enough of a clue to work with.
Almost all of them released concurrent with the anime adaptation, but several years after the manga was a few arcs ahead of what was depicted, which explains why UN4’s main story is so short compared to the others. Episode 15 was the most recent episode when that game came out. As for time constraints, with the other games coming out as fast as they did, of course time was Namco’s enemy here. I only made it to the title screen as I wanted to finish the UN games before making it to five, but from what I saw even the EU release was botched with only Japanese audio with the selected nation’s language for subtitles.
From what I can gather, they were going to keep up with this trend of releasing the games around the same week as a new arc, but it seems fate forced the devs to rethink things a bit. I could see a UN6 continuing from the emergence of the Akatsuki’s Zombie Combo up until Sasuke’s formation of Team Hebi (later Taka) to finally exact revenge on Itachi for the Uchiha Clan Downfall all those years ago. And follow that trend until the manga concluded with some extra ideas for other exclusive/filler arcs.
Realistically, the problems with keeping this up grew to be untenable. At the same time some of these games were being made, the similar graphics were being used for most of the spin-off and mobile/handheld titles like the Ultimate Ninja Heroes series on the PSP and Ultimate Ninja Impact. It’s not like the Japan-only games that weren’t meant for the west; bad luck essentially forced them to hit the reset button and try again with a better series.
Better graphics, new engine, more characters, more to do with the environment and make it feel as though the player is playing the anime, the UN Storm series is in all aspects a technical upgrade. However, there’s a bunch of from the previous series that several gamers may be disappointed to learn were done away with. It took some getting used to to learn that UN3 onwards discarded the multiple screens for an ultimate jutsu as well as different ultimate jutsu in gameplay, and the RPG-esque text reading at least felt like it was advancing faster because the characters would always voice the lines so you did more than read and listen to the background music.
My exposure only comes in the last game Ultimate Ninja 4 which wraps the story up admittedly more beautifully than the anime. At least they did something with the Boruto movie adaptation. And since this was the last of Naruto’s story, if this game was using the Boruto plot to promote the movie then cool!
Though now that I think about it, it’s possible that the reputation of Naruto was what made loads of people expect better from the Boruto series. As much as I’ve been cheerleading Boruto, I also wish it would improve in some areas, though it looks like I’ll get my wish when both the manga and anime return later this year, along with a new game set for release soon.
For this week, I recommend the YouTube channel Alternate History Hub.
This channel specializes mostly in what’s on the tin: alternate history. What if the US stayed out of both world wars? What if Spain stayed Muslim? What if Japan went Catholic? What if the Ottomans colonized the Americas? and other such topics that explore what would happen if history took a different path than what happened in our timeline.
Just like my Trash Taste recommendation from a few months ago, there’s other associated channels with Alternate History Hub. Cody Franklin oversees this channel, he used to oversee the channel Knowledge Hub which is now Knowledge Husk until he gave it to his brother Tyler, and recently, Cody launched the channel Pointless Hub which looks more at entertainment media than something along the lines of geopolitics. You can even support him and his channels through the associated Patreon links.
If alternate history seems right up your alley, give him a follow. If not, then there’s other stuff of his to view.
Opinions on Entertainment 