Category: beat em up games

KanColle, Senran Kagura, iDOLM@STER: Japanese Multimedia Franchise Trifecta

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A really long-time coming

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

いいえ、やめろ！

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Edginess and Deliberate Controversy

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What was understood and what was lost over a decade

This is something of a long-time coming, a background project based largely on a series of video games that capture a now long-lost era of pop culture. An aesthetic that can best be described as urban neo-gothic horror. Video games that were edgy because they made use of what they lacked technologically, benefitting from sixth generation console limitations. Uglier graphics, standard definition resolution, subpar draw distances; video game developers and by extension many film and TV directors were between the word-of-mouth/magazine coverage era and the algorithm, ludicrous speed reactions. What am I getting at? Well, if you’re a regular subscriber or you tune in regularly to this blog you may or may not have an idea of the video games I’m about to bring up:

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I Forgot You

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A game whose title is an easily ignored command

Zero Punctuation’s review of a 2013 action-adventure video game based largely on f[clock ticking]ing with people’s memory and further contributing to collective false memory, or the Mandela effect, was on my mind not too long ago. On sale on Steam, Remember Me is something of a spearhead to Don’t Nod Entertainment’s later time-manipulation faff about, Life is Strange, only What’s Your Name Again? is more sci-fi than that other game about early-2010s hipsters and young adults who’re better off crowding Starbucks locations in Portland and making a mockery of the acoustic guitar.

Maybe, like Yahtzee suggested, it’s the butt that’s talking. “Remember Me!” Who wouldn’t?

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