Earlier this year in February, I wrote about an Adults Only game called Scarlet Maiden, about a scantily clad heroine on a quest to defeat the Prime Evil one lewdening at a time. Once again, under the Critical Bliss publishing flag, I’ve found another AO-rated 16-bit game about slashing mooks and exposing boobs but with an emphasis on magic. The game in question: FlipWitch – Forbidden Sex Hex:
Should’ve known there’d be a bunch of fanart when looking for the title screen for this game, short of booting it up for the screenshot…
As the Flip Witch under the tutelage of a great witch named Beatrix, you’re main objective is to defeat the Chaos Witch, an Egypt-themed triclops witch messing with you and all the creatures of the land from her very own castle behind a door with six unique pyramid-shaped locks. To get them all, you have to traverse different realms and defeat the bosses to get the keys. Depending on your level, you’ll either eat dirt and be shown a game over screen where the monsters of a specific realm have their way with you, or you’ll blaze through relatively unscathed. This time, I’m torn over whether to conclude that this game uses permadeath as a feature since it doesn’t have a lives’ system, but on the other hand, there’s designated save points where you gain everything you used during your playthrough, crystal teleporters to fast travel between places you’ve been and a health restoration-like system in the form of a peach that gets upgraded with each quest you complete.
Speaking of quests, Beatrix’s secondary focus is to partake in such quests for health and magic upgrades. Some of these are found interspersed across the game enlarging your health and magic bars so that you can use more, to include the more taxing magic items, and others are gained by completing a certain number of quests. Reaching said number adds a little notification in the form of Beatrix’s sprite in the upper righthand corner to let you know that upgrades are available.
More quests mean more upgrades until you max everything out and steamroll the monsters like a one-man army. Or more like one man and one woman, both of which are you. The “flip” in FlipWitch refers to your ability to switch genders at will, an acquired skill that factors both into the quests and the game over screens, so male or female, something is gonna rise and ain’t gonna be a shield hero.
Didn’t even have to censor this one.
Combat this time around doesn’t give you the option to sex up a monster for upgrade points like Sin in Scarlet Maiden or even to add to the bestiary. For the most part, the monsters are more or less segregated to their own designated parts of the game map. For instance, only goblins roam the woodlands, demons stay in the demon realm of Jigoku, mermaids are in Umi Umi, etc., etc. and they all have their own unique game over screens for when you die and for what gender you were when you died.
The weapon variety is also limited to just your wand as opposed to any number of swords and other fantasy weapons like in Scarlet Maiden. Not to mention, the only enemy-types that do show genitalia are the female enemy types. The males do show d[spurt!]k, but often after the game over screen. So unlike Scarlet Maiden, the BDSM term “switch” has a different context. A more literal context. Where the game lacks weapon variety, it makes up for it in magic variety, by giving you more magical powers to use against enemies. The wand is capable of firing projectiles and select characters of different types that don’t give you quests give you different magic powers to use which require short tutorials to get the hang of.
As for the quests, the standard format they use is go to place, get quest, deliver thing to X, get sexy rewards. Like so:
The one twist these types of quests use is that specific costumes need to be bought with the coins you acquire through gameplay. Different costumes unlock different quests for different variations of a similar reward (sexy times), which ties into the whole Metroidvania aspect the game advertises. Nonlinear gameplay allowing for backtracking to important locations with new knowledge and more rewards and potential upgrades to finally defeat the Chao Witch…!
…which I’m very close to doing as of this writing. I’m so close!!
Recommendations? Give it a go. There’s keyboard controls like in Scarlet Maiden, but unless you’ve got the fingers for it, plug in a controller. Do what I did and program a PS3 controller to read like an Xbox controller; it’ll work the same. The fact that I’m very close to 100% completion and very close to defeating the Chaos Witch should all the recommendation needed for this game. The controls will feel slightly more sluggish at the beginning, but once you get used to it, especially after Scarlet Maiden’s fluidity and — for lack of a better term — bounciness, it’s pretty much a breeze. Currently on sale for the Summer Steam sales, but even not, $15 is a pretty good deal.
The final part of this Legacy Video Game Trilogy concludes with a hard reboot that still has the sensibilities to pay homage to the most awkward yet charmingly nostalgic part of its existence. So to recap: MK Deadly Alliance gave us an ungodly pairing in the two sorcerers Quan Chi and Shang Tsung, whose combined strength and abilities gave them the leverage to revive the Dragon King’s Army and wreak havoc on all the realms, without Shao Kahn f[screams]king them over or Liu Kang stopping them.
Not without Raiden’s intervention and before I continue on that, I had time to watch some MK 4 endings and in both Raiden’s and Fujin’s endings, Raiden accepts ascension to the position of Elder God while Fujin replaces him as Protector of Earthrealm. Raiden chose him as a successor and Fujin accepted it. But in Deadly Alliance, Fujin doesn’t appear until 2006’s Armageddon. Plot-hole? Not so. On the production side of things, the devs didn’t think Fujin had the recognition and popularity as the Thunder God so they put him back in this game in arguably one of his better looks.
Canonically, 7 feet tall.
Lore-wise, the death of Liu Kang made all the difference. Fujin hasn’t been demoted by way of a performance review; it’s just that Raiden’s attachment to half of his Shaolin Monk disciples influenced his decision to step down and see the fall of the Deadly Alliance personally. I don’t completely see this as an official source, since it came from r/MortalKombat and I wasn’t there when they were developing the game for release in 2002, but I’m glad I did.
Anyway, Raiden saw to it personally to essentially raise a militia of Earth’s best allies and defenders to destroy the Deadly Alliance. They failed, so much so that nearly all of them had become sacrifices for the undead army. Come Deception time, Raiden stood as the final bastion between freedom and conquest. At his defeat, the partnership between Quan Chi and Shang Tsung effectively evaporated and with the holder of Shinnok’s amulet (namely Quan Chi) being the one who can control the army, the two fight in Shang Tsung’s palace… and are immediately greeted by Onaga himself, coming to reclaim his rightful army that he knew was in the hands of the sorcerers.
The wiki explains that the Amulet has control over the army somehow (Boon and Tobias must’ve skipped that step), but its power and influence are superseded by Onaga’s heart. So you know you’re f[metal clanking]ked when the undead soldiers you painstakingly spent so much time and effort to revive, bow to their original master and not you. That reminds me of a Martin Mystery episode where an evil wizard attempts to revive Qin Shi Huang and the terracotta army only to realize that Emperor Qin was the furthest thing from a stable ruler and that in the show the terracotta army was created to keep the old emperor from getting out.
Misplaced balance of power and all that, Quan Chi, Shang Tsung, and Raiden temporarily work together to destroy Onaga, but two sorcerers and a temporary Elder God aren’t enough to destroy Onaga. Raiden’s last ditch effort doesn’t even dent him and worse he has the Kamidogu and Shinnok’s Amulet. He doesn’t need that for the army, but he does need it to merge the Kamidogu into one and morph into the One Being from which the realms were created. Oof, heavy stuff, huh?
By Armageddon time, it’s become apparent that the warriors in the realms are too aware of the forces that created them, and the Elder Gods consult with Argus and Delia, the Protectors of Edenia, to seek a solution so that none can threaten existence again. Argus suggested death, Delia suggested annulment, and so millennia ago, they created the firespawn Blaze so that his death in Mortal Kombat could bring about one of these outcomes, but a cascading effect seen over the course of the games led to an unintended outcome: even distribution of power. Not to mention, part of this plan was a quest which would test which of Argus’ and Delia’s sons, Taven and Daegon, would handily succeed them. The rules of primogeniture determined Taven the successor as the older brother, but Blaze was kidnapped and enslaved by Onaga’s holy men to guard the last dragon egg.
Blaze kept constant mental contact with their guardian dragons, Orin and Caro, but when he was kidnapped, that contact was lost and Caro mistakenly revived Daegon earlier than expected, kicking off much of the plot of the 3D era of games. At this revelation, Taven’s quest morphed from competition to a race to become the successor of Argus, seeing as the alternative was the Edenian equivalent of Shao Kahn. And they already had that… in the form of Shao Kahn!
Some of the endings, once again, connect as Taven is rewarded while Daegon is punished in Daegon’s ending. Raiden’s is a culmination of what he endured from Deadly Alliance to this, and Shao Kahn’s ending flows nearly seamlessly into the intro for Mortal Kombat 9. Rather than Taven become a full-god and see the failure of the quest, Shao Kahn ascended to the top of the Pyramid of Argus to defeat Blaze. In Armageddon, it was shown that Dark Raiden struck a deal with Outworld to spare Earthrealm if Raiden stopped Taven and Daegon from completing their quest. Something Light Raiden would NEVER do, even in desperation.
The opening cinematic of MK9 shows that this didn’t pan out as he’d hoped, seeing as Shao Kahn unsurprisingly reneged on that deal and used his newfound godhood to pummel Raiden before Raiden used his last moments to relay a message to his past self. The overarching crux of the message being “don’t become me,” but the most important one being “He must win,” where Past Raiden spends the game finding out who “he” refers to.
Thus, this game in the HD timeline redoes the first three MK games. The first third of the game is a near-mirror of the previous 1992 one, even with Sub-Zero’s death at Scorpion’s hands. And like the original it ends with Liu Kang’s victory in Mortal Kombat, but the intended outcome worsens the damage in Raiden’s amulet. It cracked when Raiden received the original “he must win” message and the course of the game shows it getting worse and worse.
The second third of the game is essentially a different Mortal Kombat II, and much so. Shang Tsung still got reduced to that of a fighter like in the original, but rather than it being simply a punishment for failure, the sorcerer convinced Shao Kahn to move the tournament to Outworld and fight on their terms. Raiden obviously said no, but this was less of an agreement between equals and more of a demand from a tyrant who forced his hand by unleashing Baraka’s Tarkatan horde on the Wu Shi Academy.
And that game is fantastic if you ignore its writing.
Forced to compete now on Shao Kahn’s terms, Raiden and the gaggle of Earthrealm warriors he’s recruited go to Outworld but also to investigate the real source of the cracks in the amulet and discover why Raiden’s efforts are failing fate. One of several notable changes here is that instead of Smoke becoming a cyborg like before, that becomes the fate of the new Sub-Zero Kuai Liang. If you recall, in the old timeline, Noob and Sub-Zero were brothers. Noob the more ruthless of the two when he was Grandmaster seeing as he led the charge against the Shirai Ryu and slaughtered them wholesale, but was further blamed for the murder of Scorpion’s family.
This didn’t change in the new timeline and Noob (originally Bi-Han) is still brutal, and is still innocent of the death of Harumi and Satoshi Hasashi. Nevertheless, Quan Chi pulling the strings from the sidelines once again birthed Noob Saibot and, in this timeline, Cyber Sub-Zero. Meanwhile, the tournament in Outworld commences and if you’ve ever played the original MKII and made it that far, you’ll notice that Kano and Sonya Blade are shackled in the background of the arena. This time around, Kano has no reason to be Shao Kahn’s prisoner since he’d sold him the Black Dragon’s service and arsenal, and Sonya was freed by Johnny Cage, Raiden, and Jax. Kitana, though, getting ideas from the Thunder God, investigated Shang Tsung’s flesh pits to discover her hybrid clone Mileena. With Kitana being the last remnant of Edenia’s ruling family, Shao Kahn’s plan in this and the other timeline was to replace Kitana with a loyal daughter.
Shao Kahn loses his Outworld tournament, but the future remains unchanged largely because of Quan Chi and his hidden agenda seeing as he hastens Shao Kahn’s recovery, revives and essentially reprograms Sindel to be evil, and kicked off an invasion of Earthrealm itself. Previously, Shao Kahn could never do this due to Sindel’s ward keeping him from setting foot there, but her revival and Quan Chi’s spell over her psyche making her more receptive to Shao Kahn’s tactics, lifts that barrier.
Raiden recruits even more warriors to defend Earth and repel the invasion, but finds failure after failure in the last third of this game’s glorified HD remake of Mortal Kombat 3. Kabal joins up, Cyber Sub-Zero is reprogrammed, Noob Saibot is defeated, but Raiden’s attempts at repelling Shao Kahn’s advances fail each time. Finally, he goes straight to the Elder Gods themselves who prove equally worthless in this timeline, barely batting an eye at Shao Kahn’s atrocities quoting: “Invasion itself is not a transgression, it is the merger of realms that is proscribed.” A distinction without a difference fallacy that the almighty Elder Gods fail to see themselves. Sort of like granting rights based not on race but on wealth.
In the time it took for the Elder Gods to heroically sit it out until the eleventh hour, Sindel herself decimated the defenders in no time, even her daughter. Johnny and Sonya got through with only bruises and so Earth’s final defenders were reduced to a four-man team, very much to Liu Kang’s growing resentment at Raiden’s ad hoc decision making.
Remember how I said, Light Raiden would never strike a deal with Shao Kahn to spare Earth? Well, those words are looking mighty delicious right about now as it seems that he’s about to bargain for Quan Chi’s participation to stop Shao Kahn, offering his soul and those of the fallen. But Quan Chi being a necromancer, he already has their souls in possession and after battling their revenants, Raiden realizes once again at the apex of destruction that evil needs to get within a stone’s throw of victory before the Elder Gods show themselves. “He must win” meant Shao Kahn merging the realms illegally. Mortal Kombat being the magical arbitration to decide this, violating it through conquest finally gets the Elder Gods to pass judgment and punishment.
This comes with protest from Liu Kang, who falls for the same pitfalls, as the original Raiden and doggedly vows to stand against Shao Kahn even in futilely. It costs him his life and true to his vision, Raiden does allow Shao Kahn to enter Earthrealm undeterred, feigning submission in an effort to get the Elder Gods to act, though not without taking his hits. Fans have called out Raiden for this foolishness, but across the game it shows how much he’s being put to the test. You can’t pass malice onto him for trying so hard to keep everyone alive and Earthrealm undamaged by Shao Kahn’s poison.
The pyrrhic victory gives us a glimpse into what comes in the next game. Mortal Kombat X (technically Roman numeral for 10) immediately follows the post-invasion chaos of Shao Kahn’s entry into Earthrealm. With Shinnok and Quan Chi leading coordinated attacks, Johnny, Sonya, and Kenshi (who made a glorious comeback in the new timeline even for a guest appearance in the last game) lead the charge from the ground while Raiden and Fujin intercept Quan Chi and Shinnok at the Sky Tower, home of Earth’s energy forces in the form of the Jinsei chamber.
They even meet the remnant versions of friends long passed, under the service of Quan Chi. With Shinnok now freed from the Netherrealm and facing the Earthrealm forces personally, like the other games we reach the apex of near destruction, but in a deus ex machina twist, Johnny Cage follows up from his character arc in the last game and becomes the unlikely hero we didn’t know we needed.
Yeah, one thing you’ll notice over the course of just MK9 is that while Johnny understands the gravity of the situation before him, writing it off as but a simple competition, his tone and attitude changes with each chapter. Meanwhile, Liu Kang is the one who grows further disillusioned and rightfully so. Witnessed the death of his best friend, tended to his wounded comrades, saw the Elder Gods sit by and let s[neighs]t unfold in unflattering ways, and he was witness to Master Raiden reach desperate levels to save Earth. I can’t say whether he would’ve had the same reaction in the original timeline if he lived to see it all since Shang Tsung killed him in Deadly Alliance. But if Taven’s reaction in Armageddon’s Konquest mode is any indicator, Dark Raiden was brilliant in how unexpected it was at the time, and it was after the sixth main installment where Raiden went off the deep end. Does he show up again here outside of a flashback? We’re getting to that.
After his defeat at Johnny’s hands, Shinnok is sealed within his own talisman, begging the question somewhat of why he’d have it, but going by the rules of a gun, it’s not designed to have any loyalty. The amulet is also incapable of being destroyed, so the most they can do is closely guard it round the clock, which they continually do for the next 25 years, after which the remaining combatants have moved on with their lives and the like.
Trauma bonding pushed Johnny and Sonya close enough to marry, reproduce, and divorce in that time frame over which we learn that their daughter, Cassie, has felt stuck between two worlds: Hollywood brat or military brat? Which seems like a really unique childhood to have though not necessarily envy. One lifestyle has you hounded by paparazzi for room temperature IQ tabloids, and the other has you moving at the same time as your parents depending on the needs of the branch of service, provided the marriage is strong enough to get through the military.
Then again, Jax’s daughter may have the comparatively more enviable of these two. Jacqui Briggs isn’t explicitly stated to be a military brat herself, but she more than likely has the hallmarks of one if we dissect the finer details. Unlike Cassie, Jacqui’s mother is simply an unseen NPC who most likely passed away long before the start of the game. For Jax, he, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero were the revenants who helped to defend Quan Chi’s lair during a raid by the Special Forces. In that particular mission, Johnny nearly died, but Sonya beat the piss outta Quan Chi while Raiden reversed the spell that would’ve created remnant Johnny Cage. Quan Chi’s defeat brought Jax, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero back to life and already this quasi-Mortal Kombat 4 is markedly different from the original in more ways than simply graphics.
Kenshi himself had a son named Takeda, and from the Kung family comes Lao’s cousin, Kung Jin. The MK kids are meant to be the new bloods though the fan reception was mixed to put it lightly. They’re tasked with assuring all of Earthrealm’s bonds and alliances and aiding Kotal Kahn, the new ruler and admittedly usurper of Outworld causing a civil war between himself and those loyal to Mileena who was chosen to succeed Shao Kahn after the Elder Gods ate him.
I personally like his portrayal and physical appearance, being Aztec inspired. Character-wise, he’s not a conqueror like Shao Kahn or power-hungry like Onaga. To use real political terms, he gives me “populist, isolationist” vibes. That said, he doesn’t really do away with Shao Kahn’s old policies like the liberal use of execution. He also keeps his own cabinet of characters old and new. The civil war between him and Mileena revealed everyone’s true colors. Without his original masters, Ermac defected. As did Reptile, suggesting he never respected Mileena very much as a construct of Edenian flesh and Tarkatan blood. The ones willing to serve Mileena as Kahnum of Outworld boil down to Tanya, who returns (yay!), Baraka, who doesn’t (boo!), Rain who isn’t DLC this time around *throws controller into next week*, and Kano, who’s loyalty is for rent. He’s still a treacherous money-hungry thug, but I doubt he’s as foolish as last time, even after a quarter-century sending Black Dragon-brand brutality to both sides to come out on top regardless… like Simeon Weisz in Lord of War.
Maybe I should review movies again, I’ve been watching a handful of them as of late.
I like the intricacies of this civil war so far, but they’re better experienced than explained, especially seeing as Kotal wins out over Mileena and immediately turns on the Kombat Kids for the greater good in his words. Between scares and enemy espionage, Kotal Kahn concluded that Earthrealm can’t be trusted to safeguard the amulet so it’s in the best interest of Outworld and the rest of existence if Outworld held onto it until Raiden could set his priorities straight.
Meanwhile, one of Kotal’s most trusted, D’Vorah, a Kytinn bug woman is revealed to be a disciple of Quan Chi and servant of Shinnok. Sonya resorts to bringing Jax out of retirement as a means to get Earth’s defenders back into the light and out from Netherrealm’s influence. This goes on for the last quarter of the game, though with significant trouble in the way. Jax helps apprehend Quan Chi, but this is short-lived when Scorpion learns from Sub-Zero that the mastermind behind his agony came from within the Lin Kuei. Seeing as the original Sub-Zero was also a victim, the trend of “inside job conspiracies” reappears in this game to haunt Hanzo Hasashi ’til the end of days.
Ever played the GTA IV mission where you bust out one of Derrick’s old friends only to blow his brains out? Similar thing here, Scorpion breaks into a military prison to kill Quan Chi who uses his last breath to summon Shinnok behind enemy lines. With D’Vorah’s aid, they invade the sky temple again, trap Raiden and infect the Jinsei chamber, with less effort than the initial invasion 25 years ago. And since Shinnok is a petty little bitch, he imprisons Johnny too. As Dark Shinnok, the fallen Elder God becomes Raiden’s worst nightmare.
At this point, the Kombat Kids have broken out of imprisonment and returned to Earth right as this all unfolds and stand as the last beacon of hope for Earth, a role Raiden played in Deception before turning dark himself.
Every time Mortal Kombat gets Dark Raiden, they chicken out before they can use him. The most action he gets is his own ending in Armageddon where he obliterates all realms except Earth to destroy all outside threats to Earth. MK X teased him at the end with a stern warning to the Netherrealm under new leadership to not even think about trying anything or they’ll share Shinnok’s fate.
Dark Raiden is a major part of the first two chapters or so of MK 11, but thanks to time travel shenanigans, he’s written out before he can exercise the fullest extent of his wrath. The mission from MK X is more or less complete with Shinnok defeated though I doubt Raiden was forthcoming with his fate. Not to mention, the villain this time around is the titan Kronika who masters an hourglass that writes the fates of all. I’m pretty sure I’ve played this trope before.
Time travel shenanigans aside, MK 11 takes away the heavy lifting Raiden would’ve done to protect Earthrealm by simply bringing everyone back from when they were at their best. This game does have a DLC arc that’s best explored away from the main series even though it flows into 2023’s M1K soft reboot. Re-touched upon in this game, Kronika not only manipulated events, but claims responsibility for driving a wedge in between Raiden and Liu Kang. Timeline after timeline, their power combined has shown to be a threat to Kronika. Using this to his advantage, Raiden stops fighting Liu Kang and they merge to form Fire God Liu Kang who was last seen in that god-awful Mythologies spin-off. Depending on the player, the game can end with human Raiden aiding Liu Kang as he remakes reality, or with Kitana long after she wins big as the new Kahnum of Outworld when a career-ending injury removes Kotal Kahn from power.
I’m not certain on whether M1K is the beginning of a new arc in the Mortal Kombat franchise. It’s the first one for the 2020s and has a hell of a lot of callbacks which thoroughly entertained the legacy fan in me. I’ve seen full gameplay of it, but haven’t experienced the rest of the game for myself yet, so I’ll cap this long post with my thoughts on the HD continuation. It almost follows the beats of the original series but diverges beginning in the third arc of MK9 and doesn’t look back in the rearview mirror. Shinnok still makes his comeback in this timeline’s answer to MK4, but doesn’t fall victim to Quan Chi’s machinations. Quan Chi isn’t even acknowledged as the true mastermind and even when they do treat him as such, the focus goes toward Shinnok who manipulated events from the start. So he’s no different from Armageddon’s Konquest mode, the point of divergence being that Daegon is the one who serves him instead of Quan Chi… or rather he plays them both. Honestly, MK’s biggest flaw is having loyal characters serving untrustworthy villains. Say what you want about Deadly Alliance, but Quan Chi and Shang Tsung understand fully that the partnership is purely transactional.
The villains this time around are aware of this aspect though seem to be blind to Quan Chi’s reach and influence. Not that he’s the most powerful villain or remains so for long as Kronika beats him to the punch in MK 11. It ultimately screwed over the revenants still under Quan Chi’s influence at the time of his death, but I say its for the best that he wasn’t alive to witness Kronika emerge from her chamber. Besides, the revenants can be restored after consultation with the Elder Gods, as long as they don’t take it literally.
All in all, this era in Mortal Kombat history gets a lot of praise in the beginning followed by loads of critique over what should’ve been done by whom during XYZ. All well and good, but it suffers from the same problem exhibited by the God of War series in that the games of the past are written off as weird and off-putting. But as a defender of this era of Mortal Kombat, flawed or not, this was a necessary step toward greatness, and the only regret(s) are that Shaolin Monks hasn’t been rewritten and remastered and we haven’t seen anything in the form of Chess Kombat, Motor Kombat or Puzzle Kombat in the last 20 years. I would gladly do embarrassing things to see this in the modern day again.
The Sega division, Ryu ga Gotoku Studio 「龍が如く」, exclusively works on the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series and has done so for the last 20 years.
An urban modern-day RPG-lite with a gangster skin, Yakuza features characters that are a part of a connected web of Tokyo-based Yakuza groups with the main character, Kazuma Kiryu, AKA the Dragon of Dojima, so called for his dragon tattoo and association with the Dojima family Yakuza group. From what I’ve gathered, the early games have a serious tone coupled with areas of humor and, in the long run, satire. The primary inspiration comes from decades of yakuza media with each game being something of a movie with a nuanced plot populated with characters of shifting motives.
Kazuma is a primary protagonist across the first few games, but since the series follows him throughout his life from his youth to middle-age, some of the later games feature a character-switching mechanic before Kazuma himself is retired in favor of the new face of the franchise: Ichiban Kasuga.
Less complex than Kazuma-san, Ichi-kun is introduced as a sillier character but with a heart of gold, so not at all dissimilar from Kazuma. Full disclosure, I’m still in the process of exploring the series, having emulated the 2005 game on PCSX2 back in 2023. So far, I’ve explored one of its spinoffs, Ishin, a fictional retelling of the life of Sakamoto Ryoma with our beloved Kazuma filling the role of the Bakumatsu-era samurai. Seems Sega really loves to reuse its characters.
I’d explain more about the series from game to game, but the games, though long, are worth the experiences they give you. Even if I was that involved in the games, I’d know better than to spoil them. So instead, the rest of this post will be about the gameplay features between the old games and something fairly recent.
Perhaps its because I started with emulating the first game in the series, I didn’t realize how clunky the controls could get until I bought and loaded up Ishin for the first time. Comparing the two shows how far the series has come since debut gameplay-wise. The first game has a fixed camera when moving that fixes itself closer to Kazuma when in combat. The right analog stick merely moves the minimap in the corner of the screen. The face buttons are all different combat attacks and interactive buttons in exploration and work fine on their own, but the movement in combat coupled with the block/evade functions defaulted to the shoulder buttons makes combat more than a little bit stiff and awkward.
Thankfully, 2005 and the 2006 sequel, Yakuza 2, were given the reboot treatment a decade later, thus revamping, among other things, the combat system. I’d say, the beat ’em up formula was in its prime in this era of video games seeing as Yakuza debuted at the same time the west was gifted God of War and Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. You can’t really go wrong with either the original or the remake, but if you value sturdier controls and a more fluid combat system, I and other Yakuza players implore you to buy the Kiwami games. They’re near-mirrors of the original games with extra bells and whistles to keep it modern along with the textures and graphics while staying true to the original.
Speaking of modern games, the latest installment in the Yakuza series was last year’s Infinite Wealth coupled with yesterday’s spin-off Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.
Before you speculate, this was a coincidence. Nothing more.
The most recent modern release I played is a spin-off, the aforementioned Ishin. I can’t say whether its framework and UI are similar to the main games, but for what its worth, Ishin, being a retelling of sorts of the life of Sakamoto Ryoma, incorporates multiple combat styles from hand-to-hand to swordplay to even gunplay. In real life, Sakamoto was a samurai who adopted several western styles and customs. Western-style loafers, a revolver he used to try to escape the attempt on his life, and light dabbling with western tech like the telegram with hopes that it would change the face of Japan… and it did! Approximately 20 years after his death, so influence still counts.
In Ishin, the character of Sakamoto Ryoma doesn’t change just because he’s wearing Kazuma-san’s face like some Japanese parody of Face/Off.
Insert Spongebob licking meme.
Kazuma’s Bakumatsu fever dream plays like its modern contemporary games with all the modern settings and defaults found in the games, so it plays much better than the PS2 games, but doesn’t sacrifice the difficulty curve. In fact, since the first game’s release, the Yakuza series has always incorporated RPG mechanics, notably upgrading, collecting, potions, and skills; between this and last week’s RPG adventure with tits and ass, I really can’t get away from RPG and RPG-likes. Maybe I’ll put it in the pipeline in the future for review.
Obviously the modern games look prettier with the facelift and play better with the new tools that have defined gaming since debut–what does this mean for me and my enjoyment of the series? Well, I do plan on exploring them all further in some capacity. The pandemic may have ruined console gaming for me with all the scalpers reselling the newer consoles at f[dial-up]k you prices, but I probably might return to console. I’m already emulating my favorites on a console (RPCS3 has more kinks to iron out), which may speak volumes about what I remember as a great era in gaming.
Credit: u/TheUndeadGunslinger, r/gaming
F[button mashing]k modern gaming, these are hard to find in the US these days. As a result, that Xbox is now $800. Well, I’m exaggerating, but these things being collector’s items now, I don’t think I’m that far off from what they’d go for now. Whether you can run them on a modern monitor is another story. At least the Yakuza series is fully available on Steam as of this writing… ‘Scuse me, I have a series to blaze through.
Last week, I talked about different anime series that have crossed my radar. Popular series that everyone but me has seen. Some of them I was avoiding due to the reputation of their fandoms or a disinterest in the content of the show.
I don’t know if the person who posted this is the same person who made the meme format. Exaggerated or not, I never had an interest in idol culture. I find it too poisonous an industry to support or even look into. No industry is perfect (and anime and video games both have their controversies), but East Asian idol culture (Japan and Korea especially) is the only industry I’ve heard of where the idol has been lambasted for having a normal life or worse driven to suicide or been the victim of assault, deadly or sexually. I admit, these are cherry-picked but my point still stands.
Back to gaming, I’ve been around long enough to recall gaming’s most pivotal moments. The release of GTA: San Andreas 20 years ago (if you didn’t feel old already, here you go); Sonic steadily one-upping the Hindenburg as a 3D series; Lara Croft’s second return in a more grounded approach (as grounded as a series about a British archaeologist can get when thrown against the supernatural); and the first of two Mortal Kombat reboots where smashing together the first three arcade games worked surprisingly well.
But there’s still a few gaps in my library that I haven’t filled yet. Gaps I’ll be sharing in this post. Like last time, the list is not exhaustive; and there are more I’d like to talk about, but won’t be able to for brevity’s sake.
A series of reputations, one negative one that it managed to break, thanks in no small part to the Netflix series, but another one that it traded in return through no fault of its own. If Konami was in the hands of better people, the series would either have a better send-off or at least a more recent reboot that honors its legacy while roping in new players… like MK9.
My exposure to the series comes from Castlevania: Lords of Shadow on the PS3 and a pirated version of Aria of Sorrow for the PAL region on a bootleg PSP. That’s it, so far. Based on my observations, there’s an old love for the 2D games compared to 3D. Yahtzee Croshaw and the Angry Video Game Nerd both tackled Castlevania games with both wondering what went wrong with the series. Aria of Sorrow and Symphony of the Night get praise compared to something as ridiculous as Castlevania 64, and at least by that time we had over 15 years to iron out good games from bad.
To give credit to Castlevania’s 3D/HD ventures, it’s not like all of them are bad. Enough can be said about the 2D games, but from what I recall of Lords of Shadow, it’s a solid 6/10 game. To pull from Yahtzee Croshaw’s 2010 review of the game, it combines elements of God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, and Dante’s Inferno from weapons to enemies to character design. Hell, it starts off with the main character Gabriel Belmont, a holy knight in the 11th century, who goes on a journey to rid the world of all evil in search of a way to return his wife to the land of the living. Servant of a god fights monsters with a chained weapon as penance for the death of loved ones — God of War comparison made. Some of the bosses are huge hulking monsters you have to climb on whilst pecking away at glowing weakspots — Shadow of the Colossus. And Satan’s appearance draws comparison to his appearance in the Dante’s Inferno games.
Channel: The Escapist
But the main draw of the series back in the 1980s was Dracula as well as open-ended level designs and exploration encouraging multiple runs of the same levels and therefore birthing the concept of the Metroidvania (more on that later). As such, my desire to look into the Castlevania series will have to go to the older games. Symphony of the Night may get all the praise for being one of the best games of all time, but to this end, I’d rather judge it by itself than where it stands in the series or with its contemporaries.
Another historic series getting f[bombs]ked by its Konami Overlords because pachinko and claw machines make a lot of money, as a certain Welsh monkey can attest.
Playlist by: Kim Kalliope, Videos by: CDawgVA, ConnorDawg
Still, Metal Gear is still releasing games to this day with another entry set for release later this year, tarnished as the series may be, thanks to Konami. A strategic stealth game that lampoons the s[blyat]t out of the Cold War, long after the joke died. Though, considering Metal Gear is still doing that, is the joke really dead or is it just on life support?
The best excuse I have for why I never played Metal Gear would probably be due to lack of interest. Sort of like what kept me away from Yu-Gi-Oh! or Pokémon for so many years. What ties these three together for me is that there wasn’t anything physically keeping me from collecting a few of the games. Metal Gear Solid was on the PS2, which I had; Pokémon Red or Green were on the GameBoy, of which I had several (they were fragile or we kept losing them amongst our other stuff in the house); and Yu-Gi-Oh! is a card game. Cards are inexpensive, and they have been for years. But leave it to me to stand out and not get lost in the shuffle back then. Average oddball behavior.
But of course, Metal Gear is neither Pokémon nor Yu-Gi-Oh! It didn’t begin with collectible cards (but might have them as part of a collector’s edition of sorts) and I didn’t know a lot of people playing the games growing up, though I wouldn’t be surprised if I was friends with a long time Metal Gear fan but didn’t know it at the time. Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! were just more visible at school by the nature of the games. With my experiences in games like Outlast, or Sekiro, or the hackneyed stealth sections in numerous action-games, I want to say that it’s in my corner, but I know different games do stealth differently. Sekiro’s stealth isn’t Outlasts and neither compare to the sometimes stealth of Max Payne 3. Metal Gear is a legacy series ripe for the emulating; PCSX2 still works for me and I’ve been getting remarkably lucky with the likes of RPCS3 on another machine that I own (though I’ve still got a bit to learn about extracting games on it).
RPGs and JRPGs
As far as genres go, I have a decent amount of exposure to some RPGs and JRPGs, more so the latter, but largely due to some western games having semi-RPG elements in them. GTA: San Andreas has more of it with the ability to let CJ’s waist expand or shrink; same thing with his muscles which was the approach I took the last time I played it two years ago. It’s more muted in GTA V, but still there even in GTA Online. JRPGs, on the other hand, are another blind spot I hope to fill. How I achieve that will need to be more finely detailed, but for the most part a look through of time-honored series as well as more recent releases can help me out. Octopath Traveler, for instance, is one that’s currently on my radar.
During Army AIT, a few of my classmates played around a bit in a Final Fantasy 14 RPG (and stopped after making a dedicated Minecraft server). I played some of the Naruto turn-based RPGs as a kid as well as a Dragon Ball-themed one. Fun fact, my exposure to Dragon Ball started with the PS2 games. The anime (specifically the Kai dub) came way later. And I feel like I’m selling myself short experience-wise without more JRPGs to call from. I’m starting to rectify this by way of some of the Souls’ games, which are developed by a Japanese studio, but Japan liking medieval Europe for a fantasy setting undercuts the experience aesthetics-wise. Dark Souls is still enjoyable, I’ll never debate that, but I don’t think it’s enough to fill the void. I’d like more to experience, Soulslike or not be damned.
The first-half of the Metroidvania genre, the fact that major elements from both Metroid and Castlevania combined to form a new genre is remarkable. It was a groundbreaking game when it debuted in the mid-1980s, and is still going strong with its star character, the tall, beautiful, kick-ass Samus Aran.
Practically, Ellen Ripley’s disciple, both women are space adventurers blasting away at evil aliens. Couple that concept with a Mega Man-esque arm-blaster, the core of Metroid has been a blend of its contemporaries with a few things to make it stand out. Early example of female video game character (though probably not the grandmother of female protagonists in games), sci-fi setting, nonlinear game structure and retraversable levels, different weapons; it’s a great game series that I have limited exposure to.
All my knowledge comes from Wikipedia and I’d rather not have to go to a third party for my education. My s[splash]tbag college days allowed for this absolutely, but I’m not in college anymore. I may not be guaranteed more time to do it, but whatever excuse there is to keep avoiding it is no longer valid. Emulators for the older games (because no one is crazy enough to track down a still working NES/Famicom in 2025) and I can get a Nintendo Switch or wait for the Switch 2 to release and hook it up to my monitor, if that’s allowed.
Interestingly, I’m hard at work fixing this gap with a series of Adults Only roguelike Metroidvanias made possible through Steam. Especially one I’ve discovered with permadeath elements in it. But before I cross it off the list, I do still have more to say about these types of games. I really love my narrative driven Max Paynes, Mafias, Spec Ops, CoDs, etc., etc., BUT! A huge but.
Sometimes, I just want to push buttons and make the enemy collapse into a puff of smoke. You don’t need to convince me to boot up a game of Kirby; that itself is the oil. Need I any reason to play it? If it can be accessed by any means necessary, there’s no need for me to avoid it. As for Metroidvanias themselves, never mind games that make you think through their narrative; games that make you think through their gameplay are another favorite of mine. Puzzle games used to get lambasted for being “girl games,” but I still like them as well as physical jigsaw puzzles for helping to prepare me for visual puzzles. Nonlinear gameplay structures meanwhile have their place and depending on the Metroidvania in question, the puzzle elements and level design can be really innovative and creative or boring and uninspired. Or worse, convoluted. But I’ve seen a separate category of randomly generated levels with each separate run. Sometimes this leads to perpetual recycling, but it can still feel fresh if the enemies themselves are varied, especially within the level itself.
Well, now that I’m rereading this before publishing, I think this could apply to any old adventure puzzle platformer, but the distinction between those and Metroidvanias relates to going back with new abilities to get more items, powerful items especially. So while your first run will be predictably terrible (unless you’re a based Metroidvania titan), a few more runs and experience points later, you should be able to get through to the final boss largely unassisted, like a true gamer.
That’s an admittedly short list of all the games and game types I’d like to get into more in the future. Not exhaustive, certainly and not the end, as there are more games I could mention, some of which are on my Steam library for example but I haven’t touched yet (I’m a damn hoarder). The Senran Kagura games, more of the Yakuza series (GOATed series by the way), unconventional shooters (The Suffering is a start even though its a hybrid), horror games, Resident Evil, and even more to follow. F[slurp]k me, my Discord description is too profound when I said my anime and gaming list was an expanding castle…
I might make another list about those games in the future. I filled up the list in my notes for half of this year, but not the rest so I have a backlog of free space to fill. Maybe I’ll bring back the YouTube channel recs, but I’ve been watching mostly Vtubers and I don’t want to only recommend those.
Hopefully I come up with a better name for next year.
2024 is behind us and we are now in the futuristic year of 2025, as predicted by Call of Duty: Black Ops II. From January to mid-March, I was in Army basic training where access to technology was reduced to 30 minutes a week for training purposes. Too little time for me to organize my thoughts into a blog entry, so to supplement that I had a notebook full of journal (read: diary) entries as training went on. It helped me trudge through training, though looking back, it wasn’t as bad as I dreaded. Keep in mind that your mileage may vary depending on where you do training if you choose to join the military. Most accounts sing the praises of Relaxin’ Fort Jackson whereas Chill Fort Sill is either ironic or on-brand due in large part to the cold winds in that part of the country.
January to mid-March was a blank period for obvious reasons, but I got myself a new machine and made a comeback post where not much needs to be said. On an unrelated note, I learned at the tail end of training that the man, the myth, the legend Akira Toriyama passed away in early March and thus made my own separate tribute to the God of Shonen.
So long, father of Goku and Dr. Slump. You changed and influenced millions of people the world over with the story of a monkey-tailed little boy eating bullets and growing up to be the strongest fighter in the universe. My goal will be to get around to reviewing the new Dragon Ball DAIMA arc. I’m not the biggest Dragon Ball fan, but it holds a special place in my heart.
Once I was properly back into the fold during AIT, I started April off with a reflection of my first attempt at writing an anime-themed blog. I’ve tried to forget about it, but having this one up reminds me of what I could’ve had damn near four years ago if things went swimmingly, and if I broke it up with an extra focus on other forms of media. Thankfully, this blog has rectified that issue and has branched out many times over to other forms of media, even with animanga keeping me anchored.
Something something lead a horse to water and all that jazz.
Speaking of which, when it came to reviewing animanga I started off with obscure series that flew under the radar. Titles you may have heard but haven’t investigated further, or titles you’ve never heard of until recently, either through me or another medium. This continues the trend I started here from 2023 and continues to be a personal crusade of mine. Not limited to Shonen titles, less celebrated and mostly unheard of titles give room for a few surprises; like how the creator of Prison School also wrote the Robert Johnson manga.
The man who gave us Dommy Mommy Imprisonment wrote a manga about an enigmatic black Mississippi blues artist.
I dare you to tell me that that’s not cultured!
Of course my regular content throughout the year kept to standards, games and animanga kept on pumping through the summer, and I got to writing about two awaited topics: the long-awaited anime adaptation of The Elusive Samurai as well as a Paradox game that couldn’t happen.
As much as I loved Running from the Ashikaga, it really kneecaps itself with a 12-episode run. Fortunately, a second season is in the works and in the drafting of this post, I was gonna say that going without a second season would be illegal. The art direction, the soundtrack, the name behind the series, even the soundtrack and corresponding merch set for release this year would speak volumes of marketing another season. Even if Sprinting Level MAX’s claim to fame is coming from the same mangaka as How to Kill Your Tentacle Sensei, it was enough of a motivating factor for me to check out the manga when it was licensed for an English release in 2021. I admit I was stunned at Japanese Twitter’s reaction to that one scene, and I’m keeping my eyes and ears peeled for the next viral reaction.
Elsewhere, Paradox joined the shortlist of game devs attempting to dethrone The Sims with a life sim of their own under the title “Life By You.” It was announced and showcased in the latter half of 2023 with an early March 2024 release day, later moved to June before it was unceremoniously put to bed for good. In the meantime, people continually string together campaigns connecting Crusader Kings to Europa Universalis to Victoria to Hearts of Iron for a mega campaign. One day, I’ll join those people because it sounds ambitiously fun.
Going further down the list, my entries stepped away from animanga to address other forms of media. I don’t review movies as much as I do animanga and video games, and I really wish I did. The military-sphere said goodbye to Evan Wright who tragically took his own life over summer after years getting raw stories to put into novel form from the widely celebrated Generation Kill to dozens of other publications in magazines and websites throughout his life. I doubt everyone will appreciate his work as much as military and adjacent types usually do, but there’s no denying his work over the years.
And the blog posts after did address more serious topics surrounding the medium interspersed with regular reviews. You know me as the chief advocate of anime piracy as an alternative when streaming decides to get funny. I continue to stand by that claim and I will do so for many years to follow. It was how I watched many of my favorite series over the years, and I continue to do so to this day. There’s no telling when a series will suddenly drop from, say, Netflix or Hulu and sites like Crunchyroll prove unreliable and at the worst of times dangerous. If more news crosses my feed, I’ll write about it as I had back in August.
Going back to regular reviews with more and more interesting titles until it stops making sense, I hadn’t had to reorganize my notes as much for 2024 as I did for ’23, merely putting them in the list set for weeks to a couple months at most down the line. It got messy when I did it like that back in 2023, but it made things interesting personally. It also kept me in the loop before the topic died off, but the consequence of that is some topics had more information about them come out and were at risk of aging rapidly. Such was the case of a couple of YouTube recommendations. I used to do that for channels I like and enjoy from a content standpoint instead of a personality standpoint. So far, only two of those didn’t work out as well with one getting flack for abusive behavior and the other following shareholders and causing a mass exodus of the media team, the latter of which I wrote about a week after it happened.
The last quarter of 2024 was based primarily around animanga, which was fun to write about, but I left a mildly large gap between that and other media. I definitely watched more than anime at the tail end, some of these are gonna get posts in the future. For just January, I plan on covering series I haven’t seen but would like to both in animanga and in video games with that nifty emulator on my devices, as well as another form of manga/comics that is quite celebrated but is mostly slept on. What I mean is, there’s good series from this medium, but I rarely see most anitubers address it. It might be due to its country of origin, but it that doesn’t make it any less worthwhile.
It’s manhwa. I had a whole arc dedicated to this with an interesting start point.
As of writing this, my notes are filled out ’til at least May, covering most of the first half of 2025. After that, I’ve gotta wait and see what I’ll fill it out with.
What I’m about to bring you is a video game series that is completely out of season and extraordinary mainly because of the team that developed it: The Suffering and its sequel Ties That Bind.
Yeah, I wasn’t kidding about it being a Midway game.
Released in 2004, The Suffering is set on a former POW island, now a regular civilian-operated prison under the control of the Maryland state prison system, and one with a nasty history. Think of the reputation of Andersonville prison camp or a few historical British or continental European prisons; the age-old “scrubbing a turd doesn’t make it not a turd” approach to refurbishing a place as accursed as this.
The protagonist is Torque and he’s on death row for brutally murdering his wife and two sons. Just one problem, he can’t recall ever doing such a thing, but not much can be done as he’s set to walk the green mile… or he would be if s[metal clanging]t didn’t turn sideways. Not ten minutes into his cell with fellow death row inmates–an Aryan Nations member, a pedophile, and a man convicted of an unspecified heinous crime (for giggles, let’s say he’s perma-banned from 15 states)–the prison island releases the Devil’s cologne and a legion of monsters, possibly created from the mummified remains of those who were executed return to exact their revenge on everything and everyone on the island, because no one can have s[gunshots]t in Baltimore. Not even The Wire.
These supernatural hybrid undead creatures hastily held together by nails, duct tape, and rusty scalpels prances about killing anything that breathes, doesn’t even have to move. The first victims are the prison guards, whom we see in the game don’t have the prisoners’ best interests at heart. Even those with a slated release date get stepped on. Next are the prisoners, and all of Torque’s cellies get sashimied. The rest of the prisoners aren’t as lucky but with law and order sliced and stabbed and even shot at, there’s a chance for the inmates to make their escape and Torque is of the same mindset, though he also spends his escape piecing together the course of events that put him on death row.
The horror elements of the game do wonders for the action and action is how the game was advertised. Critics at the time tried to compare it to Silent Hill or Resident Evil and the Wikipedia page states that that doesn’t work because the game is more “action-horror” than “survival-horror.” I’m not above making the comparison considering the game sets itself up for it, releasing at or around the same time as some of these; then again, the game’s reputation and comparison to other games weren’t why I chose to emulate it.
Its sequel, Ties That Bind, has a demo in the game Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, following on from Deception’s Area 51 demo.
Maybe I’ll emulate this one. Maybe not. Who knows?
The game’s designer, Richard Rouse III, made it clear as crystal in interviews that survival isn’t the focus of the game. Action is, since Torque, despite being a silent protagonist, feels like a twisted version of Ashley J. Williams from the Evil Dead movies. I haven’t finished the first game and I’ve only played the demo for the sequel (many years ago, I might add so what I’m about to say next may be inaccurate), but I believe both games give you a variety of weapons to use. So far, I’ve got a shiv and a revolver in my current run through of the first game. Different weapons will work on different enemies and truth be told, looking at the enemy variety necessitates a semi-strategic approach.
The lore plays a huge part in the enemies that pop up. Contributing to this carnval of carnage and misery, the fictional history of the prison reveals a diverse range of creative execution methods from hanging to firing squad to even lethal injection. The enemies’ appearance is a reflection of many of these and I’ve found that fighting them with the most applicable weapons in accordance to how they died. The ones who died by firing squad are weakest against a gun. What kind? The revolver you pick up off a prison guard is sufficient enough. Sorta like how in Max Payne 1 every cutscene shows Max with his work weapon, even if you shot everyone with the Dual Ingrams.
Interestingly enough, Torque shares the same healing method as Max Payne, the painkiller.
The game also features a moral choice system that gives way to three openings, each influenced by player actions and a trio of spirits who haunt the prison. The three Ghosts of Prison’s Past are a doctor named Killjoy, a former executioner named Hermes Haight, and an executed prisoner named Horace Gauge. Killjoy ran the insane asylum in the 1920s and naturally his ghost wants to comb through Torque’s quirks, discover why he does what he does. Hermes the executioner has killed a handful of inmates in his nearly 30 years at the prison before taking his last victim: himself. To him, Torque is gonna free the beast and he is gonna like it! Lastly, Horace, is himself a prisoner who was also put to death for killing his lover during a conjugal visit, something he blamed on the evil atmosphere of the island. He maintained the regret and professed his innocence up until boarding the Ol’ Sparky Express, and from beyond the grave he believes he has a kinship with Torque, spending his afterlife convincing Torque that he’s not a bad guy. All three work together to influence Torque from within his mind and even drive him to transform into a grotesque Lovecraftian creature, though this transformation is wholly psychological.
The themes exhibited by these three ghosts harkens to a brief health lesson I got from my high school English class on personality traits as explained by famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud: the id, the ego, and the superego. The shortest explanation of that is the id is the force behind your desires, no matter how wicked; the superego is the force that houses your principles, even the naïve thoughts you had as a child; and the ego where reality keeps these ambitions and ideals in your head where they belong. Gauge is the closest to the superego, Hermes is the literal id, and Dr. Killjoy is the ego.
Not a bad video game overall, it did a lot of neat things, some new things and even makes good use of its moral choice system. It screws with canon a little though I’ve yet to discover by how much come the second game. Now that all the good is out the way, let’s discuss the bad.
The 2000s weren’t a good era for Midway. The YouTube channel Matt McMuscles explains in his Wha Happun? series that the good idea fairy invaded the Midway offices and greenlit yearly releases, ramping up in 2004 with this game and Mortal Kombat: Deception and ending around 2008 when the bankruptcy rumors were turning into reality. Here’s a video he did on The Suffering:
Channel: Matt McMuscles
Focusing on Midway’s darling franchise of Mortal Kombat, the magnum opus became a cultural phenomenon in the early 1990s when those arcade cabinets were first hooked up and internal troubles had been slowly boiling since at least 1997 when MK4 didn’t live up to it’s proposed potential. Coupled with that specific game’s subpar induction of 3D technology and it would take a while for Midway to recover from such an embarrassment. Failed spinoffs from Ed Boon and John Tobias’ side, the company drowning in debt to pay off pre-existing debt, and a few small gems buried under layers of s[cow moos]t, it was reported that Midway’s prestige as one of the Top 5 video game developers in 2000 dropped to Top 20 in just a few years. But as we know, it came back like a phoenix with help from Warner Bros. and is f[pimp slap]king with timelines once again.
The anonymous editors of the Wikipedia page for the 1992 game must not have been happy to specify which game having been rebooted a second time.
For what it’s worth, The Suffering is a victim of time, in that better timing could’ve helped it escape cult status, same for the second game. Executive shenanigans also hurt it severely as a yearly release was Midway’s answer to its financial woes. The “Band-Aid on a gunshot wound” approach to solving the issue, and one that if rumors are true, are looking to roost in Ubisoft’s nest. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to you–I haven’t played a Ubisoft game in years and I know I’m sleeping on a library of peak.
Let’s rewrite history a bit: The Suffering releases to such fanfare in 2004 and gets a sequel in 2005. Does it escape cult status? From within Midway, sure. From within the horror genre, not really. It would still have to fight against Konami, Capcom, and Tecmo’s Fatal Frame for attention, and what Raccoon City, New England and Project Zero do that The Suffering didn’t (or probably couldn’t) was have a voiced protagonist. This is what tears me up a bit; on the one hand, a silent protagonist can have character without a tongue, if analyses of Claude from GTA III can attest, but on the other hand, the era the game released in would’ve had more reverence for a protagonist who can voice their opinions. Midway may not have been as ambitious with casting at the time like RockStar was, but even an up and coming voice actor with an impressive range or future could’ve done wonders to guide us further into Torque’s mind.
Don’t get me wrong, I like that the lore of the island speaks for the game itself, but a silent protagonist with a backstory this heavy sells itself so depressingly short that it would need to wait some time before it can ride anything worth its salt at Disney World or Six Flags.
You could argue that it would rob the game of the mystery of the fate of Torque’s family, but it’s not like we’ve never had amnesiac protagonists before and a lot of them are pretty bad ass. Lest we forget:
And his animated forms have always had a beautifully raspy voice to carry those raw, unfiltered emotions. Sure, the cartoons have to be censored because the real Wolverine reeks of other people’s blood, but I’ll take the sacrifice for peak storytelling.
We don’t necessarily need a remake of The Suffering, but a game that does something similar or perfects what it did could be bless us in the future.
If I have time to do so, before the New Year, I’ll do something I’ve never done before and breakdown a 3×3 of my favorite anime characters. I’m still on leave as of writing so I’ll have time to push that out and even a New Year’s Day review of this blog. Anime was king for me this year.
This would’ve come out on Friday, but I had to pack my two bookbags for the holidays. Thought I was gonna look a gift of two weeks* of holiday leave in the mouth? (Actually, 11 days, but I also have a 4-day pass.)
Veteran weebs know what the image above means. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, and everything else Christmas-y. The holidays are a lot of things: great, awful, a mixed bag, an empty bag, and a bunch of other stuff. While this post is gonna be a happy holidays to all, it’s also gonna be a setup for a New Year’s reflection of this blog as well as a look back at the content I’ve written for this year and the content that was released, continued, suspended, or discontinued. Hitting the ground in 2025 with memories and goals. Knowing me, I may entertain theories with plausibility or significant evidence, but for most things I tend to stick with the facts. You’ll almost never hear or see me make a genuine guarantee unless it’s in my notes or I have evidence and research.
Now I do have plans in my notes to review my content for 2024, but that’s a January thing, and seeing as it’s a day before I return to duty, it’ll either be delayed or published ahead of schedule. Preferably the latter so I can focus on packing up, and New Year’s Eve or Day would be perfect ideally. For a look into the future though, of all the animanga I’ve viewed or games I’ve played, a fair few favorites stand out that have wide fanfare, but I’ve either admired out of respect for the reputation or not directly engaged in myself. Others I plan on writing about after a thorough amount of time. For example, I have a decent amount of time on my emulator with the original Yakuza game, though most fans would implore newcomers to try the Kiwami updates instead.
Still, a plus for Yakuza/Ryu ga Gotoku is that it’s generally easy to get into and the number of games released since 2005 gives newcomers a backlog to play catch-ups should they choose. And I do choose that method, real life responsibilities and desires would be damned, but being a responsible adult comes first.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are series I’ve encountered through osmosis. Memes, lore dumps, wikis, explorations; individual fans have tried to explain and recommend their own series, but from the outside looking in, I feel about it the same I feel about the Dune series, best explained with this meme.
Credit: u/netotz, r/dunememes
The series’ in question that I’m referring to are Senran Kagura, Fate, and Idolmaster. Each of these has a large following, both foreign and domestic, but my previous attempts to jump into the deeper lore and find a starting point has been met with mixed results. From easiest to hardest to understand, it’s SK, Idolmaster, and Fate. And I’ll start with SK.
The series’ Wikipedia page describes it as a multimedia franchise spearheaded by none other than Kenichiro Takaki, launched in Japan in 2011 with developers Tamsoft and Marvelous. The first game in the series released domestically is translated with the subtitle “Portrait of Girls” and was ported in 2013 with the subtitle Burst. So that’s simple, boot up an emulator or track down a still working 3DS or similar handheld and get some gameplay in, right? Wrong…
Opening up a can of worms called backwards compatibility and legalese, there’s a myriad of reasons why that’s not the most feasible way to do it for most. Of course, any potato computer can run a 3DS emulator–I did it myself to play Kirby: Planet Robobot and Triple Deluxe for old times’ sake–but the difference between eastern and western developers shows in the pudding. Eastern game devs will gladly re-release and remake old games for new hardware, such as the aforementioned Kiwami remakes of the old Yakuza PS2 games, whereas western devs can’t or won’t re-release remakes. Unless it’s Naughty Dog patting themselves too hard on the back with The Last of Us.
Narcissism is calling a PS4 port a remaster, when it was only a one-year release difference.
What I’ve noticed with eastern and specifically Japanese creators is that they’re accommodating enough to make their products available to all, though from what I’ve seen it can get hectic sometimes. If done poorly, a series can have numerous remakes or remasters or be disappeared and reintroduced, such was the case with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Domestically, there weren’t many problems with manga releases, but western distributors either got a bad hand or dealt a bad hand with all the bravado and overconfidence that killed Macbeth. Long ago and today, it was considered sinful by the fandom to skip parts and lo and behold Viz Media was the one to ruin it in the mid-1990s. The approach was sound, but the execution necessitated the cancellation and re-release of a western release. To play devil’s advocate, Araki’s playlist disguised as a manga makes things difficult for copyright reasons, but it’s a miracle it was able to work so well, even if it took a quarter century to reach this goal.
25 years, people, 25 years. That’s how long it took for the first volume of Phantom Blood to get a successful anime adaptation. And the series had been through OVAs and a lost movie. If it was released contemporarily, we’d be halfway through a JoJolion adaptation with rumors of a JoJoLands adaptation getting a greenlight for Q3 2026.
For Senran Kagura, the source of confusion can come from the names they have, especially overseas. This itself isn’t a new concept, going back decades with international releases of Japanese anything, games notably; sorta like how Earthbound outside of Japan is known as Mother (which is its own wormhole of naming and releases). Couple SK with a limited anime adaptation in 2018, an OVA, and several spinoff games and it can seem like a lot to catch up to. I’m only one mission into Shinovi Versus thus far and I have an extended topic discussion lined up for February. This time, I’m going to try my best to get through Shinovi Versus and at least start another game in the series. So, does SK have a tricky starting point? Yes, but personally I found it easier than the next one I’ve been trying to find a starting point for: Idolmaster.
What makes this one trickier is that it didn’t start off with a console release, but with an arcade release in 2005, later ported in 2007 to the Xbox 360 in Japan. Clearly, it was successful to get a franchise of its own, but from what I’ve heard, Xbox and Microsoft don’t enjoy wide popularity in the Land of the Rising Sun. Sony and Panasonic have a wider reach on their native soil, but this series’ Wikipedia claims Xbox Live had better hardware. Who else but a computer company to push the limits, right?
So much for Sony, I suppose? The Wikipedia also suggests that that was just a test with subsequent releases getting PlayStation or mobile releases. Though over the course of 11 years, there’s been many releases. Again, spinoffs are no issue, but the volume of them in games like these makes finding the origin point tougher than it needs to be, especially when they’re neither conventionally named nor released in the right order for an international audience. Circling back to the Earthbound series, even if it’s true that the fanbase isn’t big enough to warrant a wide release, the small headcount was dedicated enough to translate the series themselves.
But the blame for that can’t always fall on the devs; copyright law is no joke no matter what part of the world you’re in. It’s part of the reason JoJo’s was so hard to introduce to the west. Let’s award the Benefit of Doubt in general cases and say that if it wasn’t for the corps of copyright and lawsuits, more players would play more games, no matter how obscure they are to the general populace. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s a monolith of a series that has one hell of a reputation. Starting as a visual novel, getting two separate anime adaptations (the latter made to correct the former’s mistakes), and spawning a franchise with more twists and turns than M. Night Shyamalan and Christopher Nolan could think of. Pretzels look at the timeline and think, “Holy knots, guy! The f[crunch]k am I lookin’ at?!” Of course, I’m talking about the Fate franchise.
The emperor of long and convoluted timelines, and the source of upwards of 35 to 40% of all anime-based memes, it started with a visual novel in 2004 and hasn’t stopped running. Even if you messed up the train tracks ahead, the Fate Express continues on through the power of fandom and fanservice. This passage from the associated Wikipedia page says as much:
I’ve wanted to get into Fate for a few years now, but its reputation has held me back from taking the plunge. Also being a seasoned weeb myself, I know how hideous fandoms can get (see the My Hero Academia fanbase for more details, and cleanse yourself afterwards. IYKYK). Thankfully, there’s not much in the way of ugliness for the Fate series, but to quote a Welsh monke, “if Dragon Ball fans are the ghetto, Fate fans are the crack dealers.” Some of the more vocally dedicated types will stop at damn near nothing until every newcomer lives and dies by Fate and has immersed themselves in all the VNs, anime, movies, games, and other merch that a franchise this influential can spawn.
Channel: Trash Taste Highlights
With just this video, I don’t really need to elaborate further. Someone will tell me that Fate is easier to get into than I fear, and I guess I can take their word on that being blinder than Kenshi from Mortal Kombat or Toph Beifong in this regard, but what would help is if there was someone out there who will meet normies and newcomers with some interest at the halfway point instead of leaving us to fight off a pack of wolves with a stick and a book of pressed 4- and 5-leaf clovers. You can expect to see more in-depth opinions about all of these in a post about s[horse neighing] not (yet) reviewed after the New Year.
Going through my notes whilst finishing this up, I realize some stuff should’ve been up at least a week before I thought they’d be (this post included), but life and work had gotten in the way. The holidays aren’t gonna make that any easier for the last few topics, but I’ve been beating the odds for as long as I can remember and come hell or high water, I’m gonna make this work. Figuring it all out will have to come later.
Before I part, why don’t I give you a channel recommendation for the Holidays? Behold, Geopold!
Not dissimilar from Gattsu, Geopold is another YouTube channel that introduces different parts of the world by way of the power of internet memes. Describing himself as “Birmingham’s Travel Agent,” going off of that alone, he’s confident that that he’s well-traveled enough to give an unbiased opinion about the places he’s– okay, I’m joking, he’s gonna meme these places off the map, and keep mememing them. Now that travel agent thing may be a joke, and if that’s what you’re looking for than stop where you are, have a drink of your choosing (Kirin or Asahi for me) and watch him grossly oversimplify white people… or the state of Florida…
The next topic (fingers crossed, it’ll be out by Friday or Saturday night) will be an out of season third-person shooter game that only eight people remember.
If you’re at all curious about the plot, here’s a small hint: the Maryland prison system has been better, all things considered.
If it releases before GTA 6 does (and some outletsseem to suggestthis as the case), the opening joke will become more prophetic than I meant it to. Anime and the Grand Theft Auto series aren’t too things that always mix themselves, but talking to any gamer or anime fan, you may find that they’re the same people. One of them is writing this blog right now! Matter of fact, GTA Online has a few cars that can be customized with anime liveries. You can have your very own Itasha of the GTA anime parody Princess Robot Bubblegum.
For some reason, I was more embarrassed of this than I was of High School DxD, and that series proudly shows boobs and ass in nearly every scene!
But to get away from a parody of an East Asian medium present in a game developed by Northern Englishmen and Scots, let’s go to an upcoming game whose development team is in East Asia and is drawing comparisons to a game developed by Northern Brits.
Announced in August 2023 under the working title Project Mugen, Ananta is described as a fantasy urban RPG open-world, not dissimilar from Zenless Zone Zero but with much more to do gameplay-wise. Driving, city exploration, minigames, and Spider-Man’s wrists.
Not much is known about the plot as of writing, but the associated Wikipedia page (which will definitely be updated post-release and interviews) explains that its protagonists are paranormal investigators with some kind of extrasensory perception (ESP). These abilities are being used to fight against the main antagonistic force known as Chaos.
Channel: Mugen Official
I haven’t the slightest idea who specifically asked for this, but I want to buy them a present. A six-foot tall cake with a stripper or porn star of their choosing.
It’ll be hard to see this as a gacha game with how it looks and what it’s supposed to have, being an amalgamation of GTA, Honkai: Star Rail, Spider-Man for PS4, and Zenless Zone Zero, with a dash of Mob Psycho 100. Write what you know, learn more so you can know more, write even more. It’s also worth making the distinction between the devs of this game and Mihoyo. They’re another Chinese company based in Hangzhou called Naked Rain. Due to the whales that coalesce around paid DLC and many gacha games, they most likely do have the capacity and resources to make a game like this, but they’re not. ZZZ comes close and it’s still not a 1 to 1.
Ananta’s trailer seems to promise the ability to drive around the city, or, according to the Wikipedia, cities with planned updates. A game with multiple cities. It might be due to the resources needed to include multiple cities, but I would love it if more games had more maps to explore without locking it behind an expansion pack, DLC, or any other paywall. Even a loading screen would be serviceable, to me at least. It’s what made Midnight Club 3 and the old Need for Speed games so memorable and exciting.
Also, I have to circle back to GTA for a rant. Liberty City, Vice City, Los Santos: the big three stand-ins for NYC, Miami, and Los Angeles and victims of the RockStar game design of “take well-known big city and make it an island.” There’s a few theories floating around that the reason for this is a great big satire on the old “self-absorbed Americans live in their own world” stereotype and to be honest, I’d say the joke is quite old. It may have worked before, but with GTA: San Andreas having stand-ins for Vegas and Frisco as Las Venturas and San Fierro respectively as well as an area that can be viewed as the rural part of NorCal, there’s evidence from RockStar that they can and could (read: should) make a multi-city game. Or frankenstein their three cities together. Multiple fan artists have done it in the years since.
Source: sengin*
* The source for that map is hard to find seeing as it’s nearly 10 years old. Nevertheless, we have a good base, even if conceptual in design. There was also Ubisoft’s The Crew which had a truncated map of the lower 48, and most MMORPGs to go off of for a true open-world GTA-esque game. Come on, RockStar, give us what we really want.
Sorry, back on topic. Ananta is available for pre-registration so you can be among the first get it once it’s available. And you can bet you’re bottom dollar, I’ve already pre-registered and I’ll definitely be one of the first to play it as soon as I acquire the yottabytes necessary to house them all. Maybe I should make a rant of modern gaming, there’s enough material online for me to use as examples… as well as anecdotes and memes of people moving files around for storage; a story I know all too well.
It’s easy to say that I’m excited for Ananta and want it to succeed. That kind of goes without saying, gacha games are plenty successful as shown by Mihoyo’s output and I don’t just mean the whales funding it better than any Wall Street investor. But I’m going to take a page from the Det. Cole Phelps Institute and match that excitement with some skepticism. No assumptions, wait for more trailers and information to be revealed, look into some theories, and most importantly, prioritize the facts. To quote the God of War:
Expect the worst;
Assume nothing, and;
Always anticipate [danger]
Credit: alexloai64
A series of great quotes to follow, not just in a hack-n-slash god-pulverizing simulator, and something I’ll keep in mind whilst eagerly awaiting more updates on Ananta/Mugen.
With more time and care, these could’ve helped the old games
This post was originally supposed to be about different archetypes in anime, though I’m delaying that to sometime in December as I don’t yet have enough research to discuss those in full detail. This week, however, I’ll bring up something that has crossed my mind before, but not with enough frequency to expand upon: forgotten plot points from the 3D Mortal Kombat universe.
The original idea came from a MojoPlays video that I couldn’t f[head rip]king find until a few minutes before writing this because I misremembered the title. Abandoned Story Threads instead of Forgotten Plot Points; potato, potahto. Either way, the video can be viewed on the MojoPlays channel through the link below.
Credit: MojoPlays
The gist of the video is that throughout the series, the Mortal Kombat games have introduced plot points that were about to heat up only for the devs to go in a different direction. With over 30 years out on the market, you’ve got your pick of the litter to choose from. For this week, it’s the 3D games from MK Deadly Alliance to Armageddon. Here’s the f[scream of pain]king short version: starting with Deadly Alliance, Quan Chi escaped from a fiery ass-whoopin’ at Scorpion’s hands, discovering the Dragon King’s “undefeatable” army in the process and bringing these mummified warriors to Shang Tsung where they formed a bond based on ignorance.
Context:
Channel: Kamidogu
After the Deadly Alliance is formed, they remove all obstacles that would block them from ruling all existence. Not happy sucking up to Shao Kahn for millennia, they kill him in his throne room then make their way to the Wu Shi Academy where Shang Tsung finally gets to consume the soul of the greatest warrior in Mortal Kombat History: The Great Kung Lao I mean, Liu Kang!
OGs can’t be beat!
So with Liu Kang and Shao Kahn dead, they operate a tournament under false pretenses in Outworld and use the defeated to return the mummified army to life with the goal of marching on Earthrealm with malicious intent. Raiden saw this from the heavens and organized the remaining warriors across the realms to stop them. Fun fact, you can find archived websites and forums debating the plot points of then-upcoming games, like this website MKSecrets.net, which for some reason still looks like it was made in 2001 even though it has details on MK1 (2023)… I thought that was most Japanese websites…?
Anyway, MK: Deception picks up from the premise of Deadly Alliance only the sorcerers were too powerful for all of the warriors (could’ve probably sent them all as a group, but MK9 proves that that wouldn’t have helped much) and so at his wits end, Raiden challenges them himself. Not even a thunder god could defeat the sorcerers and realizing that their goals were nearly complete, what was left was the amulet Quan Chi stole from Shinnok in MK4. He hangs onto it defeating Shang Tsung in the process, only to have Onaga reborn (hinted at from Reptile’s ending in the last game) and return to reclaim the army that the sorcerers so generously returned to life with the souls of conquered fighters.
All three men realize that danger was marching towards them and while they managed to temporarily hold them back, Raiden uses a last ditch attack on the Dragon King. It failed to even scratch him and he grabs a hold of the amulet which will be needed to form the six Kamidogu into a single entity.
Channel: MKIceAndFire
As for how Onaga acquired the Kamidogu, well it involved tricking a young boy named Shujinko and leading him across reality by the nose for 40 years. If this game were canon, that would’ve come back to bite Onaga in the ass, only for Shujinko’s efforts to go unrecognized as redemption and still get punished by a Dark Raiden. This will become important later.
Shaolin Monks was a bit of a beat ’em up remake of MKII (kinda) and I’d already talked about that before, so we’re skipping it considering it has nothing to do with the 3D trilogy anyway.
Armageddon was supposed to cap it all off and the more I’ve thought about it, the more it felt like a final send off before Midway got the crappy ideas out of the way in time to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010.
Let’s not be too harsh though, it did help pave the way for the Injustice line.
Story-wise, the protector god of Edenia, Argus, is made aware that between the actions of the sorcerers and Shujinko being duped for that long, the warriors of the realms were learning more about the construction of the realms than the Elder Gods would be comfortable with and proposed to Argus to come up with a solution. He suggested total annihilation to protect the realms from their own residents, but his wife Delia suggested depowering them all since there were many heroes who fought tooth and nail to defend the realms from evil, not the least of which was Shao Kahn and Shinnok (whom we learn later was banished to the Netherrealm for eternity for treachery, leaving Quan Chi to do the heavy lifting through the Brotherhood of Shadow).
They’re granted the power to do this and choose to do so by making a competition of things for their sons Taven and Daegon. If things went to plan, the two men would engage in a friendly competition, grab their weapons and armor and race to defeat their mother’s firespawn (half-brother?) Blaze to achieve full godhood as both of them are demigods. In reality, the two brothers, under the watchful eye of a pair of dragons, Orin and Caro, are set on a different path. Caro, who was the guardian dragon of Daegon, lost contact with Blaze believing it to be an early sign to set him on his path. Instead, Daegon forms the Red Dragon clan in Caro’s name and signs off on unethical science experiments for the purpose of choking existence into coughing Blaze up. The way its presented makes me think of Unit 731 in Manchuria and its surgeon general Shiro Ishii. If you don’t know, look it up at your own peril.
This makes Daegon the antagonist of the Konquest mode and through no fault of his own Taven loses sight of the purpose of his quest. And his frustration and confusion at this whole course of events is best reflected at the several times he’s questioned and even considered abandoning ship. The quest stopped being fun for him as he lost the things he cherished. Blaze appeared at the end to catch him up to at least what the true purpose of the quest was and Taven is a hero if we compare him to the Ancient Greek model similar to Perseus or Theseus. Self-serving at times, but the guy still knows the difference between good and evil. Daegon’s descent into evil seems random until he learned that he was supposed to lose the quest and decided to take matters into his own hands, hence the birth of the Red Dragon.
Dropped and abandoned plot points are still a problem for the series as it’s developed a reputation for introducing points and leaving them to collect dust. We barely get five minutes with the concept before the devs (read: Ed Boon and John Tobias) moved onto something else. You could say the fandom is also to blame for this as dedicated fans have asked (demanded) the team to release canonically deceased characters as DLC, but staying with the 3D games where the problem expanded, there’s more to say about it during this era than anywhere else in the series.
Starting with Deadly Alliance, Shao Kahn was established to be killed in the intro to this game, with Deception and Shujinko’s story acting as a prequel taking place some years before the events of Deadly Alliance where it all converges. Shujinko himself was invited twice by the White Lotus Society and later by Shang Tsung himself to represent Earthrealm in the tournament but couldn’t attend for different reasons. The White Lotus got tired of waiting for him to power up (never mind that the tournament is hosted every 50 years) and due to his cleansing journey with Nightwolf, he had to go back to the Netherrealm to gather more hatred, from none other than the ghost of Hanzo Hasashi.
This part doesn’t necessarily screw around with the timeline as egregiously as following plot points, but Armageddon is where it all breaks down. Canonically dead characters are resurrected off-screen and based on what we know we can connect the dots, but often the devs are a bit cagey when it comes to showing how, who and/or why characters are returned to life. The 2011 continuity shows that Quan Chi has brought Noob and Sindel back to life and claimed the souls of those killed by Sindel herself in the eleventh hour, but it’s not shown whether he brought Shao Kahn back to life or if he did why he’d do so, or even why the rest of the villains would agree to this arrangement.
Channel: BruskPoet
I’m not saying this moment in the story is bad, I like it a lot. But the nonexistent explanation for how all this can come to be is what sours me on it somewhat. I’d say there’s no care for a consistent timeline especially in a fighting game (something that doesn’t escape Tekken), but I think it’s more along the lines of the devs wanting their personal favorites to shine brighter than the others, which is why the franchise works better as video games and toy lines than it does movies.
Most of the time…
For what it’s worth, the characters have been mostly consistent with a few touch ups here and there, but if you ask people like The4thSnake, there’s a lot under the hood that could use some light to heavy rewiring from individual characters to whole ass f[swords clashing]king plot points, like what I’ve been writing about here. I’m a bit torn personally, because it brings a charm not found in other series, but this many plot holes treats the timeline like a redheaded step child. Doesn’t stop people from trying, as I’ve stated before, I rewrote MK: Shaolin Monks myself like it was Dragon Ball as that was what I was watching at the time.
Why bother with the 3D games, though? Well, of all the plot points introduced and left by the wayside, the 3D games did it the most and the worst of any other era, which seems to be the result of developmental inconsistencies prior to release on store shelves. It certainly hasn’t stopped people from trying though and it likely will keep going for as long as there is a Mortal Kombat to fix. Nothing too serious at this point, but it’s both fun to expand on what was and offer critique for one of the series most tumultuous times in its history.
A few weeks before my second attempt to Army, I wrote about my opinions on visual novels, with the overall consensus being lukewarm above all else. A good VN can stay as long as it wants, but I don’t actively make a beeline to find them all, no matter how great the art style may be. For the topic of this post, I had bought another VN during my time in AIT on sale, and one of my roommates (who’s an even bigger weeb than myself, he’ll talk you to death about Konosuba or Hatsune Miku), had recommended the video game Needy Streamer Overload.
I placated him by “promising” and dismissing future playthroughs and I couldn’t see myself continuing forward for several reasons. Not limited to my play style as I have expressed some VNs do go on to have great legacies like Fate, Clannad, or Steins;Gate. This one specifically carried darker undertones, which I’m not against, but it varies depending on certain things. Maybe I’m just being arbitrary but the juxtaposition of cute and creepy in this one makes me a little uneasy. It’s a bit like the talking pie from that one episode of Regular Show. Like a doll possessed by the spirit of some little girl that drowned.
Now, watching and keeping up with thriller series Mysterious Disappearances would make you think I have no problem with scary stories like this, but with a series written around urban legends and folktales, some of which are plausible but not guaranteed, only a fool would try to take those seriously.
But what turned me off of Necessity Streamer Maximum would be because how real the concept is. It’s basically about a depressed, near-suicidal adolescent girl putting on a show for a legion of faceless fans across the globe, acting in an erratic and unpredictable manner as part of her schtick.
Yes, I know, I practically slandered VTubers, but in another post I assure you that I have no real problem with VTubers, following a few myself when the time allows for it. That said, my description in the above paragraph shows the types of VTubers I have a preference for. Sus-commentary is fine, everyone says weird s[8-bit soundbite]t from time to time, though only a few of us have the courage [read: foolishness] to monetize it. Personalities are also fine, look up any celebrity’s on-screen vs off-screen behavior and you may be shocked at what you found, like Marilyn Monroe being an intellectual cursed by the Hollywood cretins to play the blonde bimbo.
Screaming one’s lungs out certainly has an audience and I was among those, but in the years’ since, I can’t go back to that. There’s a meme of a guy tearfully gunning down something he loved because it grew increasingly annoying, and it sounds like I’m phrasing it that way, but it’s more the process of growing up. Some things you just outgrow and can’t really enjoy anymore. It stopped being entertainment by the time I was 19 and my 26th birthday is at the end of next month. So specifically with entertainment, while I don’t see myself outgrowing the analytical like, for instance, documentaries, the random humor that emerged in the late 2000s and 2010s especially on YouTube isn’t for me anymore. And personally, I had trouble watching Pipkin Pippa. Someone will try to convince me that she has less intense content, and I appreciate the body of water you’re allowing me to drink from, but the horse isn’t guaranteed to even take a sip.
This meme is the point of this post, the crux in the custard, the proof in the pudding, the facts in the fondue (hungry yet?). I know people who stuck it out with unstable people and got severely burned as a result, not to mention the numerous stories I’ve read of how bad things have gotten for some people and hypotheticals of how much worse it could get, so sorry if I’m a bit suspicious about what can and does happen in real life. You know how you view a piece of media and the antagonist is memorable because of how they can mirror some actual people past and present? It’s a bit like that.
Now I’m fully aware that this isn’t 100%, though the potential is what keeps me at arms length at times. This part is gonna get slightly personal; everyone has their problems that they’re trying to work out or live with and it’s something I commend, but my opinion changes for those who swear to whomever they call god that there’s not one thing wrong with how they live, even more so if they’re highly reactive. These types of people are easy to avoid on the street or whatever, but what about if you work with them? Or live with them? You don’t need me to say that life with a person who dwells in misery and is overly generous with their suffering is zero fun.
For Neediest VTuber Maximum Overdrive, it reminds me a lot of what I want to see less of in my future. Not by a giant margin, though it would get a bit depressing for me if the background art was a physically broken home. Then there’s the main character herself. It’s been a while so I don’t remember what her real name was supposed to be, but the alias she puts on is “OMGkawaiiAngel” or just K-Angel for short. The game’s Steam page describes her as a girl with an unsatisfiable lust for attention, which brings me to something else I want to see less of as I age. I’m always happy to help wherever and however I can, but I can’t stomach habitual linecrossing. Kindness is no weakness, but we often find ourselves sharing that philosophy with those who think otherwise.
Back on topic: Notice Me Senpai Simulator is perhaps a comprehensive look into mental illness that most internet forums like to meme away. A look I’m definitely not qualified to discuss in length, so here’s a video I found that explains the “I Can Fix Her” situation.
Credit: BoolioGalaxy
What is it exactly? A look at one of entertainment’s dark sides? An analysis of monetizing what’s left of one’s conscience? An extreme example of things going wrong? A combination of any one of these? Or none of the above because it’s just a game? I honestly wish I could break from this streak of cop-out answers, but if it’s any consolation, it looks like there’s a bunch of nuanced answers to Feed My Attention-Seeking Behavior, Nimrod.
Subscribers will remember the time from when I recommended the darkly comical episodic series The Casket of Drew and Ash and might be confused or call tu quoque for recommending that series and being uneasy about this one. But to reiterate and emphasize, that game had comedic elements of a classic black comedy. It elicits multiple emotions as you go along, whereas Hey, All You People, Won’t You Listen to Me? is darkly comical if you cross out -ly comical.
Rather than subscribe to the stereotypical dark atmosphere that accompanied horror movies of old, the disturbing part about this is that not only could it happen in real life, it probably is and few may even realize it, or they do and it feeds into the appeal of the yandere in anime.
Everyone likes a well-written archetype, but I found that Why Haven’t You Called Me Mommy Yet? does its job a bit too well. I’m no stranger to these sorts of things, I admit I’ve had dreams before where an unstable woman loves me unconditionally (so long as I keep my eyes on her and not any other owner of a second X-chromosome) but thank Rias it was just a dream. Joker isn’t crazy enough to fight the IRS and I’m 95% sure that I’m not mad enough to live this life:
Credit: kukuri ito
On a final note, if you’re keeping in the back of your head that this game was recommended by my roommate back in AIT, then congrats on your impeccable memory, have a trophy and some cheese popcorn. You’ve earned it. He was honest with me about his life and all things considered, it makes sense that this would be more his speed than mine. Don’t worry though, we’re all living our best lives. I’ve always wanted to see even a part of Texas, and that guy is currently living it up in the Hotel California Germany.
A Georgian YouTuber, his early work specialized in analyzing music, but nowadays he looks in-depth at the world, namely the western world, Russia, and the Caucasus region. If you’re sick to death of criticism of America and Britain in the west, let this guy’s honorary American card masquerading as a video convince you that he’s worth the watch. The man does his research in a variety of topics, which shows proficiency I say. Gotta know what you’re talking about before you take the piss out of it, am I right?
Opinions on Entertainment 