Tag: reviews

The L.A.P.D.’s Det. Columbo

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

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

Columbo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

This point will be relevant later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post doesn’t exist.

Burgundy Shinobi VS Sakai Jin-dono

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戦国時代VS鎌倉幕府

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rare Tiberius artistry at work!?

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

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

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

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

Vermilion Ninja VS Ghost of Sparta

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Hacky, slash-y, chained weapon attack-y

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Channel: Parts From Movies

I could not resist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re reclaiming Kamakura with this one!!

Crimson Kunoichi VS One-Armed Wolf

Tiberius1 Comment

赤くノ一VS隻狼

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tale of the One-Armed Wolf.

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

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

Thus ended the Ashina Clan.

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

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

西男、どこへ行くと？

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

Two, actually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Channel: Xironia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s this one. Lucky Star.

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

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

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

Credit: u/YaBoiErr_Sk1nnYP3n15, r/InitialD

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

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

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

SHE’S A SENIOR.

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

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

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

If you know, you know.

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

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

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

Credit: Jas A

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

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

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

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

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

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

Channel: CrackerBountyHD

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

Miscellaneous Thoughts

TiberiusLeave a comment

A GAP! THERE’S A GAP!! NURSE!!!

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

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

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

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

Channel: Elephants in Rooms – Ken LaCorte

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

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

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

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

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

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

This one was brought to you by ChatGPT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The James Bond-style Animanga Series That’s Very Hard to Find

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Yet it was available for free on Tubi a few years ago

Due in no small part to its popularity and wide appeal, Shonen action-battle series get all the media attention at home and abroad, unintentionally hiding other genres in the process. So it’s not a big surprise or concern when people erroneously claim that the longest running animanga series is One Piece, or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, or Dragon Ball. All have been running for decades, with the latter two debuting at the end of the Showa era. The subject of this post however has been in serialization since 1968.

Indeed, the longest-running animanga series still releasing chapters even after the author’s passing is none other than this Japanese take on the well-established James Bond franchise. The mangaka, Takao Saito, designed Golgo 13 to be an international man of mystery. A man with no need for an introduction and gets all the results from the business end of a high-powered scoped rifle. Under the alias “Duke Togo,” Golgo 13’s backstory is up in the air. A legendary figure in international espionage, what’s known about him comes secondhand from those he chooses to work with. As long as they can get him a plan, a gun, and a car, then he’s in business.

The name “Golgo 13” has a symbolic meaning, Golgo being short for Golgotha, the place where Jesus Christ was crucified, and 13, of course, being the unlucky number spelling death and destruction for his targets. And Duke Togo doesn’t seem to discriminate in his choice of target. Coincidence or not, I see a lot of this man in Claude from GTA III.

Before you look at this post inside-out, let’s size them up.

Contract killers from parts unknown with little to no mention of their origin, never mind their own birth names, who take up arms and remove problems for a variety of bosses, sticking their own necks out for a couple of bucks while earning the ire of different people and/or factions. But what separates the Holy Bullet from the grimy drifter is both the environment and the nature of their respective series. Golgo 13 is a professional hitman for hire. So is Claude, but he exists in a world designed to satirize everything from the ground up: New York City (which they needed to make adjustments for because the release date was very close to 9/11), mob life, gang life, pop culture, the works. Saito’s manga is more of an homage to the James Bond franchise and at the time of debut, James Bond only had five movies.

Not to mention, depending on who you ask, the depiction of early Golgo 13 in the manga and the movies is a mirror to the behavior of Sean Connery’s James Bond as well as Connery himself at the time in regard to women. I can’t say for certain if it’s a perfect mirror of Bond, James Bond from that time period having seen the 1983 movie a few years ago on Tubi TV, but just from that, the most I saw was Golgo 13 bedding a sexy lady instead of slapping the hysteria out of her, so I take it that this is a more reserved form of misogyny compared to Connery’s more boisterous form.

Does that make it any better? Well, considering the woman in that scene was more of a side show than a main event, it puts him a stair step above his British counterpart, but it’s worth closely examining Golgo 13’s character in relation to others. By himself, he’s a quiet professional with a singular focus: the target. Personally, I think these kinds of discussions erroneously apply modern customs and expectations to a 1960s Japanese publication, but I won’t refrain from entertaining them. Ditching random women after presenting the solid snake may not sound any better than Connery’s slap ’em and plap ’em, and it’s more or less on par, but with even less to say about this aspect than Golgo 13’s background, I wouldn’t dwell on this as much since the primary focus is Duke Togo and his incredible range.

In line with the nature of this blog’s discovery and promotion of notoriously hard-to-find animanga series among other things, this series is not only right up my alley, but it’s scarcity is tailor-made for a blog like this. 50+ years in serialization, even after the original mangaka died, with a handful of movies to go along with it subbed and dubbed, and yet… hardly a squeak. And understandably so.

The series has a library-occupying 200 volumes to collect so unless Saito’s estate approved omnibus truncations to shrink the number, you may wanna invest in some extra storage space and shelves. It does have a 2008 anime adaptation on Blu-Ray (and has since been made available on the underground pirate sites) 50 episodes strong, and most likely will rely heavily on those brave enough to dedicate hard drive space to keeping it in preservation. And to top it all off, the manga hasn’t had as many people scrambling to translate it for international audiences.

A die-hard fan may have a dedicated section to just the Golgo 13 series and if you happen to be that person…

You might have the blood of a Japanese historian in you, because bringing it to light is a gargantuan task.

And a couple of movies and a 50-episode anime series doesn’t go deep beyond the surface. Having said all of this though, with audiences craving more than paper-thin characters with unchanging motives and priorities, Golgo 13 may not be what a lot of people want these days. Protagonists who aren’t heroic 100% of the time against antagonistic forces who aren’t necessarily evil is what sells than rigid good VS evil, but it creates a false conclusion that pure good and pure evil are bad. I suspect that people who dabble in fanfiction are among those who lambaste these archetypes because it doesn’t give them a lot to work with, especially if they can’t rewrite what already exists due to its non-existence (Golgo 13 being too straightforward to bend into whatever the mind can imagine), but if that’s the case, then I chastise these types back with a megaphonic “LAZY WRITERS!!!”

100 of these guys in a room can crap out Hamlet, so what’s your excuse, fanfiction writers?

But a point can be made about how immovable the character of Golgo 13 can be compared to people like Saichi Sugimoto, Frieren, or JoJolion Josuke Higashikata (東方定助). Sugimoto maintains his eyes on the Ainu gold, but faces mental and physical challenges in search of it. Frieren learns more and more about the late Himmel the Hero long after the journey has ended. And Josuke/Gappy understands who and what he was and is while battling people he regarded as friends and family for control of the Rokakaka fruit.

The usual channels of viewership for the series and the movies are available, but with most of the manga being out of reach due to a lack of translation for the later chapters, I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to skip the manga altogether.

When Personal Guilt Is Made Manifest

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If you don’t deal with your demons, they will deal with you

Late anime director Satoshi Kon created and directed the 2004 anime series Paranoia Agent. In 2020, Toonami picked up the series for broadcast for my viewing pleasure. It follows a timid character designer known as Tsukiko Sagi who gains fame from a pink dog mascot known as Maromi. Under pressure from higher-ups to imitate and essentially mass produce her prior success, she finds herself knocked unconscious by a mysterious boy on golden skates wielding a crooked gold bat. The detectives on the scene, Keiichi Ikari and Mitsuhiro Maniwa, don’t fully buy the story until another victim shows up and after that come more and more victims of the attacks. Every victim has essentially the same description of the perp: young buy with inline skates, a crooked bat, and a baseball cap. There’s two names for the kid in sub and dub: the sub refers to him as Golden Bat; and the dub refers to him as Lil’ Slugger. The dub name for the “antagonist” might be some holdover from times past, but I prefer Golden Bat because it’s one of the most identifiable objects on the antagonist’s person.

From a plot standpoint, Kon’s creation is a mystery thriller with some psychological horror blended into this cocktail. You don’t know who the antagonist is beyond the victim’s descriptions so that nails down the mystery. He’s a serial assaulter who attacks without warning, which adds to the thriller elements. And the psychological horror element has to do with the nature of the attacks. Post-assault all of the characters can consistently describe what was going on when they were attacked and what the assailant looked like or was wielding, but prior to that just about every one of them has some sort of mental health condition that makes them somewhat unreliable. That, or they’re some kind of opportunist with an ulterior motive or they’re hiding a deep, dark secret that they’d rather bring with them to the grave than make peace with.

For character design, knowing Japanese kinda spoils the main plot, which I’ll get to momentarily, but only if you know what kanji is being used and how. The main element to them all is animal based and is also based on their nature with a double entendre to boot for some characters, notably those with a mental disorder of some kind. From what I recall of the anime when Toonami broadcast it, it starts with the victims of Golden Bat before transitioning to detectives Ikari and Maniwa, but doesn’t want you to forget that Tsukiko and her creation, Maromi, are the first people who’re introduced in the series, despite transitioning to other characters.

It also has something of a supernatural element to Golden Bat. We’re gonna venture into spoiler territory right about now, so if you wanna open another tab and blaze through the series, you’re welcome to do so. Interspersed with the genuine attacks against them, there was a copycat perpetrator who personally singled out some of the victims while the real culprit was still at large and incidentally the real culprit was the one who killed the copycat while the copycat was in police custody, thereby ruining Ikari’s and Maniwa’s careers as detectives.

Disgraced and kicked to the curb, Ikari and Maniwa handle expulsion for f[metal clanking]ng up the case so royally in different ways. Ikari finds himself as extra help at a construction site that seemingly scoops up what society tosses out not the least of which was an ex-convict that Ikari himself arrested ages ago. Maniwa, meanwhile, doesn’t necessarily quit working on the case just because he no longer has a badge.

Ikari and Maniwa fill the buddy cop dynamic that I haven’t really seen since Rush Hour and wouldn’t again until Taiho Shichauzo. Ikari is the gruff, older, experienced cop who doesn’t have room for surprises anymore. His belief in the supernatural is as tight as the victims’ grips on reality and what especially makes the gears grind against each other is that his family’s future was torn apart. His wife, Misae, was expecting a child, but due either to a mishap or medical condition, she miscarried. Worse still, her health deteriorated significantly toward the end of the series.

Based on that description, she would be a prime target for the likes of Golden Bat to strike, considering he had an affinity for striking the mentally or even physically unwell throughout the series. But Misae in her final hours proved to be an indestructible show of force, refusing to let this manifestation of everyone’s darkest insecurities destroy her, even if her body is failing her.

Maniwa is Ikari’s counterpart. Young, bright, and more flexible than his older partner who’d rather stick to tradition than explore nifty and novel ideas to crime-stopping and problem-solving. While on the case, Ikari doesn’t even bother to explore the paranormal elements, writing them off as unintelligible drivel, but Maniwa examines these more closely, sometimes letting his own sanity get violently abused just to reach a conclusive answer. If it gets results I suppose… but I’m not so sure this would be advised outside of undercover work. Max Payne pushed it with his vigilantism while undercover in the Punchinello family, and the Valkyr trips were done to him than him doing it himself. Maniwa chooses to dance with the devil for a bit to parse what separates most of these cases.

Now the series does return to Sagi at the end to reveal that the pink dog mascot, Maromi, was in fact based on Sagi’s pet dog when she was a child who was run over by a car. Fearing reprisal for being an irresponsible dog owner, she makes up a false story that a random bat-wielding psycho clubbed the dog to death, and has lived with the lie for ages until she finally confronts the truth and confesses that she let the dog go. Clearly, this isn’t the series that deals with right or wrong, nor does it roll the die on its setup. Kon’s work on this was based on a bunch of ideas that were drafted during the production of some of his other movies, Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers. I’m really not well versed in anime movies, in fact, rare magmatic take: most anime movies disappoint me greatly, and that extends to modern day films like the Chainsaw Man: Reze movie. I read the manga already and as much as I wanna see it animated, when it comes to movie adaptations of manga arcs, it felt to me that a lot needed to be sacrificed to truncate it to a specific runtime. And that’s only of manga to movie adaptations; Kon’s original movies might be different, but who knows?

Anyway, Kon stated at the time that working on movies required his undivided attention from beginning to end whereas a TV series, least of all a semi-anthology series like Paranoia Agent allowed for more creativity from episode to episode. And I get that, similar to how I get some of the logic behind most anthology series, or back when they actually mattered video game DLCs and expansion packs. Nothing wrong with linear series, in fact, doing them right leaves players and in the case of film, moviegoers, with a lasting experience, but sometimes you wanna do something different.

The director of this series was promptly sacked for being 0.2 seconds late. .·°՞(˃ ᗜ ˂)՞°·.

I admit that this is the only Satoshi Kon production I can name that I’ve seen, partially or fully, but I recommend it nonetheless for the mystery thriller angle by itself. Especially if you enjoy series like Taiho Shichauzo/You’re Under Arrest or Columbo. Roughly all the details are there for you to see in real time, but to uncover each one requires close examination of each detail to a Maniwa-like level. Perhaps even re-examining the same scenes once or twice to see what is missed or will come back later in the episode or the next one. Also, red herrings. Red herrings everywhere.

The Getaway: Like GTA, But British

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Even more British than the GTA series

Although the GTA series routinely satirizes American culture from the safety and comfort of the same three locations–budget NYC, discount Miami, and dollar store Los Angeles, plus surrounding areas–the heart and soul of the series is Britain and there was an expansion pack for the original GTA, set in London and featuring James Bond of all people.

Not for nothing, I welcome more games set in the UK to break the mold for a change

But Rockstar North (formerly DMA Design) wasn’t the only British developer making open-world action games. Team SoHo, under the direction and storytelling prowess of Brendan McNamara, the same one who practically drove Team Bondi into a shallow grave, released The Getaway in December 2002 in Europe and Oceania, and in 2003 in North America; in a rare instance of Europe getting the game before America and Canada. Not so much a parody of the setting, the nature of the game was intended for a cinematic experience, so the comparisons to draw between itself, GTA, and the True Crime series all fall rather flat by way of the UI design.

From a technical standpoint, it’s a very unorthodox open-world game. Set in the borough of the City of London, not to be confused with Greater London as the PS2 never had that kind of power to render a whole f[traffic]ng city, the UI is sans a HUD, so you don’t see a typical health bar for the character. Rather, the damage is reflected on the character’s body itself, so think of any open-world game with the damage to match, but it actually had an effect on the character instead of just being a porous open wound treated the same as a scratch or a bug bite. Too many shots to center mass before death leave you huffing and heaving for mercy at which point you simply lean against a nearby wall and you’re back in action. You also don’t have a way to count your bullets unless you’re whispering the number of shots taken to yourself, but without Senku Ishigami’s brain, you’re bound to be inaccurate. Fortunately, it has what it took GTA and Max Payne ages to implement. A cover system! But it conflicts with the camera sometimes, so good luck making your targets before your carotid artery gets blocked by a loose bullet.

How about driving? Are there any arrows or a map that can help me navigate? Nope. You’re vehicular navigation is handled by way of the turn signals, and on the one hand; f[beeping]ng yes, the one game where they serve a purpose. But on the other hand; without a good map of the City of London, or any sense of familiarity, I feel even more like a tourist to Britain than I would be in real life. Turn signals being an extremely rare thing to see being used in any kind of video game is a novel idea that I wish was more common in games these days, however the implementation here is to direct you to your destination. The lights flashing faster when you’re on the street you need to turn into and the hazard lights popping on once you’re there. Additionally, the cars this time around come from real-life brands as opposed to some Frankenstein creation of existing brands that Rockstar has always loved, so you get to drive an RHD Honda or a Lexus or a Vauxhall if you care very much about that sort of thing.

For personal research, I looked up a bunch of the manufacturers and most of the car companies have since gone out of business, been absorbed in consolidation efforts, or their parent companies decided to focus on what they were originally good at, as is the case with Saab to an extent.

So what’s the game about? It starts with a woman getting gunned down and her son kidnapped by gangsters working for a crooked geezer named Charlie Jolson. Jolson ordered this attack to force the protagonist of the story, Mark Hammond, to be his personal slave and run all over the borough kicking s[tire screech]t up and causing conflict between the cities gangs of which there are four: Jolson’s gang known as the Bethnal Green Mob, Hammond’s former gang known as the Collins gang, the 14K Triads, and the Yardies. Jolson himself is particularly dastardly, aligning himself with the far-right National Front movement in Britain. For those who don’t know, the National Front in the UK has a reputation as a neo-Nazi, white supremacist political movement, and is one of several far-right political parties and/or movements from the UK, so making Jolson a member of this group can feel like forced hatred of a character to some, but I can easily see someone putting him in the same light as Battle Tendency’s Rudol von Stroheim. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jolson’s ill-gotten gains were a means of quietly funding far-right individuals to steer Britain in a neo-fascist direction.

Jolson’s main enemies, aside from Hammond, is Hammond’s original crew, the Collins gang, founded by Nick Collins. It’s explained in the story that Hammond was a part of this crew until he got pinched in 1997. Since his release in 2002 he vowed to stay on the straight and narrow until the powers that be forced him back into the life. The third gang you antagonize is the infamous 14K Triad group, who are generally more powerful in China and their territories, but also have influence over sections of the diaspora, even in the UK.

Lastly, there’s the Yardies, an umbrella term for any Jamaican organized crime group, typically used interchangeably with the term for “posse.” Like their triad counterparts, they’re generally more powerful in Kingston and Spanish Town, but have a roof over the heads of sections of the diaspora, with overseas Jamaicans calling Britain, America, Canada, and the rest of the West Indies home.

The main plot of the game is let Jolson step all over you and earn a chance to get your son back, but it also subdivides into a different focus and brings on another protagonist, Frank Carter, the undercover cop and Britain’s answer to Dirty Harry, stopping at nothing until Jolson and his kind are dead or imprisoned. Maybe both.

I’m not entirely sure how long the game is, but I know I’m about a third or so into Hammond’s part of the story. I’m trying not to spoil myself too much and keep as much of it a surprise as I can. For the gameplay aspect, there’s some variation to the movement on foot and in a car, and even shooting has quite a bit of variance. Without a HUD, the game employs much of the same mechanics of weapon equipment found in later, fancier titles like Max Payne 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2, only you get the impression that Hammond doesn’t give much of a toss over what he has on hand, with the plot reflecting that he’s only doing all this s[clank]t because Jolson is threatening to kill Hammond’s kid. But it’s not like he’s completely enslaved to the prick; one of Hammond’s best mates, Liam Spencer, hears about what’s going on and helps Hammond get one over on Jolson.

If I had to wager a guess for the rest of the game, I take it Hammond attempts to find his son himself, but gets caught up and has to suffer the wrath of Jolson’s boys, leading to the switch up to Carter.

The Wiki makes him sound like a loose cannon and I have until I get to his part to confirm that

These days, The Getaway is more than a little bit rough around the edges, but it’s not like GTA III levels of difficult. Personally, it could benefit from a modern remake with more responsive controls not dissimilar to what Sega did with the Kiwami remakes of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon PS2 games. But it did gangbusters at the time and was able to produce a sequel subtitled Black Monday in 2004, and a PSP exclusive called Gangs of London in 2006.

A third mainline installment was supposed to release sometime after 2008 on PS3, but the project was cancelled alongside another unrelated game called Eight Days, or according to the devs at the time, the games were put “on hold.” But considering it’s been nearly 20 years since either of the games have been in the public consciousness, I highly doubt anyone is holding out for either game to finish development after so f[goat bleats]ng long. The same thing goes for Beyond Good and Evil 2 and any hope anyone had for a third installment of a Valve game.

I don’t know why I suddenly wanted to bully this game, I don’t really have a reason to. I just popped into my head one day as that thing that’s been in development hell for ages.

For what it’s worth though, Team SoHo’s brainchild inspired by British gangster flicks went on to embed itself in British gangster media years down the line with a spinoff TV series in 2020 and a graphic novel two years later. Unlike Yakuza though, I don’t think I’ll see myself going through the whole of the franchise. Tracking down games to emulate is becoming a chore over time–this would be so much worse. I still wanna consume more foreign media and I think I have a case for another location:

I already saw the Tropa de Elite movies, and I know there’s more to discover outside of telenovelas. I’m gonna make this a goal for the year.

Rust Belt Snuff Film

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One of the few Rockstar products nearly banned in the U.S.

Banning and heavily scrutinizing entertainment products has been a time-honored tradition ever since Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, and Doom were released in the early 1990s. Violence, gore, and in Night Trap’s case, violence against women. All of these follow on a legacy of learning too late that being devil may care about the contents of an entertainment product can lead to controversy and public outcry. Not all of these can be accurately predicted, but if I didn’t do my research on Jaws or Gremlins before taking my kids there, I’d really have only myself to blame if the kids have nightmares.

Never mind the boat, you’re gonna need to explain to the misses why Timmy doesn’t like sharks all of a sudden before sleeping on the couch tonight.

Although not present for the 1993-4 hearings, DMA Design, now Rockstar North (because no true Scotsman would associate themselves with England anything) released a successful series of video games alluding to the act of motor vehicle theft but not necessarily exclusive to such an act. Yes, I am referencing the Grand Theft Auto series and as noteworthy as the attempts to bury this series over the years are, a different Rockstar property was almost the victim of a successful attempt on its life.

For all the flak GTA got against it for its “realistic violence” (let’s be charitable, 2002 graphics were considered realistic at the time), this game originally got what it might as well have been asking for.

The content within was made for the dark web

Released on November 18, 2003 for PS2 and then the other then-current platforms the following April, Manhunt gave the audience very little to the imagination regarding its content. Roughly every object that can cause pain in the real world is itself an equippable weapon, but the weapons themselves weren’t on trial here. Or rather, it wasn’t just the weapons getting a heavier look this time around.

But we’ll get around to that soon. The story is as follows: Carcer City, death row inmate James Earl Cash is put to death by lethal injection in public. Privately, he was merely knocked out by presumably less harmful drugs than what costs millions to pump into an actual live person in the most remote parts of the country. Afterwards, a voice, referring to itself as “The Director” leads Cash around by the nose, whispering into his ears the different functions.

There’s the Hoods, who can best be described as a very loose confederation of low-level blue collar criminals from thieves to murderers to rapists to dealers. This amalgamation of crime and villainy is enough to even get crooked cops on the take. Next to that is the Skinz, a white power skinhead group that, if you know anything about how the Rust Belt came to be, makes for a really depressing state of the region. As for why these neo-Nazi larpers would be after Cash’s head when he’s both white and shaven-headed, well the answer to that has long chain in British and American colonial, citizenship, and race laws on the whole, but the short version deals with perception. Purity, or “join or die” mentality for those who fit the mold on paper, and it’s not like the Nazis were s[nein]t-talkers about that either.

Putting the Skinz on the cover of the game’s box art works for shock value if you ask me

After these yo-yos, it’s the Wardogs, a paramilitary group made up of veterans, survivalists, and mercenaries. Pulling from real-world examples, outside of foreign volunteers and conscripts who choose or are forced to fight respectively, mercenaries have never come cheap and paramilitaries typically fight for themselves or the highest bidder, though sometimes they have an ideological goal in mind. Real world paramilitaries include the historical SS and select conscripts fighting for Imperial Japan, and in more recent history there’s the American militia movement from the early 1990s, the Tamil Tigers from the Sri Lankan Civil War, paramilitaries based in the British Isles during the Troubles, some ethnic-based groups from Southeast Asia, notably the Philippines, and numerous others. And I bring up these examples to suggest that the Director has the resources to finance this s[clapperboard]t himself. I’m not crazy enough to watch snuff films and even doing research on them is murky at best, so I don’t know what kind of budget those cinematic horror shows have. Probably not as much as a Hollywood production, but again I’m showing my lack of knowledge.

Following the doomsday preppers are the Innocentz whose name is an apt and disturbing perversion of their patterns of behavior. It should be kept in mind that all criminal organizations are secret societies, but not all secret societies are criminal organizations. In this case, the Innocentz work in tiers each more terrifying than the last from the trademark gangbanger to the thanatistic cult faction to the mentally deficient pedophilic faction, thereby making them the most disturbing enemy in the gang.

And the last round of nasties you fight are the Smileyz, a gang of escaped mental patients who are bizarrely the most vaguely explained faction. They’re not strictly anything, not gangbangers, or white supremacists, or pedophilic cultists; the Wiki makes them out to be the grayest blur in the game.

All things considered, this era of games was churning out edgy and thematically dark games left and right. GTA III and Vice City, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, Max Payne 3 and this. The more emboldened developers felt to release edgier video games, the harder the backlash and the more highly praised the games were to the audience no matter the reviews. A not insignificant portion of these fell victim to cult classic status, neither hurting nor helping the sales of the PS2, but certainly adding to that platform’s library all things considered.

Credit: r/gaming, u/veterinarygamer

And the PS2 clearly had an expansive library!

I highly doubt that Midway Games cared very much about their public image since their revenue came mostly from the arcades, but DMA/Rockstar was taking home the lion’s share of the media’s attention. The fact that their philosophy was too downright tease their critics was nothing short of genius. These days, I know better than to engage with trolls and ragebait, but the savviest of creators can farm their critics for karma, and successfully. This is the philosophy of Rev Says Desu, or more historically, circus freak shows.

The IJA’s 7th Division was a circus all its own

Aside from nanny state countries that historically coddle their populace and refuse their people the right to decide for themselves what they do and don’t like, the US of A damn near banned it thanks to the graphic violence. Mortal Kombat would’ve reasonably been written off as fantasy with all the ninjas, sorcerers, soul-stealing wizards (Farewell Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), upright lizards, and whatnot, if it wasn’t for the use of digitized actors and inclusion of blood and finishing moves. For Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto, the fact that these are plausible and can be readily seen by ordinary people away from a computer or TV screen adds to the controversy. No one’s ever seen a fire-summoning ninja throw a grappling hook from his hand, but thanks to the news everyone’s heard of cartels, bank robbers, gangs, and prison escapees.

But even these are classic horror movie tropes. Most of the time, the criminal knows the victim, and most of the time criminals target members of their own communities. The 1 in 10 percent that the media likes to fearmonger over are all rarities. They do still happen but not to the extent that you’d believe.

RNGesus really needs to hate your existence if a guy like this spawns in front of you in the midnight hours.

It’s not like Manhunt is lost on me, the dark atmosphere and easter eggs make it something of a neo-gothic treat, like that time I watched The Addams Family movies and Beetlejuice. But putting it with its contemporaries just makes it a product of the era. As for the gameplay, it’s as strict a stealth game can be, rewarding creativity in sneaking up and killing and punishing any player averse to this gimmick. Not for nothing, it shows that as much of a monster that the Director tries to make Cash out to be (and he’s definitely up there, death row is spared for the worst outside of wrongful convictions), he’s certainly a crafty bastard if you think about it. When there’s 20 of the Skinz or the Innocentz or the Smileys and only one of Cash to go around, your options are limited and outright combat is a last resort.

It certainly demands patience, but can sometimes test your patience. If you’re not careful, the enemy can sense you about to slit them up with a broken piece of glass. Or they can gang up on you with bats or nail guns while all you have are the Kanye West Supreme Brick, your fists, and Philip J. Fry’s lucky seven-leaf clover. Fortunately, the game predates the Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed tailing missions, so there isn’t any worry about having to tail an enemy to a certain location, nor is there a requirement to slice everyone up into lamb chops outside of designated spaces, so you could only cut up a few guys, sneak past the others, get to the goal, rinse and repeat. It might bring down your slasher/snuff film score at the end, but rigid grading systems like this aren’t worth s[grenade]ting your organs out over.

One notable enemy in the game goes by the name of Piggsy. I haven’t reached him yet, but the Director’s use of him as an enforcer when he looks like this:

Definitely harkens to horror movie directors like Wes Craven and Tom Six.

The game and its sequel (which was initially banned in the U.S.) are both available for purchase on Steam, but the game being as old as it is requires some mods to get it working, even if you pirate it from SteamUnlocked. If you’d like to play yourself, consider this guide on the Steam forums if you run into issues like I did.