Subatomic Brainfreeze

Dub-only Kurokami Blu-Rays and BANDAI'S GENIUS ANTI-REVERSE-IMPORTATION STRATEGY

A lot of anime fans see US localizing and publishing outfits as the ultimate evil, citing the lousy dubs, re-editing and censorship of the old days. Even though releases have gotten a lot better over the years, the myth persists as part of that "Nippon banzai" mentality all too common to anime fans. The funny thing is, you know who'll really screw up a US release of a Japanese cartoon, if you let them? The Japanese themselves.

This is going to be a long story, so let's take it from the beginning. In Japan, home video is ludicrously expensive. Go ahead and take a look at CD Japan, where any old movie costs $40 on DVD: about double what I'd pay here in the States. The situation with anime is even worse: TV series are completely dependent on DVD sales-- not the TV broadcast-- for their profits, so prices are significantly higher. The recent Bakemonogatari, for example, is selling (very well, for anime) at about $75 for two episodes on Blu-Ray.

As such, Japanese fans had to take notice of the DVD anime boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. Even taking international shipping into account, Region 1 DVDs have always been a better deal than Region 2 discs, usually by insane margins. I bought the entire 47-episode Patlabor TV series for about as much as the previously-mentioned otaku paid for two episodes of Bakemonogatari. Because the R1 discs usually had Japanese-language audio, many Japanese reverse-imported these discs, bought Region 1 DVD players, and still paid much less than they would have for the domestic equivalent. Otaku may be suckers, but they're not stupid.

This does not make Japanese companies happy. It's why it takes so long for anime to reach the US: if Japanese and US releases were made at the same time, everybody would buy the one that costs a quarter (or less!) of the price. With Blu-Ray putting the US and Japan in the same region, importing HD anime will be no trouble at all.

(My personal conspiracy theory as to why Funimation's DVD releases have 7 episodes on a disc and have video quality on par with the average fansub is that ugly R1 DVDs are one way to get Japanese otaku buying R2s. Don't quote me on that.)

Now Bandai sells Gundam DVDs for $800 (!!!) a series in Japan. Here, I can get Zeta Gundam in its entirety and brand new for about $60. Bandai has more stake in this than anybody, and they aren't at all interested in changing the way things work on their end: specifically, making the obvious move to lower prices so that more nerds can afford more cartoons. Instead, Bandai had a truly brilliant plan: they would get Americans to pay Japanese prices for anime! I've already detailed how poorly this went in an old post.

While Bandai Visual USA was dead on arrival, Bandai was still thinking of ways to avoid a dark future of affordable anime. Their latest hit came today. Sunrise's recent bomb Kurokami will be released on DVD in a few months as usual: however, the Blu-Ray release will feature English-dubbed dialogue only. The idea is clearly to prevent reverse importation by simply leaving out the Japanese-language dialogue.

This is actually not the first time Bandai has pulled this one: back when the original Mobile Suit Gundam met with disastrous failure on Cartoon Network, the DVD release was dub-only. Bandai's US people lied about the reasons for this, insisting that the audio materials for one of the most important and successful anime in history had been, uh... lost somewhere. Right. Years later, of course, Mobile Suit Gundam came out on DVD in Japan for 800 dollars as usual, with the original dialogue intact.

Now Kurokami sucked anyway, so this isn't a huge loss in and of itself. However, one has to wonder what this means for the future. If a shitty show like this gets this treatment, is it fair to assume the same will happen with shows people might actually want to reverse import? Gundam Unicorn is just around the corner, you know, and the Japanese release is set to have English subtitles. It will also cost $50 for one episode. As of yet, there are no details about the US release of Gundam Unicorn. It would make absolutely no sense to sell a new show directly targeted at diehard fans of the old Gundam anime dubbed-only, but you know what they say: nobody fucks up anime releases like the Japanese.

Afterschool Charisma is either the BEST or the WORST comic THAT I HAVE READ IN YEARS

Let's start with a sad fact I was tipped off to a few days back: did you know that Colony Drop's got a higher Alexa rank than Viz's Sigikki? Something's wrong with that, Internet. People should be more interested in reading good manga than they are in listening to angry ol' us!

And by and large, Ikki runs a great bunch of comics. The only outright misfire is probably Tokyo Flow Chart, and considering they run stuff like Kingyo Used Books, Dorohedoro, and Bokurano that's a small price to pay. On the other hand, one Ikki comic toes a line the other titles in the line do not. It might be really bad. It might be brilliant. It's been five chapters and I still don't know what the hell is going on with Afterschool Charisma.

The premise is Clone High, except while that cartoon fully realizes the inherent silliness of its premise, Afterschool Charisma takes itself dead seriously. The protagonist is the lone natural-born human in a school full of clones of great leaders: just for starters, his crew consists of Freud, Florence Nightingale, Napoleon, Queen Elizabeth, and Marie Curie. Most of the chapters open with some kind of school-days hi-jinx (oh my god I just saw Queen Elizabeth and Florence Nightingale topless) and end with a shocking, bizarre revelation.

They're trying to establish a mystery here: odd things begin to happen, and the incidents only exaggerate the teenage clones' deep insecurity over who they are, the expectations that are held for them, and their ultimate fates. This sounds good in theory, but the treatment is so heavy-handed I found it hard not to chuckle. If you're at all capable of reading between the lines, what's terribly wrong with this place is pretty much spelled out from the first chapter, but the kids are oblivious. From there, all the crazy starts to pile up on itself. You want to know how crazy? A small cult starts, one which apparently worships Dolly, the cloned sheep. It's that crazy, and it it always plays these moments as gravely as possible.

It's really hard to talk about this without spoiling major events, because major events are simply thrown out at the reader-- usually as abrupt cliffhangers- whether or not they make any sense. A certain major character, (whose identity is also an "are you fucking kidding me" moment) for example, is just tossed out there five chapters in. He's been the hero's roommate and best buddy all this time and we just haven't seen him, even though the lead has been hanging out with his friends this entire story!

I get the feeling that the story really has no idea how ridiculous it is, so it's probably going to continue to chug along like this. I can't imagine what the hell this thing is going to look like two or three books down the line. It's definitely not a good comic, but it's entertaining the hell out of me and that's all I care about.

Kimi ni Todoke: EVERYBODY'S SO NICE

The other thing I'm bothering to watch this anime season is Kimi ni Todoke (Reaching You), an almost unbearably sweet shoujo romance. It's relatively uncommon to see shoujo manga adapted to animation, and it's even more unusual that big-deal studio Production IG is handling something like this. Watching this show kind of makes you wish they did it more often: I haven't read the original (I think I'm going to be doing that soon), but it's clear that IG has nailed the atmosphere of Karuho Shiina's original work. I mean, everything's so shiny and everybody's so nice!

The gimmick-- you can kind of tell this started out as a one-shot-- is that our heroine kind of looks like Sadako from the Ring (Samara in the US remake, if I recall?), who would crawl out of your TV and kill you. The people around her are either shitty to or terrified of her, completely socially isolating her. It goes without saying that Sawako isn't scary at all: she is meek and sweet and stupidly earnest. Eventually she meets a guy who's about as earnest as she is, and I presume that they will dance around whether or not they are dating for the rest of this show. Together with the girls who appear mean but are totally nice and the cool, silent guy (who's probably really also really nice), a little Sawako clique forms and the girl starts to learn to break out of her shell.

As I hinted before, things move as slowly as I usually see shoujo move. The leads can't seem to figure out they're in love. The current arc is about Sawako being accused of something that she obviously didn't do, and her friends tormenting themselves with "what if she did it" even though they themselves have figured out she didn't do it. There are vague statements spun off into emotional meltdowns, there are super-deformed heroines worrying, and there are sparkles. None of it is really outside the standard, but the execution is so solid and the characters are such nice people that I really can't say anything against it. It's like watching puppies and kittens go to high school.

Tekken 6 again: How to grind money in Scenario Campaign mode

I know, I know, it's a lot of videogame posts in a row. My regular readers who only do anime are probably yawning or crying or something by now. Anyway, since T6 came out I've been getting a ton of hits on the post about Scenario Campaign and how much it blows. The searches are either about a) how the mode sucks or b) the fastest way to get fight money so they don't have to play this crappy mode anymore. For the players' benefit, I will post the fastest (but still slow) way to get fight money. Protips after the cut!

An open letter to Namco: FIX TEKKEN 6

While I have little faith in the company, given their track record, I noticed that Namco was taking suggestions and took the opportunity to write them. Being as I just complained about this game, I thought I would put this up as a follow-up. The letter's after the cut.

Dungeon Fighter Online: QUICK, FIND A WAY TO MAKE THIS NOT FUN ANYMORE

(I guess now this blog will be the Shitty Things About Good Videogames blog for now)

MMOs are a tough enough proposition when they're subscription-based. The more you play, the less fun the game becomes and the more obligated the player begins to feel. This is why I don't take them up for longer than a few days: I have fun at low levels, and once the game starts to look boring, I can leave it alone forever. The twist with Dungeon Fighter is that it's an MMO beat-em-up in the style of 90's arcade games: the closest comparison is if somebody were to make Capcom's classic Dungeons and Dragons arcade games into a full-fledged MMO.

This is key for me: the big thing MMORPGs miss, in their scrambling over stats and loot and meta-gamey stuff, is that the key activity isn't any fun. Clicking a monster and sitting back as my guy fights it is neither very involving nor very exciting. Actually punching hordes of monsters? In their faces? Sounds to me like somebody's made the fun connection.

So Dungeon Fighter and I had a pretty good run, especially when my character became Dudley from Street Fighter 3. My character was getting noticeably stronger, new stages to fight on came fast, and I always had a side quest to take care of while I juggle comboed goblins and golems and knights for days.

Unfortunately, like many MMOs, the rate of progress eventually hits a brick wall. Quests stop appearing, new maps stop showing up so often, and the only way to level up is to play the same stage over and over again. On the next level, you hope the game gives you a sidequest or a new map or something, but nothing ever appears and before you know it you're stuck grinding.The game is satisfying enough to play for its own sake for a little while, but you try running the same long level in Streets of Rage five times in a row and tell me if you're still having fun, because that's what happens in Dungeon Fighter.

Something felt wrong and unnatural about the way the game had just quit on being fun, so I decided to do some research on the game's boards. Here I found out that it wasn't just me. The entire player base was livid about two things in particular: the tedious rate of leveling up and the ludicrous costs of cash items, both of which have been adjusted substantially from the game's Asian versions. I'd only been getting half the experience points all this time!

There were no quests because aside from turning down the dial on XP, the people running the game didn't bother to think about how such a major change would affect the game flow. Of course, it throws a wrench into the whole thing, crippling advancement and leaving the player with nothing interesting to do for long stretches. Goes to show that game design changes are best left to actual game designers.

As for the cash items, this is the same burn that every "free-to-play" game performs: it's free to start, yes, but if you want to use certain basic functions that every regular player is going to want, it will cost you. "Free-to-play" really needs a relabeling: it's not that it isn't possible to play for free, it's just extremely impractical to actually do so. Selling items to other players (a major source of income) costs a little bit of money, extra storage space costs a little bit. It's nothing backbreaking-- you can get a perfectly good setup going for $10-- but the higher up you go, the higher the costs rise. And, of course, buying items for this game costs way more than in its Asian equivalents.

Clothing items, for example, are bought via an in-game gashapon machine that gives you something you may not even want for your $2.50. (Korea gets to choose, Japan does not.) Unwanted items can be sold to other players, which is funny, because paying a huge amount of gold for the item you want is the better choice by a mile than throwing real money at the game in hopes of getting it at random. In the highest-level fuck-you, endgame players are charged a shocking $25 to go back and tweak their skills for player vs. player play: this is an essential step for the PvP player and they charge what they do because it's a "gotcha by the balls" situation. Free-to-play is dangerous, man.

Players complain about these issues, but the staff engages them infrequently, if at all. When they do, the results aren't encouraging, as seen in this GM thread, where GMs acknowledge that the problems exist while not actually displaying any intentions of fixing them. These guys seem to have been complaining for a while to no avail, so I don't expect things on DFO to get better any time soon. I'll probably come back in a few months and see if anything's been fixed, but Nexon appears kind of greedy and incompetent. Doesn't exactly inspire any confidence. Maybe I'll give the Japanese version a shot.

Tekken 6: Scenario Campaign Mode is THE WORST GAME I WILL PLAY THIS YEAR

Hey kids! Want to know how to get fight money fast in Scenario Campaign? Take a look here!

Well, guys, my store broke street date, and I have Tekken 6 a couple of days before I should. Barring online mode-- which I presume will be patched in when the game actually launches and the servers are up-- everything is in my hands. Considering the situation, I figured it would be cool to write something up. I haven't played Tekken with any enthusiasm since the mid-90s, so you'll have to excuse me for knowing very little about the game. But this post isn't really about the home version of Tekken 6, it's about the terrible, boring thing that Namco decided to tack onto the game. This post is about Scenario Campaign mode.

God, that name. It sounds like it went directly from a marketing guy's bulleted list to the game. "We'll have a, uh, Scenario Campaign mode! For the longevity!" Scenario Campaign mode has but one design goal: to make the average buyer's experience with Tekken 6 longer. Whether it's fun or not isn't really the issue: it's about keeping your ass in the chair long enough to keep you from selling the game to somebody else (or at Gamestop, if you're a sucker). It's filler.

Now it's common practice, and usually a good idea, to puff out a home port of an arcade game with extra modes and content. Blazblue did this very well with it's limited edition package and big story mode, Street Fighter IV did it lazily with unlockable items that were more a chore than a gift for the player, and Tekken 6 has this. It tries harder than, say, Street Fighter IV did, but that's not saying much. Even if they were trying, this idea would be fundamentally flawed: it tries to shove Tekken 6 into a genre it's just not suited for.

Namco's been doing this since the Tekken Force mode in Tekken 3 about ten years ago, and they haven't gotten it right any time since. This wasn't much of a deal back then, because Tekken games have been overstuffed packages for years and Tekken Force was but one of many silly bonus features every game got-- I believe Tekken Tag had a volleyball mode? I'm particularly harsh with Scenario Campaign because it gets this game's top billing: it's the first item menu, and the whole rest of the game is practically hidden in a sub-menu. Most of the achievements, even, are things you will do in Campaign mode. The people who put together this port of Tekken 6 expected that everybody who bought it would play Campaign at some point. As such, there's really no excuse for how lousy it is.

Tekken 6 is a one-on-one fighting game, as you probably know. Scenario Campaign mode is a one-versus-many fighting game. From a design point of view, these genres have to be handled in completely different ways: control, character design, stage design, everything. That is, if you want the game to be a quality piece of work, you do that. If you're Tekken you just lazily graft one onto the other and call it a day.

The resulting game is really sloppy and uncomfortable: because your character wasn't designed to deal with a big crowd, you typically have to take guys down one at a time. As in a fighting game, you're locked in a straight line to your target. The problem with this is that you've got five other guys locked on straight lines to you too, and you can't very easily move around them. Fighting game controls are great for getting to one guy and beating him up: they are not great for getting around a room. Get ready to find yourself unable to reach that too-close, too-far lifesaving weapon or health item... repeatedly.

On top of that, the fixed camera is working against you, regularly making it unclear where to go, where your dumb AI buddy is, or where the enemy you're supposed to be fighting right now is. If you've got guys in front of you you're often completely unable to see yourself. Also, the one-button targeting system often picks the wrong guy, and inexplicably doesn't shift from enemies you've already killed. And don't get me started on what happens when you're too far away from a guy with a gun! Level and enemy design are essentially the same every time, and there is one level for all of the game's 40 (!!) characters.  It grates, and it grates fast. Little annoyances like this pile up on top of each other until you're pulling your face off. Especially if you're me, and you're running through it really fast so you can tell your internet friends about it before the game formally comes out.

And then there's the story: this is the story mode, after all. If you're absolutely obsessed with the Tekken storyline (which, like most fighting game stories, is total nonsense not worth telling) and don't mind long cutscenes about it, then you're the target audience for this and maybe you won't skip the majority of them like I did. I never skip story cutscenes in games, but when I realized that the ten-minute history of the entire Tekken series was only the first cutscene, and that three more cutscenes followed, I started hitting that skip button, and hard.

In a nutshell, new protagonist Lars Alexandersson, the Scandinavian, illegitimate son of Tekken patriarch Heihachi Mishima, goes out on an adventure of revenge with his moe robot girlfriend, Alisa Bosconovich. They're always posed the exact same way as they talk before every level. With the ridiculous costume items you put on them to improve their stats (yes, there are tacked-on RPG elements too), they kind of reminded me of the protagonists of a very dry gag manga-- a Cromartie or something. Except instead of a delinquent and a monkey, it's a spiky-haired Japanese videogame hero and a space hooker wearing star-shaped sunglasses and a cowgirl hat. Perhaps they're more like the Fuccons?

So this mode kind of sucks, is what I'm saying. Games shouldn't try to be all things to all people, because shit like this happens. If I could just avoid it, I would, but I can't. See, the game has this "fight money" system going. If you want to customize your character (ie. dress them up and make them fancy), you need a ton of fight money: there are single items in the in-game store that cost more than I got on my entire run through Campaign mode. The fastest way to get fight money, as far as I can tell, seems to be to keep playing this crappy game. Actually playing Tekken 6, the pretty solid fighting game, gets you peanuts by comparison. Even beating Arcade mode repeatedly-- this is still boring, but at least the game you're playing doesn't suck-- yields relatively small gains.

It's that much worse because not only will I have to play this thing, I'm going to have to play it a lot, when I'd much rather be playing the real game. You know, the one-on-one fighting game that's a distant memory by now. I grudgingly accept a little grind here and there, but this is just not acceptable. It's poor design, plain and simple. I'd be surprised if Bandai Namco, greedy fuckers that they are, didn't charge people five bucks to unlock the items without the work. I'm going to go ahead and call that a prediction. Watch it happen.

(My second prediction, by the way, is that Tekken 6 gets great reviews in the mainstream gamer press for Scenario Campaign because it adds replay value and hours are very important. The PS2-grade graphics will probably be the main complaint.)

11.8.09 Update: I was wrong about the second one, by the way! Nobody in the gaming press liked Scenario Campaign either. This is like that time I said "A $200 videogame? They're crazy! Rock Band won't sell!"

Good news, everybody: HOUSE IS ON TOUR

This is just a quick heads-up, but it's way too good to keep to the Twitter.

A couple months back, I watched and loved Nobuhiko Obayashi's surreal 1977 horror movie House. I loved it so much, in fact, that I urged you readers to see it any way you could. As such, I'm pleased to report that starting next week, House will actually be running in a few cities! This is especially nice for me, as there's a showing Halloween night, and Halloween is my birthday. This cosmic gift pleases me. If you can make it to any of these shows, do so: you won't be disappointed.

Trapeze: YOU'RE FABULOUSLY GOOD AT GIVING INJECTIONS

A lot has been said about how weak the current anime season is. To this I say "shut up, I'm watching Sunred." It's hard not to see a wall of shitty late-night porn game adaptations and moe exploitation and lose all hope for the medium, of course, but don't all of us right-thinking people just skip that stuff anyway? Let's talk about a good cartoon.

I was interested in Trapeze from the moment I saw the trailer, in large part due to Denki Groove's involvement with the music. If Denki Groove is down for something, it's probably a safe bet, I figure. As you can see here, it's a heavily stylized live-action/animation hybrid. This is not exactly a Roger Rabbit situation: rather, in one shot we see an actor, in another we see a cartoon, and in others, the same person is a little bit an actor and a little bit a cartoon. It also happens to be about a psychiatrist in a bear (?) costume who gets off on injections.

In this first episode, Ichiro Irabu's patient, a trapeze artist, has a pretty mundane problem with a mundane solution. You're probably not going to notice, though, because the way the story is told is so strange. It isn't hard to follow, mind you, just strange. As I mentioned before, everything is constantly changing: the doctor him/herself takes three forms and seems to be voiced by three different people. The show's running theme appears to be multiple personalities and the way people subconsciously become different selves, but it remains to be seen where that goes. Until then, I recommend you kick back and enjoy the music.

I would also feel like I was cheating my audience if I didn't mention the hot nurse. Damn.

Black Dynamite: USE KUNG FU WHEN HE WANT, HAS SEX WHEN HE PLEASE

Last night I finally got to see Black Dynamite, which I had been eagerly awaiting for some time. It's a very small release, and unless you live in NYC, LA, Chicago, Philly, Seattle, or Atlanta you won't be able to see it. That said, if you do live in one of these towns and you like fun, you would be be seriously remiss in not seeing this movie.

As you might have gathered from the trailer, Black Dynamite is a blaxploitation spoof: if you're not familiar with that-- I guess you might not be, I guess this is supposed to be an otaku blog-- we're talking about a wave of B-movies that specifically targeted black audiences back in the 70s. You've probably heard the names Shaft, Foxy Brown, and Superfly before. These movies have a lasting camp appeal, and this isn't the first time somebody's homaged them. It is, however, probably the first time somebody's homaged them so thoroughly: this director should probably be awarded a degree in Blaxploitation Studies.

At the start it's kind of tough to even call Black Dynamite a spoof, because it's so dead on. Fake Rudy Ray Moore who speaks only in poorly-metered rhyme, check. Fake Pam Grier, check. Boom mic in the frame, you got it. Even when the movie breaks into song about exactly what is going on in this scene right now, it's not too far off from what the bottom-of-the-barrel blaxploitation movies were really like. In fact, terrible production values are less a running gag than a way of life for this movie: weird cuts, people standing in places they shouldn't be, and awkward silences after bad line readings are all common. This is no slick studio production: it's going for that Dolemite, that Fred Williamson vibe.

And yes, it works. We had a pretty small crowd in attendance (small movie, limited run, limited advertising, people don't know this movie exists), but the movie managed to keep all of us laughing for nearly its entire running time. There isn't a line in this script that isn't funny: when the guys and I got out of the theater, all we could talk about for an hour were all the awesome things people said in this movie. Check out the soundboard for some examples, but be warned that this, and even the amazing trailer, only give away a tiny bit of how awesome Black Dynamite actually turned out to be. I'm deliberately withholding information from that is too awesome not to find out in the theater. Don't look up plot details: go see the movie instead.

So not only were my expectations met, they were actually exceeded. Considering my expectations were high enough from the trailer, this is really something! If you're in a city this movie is playing in, I'm telling you, it will not disappoint. Get out there and see this movie on the big screen while you can, before it inevitably becomes a cult hit on DVD and cable.