Subatomic Brainfreeze

King of Fighters XII console drama: SNK SHOOTS ITSELF IN THE FACE

Back when Mark of the Wolves came out on Xbox Live, I started to get a little worried for SNK's future in the West. We've really had a genre boom lately, and people expected King of Fighters XII, SNK's reboot of its flagship KOF franchise, to ride the boom, the fan hype, and its unprecedented 2D graphics to at least moderate success. But MOTW had a big, big problem: terrible online play.

Good online play is extremely important for the genre, and particularly SNK, to get right: even after the post-Street Fighter 4 influx, the fighting game community is still extremely niche. Here in the West, SNK's games have never been even close to the popularity of Capcom's. Street Fighter and its relatives are a rather niche market themselves, so we're talking about a niche within a niche. If you play Garou, you're probably the only person you know (barring the Internet) that does.

But the online play was crap. You were better off playing it emulated online. This was worrying, and it put me on watch for the next XBLA release, which was King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match. This game wasn't going to be available to play online any other way, so it was even more important that SNK get it right. They didn't, of course: if anything, the release of KOF98UM was even more embarassing, with the same terrible netcode and no English translation of any kind. All the character dialogue text, and even more embarassingly, certain ingame options, are left in the original Japanese. What do these options do? You're just going to have to guess. And no, they didn't patch it. Stuff like this is indicative of total apathy on the part of the developer, so my hopes for KOFXII sunk.

I hate to be right, but SNK kept up with my expectations and continued the streak of poor releases. On their flagship, save-the-company title. I'm not sure why a company would put so much into a game and then bomb the home release so hard. By all reports from the Japanese scene, and by my eyewitness investigation at Chinatown Fair, this game has already bombed in the arcade. It's a rushed product, unfortunately, and as enjoyable as the core engine is, you don't want to play a game and think to yourself "the next one of these will be really good". SNK was working on this game for four years. They needed this game to be really good.

Meanwhile, there are too many complaints about the home release to even count. The netplay was bad, so SNK patched it. After patching, the netplay was still bad. The patch actually introduced one of two game-breaking glitches (here is the other). SNK's US publisher, Ignition, is not pleased with the quality of this release and the resulting ill will and bad sales. They have pledged to press SNK to fix the product, but will SNK listen? I'm not holding my breath, and I certainly won't be buying this game until I hear absolutely everything is fixed. By the time this happens, KOFXII will probably be in the $20 bargain bin. SNK's already proven themselves completely apathetic, and I'm not sure if even solid evidence that this is murdering their bottom line will move them. It's like the company wants to be bankrupt again.

Onani Master Kurosawa IS THE BEST COMIC ABOUT A SERIAL MASTURBATOR I HAVE EVER READ

A year ago, I made a post about a comic called Onani Master Kurosawa, or "Masturbation Master Kurosawa". It was like Death Note, except the hero dished out justice by masturbating on the belongings of his enemies. The story was shaping up to be effective parody, but the group that was translating it released chapters really, really slowly and so it eventually fell out of my mind.

But Kurosawa was going on. It was changing dramatically. It was actually getting good. Believe it or not, this story about the loser kid who heroically jerks off on things was becoming one of the most honest and heartwarming things I'd read in a while. Kurosawa himself very slowly transforms from a creepy loner doing his impression of Light/Lelouch (the typical male anime convention attendee) into a slightly more mature, slightly more functional human being. Over the course of the story, he learns to live with people and grow out of the adolescent, melodramatic "it's me against them!!" mentality of a kid this age.

And we were stuck during Kurosawa's big crisis of faith-- his "to jerk or not to jerk" moment. As it was a back-burner project for the translators, only 18 chapters were out as of a week or two ago. The cliffhangers were getting worse and worse, and the translators were taking longer and longer to get chapters done. But then, a hero arrived.

The one-man Emergency Exit team started putting out chapters: two or three in a day. The story was finished up yesterday. In the space of a week, with a better translation than the frequently-awkward script the last group was giving us. Kurosawa finished his journey, and everybody was happy. Except for the previous translation team, who called the guy a retard and posted WE DUN CARE in big red letters on their stunningly illiterate forums. Unbeknownst to them, that was just additional entertainment for me.

I mentioned already that what I like about Kurosawa is its honesty. It's a surprisingly feel-good story without ever ringing false or dipping into cliche. Kurosawa is neither sold as an irredeemable monster nor a justified hero. The comic doesn't forget that these are just stupid middle school kids who do stupid things, and it's able to forgive them. The protagonist goes through some big changes, and he doesn't just wake up a new and better man one morning. He just gets progressively closer to seeing the world and the people around them for what they are: from Death Note to... normal, everyday people trying to live happy lives.

It's really unusual to see this kind of thoughtful, even-handed story at all-- nevermind out of such a bizarre premise. I'm not sure whether the comic matures on purpose or by accident, but it's probably more mature than many of its contemporaries. This comes highly recommended, but, uh, you probably still shouldn't read it at work.

IKKI: Naruto continues to fund COMICS I ACTUALLY WANT TO READ

I've always liked Viz's plan in the US manga market: release safe, boring hit titles, make a ton of cash, and then use some of it to fund the distribution of awesome under-the-radar titles that could never possibly break even.

For example, why not have an anthology for older readers? Viz used to run Pulp, but the mag arrived before its time-- it was over before I knew it existed-- and as we know, the market for anime/manga just gets younger and younger as it moves further into the mainstream. Today, Viz is back at it with IKKI, an online magazine focusing on the kind of unusual Japanese comics that are both sorely needed and completely unwanted by the print market.

Technically, sigikki.com launched a while back with one title, Children of the Sea, a beautiful coming of age story about mysterious kids who are bonded to the sea in a way which isn't quite human and isn't quite animal either. I was considering making a post back then, but decided to wait until a formal rollout: a one-title anthology just isn't much to talk about. Of course, as Children of the Sea has been ongoing for a few months, there are ten chapters available. All of the other titles only have one chapter available, or are listed as "coming soon". The site seems to update on Thursdays, and I assume that each week we'll have new chapters for half of the titles, and the next week we'll have new chapters for the rest.

The other titles currently up are Bokurano, Dorohedoro, Saturn Apartments, and I'll Give It My All... Tomorrow. There isn't too much to say about these titles or where they're going from one chapter, but I'll do what I can. Bokurano is by the guy who did Narutaru, and his thing seems to be realist deconstructions of stock kids' manga stories with kids who are as cruel as real children. Narutaru was Pokemon, were it cruel, and Bokurano is going to be a take on super robot stuff. Obviously, I'm looking forward to it. Dorohedoro, being violent fantasy, is probably the most mainstream-attractive title: you can't really beat a first panel where a lizard-head is about to bite a dude's head off.

Saturn Apartments is a laid-back piece of sci-fi in the vein I particularly enjoy: the world is dramatically changed, but the story isn't about the tech that guides that, it's about the ordinary struggles of people living in that world. Specifically, the story revolves around a humble window-washer, cleaning the outside of the gigantic space colony/apartment building that surrounds the now-vacant Earth. I'll Give It My All... Tomorrow is a mid-life crisis story about a pathetic salaryman who quits his job for a quest to find meaning... and ends up laying around his house playing videogames all day. Meanwhile, his elderly father and teenage daughter cope.

I'm not too crazy about the interface, though: the notable (and less legitimate) manga-reader sites out there allow you to read as much of the title as you like in a single window. The Viz reader, though it thoughtfully loads pages of a chapter in advance, must be closed and reopened every time a chapter is over. This feels really unintuitive, and I hope that in the future they fix up the interface so I don't have to do this little, annoying thing.

Viz has also started a Shonen Sunday site which I'll probably take a look at too, but the titles obviously don't interest me nearly as much. When I do read it, I doubt I'll actually post about it, you know?

I think this is the first time I've used "Naruto" in a post title. I expect my hits to skyrocket. This will eventually lead to tagging all of my posts with "Twilight." Look forward to it!

Shin Mazinger Episode 16: MAOH DANTE GETS HYPE

Hey guys! The episode just came out yesterday, much faster than usual. The reason for this is that Bandai is no longer running their Bandai Channel webcasts with the two minutes of extra footage per episode. So on the good side, the fansubbers don't have to do the extra work of splicing footage from one version of the show into the other, meaning we get our episodes sooner.

On the bad side, the TV broadcast of Shin Mazinger is still only a scant 20 minutes per episode, meaning we are very likely missing some footage that will eventually turn up in the video release. In previous episodes, a lot of this footage has been vital "what the hell is going on here" exposition, so it's really unfortunate that we'll be losing this for the duration of the show. In related news, the first Shin Mazinger Blu-Ray box will cost $200, contain just nine episodes, and come with a giant, golden vinyl figure of Zeus. I am not ashamed to admit that the moment I am gainfully employed (hire me), I will start putting away money for these boxes. It's important to have priorities.

In other news, the show has a new opening. On the one hand, the new theme song by JAM Project, who you all know I love deeply, is certainly not as awesome as Kanjite Knight was. I mean, it's alright, it's just that it's the typical Jam Project theme song. I don't love JAM because they're always trying new stuff or anything. To be fair, it's really hard to top reassembling your old 80s band, a few of whose members are dead, to turn out an amazing hair-band cover like Kanjite Knight, but still, a show this big deserves a little better from JAM. On the other hand, the animation itself really shows us how far this show has come. Remember the beginning, when this show didn't have a budget? Remember how a couple of the shots in the first opening looked so bad that they had to go back and redraw them for later episodes? There was a time, ladies and gentlemen, and you wouldn't know it by the production values this show has now. We can only assume that the show really has been successful, despite expectations (I'm judging by the low animation budget in the early episodes and the too-short time slot the show is in). I wonder what the ratings look like.

Anyway, we start out with one of the "Hey, kids!" interludes that I really love, and Baron Ashura gets to deliver it. As if this show wasn't bold enough already, Ashura promises us an even greater diversion from the established story, a "new world of Mazinger Z" in which "we (Ashura) shall take part more than anyone else!" If you're paying attention, you'll recall that Ashura was "killed" by the Danube Alpha last episode, and does not reappear in this one: when Dr. Hell meets with his henchmen, only Count Brocken and Viscount Pygman are present. Will Ashura, who has been a sympathetic villain from the very start of this show, return from the shadows and become a independently operating wild card? I sure hope so!

Anyway, this week's episode is a very close adaptation of a one-shot story that Ken Ishikawa did. The hook is that all this time, the brains of the mechanical beasts have been these biomechanical organisms you see in Mazinger's head to your left there: they're called the Kedora, and they are the brains of the ancient Mycenae warriors that Dr. Hell, the Kabutos, and Tsubasa found on Bardos Island all that time ago. Their sole instruction, naturally, is to destroy. Dr. Hell has been hoarding these guys in a cave back at Bardos, and as you can see, this week he got the "why didn't I think of this before" idea to let one of them take over Mazinger's controls. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't yet realize that the Kedora want to destroy everything, not just Kouji and friends.

Meanwhile, there's some family drama as Kouji moves out of Kurogane House into the Photon Power Labs, where there's at least a girl to hit on and there isn't this crazy lady running around who says she's your mom and she killed your dad and it was awesome. But if you know Mazinger, you know the Photon Power Labs, unlike Kurogane, are pretty poorly secured, and it's only a matter of time before Mazinger gets captured and makes a run for Kurogane House, destroying all the city that stands between them. Boss Borot actually makes a surprisingly unglamorous debut here as a construction robot, and it goes without saying that the possessed Mazinger hands his ass to him.

With cover fire from the Kurogane gang and Sayaka flying the Pilder, Kouji manages to jump inside of the head and personally face down the Kedora: this doesn't go so great. Getting impatient, Dr. Hell pops up a small band of mechanical beasts from nowhere and attempts to physically drag Mazinger off. And then there's a surprise: Mazinger's Photon Power overloads, the robot turns into Maoh Dante, and the demon goes on a rampage. When Gramps said Mazinger could be a god or a devil, he meant it literally.

Kouji's still stuck in the head, here, and Tsubasa has to bring the Pilder back around to save him. Apparently all it takes to get the devil out of Mazinger is to park the Pilder in its head, and Mazinger makes short work of the last mechanical beast lying around.

Dr. Hell, realizing that the Kedora are beyond his control and would kill him as easily as Kouji, has the lot of them purged. However, this is too little and too late, as there are much more terrible things than the Kedora hiding out in the depths of Bardos: namely, Duke Gorgon, who has a damn sabertooth tiger for a body. Don't mess with guys like that, or you'll get a cliffhanger ending.

Shin Mazinger Episode 15: LORELEI STROHEIM GETS HYPE

Meanwhile, the "No! No! LORELEI!!" Arc closes with the promised tragedy. The hologram of Kenzo was a trick set up by Baron Ashura, who, as ever, is being unecessarily impatient and wants to bring Dr. Hell the Danube right now now now. But it's not ready yet, dumbass! There's a reason silly Ashura has a 100% failure rate, and it's because of all this rushing into things. If Dr. Hell was really all that super-genius smart he'd sit his minions down and educate them on their personality flaws. Did I mention that Dr. Stroheim has had machineguns up the sleeves of his gentlemanly robe this whole time? Because he has.

The Danube really does run on children, though not, like, through a part marked "Children" on the robot's leg where you open it up and stuff in a child for every three hours you want the robot to keep going. It turns out that Lorelei is a robot herself, and the heart of the Danube (which, you'll note, has a Lorelei head on its chest: Nagai does love monsters with faces on their chests.) . See if you can keep up with the Mazinger Logic here: to make a better robot than the human-piloted Mazinger Z, Stroheim decided to raise a robot as his daughter and teach her the things that make us human. The only human emotion Lorelei lacks is sadness. To this end, Stroheim sent her to see Shiro so that she could bring him back and Stroheim could later kill him, completing/traumatizing Lorelei.

Unfortunately for Stroheim, Ashura kills him during the attack, and Lorelei is emotionally completed in a way Stroheim might not have expected. Stroheim tells Lorelei everything as he dies, and so, resolute, she fuses with the Danube. Of course, she takes a moment to kill the hell out of Baron Ashura. It's a shame she hasn't been in this show long enough to know that Ashura is unkillable and will be back next episode with no explanation of any kind, like Wile E. Coyote. Next, of course, is the fated duel, which Kouji (having just fixed up the Pilder) and Lorelei are resigned to fulfilling. At the outset, the completed Danube really does put on a strong show, even clobbering Mazinger with his own rocket punches. But, well, Mazinger's strength is transcendent and possibly demonic. You already knew things weren't going to go well, right?

It really, really, doesn't go well. Stroheim and Kabuto's idiot robot fight over Tsubasa-- who gives so little a damn about either dude that she's almost killed both of them in the past-- has ended in a dead little robot girl singing to poor Shiro in his head forever. Good job, assholes. By the way, this will be the last episode of Shin Mazinger to feature the first opening, with Kanjite Knight. Though it will live on in my heart and my MP3 player for a long time to come, let's all say goodbye to Kanjite Knight by listening to the original studio recording by LAZY, featuring a very young Hironobu Kageyama and a very goofy machine voice. It should cheer you up! Shiro, on the other hand, will probably never cheer up. He can only listen to one song anymore.

Shin Mazinger: AND WHAT OF DR. KENZO KABUTO?

The blogging software ate my last draft of this post! I was so mad. Anyway, we have a bit of fan theorizing to do before we get to the episode itself. The big surprise at the end of last episode, the appearance of Kenzo Kabuto, predictably turned out to be one of Baron Ashura's tricks. However, the established Mazinger lore-- lore that might be too important for Imagawa to entirely depart from-- dictates that Kenzo has been alive all this time, building Great Mazinger, which saves and replaces Z at the end of the TV series.

I'm not so sure about Great's appearance (it really depends on whether or not this gets another season) but we have known from the existence of this Shin Mazinger-branded toy that Energer Z, Nagai's early prototype for Mazinger, will be appearing in the anime at some point. On top of that, Energer appears in the new opening for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, along with the character introduced in the chaotic first recap episode as "Blade": the hero of Great Mazinger is Tetsuya Tsurugi, Tsurugi meaning "sword". Blade and Tetsuya certainly appear to be the same guy, down to the pilot suit. Furthermore, the pilot figure that comes with Energer Z is clearly Blade. Enjoy your advance info! This raises a ton of questions for long-standing Mazinger nerds, so let's leave it to the show to answer them.

Ristorante Paradiso TRANSCENDS OLD MAN MOE ANIME

Ristorante Paradiso makes no bones about the fact that it's for women who are attracted to old men. Not older men, old men. 50 and up. Now, I'm a straight guy and I like girls about my age. This show's not really intended for me in any sense. As ever, I came to Ristorante Paradiso as a tourist of oddities. The hook was just too niche and out-there for me not to try. Niche subgenres are healthy enough in manga, but how likely was I to ever again see a Japanese cartoon for women who like old men-- as opposed to Japanese cartoons for old men that feature women who like old men? The answer is "never".

And so I took this, shall we say, unique opportunity. The show is about Nicoletta, a pretty typical 20-something "your face here" ladies' manga heroine who moves into Rome and starts working in a restaurant staffed entirely by old, bespectacled gentlemen. Particularly taken with soft-spoken, sensitive, and oh-so-vulnerable Claudio, Nicoletta strives for acceptance at the restaurant and to come to terms with her relationship with her nutjob mother. The setup almost promises a harem situation-- and, in turn, a 90% chance of shit-- but the show actually delivers a laid-back sort of drama in the vein (but not the incomparable style) of my beloved Bartender. While slowly, subtly moving the relationship between Nicoletta and Claudio forward, each episode focuses the backstory of a different employee: for the record, Luciano, the oldest and grumpiest, is my favorite.

The thing Ristorante really has going for it is atmosphere: the more niche the show, the tighter the animation budget, and this show is walking a tightrope. Luckily for us, the show is clever, blending its simple animation and cheap CG to create a Rome that we know isn't real, and that we can thus forgive. I smiled every time I saw a paper-car pass someone by in the street. There are probably more loving glances at the city than are ever exchanged between human beings in this show: I guess this is how girls feel when they talk about "Europe".

Man, I'm gonna miss this show. I didn't exactly keep up with everything I was watching this season, but I made damn sure to spend my 20 minutes with Ristorante Paradiso every week. I do a lot of chilling out-- you could call me an expert on the matter-- but when I was watching Ristorante, I was easily reaching double-chill. So check it out, and relax.

Not doing Otakon this year

Last year I did a really big Otakon report, so I'm just putting out a heads-up that I won't be there this time. Why not air out my concerns? First reason is obviously cost: Otakon, as any of you who have been already know, is one of the most expensive anime cons you're going to go to without getting on a plane. The con sells out the hotels of the entire town of Baltimore nine months before it even happens. Rooms are not cheap. Likewise, it's pretty well-known that the merchants of the town all raise prices for Otakon weekend (and I don't blame them). This is putting aside the cost of transit: from here in NYC I can pay out the nose for Amtrak, pay a bit less and suffer with the smell of piss on Greyhound, or pay ten bucks and risk my life on the Chinatown bus. I have a good story about Chinatown buses. Maybe I'll tell you sometime.

The next issue is the whole "nine months in advance" thing, which is an unfortunate side effect of a large con like this. You can't just decide to go to Otakon a month in advance. You can't even find out of there's anything you like there before you commit, because with Otakon you really can't be sure until two weeks before the event (when exactly did they announce Ishiguro for this year?). Unfortunately for you, hotels are sold out long before anybody knows anything about anything, because that's how fans are. If I'm gonna drop that kind of money, I really need to know what I'm paying for.

Last year, for JAM Project Con America '08, I was lucky enough to get in with a regular group of friends. I'm sure they could have worked me in for this year, but between the cost and my general apathy on the event, I didn't bother getting to them. Given the whole year I had to prepare, I certainly could have scrounged up enough cash to go, but since graduation I've been telling myself "these kinds of expenses should wait until you're steadily employed". (Hire me. I'll do whatever and I'll do it cheap.) So there's that. Final blow.

So no Otakon this weekend. I'd rather be there regardless, but that has less to do with the con itself than the fact that all my friends--from real life and from the Internet-- will be there. Have fun, guys!

(I'll miss you too, Scary Rena.)

Anyway, here's a story from one of the first Otakons I went to. Probably the first, maybe the second. The guys and I have a 1 PM bus back to Chinatown, but 1 PM came and went. We knew something was wrong at 1; we knew something was really wrong around 5. We didn't know just how wrong things were until 10, when a minivan bearing our bus company's name rolled by. My friends and I piled in, no questions asked. We knew that if we didn't take this we weren't getting anything at all. The other half of the bus was shit out of luck. We watched them sitting out behind the McDonalds with a bit of shocked pity as we sped out of the lot. And speed we did: the driver was taking our little box home at a consistent 80-90 miles per hour. This includes when he got into the city. When Chiyo-chan steps out of the car with her shivers and her dead-eyed stare, I understand. I, too, was once in the car while Yukari drove like a god damn maniac.

Charger Girl Juden-chan and THE GREAT PISS MOE DEBACLE

Ladies and gentlemen, we've come to a disgusting place. Even for otaku. I'm not going to exaggerate and say that we're in the deepest circle of Otaku Hell-- there are only ten copies of the most hellish thing in otaku and they were all already sold in the first fifteen minutes of some underground comics convention you've never heard of and never will-- but we're a circle or two in. This is the Circle of Piss. You have been warned.

I got third place in a Pac-Man tournament and all I got was this PRICELESS T-SHIRT

In addition to the pile of prizes that I won for making third at Uniqlo NYC's Pac-Man tournament, there was a final and, by far, greatest gift that I had been waiting for until earlier this week: a T-shirt bearing the signature of Mr. Toru Iwatani, the fellow who created Pac-Man all those years ago. These pictures really should have gone up on the site days ago... but they didn't! The shirt came with a nice handwritten note from Uniqlo's marketing dude, and all of it has naturally been locked away in a closet forever on top of my bagged, signed JAM Project shirt. Hey, at least some of the things I hoard are priceless.