Subatomic Brainfreeze

Galactic Cyclone Bryger is THE 1981 ANIME OF 2011

Are you bored this anime season? Whats your problem, then, idiot? Penguindrum is on! Don't you know about rock'n'roll? Haven't you seen Redline yet? Haven't you seen Redline twice yet?

Anyway, there's a great 30-year-old robot anime that's being fansubbed right now and it's called Galactic Cyclone Bryger. The dude subbing it got himself through Fang of the Sun Dougram and Panzer World Galient  already, so even though there are only six episodes available right now, I expect it to be followed up on and finished. (As for its sequels...)

So what's good about this show other than "it's a really old sci-fi anime with a robot in it"? That's easy. Bryger is fun. It's way chill. It's super laid-back. That up there is the eyecatch for this show.

The catchphrase of the team is a thumbs up and a "Yay!". You may notice that the character designs are kind of... reminiscent of Lupin III author Monkey Punch. If we trust Wikipedia, the character designer was told to do that, and honestly the whole of Bryger kind of has a similar vibe. It's a robot caper anime.

These are the most gung-ho protagonists I've seen in a robot anime in quite a while. Internal conflict doesn't take place here: hell, they don't even think. When Blaster Kid, Speedy Bowie and Angel Omachi are called to live on a remote asteroid in a lawless sector of the galaxy with Isaac (the Harlock-looking guy in the back) to go around doing mercenary jobs in his flying space car, they all just say "Yay!" within five minutes of meeting the guy. And they put on the uniforms right then and there.

And they're that free-wheeling about everything. This is how the hero sits during the robot transformation scene. The car grows to 20 times its size (a logical nightmare, don't even think about how this is supposed to work), turns into a spaceship, and then turns into a robot. And this is how impressed the hero is by all this as his seat is catapulted into the head of the monster.

J9 missions include stopping space biker gangs from fighting so much outside the dance club in their space bikes (by planting bombs on their space bikes) and taking down an evil organization that kills dudes by stuffing them into missiles which they then fire at Venus. J9 shows no mercy and makes no money!

Right now there is only a hint of a continuing story: mostly the gang just does work (usually the delivery of an ass-kicking) for nice people with deep pockets, only to then lose the money doing something nice for the nice person. There is banter. There is fun. It is ridiculous, and it knows it and it is smiling (but not smirking).

So call Bryger. It'll arrive in a second!

Super Robot Shooting IS A PRETTY BAD VIDEOGAME

I've talked before about how one of the defining characteristics of American otaku is the prestige and the mystique afforded some pretty average stuff due to its relative scarcity before 2000 or so.

These days Modern Wapanese can walk into a store, or an import shop, or whatever, and they can walk out of there with a game about their favorite anime characters that's actually okay-to-great. It wasn't always like that. Anime games used to not come to America, and at any import shop simple action games based on anime characters (Dragon Ball games were notoriously awful) used to be the biggest sellers and the worst games. It's incredible what people bought for 80 bucks with a straight face! Ranma, anyone?

This week at my favorite store, I found a small pile of middling Playstation games about super robots and I figured I would get to the worst one first. This game came in immaculate condition, complete with manual, insert, and spine card, but somehow the jumbo PS1 case was cracked in half. After playing this game I think you'll understand!

Banpresto's Super Robot Shooting (seeing a Banpresto logo on a game aside from Super Robot Wars was like seeing the Acclaim logo on a game in the 90s: a seal of reverse quality) is a rail shooter along the lines of Star Fox, and it's complete trash. You can probably tell, but the 3D models used for the robots are lousy even by 1997 standards: they barely even animate, spending the majority of the game in one pose. Closeups in the launch cutscenes display just how little care was put into them. If you listen closely, you can hear some overworked 3D modeler mumbling "fuggit, they never see 'em from the front anyway".

You can choose from Mazinger Z, Shin Getter Robo, Nu Gundam, and a lot of other big shots, but everything is the same about all of these units except for their weapons. Some robots' weapons are entirely superior to others, some robots are total crap, and having played all of the robots I can say that there's really no reason not to just pick Combattler V every single time.

The other robots are supposed to serve as your wingmen, but you rarely see them and are never, ever helped by them. There's a level where they send you in alone, and that's supposed to mean something, but you've been running alone the entire game! Who cares? Nobody. Absolutely nobody who was making this game cared.

Each level is themed after one of the respective robots' shows, but there's no such thing are real level design here: the stages are straight lines that lazily toss enemies at the player (barely-animated, pre-rended 2D sprites) for about five minutes until a boss shows up. There's no particular amount of skill involved in playing: enemy fire is extremely difficult to see coming, what actually constitutes a hit is confusing, and you will take hits. The game knows this and provided you save all your bombs for the boss, the stage will end before you've taken enough damage to die from.

Between levels there are short, crappy CG movies of each individual robot posing. You can watch all the movies on Youtube and not have to play this awful videogame. But then, the movies aren't really worth watching either!

So there you have it: a bottom-of-the-barrel anime-licensed videogame from 1997. Keep in mind that Banpresto was (and to an extent remains) the crap mill of the day, so we're really looking at the very worst. Still, people bought this for 6800 yen (the equivalent of 70 bucks or so) and the unfortunate folks who imported this game paid even more. For the importer, the worst part was that now they had to rationalize their purchase! I'm sure people out there have fond memories of Super Robot Shooting, just as I used to know people who told me that Dragon Ball: Final Bout (which sold tons in Japan, of course) was an amazing game. Sometimes it really is best not to go back!

Mazinkaiser SKL: WE ARE HELL

Well, Imagawa says they aren't making the Shin Mazinger sequel he deserves, but back in the real world Bandai needs to sell toy robots, so the Wheel of Mazinger continues to roll on. Mazinkaiser SKL isn't the show I'd hoped for, but I'm sure as hell happy to have it.

I get the feeling that director Jun Kawagoe and the usual gang that's been doing all the other Go Nagai remakes this decade saw Shin Mazinger and said "hey, let's reinvent this thing too!" Rather than Imagawa's "best fanfiction you ever read" approach, though, the Mazinkaiser SKL staff decided to make something that wouldn't be out of place in the Youth Restricted Viewing section of your local Blockbuster Video in 1998. Watching this show will make you put on some kind of cybernetic headgear and incorrectly pronounce "MANGAAAAA" very loudly.

Do you know what Mazinger always has that Mazinkaser SKL doesn't have? The origin story. You know how the super robot story goes: boy meets robot built by his dad, boy and robot team up to battle evil with their combined manly spirit. The origin story of Mazinkaiser SKL goes more like this:

"There's this badass robot called Mazinkaiser SKL-- that's for skulls, bro, cause he's fuckin' covered in skulls-- that fuckin' kills the shit out of like, everything. It's got these two dudes that like, one of them is the gun guy and he knows Equilibrium, and then the other guy is the sword guy, right, and they're both fuckin' crazy, like they don't give a fuck about whatever. So basically they fly around in this plane shaped like a skull and save all these girls with big tits from fuckin' robot gangs, shit yeah it's awesome."

From the barren wasteland to the bloodthirsty heroes, it's kind of like Mazinkaiser is being pulled a little closer to Devilman. Or Heavy Metal magazine. Or MD Geist. It honestly makes sense: Mazinkaiser was always this really overdone-- many would say to the point of being tacky-- version of Mazinger Z. They came up with the robot specifcally for the Super Robot Wars games, specifically because they wanted there to be a stronger Mazinger to catch up with all the other robots. So SKL makes sense. It doesn't even care anymore that it's tacky, it's just about STRONGER. Just look at the weapons! The chestplate is made out of guns, and the guns are also knives. In the opening animation, SKL shoots a rocket punch-- except the fist is holding a sword-- to mow down a mob of enemies. There are characters named Hurricane and Flash, okay? We're past worrying who's gonna make fun of us, here.

There's a backstory somewhere in here, something about gravity fields and factional wars and whatnot, but I think I understood more from reading the blurb on some anime site than I did actually watching the episode.

The important thing here is big, stupid, screaming robot violence (Kaiser lays waste to armies of mass-produced, human-piloted versions of classic Mazinger monsters) and a general 16-year-old-boy kind of attitude maintained throughout. (Never mind how it got there, of course there's a strip club!) Our heroes (definitely not Kouji Kabuto or Tetsuya Tsurugi, that's for damn sure) are complete bloodthirsty killers who never miss a chance to stomp on a helpless enemy pilot or splatter blood or oil on some terrified bystander girl. Did I mention that the English-language theme song is by famous Japanese 80s hair metal band LOUDNESS and contains such lyrics as "IMMORTAL GOD MACHINE SET THE WORLD FREE"?

Again, this is the kind of thing that Manga Video would have sold a ton of in 1998 (even the subtitled dialogue on my copy has kind of a profane Manga Video vibe). It's loud(NESS), it's violent, it's stupid fun and it's totally worth thirty minutes of your life. I'm going to describe a thirty-second scene verbatim so that you really get it:

Our friends Hurricane and Flash (maybe a Cutey Honey thing?) get surrounded by a group of robots. Flash's machine gets the pilot's chamber cracked open and naturally, the enemy pilot drops everything to hops out and try to rape her. As the guy's wiggling tongue approaches, something falls, whacking him on the head and causing him to bite his own tongue off. Blood's gushing everywhere. We cut back, and the impact was from Kaiser's saw-serrated sword, which has cut both robots in half. The enemy pilot survives the fall to the ground, but is immediately stepped on by Kaiser. His blood splashes up onto the squealing Flash, who is safely inside the cockpit of her now-destroyed robot. Our heroes yell down:

"We told you to get the hell out of our way!"

Media Blasters has had the rights to this show for some time and the US DVD/BD release is planned for May, a good long time after the three episode OVA is finished running in Japan in its entirety. I'm definitely getting that Blu-Ray: this is the kind of entertainment where you know 100% what you're getting, and I've got no problem with that.

Super Robot Wars J translated: ROBOTS FOR CHRISTMAS AGAIN

I think the last time this happened was when SRW Alpha Gaiden was translated. I have a friend who's been working on this, so I've been hearing about the process as it happens. Apparently there was some kind of large-scale effort to call this whole project a hoax, for example. It's not a hoax. I played it in beta, it's there for you to play right now. It exists.

Anyway, SRWJ is probably the best of the Game Boy Advance SRW games that aren't Original Generation: they have licensed robots like Mazinger and so on, so the likelihood that they'll ever come out in English (especially as the GBA is a dead platform) is basically nil. A large amount of the material that was in J was chopped out and placed into W, the first SRW DS game. Despite lacking Voltron, J is a much better game. It has cool stuff like PUZZLE ROBO, in which the player solves an SRW chess problem in X amount of turns. Give it a go, especially if you're snowed in like I probably am for the next couple days.

I got SRW for Christmas myself, actually: Mike Toole of Anime Jump was so kind as to surprise me with copies of SRW 4 Scramble for PS and F and F Final for Saturn. Thanks, buddy!

Subatomic Brainfreeze sells out to The Man: YOU LIKED IT BETTER WHEN IT WAS STILL UNDERGROUND

If you're reading this, then I'm doing awesome, because my first piece of work for Anime News Network just went up. I'm taking over Astro Toy, the ANN toy review column. I've never really talked about it on the blog, but I used to really be in love with Japanese toys, to the point where I just ran out of room for them. Every few years I buy something nice for myself, but I've mostly been away. When I was approached with the opportunity to re-awaken the terrible, plastic-and-diecast-craving beast inside of me as a part-time job, I really had no choice but to say yes. The first piece is a review of Max Factory's Figma Golgo 13, and I hope you all love it. I'm gunning for other opportunities, so hopefully this won't be the last of me you see around the internet. Tell your friends! Tell your friends who can pay me to write for them! In fact...

HIRE DAVID CABRERA TO WRITE FOR YOU TODAY.

Hey, everybody! If there's one damn thing David Cabrera knows in all the world, it's stupid crap like Japanese videogames and cartoons! I'm proven to have spent way too much time on this stuff. I:

-am Anime News Network's new toy reviewer
-have been writing about videogames and anime on this blog for over three years, and am a founding member of Colony Drop, the angry anime fan's favorite destination.
-have guest written at places like Insert Credit and Action Button
-was famous, filthy-mouthed 4chan gimmick poster Badass Manly Anime Reviewer
-have a functioning work ethic
-am regularly asked things like "How do you even know things like that?" and "You're an Akiba-type, right?"
-love this stuff too, too much.

Potential employers are welcome to contact me at subatomicbrainfreeze at google's email service.

(Don't worry, guys, the blog isn't going anywhere.)

Is Max Factory THE MOST BRILLIANT INDIE VIDEOGAME DEVELOPER OF ALL TIME?

I'm going to say "yes". There's a lot of competition in the videogame market these days, as I'm sure you're aware, and owing to the sheer amount of stuff out there, people have had to try all kinds of revenue models to catch players' eyes: the "first month's free!" subscription model, the "free unless you want all this basic functionality!" free-to-play model, and the paid, extra content which is springing up in every mainstream console game to fleece a couple bucks off the more enthusiastic fans out there. Well, I've got a model here you sure as hell haven't seen before: the "paid for entirely by toy sales" model.

Prominent figure company Max Factory, who produce such popular toys as the Figma series (I want the Marisa one), has hit upon this ingenious plan. We know that a big chunk of the market for PVC figures comes from porn games (and I'm not gonna lie, that statue looks baller). Let's look at the situation from Max Factory's point of view. Max Factory spends money to license the rights to other people's games (or comics, or anime), and then makes figures out of them. You have to have played the game to care about these releases, and the game typically costs a hundred dollars.

Why not cut out the middleman here? Max Factory has decided to make their own damn porn game, called se.kirara, and give it out for free. It's the drug dealer model we're familiar with from MMORPGs, except in this case the whole game-- a full-featured piece of work, with lots of heroines and branching routes and all this stuff-- is free. The "second step" is when the player finds himself paying for se.kirara by buying a hundred-dollar hugpillow or PVC figure instead of a hundred-dollar porn game. If the intent of this game was not already clear, a limited edition of the game will ship with a Figma of one of the characters. The cost is... that of a Figma. It's like the game is a bonus with the figure!

(One time my buddy bought the LE of Fate/Unlimited Codes solely because he wanted the exclusive Figma that came with it. I bought the game off him and we were both happy.)

Of course I'm kind of joking when I use "indie" here: Max Factory is a huge figure-making monster with cash to burn. Nobody working out of their basement could get away with producing toys on top of producing a game.

Carl and I were talking about how maybe robot anime could benefit from this sort of treatment. The facts are clear: the only people left buying toy robots are otaku,robots-- especially the kind of ornate designs otaku like-- are notoriously difficult to animate in 2D, and the anime industry is broke. Now why make an expensive robot anime when you're not sure it'll sell anything anyway? Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to skip to the toy. Imagine, if you will, a series of robot toys sold effectively as pitches. Each robot could have a drama CD, a little comic, a bunch of cheaply made material that lays down a mythology. Geeks love promotional material for things that never came to pass! Then you take the one that sells best and make it into whatever is most convenient. I expect a sizable check for this one, Japanese toy industry. Don't say I never did nothin' for you.

BROTIPS: Super Robot Wars OG Saga

I seem to be about two thirds into the game, possibly approaching the end, so I figured it would be a good idea to share some of the little tricks that got me there faster. Endless Frontier isn't too tough, but everybody knows that Super Robot Wars isn't just about beating the game, it's about annihilating the game. This post is not really going to be any use to you if you're not playing this game. In fact, it will likely be boring. Be warned!

Super Robot Wars OG Saga Endless Frontier: SCREW WORLD PEACE, I JUST WANT SOME AIR CONDITIONING

Upon first seeing this game, you might ask what the hell it has to do with Super Robot Wars. This is a really hard game to explain, but I'll give a shot. There's a long answer-- we'll get to it-- and there's a short answer. The short answer is that Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier is about something else you've loved from childhood, something which, like the super robot, you've only come to love more and more over the years. I'm talking, of course, about breasts.

Shin Mazinger Final Episode: One Hundred Rocket Punches GET HYPE

I hope you didn't find out anything about this episode during the wait for its release: I know I avoided every place that might possibly have been talking about it. I was pretty sure of the big thing (we'll get to it), but the rest of it was a series of very happy surprises.

Dr. Hell's King of Hell (which has faces on the sides of its face) is rampaging around, and both the Mazinger Army and the fancy new weaponized Photon Power Labs are completely useless against it. Obviously, it falls to Kouji to take care of it.

 Now this is where the Baron Ashura Show (and make no mistake, we were warned halfway through the series for very good reason) gets complicated: it is revealed that Ashura had actually joined forces with Tsubasa and Kouji, unbeknownst to everybody, when they were inside the Mycenae pillar. Why would this happen? Remember that there was a part of the Kedora's memories that we were never shown: Kouji would just say "we saw a lot of things in there I don't wanna talk about." What they actually saw was grounds for Ashura to backstab Dr. Hell. Remember that Ashura is supposed to be a fusion of two half-rotted bodies, and that the rotting is never really accounted for in the story of this show or the original Mazinger. It just kind of happened.

The truth is much nastier: Dr. Hell and Kenzo Kabuto actually half-rotted the bodies themselves so as to have one less person to deal with when they stitched it back together. For good measure, they obliterated the remains of the Mycenae civilization that was preserved inside of Bardos. So, as it's all part of the plan, Ashura fishes a waterlogged Kouji and his Pilder out of the ocean to fight Dr. Hell. But wait, Mazinger's still down there! What the hell is Kouji going to do from his Pilder against this mightiest of evil robots? Isn't it obvious? He's going to punch it. Over and over again, in the most awesome way possible. No, seriously, if you haven't seen this, then don't let me be the one to tell you how it happened.

Kouji makes it rain. Inside the mechanical corpses of the defeated Mazinger Army are hundreds of Rocket Punches, which fly up and fall onto the King of Hell from the sky. Kouji wrecks the body with a machinegun hail of Rocket Punch fire. He then calls back all the punches to become one huge Rocket Punch, which he then flies directly through the King of Hell's body before completely obliterating it with a Big Bang Punch. Meanwhile, the show is hinting that this was actually a terrible idea, but I, the viewer, cannot bring myself to care because what just happened is so fucking awesome.

Well, it was a terrible idea anyway, and here's why: this was all stage two of the Baron Ashura Triplecross. Let's give Baron Ashura a hand: for all the scheming that was going on in this show, Ashura, of all people, ends up the decisive winner. It turns out that Dr. Hell's goal was not to take over the world and Photon Power for its own sake: it was to take over the world and defend it from the Mycenae with Photon Power. Oh, Dr. Hell. You could have been less of a dick about protecting the earth from giant god-monsters. If you'd just sat everybody around a table and had a talk, maybe they could have worked this out. But they didn't, and Dr. Hell's death actually makes a huge mess of everything. Remember how Ashura couldn't commit suicide as long as Dr. Hell was alive? Well, that's pretty important, because as it turns out, it is Ashura's blood that is necessary to revive the ancient gods of Mycenae. As the credits roll, Ashura tears itself in half with its bare hands, and an army of seven appears before Kouji. They are led by the Grand General of Darkness (Ankoku Daishogun), who, in the final moments, unsheathes his sword and slices Mount Fuji in half.

And that's exactly where it ends. I had said a few posts back that the best possible conclusion would be a revisiting of the fantastic 70's movie Mazinger Z vs. Ankoku Daishogun (which transitions from Mazinger Z to Great Mazinger) in the form of a movie or special, and this has got me very hopeful. This show isn't over. Great-hen is probably going to happen, and there's a possiblity of the movie or special I was talking about, but nobody's said anything and any new stuff is probably a ways off. You'll live.

So how about this show, you guys? Putting the inconsistent animation aside, this was a hell of a ride all the way through. Giant robots are fun and all, but as Tomino will tell you, they're not enough by themselves. This show really sold on its twisting narrative, strong characters, and, of course the fact that nearly every episode had some kind of "oh my god holy shit" payoff. It's great to see Imagawa get to make an epic again, and I really hope everything continues to go as planned. For the time being, though, these writeups will end and I'll have to find something else to talk about. Oh well!

Shin Mazinger Episode 25: Blade GETS HYPE

Well guys, Shin Mazinger Shougeki Z-hen on television is over, and seeing as I've been busy anyway-- I have grown a serious blogger backlog that I haven't been too great about clearing up-- I decided to do a special double-post for the last two episodes. Hope you guys enjoy.

Boy, things were still a total mess last week, weren't they? Kouji and Mazinger were mobbed with robo-monsters, the Photon Power Labs self-destructed, and only the Kurogane Five stood between Ashura and Kurogane House. Well, as it turned out, the God Scrander Cavalry saves the day courtesy of Computer Grandpa, there's a real Photon Power Lab under the old one that's way better anyway, and the Kurogane gang are protected by the, uh, capable Boss Borot. The fight between Dr. Hell and everybody else is still hurtling towards its conclusion.

This Blade appearance is exactly the same as the Blade appearance from the very first episode, but he gets the Hype Award for killing Pygman as abruptly and effortlessly as possible. As the narrator hypes him up, Blade cuts out as quickly as he appeared, leaving Anokuji to remind the audience that this is a story for another time. Sorry, Great fans, but if you wanted to know any more than this, you're just going to have to wait. Great-hen has been repeatedly hinted at by the mechanical designer and is very likely to happen given the success of Z-hen, but Giant Robo fans remember that time Imagawa promised a sprawling epic. We remain cautious.

Running out of options and generals, Dr. Hell desperately launches Bardos Island... which was exactly what Tsubasa had wanted him to do. Everything up until now has just been part of the plan: even Kouji rushing into battle instead of going with "the plan" was completely intentional. Once Bardos is up in the air, the reinforced Mazinger Corps surround and bombard it. But wait! Taking down Bardos Island was part of Dr. Hell's plan all along! Wait... what? Behold the final Dr. Hell robot, the King of Hell! Plus there's nothing left of Kenzo but the Kedora! I don't even know anymore, man! Good thing there's another post coming...