Battle Beasts: Animal Collecting

If you asked me to pick my favorite toy from my childhood, I would consider that question carefully and wonder if you were surreptitiously sizing me up for identity theft. But if you asked me my favorite line of toys from my childhood, I’d have an easy answer: Battle Beasts. 

Even if you’re never heard of Battle Beasts, you've at least heard of the toys that spawned them: Transformers. Back in 1987 Battle Beasts first showed up in Japan as Beastformers, a spin-off of Hasbro and Takara’s successful empire of transforming robots. The two were technically part of the same series, and the Beastformers and their homeworld appeared in a single episode (a backdoor pilot, if you will) of the Transformers Headmasters TV series, complete with its amazing, infamous dub. In the West, Hasbro licensed these animal-themed figures and dubbed them Battle Beasts for a separate and much lower-key release. As Battle Beasts they had no obvious links to Transformers, and for promotions they enjoyed only a short, obscure comic and a TV commercial that made kids wonder how wood actually defeated water.

 

I was very fond of the Battle Beasts, and not so much for the reasons extolled in the commercial. Their gimmick was a rub-and-reveal sticker on the armor of each figure, with fire, water, and wood assigned at random. The beasts’ battles took place in rock-paper-scissors format; fire and water’s attributes were clear, and wood technically bested water by floating on it. Yes, that was a stretch, but it wasn’t the competitive aspect of Battle Beasts that I liked anyway. I thought the figures were highly cool on their own merits. They were only a little larger than Army Ants or M.U.S.C.L.E. or a number of other small-scale toys, but Battle Beasts were far more detailed and varied, combing animals with cybernetic attire worthy of any 1980s mecha anime.  

They were also compact and affordable, and the fact that they had no real backstories allowed me to imbue them with whatever personalities and plots I devised. One day they might be relentlessly bellicose gremlins squabbling to escape a doomed planet, and the next day they’d be comical little creatures living harmoniously and Smurf-like in some wilderness.  

I sold off the majority of my childhood toys long ago, and I do my best to avoid falling into blank nostalgia or collectible clutter. Battle Beasts are one of the few cases where I’ve not only kept my original collection but actually added to it. And since I haven’t blathered about toys in a while, I’ll round up five or six Battle Beasts of personal note. 

BLOODTHIRSTY BISON 

Let’s start with one of my favorites. Technically his name’s Bloodthirsty Bison, but I was largely unaware of the official titles for any Battle Beasts. I quickly picked him as the leader, named him Taurus, called his ram counterpart Aries, and thought I was clever. This would be the limit of my Battle Beast nomenclatures, though, because I just called most of the others things like Bearton and Boarton. 

Taur...uh, Bloodthirsty Bison shows off the typical and surprisingly intricate design of a Battle Beast. Most have gauntlets, shin guards, and armor, plus some decorations like that little light panel on his forehead, presumably so he can see where he’s charging at night, and the similarly and inexplicably illuminated codpiece. I’m still impressed that despite the small size of the figures, there’s very little repetition across Battle Beasts. A lot of 1980s toy lines would repurpose production molds by recoloring them (for example, most He-Man characters have the same body), but not Battle Beasts, Every one of them is a unique creature with its own outfit and embellishments, like Bison’s horseshoe-claw hand. 

With most old toy lines the accessories are often harder to find than the figures, and that certainly applies here Each Battle Beast came with a weapon, and if you look close you’ll see tiny numbers on both the armaments and figures. I don’t have Bison’s corresponding weapon, so I gave him a few random ones and pretty much recreated the Cow Tools from The Far Side. 

MINER MOLE 

There’s something inherently cute about Battle Beasts, even when they’re positioned as a warlike throng of cyber-suited lions and eagles and iguanas. Miner Mole captures this well; despite all the technological adornments, our mole has a little nose and rounded head that would fit in any Russel Hoban children’s book. Also note the giant claw. A shovel would make more sense for a mole, but it wouldn’t look as cool. Besides, maybe a cyborg burrowing mammal has to use it in combat with all the giant mechanized grubs and insects awaiting underground. 

You’ll note that Battle Beasts tend to lose their rub stickers over the years, and the stickers that remain often degrade to the point where they no longer show their fire-water-wood symbols. I’m sure some collectors prize figures with intact stickers (or apply their own replacements), but I pay no mind to that detail. When I was a kid I actually peeled the symbols off so my legion of Beasts would all be friends and not squabble over social constructs like fire, water, and wood. I was a strange child, but it’s saving me money on my Battle Beast budget years down the road.

POWERHOUSE MOUSE AND HUNCHBACK CAMEL 

These two are grouped by a curious designation. While Battle Beasts originated in Japan and saw more toys released there, Powerhouse Mouse and Hunchback Camel were by all available accounts never sold on the Japanese market. They’re Western exclusives, and they’re fairly neat figures. I like Camel’s uniform desert color scheme and the look of sheer derangement that Mouse wears. If you go by the size of their real-world animal counterparts, Powerhouse Mouse might be the smallest of the Battle Beasts next to the spider, and you've got to put up an imposing front. 

Battle Beasts were most commonly sold in pairs, though some were in larger sets. Usually the two-packs matched up the Beasts by number, so the Mouse and Camel would not have been available together. However, I’d swear than many of the sets I bought in Germany had the figures randomly bundled in defiance of their numbers and proper Teutonic alles-in-Ordnung structure. And today, when Beasts are randomly strewn about secondhand shops and eBay listings, it’s sometimes satisfying to reunite them with their store-shelf companions like they’re mismatched partners on the police force. They’re Powerhouse Mouse and Hunchback Camel, teaming up to catch a killer and finally get a trip to Japan.

MUSKY OX 

Take a close look at Musky’s hands. Yes, that’s right. His arms are upside down. This could be a manufacturing error, but I suspect it was the work of a former owner who yanked off Musky’s limbs and put them back wrong in subtle Frankenstein fashion. You’ll occasionally see this sort of thing on Battle Beasts. Their owners got tired of the basic figures and swapped the arms around. The problem was that Battle Beasts were never designed to have interchangeable arms, and much of the time kids just broke them. 

As 1980s action figures go, Battle Beasts are sturdy; they’re made out of hard rubbery plastic, and their arms are the only moving parts. So when you see partly dismembered figures, they’re likely the result of someone’s failed experiment in customization. It’s also common for broken Beasts to just get their arms glued back on, so if you’re selling or buying these toys, consider some photos of Battle Beasts with their arms in different positions. Just a tip there. 

Musky Ox has one of the less intimidating names among Battle Beasts, who go by everything from “War Weasel” and “Sly Fox” to “Bodacious Bovine” and “Ossified Orangutang.” My favorite from the first three series of toys would be “Wolfgang Walrus,” which could be a threatening adjective only if you’re Salieri in Amadeus.

BLUE EAGLE 

The last wave of any toy line is usually the rarest, and for Battle Beasts that final run was called Laser Beasts in Japan and Shadow Warriors in the West. These replaced the rubsigns with crystal spheres that revealed fire, water, and wood symbols when you held them up to a light source. Japan got the entire Laser Beasts run while other markets had fewer types of creature available, and just about any figure in this final set is pricey today. So if you’re sorting through a tub of old toys at a garage sale, keep an eye out for Battle Beasts with that circle symbol. 

Blue Eagle, with an admittedly limited blue coloration, is the only Laser Beast I own. That’s partly due to this being one of the more common figures from the set, at least as far as I can tell. I couldn’t capture it in pics, but that symbol has the wood icon inside. Because eagles can perch and nest in trees, that’s why. 

Blue Eagle also reflects an unflattering memory. I had a bunch of Battle Beasts as a kid, and of course I wanted Laser Beasts. I spotted some, including Blue Eagle, in a German toy store once, but my mother forbade me from getting them, and I consequently threw a tantrum. It was the last time I remember getting mad over being denied a toy, and I was so embarrassed by the incident that I avoided buying any Laser Beasts even when I could easily afford them. I lucked into Blue Eagle through a friend of a friend decades afterwards, when I was well past the statute of limitations on my childhood shame.   

Battle Beasts have seen only a few small revivals over the years, and sometimes those comebacks bear only limited resemblance to the 1980s line. That’s rare in a world where an entire quadrant of the toy industry specializes in serving up Ninja He-Man G.I. Joe Ghosbuster Transformer Turtles crossovers and “retro-play” reissues for middle-aged nostalgists, but then Battle Beasts were never a major name in the first place. And I like it that way, since rampant reissues and new versions of toys accurate to the originals would only tempt me to spend more money—and perhaps make me weary of such oversaturation.

The closest thing to an all-out Battle Beast revival was Beast Saga, a 2012 toy-and-media effort from Takara Tomy. The figures resemble Battle Beasts (or rather, Beastformers) that hash out their differences by launching dice instead of revealing their elemental allegiances. The Beast Saga toys are surprisingly high in quality for their price point and target audience, but the whole thing crashed quick and hard, leaving behind canceled figures and a middling anime series. It was also exclusive to Japan, aside from a dubbed version of the show that apparently aired on some satellite channels. This didn’t stop me from collecting a load of Beast Saga stuff, but that’s a story for another long and confessional post. 

To return to that opening question, I’m not sure if Battle Beasts were my favorite childhood toy line when I was actually a child, considering all the competition. Yet they’ve risen through the ranks over the years, partly on account of their simplicity.  They’re unobtrusive enough to store my entire collection in a shoebox, but crafted well enough that you can admire the design work in a two-inch figure of a cobra or beaver or sabertoothed tiger outfitted like a high-tech Roman gladiator. I think I’d like them even detached from any youthful ownership or memories of questionable fondness, just because they’re neat little toys.

Golden Axe: Playing Favorites

Golden Axe is perplexing in the Sega catalog. It’s not a mammoth name like Sonic, but it’s often trotted out for classic reissues and merchandise. To be fair, it got off to a good start: original Golden Axe set new standards for arcade brawlers back in 1989, and even now it remains an exemplar for video games fused with barbarian fantasy. 

Yet the Golden Axe series walked a rough road. The first game was a hit in arcades and on the Sega Genesis, but the two Genesis follow-ups were seldom praised. A further look reveals disappointments like the laborious Ax Battler: A Legend of Golden Axe for the Game Gear, the ungainly, forgotten 3D remake for the PlayStation 2, and the infamous Golden Axe: Beast Rider. Decent spin-offs like Golden Axe Warrior and Golden Axe: the Duel remain obscure, and the best game in the entire line, Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder, was only available as an arcade release until the modern era.

 

It’s mostly the first Golden Axe that sustains a reputation. It was an arcade centerpiece back in 1989, drawing players in with a vision of sword-and-sandal violence and brutish fantasy staples, as facsimiles of Conan and Red Sonja and your favorite Tolkien dwarf slew enemies by hacking them, kicking them, casting elaborate spells, and hijacking dragons and cockatrices. Today the controls are a little awkward (and the scoring system is bizarre), but there was no matching it for spectacle in the late 1980s.

A lot of arcade games, and Sega games in particular, drew in kids with video-game simulacra of the movies they probably weren’t allowed to see just yet. Your parents might not let you rent some cheaply made barbarian flick with an incongruously amazing cover full of muscular warriors and hideous demons in the style of Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, or Julie Bell, but they couldn’t stop you from playing Golden Axe. And while those cheaply made barbarian flicks never remotely lived up to their box art, Golden Axe delivered monsters and violence aplenty.

I first saw Golden Axe during one of those unfortunate arcade situations when I had plenty of time to kill but was also flat broke and all by myself. So I just wandered around and watched the games. And nothing there was as fascinating to watch as the Golden Axe demo. It showed just enough of the game’s varied fantasy scenery and screen-filling magic spells to get me curious, and it also introduced the playable characters. And I most of the afternoon to ponder and choose a favorite.

 

Hmm. So the broadsword-swinging Ax Battler (or rather, Axe=Battler, as though the characters are all odd equations or progressive rock songs) wants revenge on Death Adder, who slew Ax’s mother.  Yes, that was very tragic, in line with the original Conan the Barbarian movie that I hadn’t yet seen.

 

Ah, and Gilius Thunderhead seeks similar vengeance for the death of his brother. That seemed like a good motivation. Incidentally, Gilius’ brother is apparently called Gari, though that’s never mentioned in the game, possibly because a name that could be read as “Gary” doesn’t evoke an atmosphere of ancient conflicts and dwarven vengeance.

 

But what’s this? Tyris Flare, the amazon warrior, lost both her mother and father to Death Adder! To me that made her the most immediately sympathetic of the trio. Sure, Ax and Gilius were out to avenge family members, but they weren’t made orphans like poor Tyris. And since Golden Axe showed a harsh fantasy world lacking even the Dickensian standards of workhouses and gruel, Tyris must have grown up fending for herself, a parentless and destitute urchin in a land of monsters and bandits and countless medieval cruelties. That may explain why she can’t afford much in the way of clothing.

There are obvious reasons why a preadolescent boy would find Tyris Flare the most appealing of the three Golden Axe characters, but I’m not kidding when I say that it was her single-sentence backstory that won me over. Watching Golden Axe’s display over and over let me envision a childhood of Tyris begging and scraping by like a humbled Disney princess, and the game clearly didn’t allow for perky animal sidekicks or heartening musical numbers.

So when I finally had a quarter and the opportunity to play Golden Axe, I picked Tyris and sped her forth on the game’s most justified quest for recompense. It lasted all of three minutes. I wasn’t very good at video games.

This was a lot to extract from just one sentence, but that was the way of things. If we didn’t have a magazine like Nintendo Power handy, we knew only what the game told us, and Golden Axe’s introductions were fairly detailed for the era. Such limited narratives often enhanced a game, amplifying each little fracas and victory into something important.  And if our impressions were wrong, there was no vast online repository of wikis and forums to unravel our beautifully entwined ignorance and imagination.

So was many years later that I learned the truth about Golden Axe. I looked up the actual backgrounds for the characters and saw that Tyris is the princess of the Firewood Kingdom and that Death Adder destroyed it and slaughtered her parents…when she was seventeen. 

Not to downplay the grief of such a loss, but this was not quite as vicious as my earlier concept of Tyris losing her family and being cast out into the world in early childhood. That was usually how these stories worked: the hero or heroine witnesses horrors as a kid and forges a bitter desire for revenge throughout a hardscrabble youth. Golden Axe’s arcade demonstration had not directly misled me, but I saw it as a lie of omission. How dare this video game’s threadbare storyline manipulate my simple young mind.

 

Hold on, though. The PC Engine version of Golden Axe has more elaborate cutscenes for the characters, and it revamps Tyris Flare’s origins. She’s now all of four years old when Death Adder arrives and kills her royal parents, thus setting off the tale of shattered childhood happiness that my pre-teen brain extrapolated from the arcade attract-screens. She’s found and raised by a tribe of amazons, of course, and I gather that makes for an upbringing better than begging on cobblestones or eating rats in a ditch. Golden Axe for the PC Engine is seldom praised, as it removes the multiplayer element and disrupts the pacing, but I salute it for proving me right about Tyris Flare in some capacity.

One might expect Tyris and her combat swimwear to be the most popular part of Golden Axe, but it’s actually Gilius who shows up the most. He’s in some Sega racing games, and he provides a recurring gag in the surprisingly funny Sega Hard Girls anime series. Tyris only gets the spotlight in Beast Rider, a game beloved by no one but Dave Halverson, and that seems to have done her few favors as a Sega mainstay.

No matter its history, Golden Axe gets periodic revivals and promotions from Sega. The latest is a Comedy Central animated series from some of the folks behind Star Trek: Below Decks and American Dad. The press release describes Ax Battler as a warrior whose “brain outweighs his brawn,” Gilius as having “poor hygiene,” and Tyris as deadly with “her sharp wit,” which is what happens when writers are afraid to assign a woman actual flaws. And there’s a new hero, the earnest neophyte adventurer Hampton Squib (or possibly “Hampton=Squib”). Comedy Central hasn’t shown a trailer yet, but I admit that the show is already evoking some nostalgia: once again, I feel sorry for Golden Axe’s characters.

Three Sentences About Three Gundam DVDs

You and your friends were really into Gundam Wing midway through high school and when they picked out their crushes from the show you went with Trowa even though Duo was your favorite because one of your friends had a scarily intense infatuation with Duo and you didn’t want to get in her way, and then in senior year that friend gave you this Gundam Wing DVD as a joke present for your birthday even though you’d all long since stopped caring about the show and she’d moved on from a crush on Duo to a crush on Kyo from Fruits Basket to a crush on a guy from the next town over who said he was eighteen and had just graduated so you and your friend sat down and watched the DVD and laughed about how much this show had once mattered to you and she teased you when Trowa was on the screen and you thought about telling her that Duo was your favorite anyway and you also thought about telling her that the guy she liked looked at least twenty-one and not exactly on the level to you but then you decided not to say anything even though you really should have.

This one guy you knew your last year of college found out you liked anime because you made some remark about watching Gundam Wing and G Gundam and he was aghast that you’d only ever seen those and insisted that you should watch the good gundams, as he put it, and you mentioned you’d seen the first few episodes of The 08th MS Team so then for Christmas that year he gave you the second 08th MS Team DVD and you watched it and it was okay albeit sorta cliché but the real problem was that he’d given you a gift even though he barely knew you so you had to find a last-minute reciprocal Christmas gift for him over the break but you didn’t want it to be anything remotely romantic because this guy wasn’t your type at all and you were worried that he’d ask you out and get awkwardly rejected so you got him a Best Buy gift card even though you hate how impersonal gift cards are and you also gave him your honest opinion of the Gundam DVD and he said that some other series are even better and he gave you a bunch of mecha show fansubs burned to a stack of CDs five inches high and you ended up watching some of the movies and shorter series one week while you were stuck housesitting for your aunt and War in the Pocket was pretty good and Do You Remember Love was fun and some of the others were all right but not mind-blowing and a few were flagrantly sexist so you actually formulated some trenchant criticisms to share with this guy but before you could he dropped out of school to teach English in Japan and you and one of your friends later got into a debate over whether this guy was creepy or just awkward and you favored awkward because he was never creepy with you, just nerdy and a little snobbish, and even though your friend maintained that he was creepy she couldn’t give any examples or explanations because she said that sometimes people just make you feel that way, and you agreed with her on that at least.

You and your roommates liked watching G Gundam together for one freshman semester in college when you’d all get high and yell the Shining Finger speech and you’d all never get together for a show like that again because by the end of the year you had a part-time internship that sorta sucked and didn’t pay but you thought it was good exposure and one roommate started working a late shift so you never saw her and the other roommate moved out to get a place with her boyfriend and the next roommate after her hated everything you liked right down to your breakfast cereal so for the next year of college you lived in your grandmother’s spare room and commuted to save money because at least your grandma didn’t complain about every album you owned or lecture you about the additives in Cheerios every morning and then eight years later you were at an FYE store that was clearancing a lot of DVDs at three for fifteen bucks so you picked up My Best Friend’s Wedding for your mom because she loved the movie but refused to buy it just like she refuses to buy herself anything inessential for human survival and you also got Happy Feet because the last time you babysat your niece she loved Happy Feet and wanted to watch it more than anything but the DVD wasn’t in the case or the player and you spent almost an hour looking for it while she was on the verge of a full-bore tantrum and you debated calling your sister’s cell but decided not to because this was her first real date since the divorce and you didn’t want to bother her and your niece just ended up watching Corpse Bride even though it was a little dark for a four-year-old but she fell asleep on the couch anyway and when your sister got home she spent twenty minutes complaining about her date before you could ask about the damn Happy Feet DVD and it turned out your sister didn’t know where it was either and that’s why you decided right there in FYE that you were not going through that again but then you needed one more DVD because they would otherwise be seven bucks each so you found volume five of G Gundam and that was good enough and you watched it and had a laugh about the guy named Schwartz Bruder who was secretly the hero’s brother but it wasn’t the same without your old roommates and you thought about selling the DVD but then you decided to keep it because people, normal people, usually have dozens of DVDs but you have just a fullscreen Matrix Reloaded that one of your exes didn’t want, Happy Feet, three random Gundam DVDs, and the suspicion that you’re turning into your mother.

Little Things: Fire Shark

I admit it: I neglected Fire Shark for a long while. You can’t blame me that much. It seemed mundane when I sampled it during my trips through Sega Genesis shooters, and even the label for the North American version of Fire Shark is a boring black-and-white deal without illustrations, apparently due to someone’s desperate attempt to trim costs. So the game was easily overlooked amid the throng of M.U.S.H.A., Gaiares, the Thunder Forces, Phelios, Grind Stormer, Sol-Feace, Wings of Wor, Dangerous Seed, Forgotten Worlds, Arrow Flash, Hellfire, Vapor Trail, After Burner II, Zero Wing, Bio-Hazard Battle, Insector X, Gleylancer, Atomic Robo-Kid, Whip Rush, Burning Force, Steel Empire, Truxton, Panorama Cotton, Galaxy Force II, Eliminate Down, Sagaia, Curse, Elemental Master, Task Force Harrier, Air Diver, Air Buster, and, of course, my beloved Trouble Shooter series.

 

Sorry, Fire Shark, but you didn’t wink at me like Trouble Shooter did.   

I’ll still acknowledge that Fire Shark doesn’t look like much at first: you pilot an ordinary biplane into an oncoming force of tanks and aircraft, also of mediocre appearance. Yet things perk up very soon. Enemy fire constantly forces you to dodge and destroy as quick as you can, and the weapons gradually change from a routine spread shot to a twirling spiral green laser and a screen-filling octopus of a flamethrower. The opposition also gets more impressive, growing into more stylish assault vehicles and immense stage bosses. It’s a fantastic workhorse of a shooter. It’s not always pretty, but it’s constantly challenging you, leaving you wanting more at your inevitable defeat and even dropping small details for you to appreciate when you're not weaving through certain destruction. 

When it comes to those details, my favorite is the ground crew that awaits at the end of each stage. They’re tiny green figures that scamper across the curiously friendly airfield where your plane lands, somehow in the middle of hostile territory, and those mechanics are usually up to something. At the game’s start they’ll form an encouraging arrow for you. On another level one of them will try to fly a plane like yours, only to crash it and apparently survive. 

The best ground-crew routine appears at the end of stage four, when they’ll rush toward the landing strip and line up…except for one crew member, who trips over the barrier.

Whoops! Quick, get up and get in line before someone notices!

Uh-oh. Your boss noticed, and you’re getting chewed out.

But it’s okay, because now you’re back with the others…only you’re just a little out of step with the rest of the crew. That’s really a nice touch.   

Toaplan went on to make more complex shooters with more complex background details, perhaps reaching their apex with that gorgeous spread of ocean life in Batsugun’s first stage. I think that Fire Shark was the start of that. There’s a certain care to it that isn’t really apparent in earlier works like Tiger-Heli, and it set a lot of standards for shooters both inside Toaplan and out of it. For example, Seibu Kaihatsu's original Raiden has a lot in common with Fire Shark, from the round, bullet-spraying tank turrets to the overall intensity of it. So when people talk up Raiden, you can mention that it swiped a lot from Fire Shark. You’ll be the old-school shooter version of those people who won’t let anyone mention the Ramones without bringing up MC5 or the Dictators or the New York Dolls.  

There are several ways to enjoy Fire Shark, including a recent port of the original arcade game for the Toaplan Arcade Garage. Yet the Genesis version, which Toaplan themselves programmed, is hardly irrelevant, and I actually prefer it in many ways. The soundtrack has more impact there, and a special code lets you max out your weapons at any time. This fixes one of the game’s few general flaws: power-ups are a little too infrequent in the face of the opposition. So don’t feel guilty about pumping up that  fire cannon and filling the screen like some b-movie giant spider. 

So now I appreciate Fire Shark. I don’t like it quite as much as I do M.U.S.H.A or the Trouble Shooter titles (did I mention those?), but I think Fire Shark places in the top five shooters on the Sega Genesis. And on a system so full of them, that’s saying an awful lot.

Lunar Remastered: Hope Springs Eternal

Hey, the Lunar games are back! There’s a new collection with Lunar: the Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue! What should I say about them? How about a discussion of the common RPG cliches that the Lunar series polishes up and arguably perfects? Or the differences between the Sega CD games and the PlayStation remakes? Or the schism between Game Arts and Studio Alex that effectively derailed the series? Or those Working Designs localizations, controversial hodgepodges of dramatic dialogue, lavish musical numbers, and Baywatch jokes?

Wow. For something so straightforward in tone, the Lunar series sure carries a lot of baggage. The important thing to understand is that the first two Lunar games are cult favorites twice over. First on the Sega CD and then on the PlayStation, Lunar: The Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue were extraordinary treatments of ordinary RPG elements, coating the conventional and the lightweight with novel settings, memorable characters, neat battle systems, excellent music, and impressive anime cutscenes. In the late 1990s Lunar was the second biggest console RPG series in North America, right behind Final Fantasy, and that alone cemented the games as classics in many corners. Theirs is a long tale of rising and diminishing fortunes, of remakes and cancellations, of shifting tastes and resilient stories.

So I’ll just talk about a magazine ad for Lunar 2.

Even that gets complicated. You can’t discuss Lunar without discussing Working Designs, the North American publisher for the series in the 1990s. Forever playing fast-and-loose with the original Japanese scripts, Working Designs refashioned everything; dramatic dialogue generally retains the impact of the story, but more comical situations and casual conversations with villagers are filled with frequently crass humor and references to everything from milk commercials to The Matrix.

I often find myself defending Working Designs and its co-founder Victor Ireland. At the very least, I think it’s worth analyzing and taking in their localizations line by line. You’ll see some things that shouldn’t be there, usually jokes that aged poorly or that shouldn’t have been made in the first place, yet there’s an undeniable sense of respect for the games’ more serious moments, preserving the spirit and tone of the drama if not the literal meaning. And I can’t deny that the goofy lines from random civilians are often amusing. It’s a fascinating study, partly because the liberal rewrites of optional townsfolk dialogue have no equivalent in more linear forms of storytelling like prose and cinema, leaving comparisons to similarly rewritten anime or live-action dub scripts ringing hollow. And it also raises the question of how Working Designs succeeded in one goal of translation: making the audience forget that something was originally in a different language.

There’s nothing simple about Working Designs, and I hope someone one day writes a book about the company. They could call it Fantasy and Fart Jokes: The Working Designs Story. Yet if there’s one point on which I will brook no disagreement, it’s the polish that Working Designs put into their packaging and promotions. Their releases grew from nice foil manuals to gargantuan box sets, peaking with a free punching puppet for Lunar 2's PlayStation preorders. Their advertising was equally sharp, as it usually employed the original Japanese art when many publishers did their best to bury that sort of thing.

At last we come to the magazine ad for Lunar 2: Eternal Blue on the Sega CD, which might be my favorite magazine ad of all time. Yes, it’s vacuous of me to have a favorite piece of advertising in any sense, but hey, blame capitalism.

This Lunar 2 ad catches the eye with its first page: a stark depiction of heroine Lucia enrobed like a monolith against the blackness of space, a planet and a moon in shadow behind her. The game’s title appears nowhere, but in true Working Designs fashion, there’s a pun: “In the darkest hour, hope springs eternal.” And in true Working Designs fashion, it works. Running this spot alone would be a risky move, so let’s turn the page.

The spread that unfolds is a flurry of revelations; a movie reel of screenshots, a bizarre ship pointing its cannons skyward, a collage of the characters grinning and dancing and gawking and casting spells. The contrast works nicely, as the first page’s reserved negative space lets the inner spread explode out at the reader. There’s no real story summary, but the images tell just enough to entice and invite conjecture about dragons and temples and gloating, Harkonnen-esque wizards.

I cannot recall another advertisement, print or otherwise, that so completely floored me. Some of the impact came from the timing of it all. For me and a good chunk of young nerds, 1995 was still an era when anime was a new and innately compelling realm, when even the most generic sight of stylized blue hair or energy beams grabbed our attention. Lunar was there at the crossroads of RPGs and what mainstream media pieces still labeled “Japanese animation,” and with those sharp cutscenes and colorful Toshiyuki Kubooka designs, it had the best of both worlds. We could go from playing Lunar 2 to watching Cyber City Oedo 808 or Ranma ½ or Giant Robo (from which Kubooka possibly reused bits of Taiso’s design for Lunar 2’s Ronfar) and always would it seem novel. For most of us, that halo departed by the end of the decade, and we learned to take anime and anime-flavored games just as discerningly as we would anything else. Most of also learned to hold on to what mattered.

There’s undeniable nostalgia behind the Lunar Remastered Collection, which packages the PlayStation versions of the games with new voice acting and the majority of the original Working Designs script. As with that ad, however, the Lunar games hold up beyond those misplaced yearnings for more innocent ages of RPG filled with battles or VHS tapes filled with grainy fansubs. They’re still exceptional games. The Silver Star Story is perhaps a mere excellent treatment of a very typical premise, with an earnest hero and a timorous heroine and a colorful supporting cast. It’s charming and straightforward, a good introduction to old-fashioned RPG stories if you’ve never experienced them—and a good encapsulation if you have.

Eternal Blue goes deeper with its vision of an everyman protagonist meeting a mysterious woman, delivering more complex character arcs and insights. It surpasses the usual “What is…kiss?” cliches of an otherworldly character’s path to understanding humanity, and it’s probably my favorite treatment of that entire trope. In fact, I’d place Eternal Blue next to Final Fantasy VI and Earthbound as one of the best 16-bit RPGs—though I’d recommend the PlayStation version, either in its older form or through this new collection.

I would not, however, recommend paying absurd amounts for it. Lunar Remastered Collection is an Amazon exclusive and sold out rapidly, but publisher GungHo announced that they’ll print more copies. That’s another contentious point with the games: even old Sega CD and PlayStation versions, like all Working Designs releases, are expensive to come by. The Remastered Collection has new voice-overs, trims some offensive lines from the Working Designs localization, and lacks that cool Lords of Lunar mini-game. Yet they’re still the marvels that drew in so many of us decades ago. And they’ll do that again now if you let them.

Valis Analysis

The Valis series is far more interesting than it first appears. Yes, it’s a line of side-scrolling games with anime heroines and fantasy worlds and less-than-sensible armor, all of which is hardly unique in video games. Valis, however, was in at the ground floor of all that back in 1986, and as such there’s a lot to say about its influence and history. I tried to get into as much of that as I could in my review at Anime News Network.

 

 

One thing I briefly mentioned was Renovation’s advertising of the Valis games that appeared on the Sega Genesis. Now, there’s no question that Telenet created Valis with male players in mind: Yuko and her friend Reiko wander about in bikini armor, and the home-computer and PC Engine versions of the game sport the same gratuitous undressing scenes that anime OVAs of the era exploited. Yet when Valis III and a remake of the original Valis came to the Sega Genesis in North America, Renovation seemingly marketed them just as much to a female audience. In fact, I assumed Valis was a game for girls when I first saw it in GamePro and Electronic Gaming Monthly so long ago.

Evidence? Well, here’s the ad for Valis III, exhorting players to take on Yuko’s role and wield the sort of Valis. We might laugh at the costume, but we might also note that it’s far less revealing than Yuko’s in-game attire (though the screenshot doesn’t show it). There’s no battle brassiere, no bare midriff, no sights that might turn away concerned parents. Renovation wanted to pitch Valis to a wide range of customers. 

This went against just about everything the Sega Genesis stood for in North America. Sega had swiped away a big chunk of Nintendo’s market by peddling aggressive adverting that targeted teenage and pre-teen boys. Sometimes it was a commercial with groundhog puppets getting squashed by TVs and yelling “SEGA!” Sometimes it was a box illustration that no qualms about showing the heroines of Golden Axe or Alisia Dragoon in full pulp-fantasy metal swimsuits. You might even look at Renovation’s ad for El Viento, in which we’re told that the Mistress of the Wind "will blow your mind." Har har. They weren't going for that with Valis.

The Genesis version of the original Valis went further. The artwork renders Yuko’s outfit as nothing that would be barred from a Super Friends cartoon, and the accompanying writeup seems acutely targeted at girls: what would YOU do if your friend started dating a weird dude from another dimension? It again seems far from the usual pitches for Genesis games full of action and violence and yelling.

Perhaps that’s why I first assumed that Valis was aimed at the same audience as She-Ra, that Yuko was an avatar of feminist empowerment in a world of evil male oppressors. And the games, at least in Genesis form, don’t really dissuade that. There are no absurd sequences of Yuko getting dressed or her compatriots taking showers. It’s entirely possible that some young women latched onto Valis exactly as Renovation hoped. Like Trouble Shooter snatching up slogans like “The best man for the job is a woman” for its box copy and magazine ads, Renovation’s packaging of Valis struck an interesting turnabout in the brazenly male-focused marketing of the Genesis era.

Renovation’s Valis spots and Yuko’s altered costumes bring to mind another obscure case of companies marketing women warriors: Golden Girl and the Guardians of the Gemstones. This was Galoob’s attempt at replicating He-Man’s success in the mid-1980s, predating She-Ra by a year or so. Golden Girl faltered rapidly and didn’t last long enough for a TV series or a second wave of toys, and I suspect that the promotional art on the boxes (stolen from this auction) might have put off some parents and possibly kids as well. The toys were aimed at girls, but on the packages Golden Girl looks more like something a 23-year-old bassist would have painted on the side of his van circa 1985.

Galoob apparently missed an important memo for 1980s and 1990s advertising: if an outfit shows a woman’s navel, it’s no longer appropriate for children. Renovation apparently knew better. 

Did it work? I have no idea, but Renovation could take heart that such advertising was worth it if at least one girl with a Sega Genesis felt included by the Valis games or empowered by Yuko. It probably did them more good than playing Sword of Sodan.

Little Things: Pop Breaker

Pop Breaker could have very well ended up forgettable. It’s a puzzle-shooter for the Game Gear, putting together its stages with basic graphics and rigid design. Heck, even its name sounds like a bland, long-buried knockoff of Breakout or Arkanoid. Yet it went through the trouble of decorating itself in anime aesthetics of a certain style, and so it became, then and now, a cute encapsulation of the late 1980s and early 1990s. That’s nowhere more apparent than in the game’s seemingly irrelevant intermission screen.

 

Yuki, the heroine of Pop Breaker, guides a tank named Diana (or “Daiana” as it appears in the game) through overhead stages of drones and turrets and other bullet-spewing hazards. Both tank and pilot are seemingly drawn from the pages of Masamune Shirow’s Dominion Tank Police, with Yuki resembling Leona quite a bit and Diana resembling Bonaparte only a little. The game adds some small strategy when you select just where to mount Diana’s cannon. It can be stuck in the middle or placed on either side, for that Bonaparte look, and it plays a big role in how you’ll face the game’s challenges.

It helps to consider Pop Breaker a puzzle game above all else. The tank scoots along gradually and fires slowly, and from the first stage it’s apparent that strategy is the only way forward. You’re even given the chance to look over an entire level before starting (and again by pausing), and this lets you figure out how to use the barriers and power-ups and bullet-bouncing mirrors to your advantage. The game doesn’t run all that smoothly and Diana is an uncommonly large target, taking up a good chunk of the screen and having armor so thin that just one shot sends it up in flames. Even so, that brings a certain satisfaction when you finish a level. 

Beating each stage also brings up an intermission screen, one that serves no apparent purpose other than to show Yuki chilling in the cockpit of the tank. No, the player’s score isn’t tabulated here; that happens on another screen. The intermission is just there to exhibit an impressive pixel portrait of a woman and her workplace.

Yet that adds something. In Pop Breaker’s scrap of storyline Yuki is piloting Diana through the rigorous tests for a special-forces police unit, and the intermission is a reminder that it’s all just a game, that Yuki’s taking it one stage at a time and allowing herself a cocksure moment with each small triumph. Games of this vintage often skip the details, especially when they’re cramming a lot into a handheld’s screen, but Pop Breaker wants to make sure it evokes the feel of Dominion Tank Police and the surrounding school of anime heroines and bulky vehicles. We can find plenty of games that combine those two elements today, but they’re rarely done in that casual, fluffy-haired 1980s style that so clearly influenced Pop Breaker.

Also appreciated is the game-over screen, where we see a green-haired coworker greeting a slightly embarrassed Yuki with a banner that reads "Game Over" in hiragana. You know, just to rub it in. There’s no smoldering wreckage of bitter defeat to be seen, since it's just an entrance exam. Maybe that’s why Diana is so fragile and enemy fire so damaging: this academy only accepts perfect scores. 

The game’s ending is also short and comforting. Yuki passes the course and gets her official uniform, now resembling Dominon’s Leona even more, and poses triumphantly before a Diana that now looks like a low-slung Metal Gear mech. Pop Breaker avoids any soberingly Pyrrhic twist or a DonPachi-level revelation that you were fighting and killing your fellow soldiers the whole time. Nope, none of that. It just shows another cheerful picture.

So I salute Pop Breaker, a sluggish but generally enjoyable action-puzzle game with just enough touches to evoke a charming and largely dormant style of anime and manga style. It’s a neat little find among Microcabin’s varied offerings, and it deserves to be remembered now that it’s forced to share search engine results with an identically named smartphone puzzle game. 

By the way, actual Pop Breaker cartridges are curious in that they only work on Japanese Game Gears—not by design like certain Mega Drive games, but because of a bug. That’s an obstacle for anyone who wants to play the game in its only officially released form, but Pop Breaker is all about facing obstacles and taking them in stride.  

Moving Signs

A quick notice: this site will move to a new host shortly, so the images and the old site archive may not work for a brief period. The actual blog entries shouldn't go anywhere, but I may suspend my usual monthly updates until everything is back to normal. 

This is all part of a plan to save money and still maintain my indulgent project here. The truth is that I was overpaying for hosting far too long, and it wasn’t out of some misguided idea that the entire world needed immediate, unfettered access to a Gungrave review I wrote back in 2002. I just wasn’t looking at what I was buying and what I actually needed for a website with such an obscure and personal focus. 

I don’t want to tread too deep into the unpleasantness of the real world, but there are many signs that money will get worse for a lot of people in a lot of places very soon, and nerdy excesses should be the first things trimmed. I will keep my little site around, of course, so I’ll cut back in other areas. For example, I have already sworn off buying any physical copies of old games unless they happen to be either exceptional deals or made by Treasure. That way Kid Fenris will stick around even if cheap copies of Tiny Toons: Scary Dreams or McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure tempt me.

Shinesman: Still Bright

Special Duty Combat Unit Shinesman is the rare anime seemingly remembered for its dub. That’s not to disparage the original Japanese version of this OVA, a 1996 two-partner based on Kaim Tachibana’s manga, yet it’s hard to deny that Shinesman left its strongest impression on account of Coastal Carolina’s English adaptation. There are far less flattering ways we might remember an anime series, after all. 

Two worlds overlap within Shinesman, as the buttoned-down office atmosphere of Right Trading Company hides a team of sentai superheroes. New hire Hiroya Matsumoto ends up leading them when he interviews well enough, mostly by naming red as his favorite heroic color. Thus he becomes Shinesman Red alongside the suave Ryoichi Hayami as Shinesman Moss Green, the doting father Shotaro Ono as Shinesman Sepia, the put-upon Riko Hidaka as Shinesman Salmon Pink, and the automotively obsessed Shogo Yamadera as Shinesman Gray. Their adversaries, disguised as corporate clients, are the undercover alien royals Sasaki and Seki, who endure a visit from Sasaki’s doofus cousin Princess Shina. 

True to their corporate battlefield, the Shinesman shun traditional Power Rangers weapons like swords and lasers in favor of lethal business cards and exploding tie clips, while the team juggle the demands of career and family in between their clashes with monsters. It's all a cute sendup of tokusatsu conventions, but it has only one real joke at its core. Much of the gags surrounding it are just sly references, such as the characters having the same family names as their voice actors. Nor doe it root all that deeply into the nature of corporate wage-slavery, apart from the innate reminder that our heroes' true lives are outside of the office. 

For its North American release Shinesman landed at Coastal Carolina, a dubbing studio that rarely did anything half-hearted. Their efforts sometimes went to waste on unsalvageable dross, but Shinesman’s humor was just waiting for a spirited treatment. Director Scott Houle oversaw a dub script peppered with jokes from deadpan humor to melodramatic mockeries, and the cast sells it perfectly. We’re walked through the usual cliches of the story, such as Shina meeting and falling for Matsumoto without either of them realizing their true identities, but it’s simply more appealing when punctuated with gags about giant fish and car inspections. To this day I cannot hear the color gray defamed without wanting to defend it as “a regal, manly color.” 

Highly liberal dub adaptations sometimes carry an underlying contempt for the source material, such as the crass rewrites for Ghost Stories or some of the old Streamline treatments that seemingly aimed to improve the Japanese scripts. Shinesman doesn’t come off like that. The dialogue feels more like it’s enhancing the original, sharpening and polishing its sense of parody without replacing it. Inherent gags like Yamadera’s obsession with his car, Matsumoto’s overprotective stance on his little brother, or the recurring unmarketability of the Shinesman colors all come through beautifully, and the embellishments fit surprisingly well. It’s hard to choose a favorite line, though I’m partial to Pamela Weidner’s delivery of Shina proclaiming “I am NOT a BIMBO.” 

Shinesman has lost little of its charm over the years. True, there are some dated jokes about long-distance calls, Prince’s name change, and a South Park reference that was a bit much even back in 1999. These are negligible skips. Shinesman will not be ranked high for its production standards or narrative complexity, as it’s just a mid-budget promotion for Tachibana’s manga (one that apparently helped, since that manga lasted 17 volumes). Yet in dubbed form it’s a funny, endearing little gem with a rare sense of affectionate sarcasm. 

Shinesman also didn’t overstay. It’s common for us to see a delightful old OVA and wish there could be more of it, but I’m not sure how long Shinesman could have kept up the pace even with Coastal Carolina handling it. After all, it’s a very straightforward story beneath the humor.

The only narrative thread left dangling is a possible relationship between Matsumoto and Shina (who apparently doesn’t even appear in the manga). Like any good comedy, Shinesman goes past the sale and leaves me actually caring about what the future holds for that dorky princess and her entry-level prince in shining tokusatsu armor. That could easily wrap up with, let’s say, a post-credits gag where Shina comes to work at the company. Perhaps that even happens in the audio drama, which I’ll have to track down one of these days. 

I uploaded the dubbed version of Shinesman to YouTube many years ago, but I’ve been hesitant to promote it just in case the rights holders are watching. Fortunately, this website sees so little traffic these days that I’m certain it won’t ping any legal radar with this entry. Give it a watch, and leave a comment if you like. It’s heartening to see remarks from viewers who remember it and newcomers who appreciate it. There’s no telling if that would translate into Shinesman actually selling if Discotek or another company reissued it, but they’ve brought back things much more obscure. 

I would grab a copy, of course. Coastal Carolina shut down in 2003, and while their catalog includes such excellent dubs as Blue Sub No. 6, Kite, and the Virtua Fighter TV series (yes, really), I think Shinesman is their best work. A re-release would be the best way to remember them and to remember an axiom that holds even in the cautious realm of translation, localization, and dubbing: it’s not what you’re given, it’s what you do with it. 

Updates and Updates

It's time for that annual post about myself—or at least one about the stuff I’m doing elsewhere. Life is busy, yes, but I sometimes find enough breathing room to write about games and cartoons beyond this site. So here’s what I’ve been doing. 

For starters, I wrote the liner notes for Discotek’s release of Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast-Food Grifters. I am forever fond of Mamoru Oshii, and this might be his most self-indulgent creation ever: one big movie-length joke about petty lunch-counter thieves and post-war Japan that references plenty of the director’s previous work. It’s an incredibly layered mockumentary that will either entice you completely or exhaust your patience within the first three minutes, so you definitely should find out where you land by picking it up on Blu-Ray. 

That’s not all I can point to as I attempt to build a post from merely personal matters. I also reviewed three games over at Anime News Network, including one that I think just about everyone should try. 

That game is Shadow of the Ninja Reborn. I could say that it’s an extensive overhaul of the NES side-scroller from 1990, but I really think it’s best approached as an entirely new creation. That way you can go in fresh and take in all of the gloriously detailed levels, experiment with the special weapons, and appreciate just how much though and craftsmanship Tengo Project put into the game. Ninja rebels Hayate and Kaede dash through one spectacular scene after another: glittering rooftops, rainswept docks, airship fleets, and tiny ledges and platforms that test your precision beautifully. Apart from some climbing mechanics (and Kaede’s outfit) there’s not much I would change. It’s tough, but it’s the good kind of tough, the kind of tough that makes you gladly retry that level instead of groaning and shrugging and possibly giving up. 

Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is cheap and available just about everywhere. There’s a demo for the curious, and if you like it I’ll advise you that the rest of the game is even better. In fact, I’d call it the best ninja video game I’ve ever played. Better than any Ninja Gaiden. Better than any Shinobi. Better than Kaze Kiri. Better than Ninja Spirit or Ninja Five-O or Ninja Crusaders or Ninja Warriors. And yes, it’s even better than Wrath of the Black Manta. I’m sure I’ll get heaps of angry comments for that last proclamation. 

I also recommend Sunsoft is Back! Retro Game Selection. Sunsoft technically never went away, but this collection has three games never before officially translated: 53 Stations of the Tokaido, The Wing of Madoola, and Ripple Island. They’re all old NES games (or Famicom games, if you want to get technical), and two of them show it in ways potentially unflattering. The extreme difficulty of 53 Stations makes it frustrating unless you take full advantage of the collection’s rewind feature and save states. The same might go for The Wing of Madoola, a savagely hard side-scrolling action-RPG, though at least its mechanics are relatively complex and its heroine was a minor trend-setter in an era that seldom reversed the cliché of heroes rescuing princesses. 

The best part of Sunsoft is Back! is Ripple Island, a charming adventure game where two kids defeat an evil frog king and make plenty of animal friends along the way. It’s built around the same exhaustive, try-everything concept as most point-and-click quests of the day, but it’s lenient on the player and makes it difficult for protagonists Kyle and Cal to meet an unpleasant fate. It’s not difficult, though, to enjoy the game’s procession of goofy creatures and cute dialogue, though, and it all makes me wish that Ripple Island had been localized way back in 1989. Of course, it’d probably have been released in limited quantities and would now be as expensive as Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom. 

Lastly, I'll bring up Elrentaros Wanderings. It’s one of those games I wanted to like, if only as a historic curiosity. The parallel worlds of a fantasy realm and a modern high school make an interesting premise, and the game’s pedigree promises the same mix of farming and action-RPG that drives Rune Factory. It’s even made by Yoshifumi Hashimoto and Hakama, the same crew that’s behind recent Rune Factory titles. I’m always interested when the keepers of a popular game series try to duplicate that success with a similar but technically unrelated game, whether it’s The Last Story or Mighty No 9 or Major Minor’s Majestic March. 

Too bad there’s just not that much going on with Elrentaros Wanderings. Some of its simplification is welcome, especially when you have to race across town for various subquests. Yet so much of the game is insubstantial: the dungeons are okay but force too many return trips, the storyline is sluggish, and there’s not enough to do in terms of character relationships or agriculture. Yes, I’m complaining that a game doesn’t let me spend enough time growing fantasy-RPG alfalfa and raising chickens.

And that’s what I’ve been doing this year. Come back next month and I’ll go back to shunning such modern pursuits so I can spend thousands of words dissecting the pixels of Micro Cabin’s Mystic Formula or wondering if anyone ever dubbed Dragon Century.