My First Fansub

The mid-1990s weren't such a bad time to watch anime. Japanese cartoons didn’t fill an aisle at Best Buy or clog all corners of the Internet like they do today, but they were conveniently infiltrating television and video stores back in 1995. I was better (or worse) off than many young anime geeks who picked through the “animation” sections at their Blockbusters. My local comic shop rented just about every new anime officially released in North America, no matter how awful it might be. This let me discover many things I could’ve done without, but it also kept me well outside of anime fan circles.

I was dimly aware that there was a large community of people peddling tapes of anime that you couldn’t find at Suncoast, but I didn’t care as long as I could freely rent Dangaioh, Gunsmith Cats, El-Hazard, Blue Seed, Urusei Yatsura, Angel Cop, and whatever else the comic store bothered to stock. Then my sister went to a comic convention and returned with one of those “fansubs.” It was Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, only this version had Japanese dialogue, Chun-Li’s uncensored shower scene, the original lawsuit-friendly character names, and a soundtrack free of Alice in Chains. It also came with a flyer listing a bunch of other tapes offered by a fansub distributor.

So I look over the titles, and something jumps out at me. Why, they have the sequel to that Silent Möbius movie I oh-so-vaguely enjoyed! And it’s only $19.99! That’s a steal for something that’s only available in Japan! I’m ordering that right now!



Yes, it was a massive rip-off in several ways, though at least the tape came in a clamshell with a Xerox of the movie’s Japanese packaging. That way I could see that this thing cost about $98 in Japan, making a $20 price tag seem a bargain at the time. Of course, it wasn’t long before I ventured online and learned that a lot of fans just traded fansubs, and that most of the people who flat-out sold them charged about seven bucks per tape.

And what about Silent Möbius: The Motion Picture 2? Disappointing. Silent Möbius is and always was a cliché carnival about women hunting slimy trans-dimensional invaders in rainy future Tokyo, but the original Silent Möbius: The Motion Picture had some slickly animated battles. The second film is much slower, featuring more of reluctant heroine Katsumi Liqueur whining about the exact same things she whined about (and seemingly got over) in the first movie. It also makes the mistake of humanizing the Lucifer Hawks, the other-dimensional antagonists of the series. The first movie keeps them as slavering monstrosities beyond humanity's realm, sorta like a low-caliber Lovecraft story with generic anime women instead of virulent racism. Silent Möbius 2 makes the Lucifer Hawks more like the angry, conniving demons found in just about every anime ever made, robbing itself of a good chunk of novelty.

It’s a different world today. No one cares much about Silent Möbius, fansubs are so plentiful online that they overwhelm the official anime publishers, and VHS bootlegs like this are just quaintly embarrassing pieces of nostalgia. There’s certainly nothing else interesting about my blurry old copy. It was subbed by “E. Monsoon Productions,” a name that now brings up only a few lists of obsessive anime fans’ videotape collections.

The anime nerd that I was can take comfort that Silent Möbius: The Motion Picture 2 wasn’t officially released in North America until years after he paid for his pricey fansub. Bandai brought both films to DVD in 2008, redubbing the first one and unwisely not selling the two movies together. I didn’t bother buying them, as I was hurting for money and my interest in Silent Möbius 2 had faded by then. Perhaps I knew that I’d already spent too much on it.

Depressing Game Endings: M.U.S.H.A.

The Sega Genesis library boasts an estimated 47,000,000 shooters, and Compile’s M.U.S.H.A. is the best of them. It’s visually stunning even today, it's well-designed, and, of course, it's unfairly hard. From the fourth level onward, it’s a frantic battle for survival that all but forces you to exploit the game’s cheats to their fullest.



There’s even a nasty surprise after the game’s assumed final boss, as a recurring orange-and-black mecha swoops in to pelt you with one last flurry of lasers and homing fireballs.



And then it’s over. The M.U.S.H.A. mecha’s pilot, a young woman named Terri, limps out of the cockpit, and her nerve-flaying battles are finally at an end.



Well, not quite. Terri has only minor injuries, and the game assures us (with three exclamation points) that she’s just waiting for future adventures! Funny how Terri doesn’t really look like she’s waiting for future adventures, especially not any in the form of grueling, Compile-made shooters. She looks like she’s praying for merciful death to release her from the unending, robot-waged war in which she's trapped.



Or maybe she’s actually in rehab for a crippling heroin addiction, as the M.U.S.H.A. manual suggests.

Fortunately for Terri, Compile stopped making shooters around 1993, as the company landed a hit with the puzzle-game series Puyo Puyo and created little else until 2001's Zanac X Zanac. Then Compile folded. This denied the world many excellent shooters in the vein of M.U.S.H.A., but at least their mecha pilots were finally allowed to retire.

Metal Storm: The Destruction of Gundam Copyrights

Irem and Tamtex’s Metal Storm is an often under-appreciated marvel from the NES era. It’s a solidly designed mecha-shooter at its base level, but then it throws in the ability to reverse gravity, affecting enemies, obstacles, and the player’s M-308 Gunner robot. It’s a wonder that this idea hasn’t been ripped off countless times since Metal Storm’s 1991 debut, but then again, the game was never a huge success. There are several reasons for that. For one thing, Irem couldn’t afford to market or distribute Metal Storm heavily. And even though the game landed a Nintendo Power cover, it didn’t catch on among a gaming press that was already inundated with NES releases. I doubt that the M-308 Gunner itself had anything to do with Metal Storm’s low profile, although it lacks something found on most robots of its day. Everything about the M-308 Gunner makes sense until you notice that it has no head, and that big orange shape on its chest doesn't immediately register as a cockpit. Perhaps American kids just weren’t ready for a mecha without a face. Someone involved with Metal Storm’s print ad thought the exact same thing and decided that this robot needed a head. Any head would do. So the advertised version of the M-308 Gunner borrowed a head off one of Japan’s most recognizable anime robots: the Zaku from Mobile Suit Gundam. As low-level enemy mecha, Zakus are destroyed by the truckload in various Gundam series, and by the end of the 1980s, they were almost as recognizable in Japan as the iconic white Gundam robots themselves. In America, however, no one would spot a Zaku’s head (or a Gundam-like shield) outside of a few devoted anime nerds who happened to page through a GamePro issue. Nobody at Bandai, which had canceled a Zeta Gundam NES game back in 1988, noticed this copyright violation either. They were too busy prepping Doozybots for that fall's TV schedules. Metal Storm also might’ve stolen its name from a movie about The Destruction of Jared-Syn, but that’s another story.

Darkstalkers and the Enigma of Trouble Man

There’s a special procedure to follow whenever I mention Darkstalkers. First I have to explain that the series started out as Capcom’s second fighting-game venture after the success of Street Fighter, which Darkstalkers briefly eclipsed in popularity among Japanese fans. In America, though, the monster-filled Darkstalkers never really caught on to that extent, and Capcom shut down the whole thing after three major games.

Then I have to explain that this is a terrible waste, because the Darkstalkers games are excellent. Marvelously animated and highly amusing, they shed the few realistic traces of Street Fighter and build a cartoon world where chainsaw-legged zombie rockers moon over Chinese ghost-girls, mummified kings turn werewolves into wiener dogs, and a bee-woman dies after she stings an opponent, only for her clone to burst anew from her foe’s honeycombed flesh.



Anyway, the PlayStation port of the original Darkstalkers isn’t very important. It was scheduled to ship near the system’s launch and show that Sony’s new console could handle a heavily animated 2-D Capcom fighter. Yet the game was delayed until March of 1996, a month after the generally better sequel, Night Warriors, came out for the Sega Saturn. By that point no one cared that Darkstalkers was on the PlayStation or that it had an inexplicable and strangely catchy theme song.



Instead of the arcade game’s introduction, the Japanese PlayStation port of Darkstalkers (known over there as Vampire) has grainy footage playing along to “Trouble Man,” in which somewhat notable J-rock singer Eikichi Yazawa declares that he’s gonna be trouble, ‘cause, baby, he’s a trouble man. He proves this by accepting a challenge for a rumble. Toniiiiight. This would be nothing out of the ordinary for Japanese pop carelessly in search of English lyrics, but these lines were actually written by Andrew Gold, who’s had a storied musical career that stretches from hit ‘70s singles to the theme music for Mad About You.

Capcom removed this intro for the North American release, but “Trouble Man” clung to Darkstalkers. The song pops up in the brief credits for the American syndicated Darkstalkers cartoon, which is horrible enough to shame even its Street Fighter cousin. A longer version of “Trouble Man” also blares over the closing for the four-part Night Warriors anime series, which is just plain boring after a slightly promising first act. Someone clearly paid for “Trouble Man,” and dammit, they were going to get their money’s worth.



It was never clear why Capcom wanted Darkstalkers to have a completely unrelated theme song full of guitar hooks and nonsense, and no other Capcom fighters had anthems until Street Fighter IV’s “Indestructible.” Perhaps someone at the company just liked Andrew Gold.

When Capcom rolled around Darkstalkers 3 (known as Vampire Savior in Japan and among American kids who owned Saturns), “Trouble Man” was nowhere to be found, and the series went under not long after that. Would it have survived if Capcom had given it another theme song? And if Capcom greenlights another Darkstalkers, will it have another rousing opening number about trouble, men, and various combinations of the two? We’d better find out.

Conquest of the Bio Force Apes

Is Bio Force Ape the most popular NES game never released? I'd say so. It drifted into obscurity after Seta canceled it in 1991, yet this past decade gave rise to a geek subculture that hunts down canceled games, and Bio Force Ape was always pursued. At first it was only one of several sought-after lost games, squabbling for space with Bandai’s Ultimate Journey, Capcom’s Black Tiger, and such planning-stage pipe dreams as New Kids on the Block and Hellraiser. Yet one amazing prank and its buttery residue shot Bio Force Ape to the top of the list, so much so that fans started making their own version of the game.



Then the real Bio Force Ape showed up. It appeared in a Yahoo Japan auction, and the game quickly made its way to 1up.com’s Game Night, where the public saw it played for the first time in 19 years.

And it’s amazing. Well, it’s no rediscovered masterpiece, but it’s great fun in that absurd, clumsy way that middle-grade NES games often stumbled into. There’s no question that Bio Force Ape makes the most of a game about a monkey who grows into a pro-wrestler ape and bodyslams bee-men, monstrous sumo wrestlers, and mutants with crocodile jaws for legs. It’s also technically impressive for an NES game, with a well-animated simian hero and some dizzyingly fast rides on moving platforms and mine carts. In another world, perhaps Seta released Bio Force Ape and built it into their Battletoads, with its own toy line and terrible cartoon special.



Then again, Seta would’ve needed to actually finish the game. This version of Bio Force Ape is as far as things got, but it lasts only three levels, and they’re noticeably incomplete when it comes to the enemies and overall design. It’s believed that this game was built as a demo, but someone went through the trouble of giving it a grueling final stage and a shocking twist ending that we ask the audience not to reveal.

Despite the rampantly bizarre scenes in the game, my favorite thing is the ape’s rolling move: he can drop to the ground at any point and just tumble forward at insanely high speed. It doesn’t damage enemies, it doesn’t get him past many obstacles, and it doesn’t really serve much of a purpose. It’s just fun to screw around with it. And that’s the legacy of Bio Force Ape.

Demo Demo PlayStation Predicts the Future

Sony’s Demo Demo PlayStation series is less than a footnote in the system’s history. They’re very similar to the Play Play demo discs that were mailed to new PlayStation owners across Japan starting in 1995, as Demo Demo volumes are also loaded with promotional videos and playable previews. Unlike Play Play, Demo Demo discs were originally made for PlayStation store kiosks in Japan, and they were perhaps the first PlayStation demo discs ever released. They stretch back to the system’s launch in late 1994, making them relics of a time when Sony was doubtless worried that the PlayStation would flop and send their entire video-game division scrambling for new jobs at Nintendo’s Virtual Boy department.

I'll remember Demo Demo PlayStation mostly for including a playable version of Bounty Arms, yet these discs are interesting beyond that sample of my most-wanted unreleased game. True, Demo Demo volumes are bare-bones compared to the Play Play series. Play Play discs come with plenty of extras, commercials, original games, booklets, and glossy designs. Demo Demo discs just get covers with generic comics. That's understandable if these cases were meant to sit idly on a shelf while the disc ran in a kiosk somewhere. Sony gave Demo Demo covers to any manga artist willing to sacrifice a few panels to obscurity.

My favorite Demo Demo PlayStation cover comes from Volume 11, because it’s the only one I even remotely understand.



If this were a good website like Magweasel, I’d have a detailed translation of this comic. It’s not, so here’s a crude guess (edit: I am, in fact, mostly wrong; see the comment below). Starting on the upper-right and going clockwise, we find two girls wolfing down cake, with the brown-haired one fretting about gaining weight. Her blonde friend points out that she’s not worried about her own figure, explaining in the second panel that “games” keep her thin. I assume she’s talking about sports.

Our heroine, being none too bright, interprets this to mean PlayStation games, and the next panel sees her embracing a “Game Diet” with the help of her trusty Sony-manufactured game console. This diet presumably consists of her sitting around all day while playing Ridge Racer, Philosoma, and maybe even Hermie Hopperhead. In the last panel, she laments that she hasn’t lost any weight on the Game Diet, while the blonde girl laments the unfathomable stupidity on display.

Edit: Since I guessed wrong, here's a actual translation.

PANEL ONE

Brown-Haired Stupid Girl: We’ve had so many sweets this fall, we’re going to get fat…

Blonde-Haired Smart Girl: Oh, I’ll be OK.

PANEL TWO

Smart Girl: I lose weight with video games. I play them so intensely, I don’t have time to eat, you know?

Stupid Girl (vagrant floating thought): Really.

PANEL THREE

Stupid Girl: All right! I’ll try it too! I’m on the Game Diet!

(Headband: Something about losing 5 kilograms. It’s hard to read.)

PANEL FOUR

Stupid Girl: I was so bad at playing games, I got depressed and started eating. And I gained weight!

Smart Girl: You are such an idiot.

This sort of allegedly classic humor has entertained manga readers for decades, yet there’s something charming about this little throwaway gag. Perhaps it’s the way the comic unwittingly predicts Wii Fit fourteen years down the road. Or perhaps it’s the backhanded, Sony-endorsed admission that playing video games will make you a gloomy fatass.

The Rise and Fall of Masamune Shirow

[Note: this entry charts a manga author's descent into creepy porn, so it contains images that may offend some workplaces.]

Few authors in the manga industry went wrong like Masamune Shirow. True, he remains well-known in the North American anime and manga market, largely because of comics he made nearly twenty years ago. Those comics are kept in print, and his name is invoked and praised whenever a new Appleseed movie or Ghost in the Shell adaptation arrives. Yet his reputation is a lean shadow of what it was during the 1990s, when Shirow seemed unstoppable.

Shirow started off in the 1980s with a generic spaceship manga called Black Magic, but no one was really impressed until he rolled out Appleseed, a dense tale of science and politics gone astray in a 21st-century urban utopia. It set many Shirow standards: pretty and highly lethal heroines, police-procedural stories, rampant philosophical technobabble, and incredibly detailed mechanical designs for everything from firearms to city-crawling robots. It appealed to content-starved American comic readers of the 1990s, and Shirow caught on in a big way.

It wasn’t just Appleseed, either, as Shirow recycled the same approach (Women! Mechanical suits! Violence!) in better form. Ghost in the Shell added more police drama and copious lumps of artificial-intelligence ruminations, while Dominion went the opposite direction and made a silly comic about tank-driving cops in a future of pollution and terrorist robot catgirls. And then there was Orion, a mixture of space opera, Buddhist-Shinto mysticism, and concepts so insane that Shirow admitted he didn't even known what they meant.


Shirow grew even more popular with the mainstream exposure of the first Ghost in the Shell film in 1996, and it wasn’t all just because he could draw anime chicks straddling mechanized police armor. Most of the manga titles foisted on readers in the 1990s were cutesy piffle or dated pulp (completely unlike today’s scene, of course), and they were lightweight even when they were enjoyable. Shirow’s stuff was hardly of great substance, but his stories were usually driven by interesting ideas. His comics unsubtly reminded readers of this by having characters spout off reams of tangential discussion about the Gaia hypothesis, particle physics, or just how human a disembodied brain can be. It bordered on philosophy-student gibberish at times, and yet it was a blessing to any manga reader who wanted something to think about.

Of course, a lot of Shirow’s appeal came from his English translators. Frederik Schodt, Toren Smith, Dana Lewis, and other members of Studio Proteus dressed up Shirow’s stories with dialogue that was memorable, funny, and about as natural as a conversation can be when a bodiless synthetic consciousness is lecturing the vagrant cyber-spirit of a government operative about the benefits and risks of non-corporeal living.

There were, however, signs that Shirow possessed unsavory tendencies, and no one had to hunt for them. He seemed to write at the rate of one bad decision per comic: a gooey, virtual lesbian three-way in Ghost in the Shell (which was cut from the first U.S. version of the comic), a photosynthetic, bug-winged pixie who spent a fourth of Dominion naked, and a scene in Orion where the heroine is rolled up by karma-magic, thrown into the ocean, and dragged down to the lair of octopus creatures who want to eat her excrement. Shirow had himself some issues.

Little Things: Cyberbots

Cyberbots isn’t my favorite fighting game, but it’s my favorite obscure one. It’s a mid-1990s experiment by Capcom’s talented designers, paying tribute to the orbital-war intrigue and clanking, realistic robots of Gundam. It’s full of huge, well-animated mecha smashing each other in front of richly drawn backdrops, and I often wonder why it doesn’t command even a fraction of the attention given to Street Fighter and Darkstalkers.

And then I remember why Cyberbots isn’t popular. It’s far too shallow to entice the combo-memorizing players who take on fighters competitively, and it doesn’t have the marketing to pull in the anime and model-kit fans. Yes, the giant-robot collectors of the world will buy variations of the same Gundam and Mazinger figures year in and year out, but they don’t want a big plastic version of Blodia, the flagship machine of Cyberbots; its spokesmecha, if you will.



Blodia is the Ryu of the game: a well-rounded combatant and the chosen robot of the game’s ostensible hero, the gung-ho Jin Saotome. Blodia also embodies the impressive level of detail in Cyberbots. When it comes to the small touches in the game, I can’t think of a better example than the spent shells that fly out of Blodia’s arm with each punch.



Mind you, that happens with every regular punch. It’s not a special move. Just tap one of the game’s two attack buttons (I told you it was shallow), and Blodia will spew tiny casings from its elbow.

Blodia and Jin Saotome later showed up in the Marvel vs. Capcom series, gaining some hilarious, excessively damaging attacks. Still, nothing really strikes my admiration like those little empty cartridges tumbling through the air.

The Vague Search for Gu Gu Ganmo

In my days at Anime Insider, the magazine occasionally got letters from people trying to identify Japanese cartoons they’d seen long ago. Most of these requests were easily answered by pointing out semi-obscure ‘80s creations like the Unico movies, Macron-1, or Galaxy Rangers, the last of which is, shockingly, not even anime.

One stumped us, though. A reader wanted to know the name of an anime comedy shown in France in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and two major details about the show were offered: it featured a giant yellow alien bird that came to live with and irritate a human boy, and one of the show’s running gags involved the boy’s older sister kicking him in the crotch when she was riled. No one at the magazine had the slightest idea of what this show could be, and I gave up after a few Google searches revealed places offensive even to an office wallpapered with anime posters.

Years later, I looked over some of the old series represented in Konami’s shonen-manga crossover fighting game for the PSP, and I noticed a 1985 cartoon called Gu Gu Ganmo. The bird is pink instead of yellow, but everything else about it matches up. It was shown in France, it features numerous crotch-kicking jokes, and it stars a trouble-making bird of possibly alien origin.



In fact, Gu Gu Ganmo seems more popular among nostalgic French viewers than Japanese audiences. The first French-dubbed episode was uploaded here, and it reveals a fairly standard comedy in the Doraemon mold. Young Hanpeita’s pet bird flies away one morning, so his sister gives him a huge egg that she finds in the street. Soon a giant pink creature hatches out and takes up residence with Hanpeita’s family. Mostly unremarkable antics ensue as the self-centered Ganmo torments our hero by hogging the bathroom, snoring loudly, and embarrassing him in front of girls and nose-picking neighborhood bullies alike. It might not be particularly imaginative, but Ganmo found enough of an audience to last 50 episodes and get a movie deal.

As far as I’m concerned, the highlight of the show is its opening, which has all of the characters dancing on stage for no real reason. I love this sort of thing, and I wish every anime show, regardless of genre, led with some pointless Broadway-style musical number. Even Code Geass might've been good with a big chorus line to start it off.



As is often the case with old cartoons and the Internet, the edifying clips of Gu Gu Ganmo are outnumbered by the clips that suit someone’s fetish. This can be seen in a YouTube account dedicated to nothing but the girls of Gu Gu Ganmo farting. An entire account.

So, possibly French letter-writer, there’s your answer: Gu Gu Ganmo. I hope you found it before the farting fans did.

Tape Test: Violence Jack

[This begins a semi-regular feature that examines anime available in North America only through old VHS releases. The first installment looks at Violence Jack, because you really can't start anywhere else. Please note that this entry covers disturbing subject matter.]

Go Nagai is perhaps the most famous perv in the entire history of Japanese comics and cartoons. He rose to infamy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Japan’s manga-consuming public hungered for an author who would push the boundaries of comic superheroes, giant robots, and taste. Nagai was there, summoning floods of controversy with his risqué titles, and he didn’t stop with the schoolyard puerility of Harenchi Gakuen. He worked in all sorts of pulp fields, like a performance artist covering himself in robots and demons and naked women before writhing upon a huge, cheaply printed canvas. And the act paid off. Many of Nagai’s comics became industry staples and, of course, prominent animated series. Mazinger, Cutey Honey, Getter Robo, and other Nagai creations are now anime-industry legends.

You won’t find Violence Jack among those legends. Of course, it was successful enough to get a few dozen manga volumes to its name, and it's been relaunched about once a decade since its 1973 debut. Yet it’s never held in as high esteem as Nagai’s more enduring creations, and that may be due to the lack of Violence Jack anime. Companies took three shots at animating Violence Jack, and the results explain why no one else tried after that.

Conceived as a pseudo-sequel to Nagai’s Devilman comics, Violence Jack proved to be a muddled pioneer in post-apocalyptic manga. That apocalypse is a possibly Devilman-related earthquake which destroys civilization, leaving behind vicious remnants of humanity as well as whatever sex and violence Nagai cared to put on the page. It was likely this setting that drew in anime producers back in the 1980s, when Mad Max and Fist of the North Star brought disaster-ravaged worlds into style. Three Violence Jack OVAs were made by largely different production teams, and Manga Entertainment released them all in judiciously censored American form during the 1990s.


Perhaps noting the lack of continuity between the three episodes, Manga started their Violence Jack media blitz with the second OVA, Evil Town. I suspect Manga judged Evil Town as the most controversial of the three episodes, as well as the only one with a remotely interesting (if stupidly implausible) premise: in a city buried by an earthquake, pockets of survivors butcher each other while digging for the surface. Evil Town is also the only Violence Jack OVA put together by anyone important. It was directed by Ichiro Itano, famous for animating the whirlwind missile ballets of Macross, and written by one Noboru Aikawa. Noboru would later change his name to Sho Aikawa and work on The Twelve Kingdoms, Martian Successor Nadesico, and a series called Fullmetal Alchemist. At this point in his career, however, he was still trudging through porn and mediocre OVAs.

Itano prefers his anime gory and grim, so Violence Jack: Evil Town starts with a scruffy police officer named Kawamori gunning down a child for the heinous crime of stealing a ham. So goes life in the buried city's Section A, where politicians and cops ruthlessly strive to maintain order. The boy’s fellow ham thief seeks refuge among the stock 1980s post-apocalyptic bikers of Section B, who quickly murder him. No one quite cares back at Section A, though, because they’ve just dug a gigantic, glowing-eyed dude out of a wall.


Despite some subtle warning signs, Section A's oily leaders decide that the self-named Violence Jack is the answer to their prayers, and they show him off to the thugs of Section B during a big ol’ friendly down-home meet n’ greet. Jack grunts and stares impassively at Mad Saulus, the towering leader of section B, and his transvestite sidekick, Blue. This standoff is interrupted by the arrival of Section C, formed by women who were once raped and assaulted by the men of Section A. Here Itano and Aikawa could make a finely honed statement about the fragile nature of civilization, touching on how savagery and corruption invariably lurk within the halls of power. But no, they just show flashbacks of Section C’s women being violated.

Bounty Arms: The Demo

Bounty Arms shouldn’t be anything special. It’s a PlayStation action title from Data West, an obscure software publisher that rarely made actual games. This particular game also revolves around an awkward idea: anime heroines using telescoping cybernetic arms as whips, grappling hooks, and flamethrowers. Besides, Bounty Arms was canceled, and that strongly implies something was wrong with it, that it wouldn't stand out at all.

But it does.

 
For those aware of it, Bounty Arms seemed unlikely to ever show itself. Unreleased Japanese games are hard to lay hand on, and Bounty Arms is quite low-profile. Yet part of it saw an official release. In 1995, a brief demo of the game appeared on the fifth volume of Demo Demo PlayStation, Sony’s early line of discs made for Japanese store kiosks. The demo is incomplete and barely lasts for two minutes of the game’s first stage (five minutes if you take it slow), but it might be all of Bounty Arms we’ll ever play. And it’s better than I ever thought it'd be.

Data West planned to ship Bounty Arms in April 1995, the same month it appeared in Demo Demo PlayStation. Yet the demo included here isn’t finished. That much is apparent even on the title screen, which mentions a lack of “game balance." One can’t help but catch a whiff of desperation in it, as though Data West itself is confessing that their game isn’t ready and asking you to please patiently enjoy this fine product sample.


The character-select screen presents two playable leads: the dissatisfied, red-haired, red-eyed Rei Misazaki and the blonde, ponytailed, coquettishly grinning Chris Prenacaluto (which is how I’m spelling her mess of a last name until this contest is over). While the artwork recalls a low-rung (and possibly adults-only) 1990s Japanese PC game, it’s an improvement on the washed-out illustration that Data West used in a Bounty Arms ad, and the portraits come close to giving Chris and Rei trace amounts of personality, however stereotyped. They’re identical in gameplay except for one thing: Chris wears her Relic Arm on the right, Rei on the left. It’s a seemingly pointless distinction, but it has subtle effects in battle.

The first level of Bounty Arms is a jungle raid, just like Ikari Warriors and Mercs and every other top-down arcade shooter that might’ve inspired Bounty Arms. Once Chris and Rei get going, their Relic Arms show off the game’s novel approach. Press the one and only attack button, and Chris or Rei whips her Relic Arm like a Castlevania lead, lashing out and retracting the pointy, tentacle-like appendage. The Relic Arm does heavy damage, and any bullets it strikes are bounced back at enemies. Holding down the button charges a meter at the bottom of the screen, and releasing it makes our heroines whirl their Relic Arms in huge circles of flame.

Important Bounty Arms Update

What's this?

















Fuck yes. More soon.

Bounty Arms: Visual Conversation

I recently rewrote my Bounty Arms article, partly to clear up errors and partly because I can’t forget about the game. There are scores of unreleased titles to obsess over, but Data West’s Bounty Arms draws my interest like nothing else. After all, I can’t think of another game that combines overhead perspectives, cybernetic grappling arms, flamethrowers, manga-eyed heroines, and strangely substandard production art.


For years my article meandered under the mistaken impression that Bounty Arms is a shooter like Ikari Warriors when the game’s really more like an overhead Bionic Commando with huge explosions. The new article is functional and curt, but it gets the point across. The point being that I want to find Bounty Arms. I’ve posted about it at Lost Levels, I edited Giant Bomb’s entry, and I even worked the game into a list of amazing unreleased things.

Perhaps a contest is the best way to drum up interest in Bounty Arms. See, I can’t translate the last name of Chris, one of the two Bounty Arms characters. Here’s the katakana for it.



The first word is, of course, “Chris,” but I’m mystified by the second one, separated from the first by a dot. The katakana comes out as “Purenakaruto,” which could turn into all sorts of bizarre phrases. None of them seems to be a typical surname, and someone suggested that the word is, in fact, just a bunch of gibberish that wasn’t supposed to be any familiar name.

So that’s the contest: come up with some interpretations of Chris’ last name and post it below. I’ll pick the one that makes the most sense (or, alternatively, amuses me the most). The winner gets a box full of crap, including games, anime DVDs, game-and-anime trinkets, and maybe some magazines. Here's a katakana chart for reference.

Dreamcast Day: Low-Effort Edition

It’s Dreamcast Day, when Sega fans everywhere look back fondly on the last time their favorite company had the remotest chance for widespread success. In truth, the Dreamcast was doomed from the get-go, but it was a fun little system. And I still have the box for mine!


That’s a smaller library than most Dreamcast owners could claim, but I didn’t care for some of the console’s biggest titles, including Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia, Space Channel 5, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, and Sonic Adventure. In fact, my collection could be smaller still. Ikaruga, Soul Calibur, and Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves are all out on Xbox Arcade, and there’s no reason to keep Guilty Gear X when you’ve got Guilty Gear XX #Reload. Perhaps I’m just fascinated by the cover’s juxtaposition of Ky’s head and Sol’s crotch.

The real oddity here is Evolution 2, which I’ve played for no more than twenty minutes. Yet I won it in a contest at the Gaming Intelligence Agency years ago, and I always find it hard to sell things I’ve won.

Speaking of the GIA, this is excellent. Edit: Or at least it was.

Policenauts: Bizarre Love Triangle

Last week saw a proud moment: a group of fans released a translation patch for the PlayStation version of Policenauts. Many thought that the game, a 1994 digital comic from Metal Gear Solid creator/destroyer Hideo Kojima, was too thick with detailed text for fans to render in English. Well, many were wrong.

I’m very glad to have Policenauts in a language I can understand, as I’ve wanted to play this ever since GameFan first described its sci-fi blend of near-future space colonization, drug-industry conspiracies, shooting interludes, and attempts at an anime version of Lethal Weapon.


Oh, and the New Order references. Kojima can't forget those.


The only troubling part of the game is the way Jonathan Ingram, the blue-haired Mel Gibson stand-in and main character, can grope a lot of the women he questions in his investigations. It’s played off as comedy, and that makes it all the more unnerving when women clearly don’t like Jonathan’s attentions.


Of course, the Policenauts fan’s knee-jerk defense is that the “touch” options don’t show up unless you actually move the cursor over boobs, meaning that you, the player, are the disgusting swine in all this. Not Kojima and his team. It’s not as though they actually made the game and credited a staffer with “breast bouncing supervision.” Oh no no no.

However, there’s something to be said for a game that leaves its worst moments optional and slightly obscured, making it possible to enjoy Policenauts without flicking a secretary’s cleavage. And Policenauts is otherwise enjoyable, as it has both Kojima’s characteristically thorough research and his willingness to continue stacking up plot twists well after everything’s toppled over and caught fire. That’s the good side of Kojima’s insanity, and Policenauts shows plenty of it.

The Wings of Honneamise: Royal Rape Force

[This was originally intended as a review of The Wings of Honneamise, but it turned into a diatribe about the film’s most controversial scene and how anyone who defends it is intellectually dishonest or just human filth. The following article discusses the movie's depiction of sexual assault. Please take precautions if you find that disturbing.]

Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise is often praised as one of the most compelling creations of Japan’s animation industry. In 1987, it stunned many with its gorgeous visions of another world’s first steps into outer space, and it's praised as a monument to the creative heights that animation can reach when freed from commercialism and pandering.


It’s also one of the biggest screw-ups in the history of animated cinema. I’m not talking about the film’s finances; it did well enough at the box office and only failed to break even because it was so incredibly expensive in the first place. No, I’m talking about the film’s drastic, ill-advised, and misogynistic detour off a cliff.

Honneamise is an amazing film at first. Set in a world that’s Not Quite Our Own and looks it, the movie follows a would-be astronaut named Shirotsugh Lhadatt. Shiro’s introduced as a goofball slacker in his nation’s ineffectual Space Force, which hasn’t gone into space and, at best, only manages to get its test astronauts electrocuted by their own urine bags. One night, Shiro meets a religious young woman named Riquinni when she’s handing out alterna-world Chick tracts in the street. Her piously supportive attitude inspires Shiro to volunteer as the Space Force’s next astronaut.


What follows is a film that initially seems far from the usual anime nonsense or mainstream family-oriented schlock. For one thing, Honneamise has some of the most amazing visual world-building I’ve ever seen in a movie. The entire setting is comparable to industrialized nations of the 1950s, but it’s re-imagined in stunning completion, from the cityscapes and vehicles down to the coins, the spoons, the clothing, the TV weather broadcasts, and the origin myths. It’s the sort of movie that reveals new things each time you watch, because there’s too much well-animated detail to take in at once.

Honneamise is also a refreshingly sedate story. Instead of pointless or gaudy imagery, it opens with Shiro reflecting on how he just drifted into the Space Force, and it follows with a fascinating montage of this alternate world’s journey toward powered flight, set to the staccato overtures of a Ryuichi Sakamoto soundtrack. From there, the movie roams through Shiro’s humdrum life. He’s no action-film centerpiece, and his days are spent clowning around with the other Space Force goons and trying to circumvent Riquinni’s strict views on romantic abstinence.


But a problem arises for our main character. In the midst of the Space Force’s efforts to put him up in orbit, Shiro loses his confidence in the program, realizing that it’ll do little to ultimately improve life in his country. He turns to Riquinni, whose house has been bulldozed by creditors, and her passive attitude frustrates him. Clearly, he is a troubled individual, carrying an inner conflict that represents the existential turmoil every member of this sad human race must confront in some way. And Riquinni, with her perpetually self-humbling views of the world, can’t really help him.

So how does Shiro deal with this? He tries to rape her.

Southern Cross Don't Need Men Around Anyhow

I watched a bit of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross the other day. In the heyday of 1980s space-opera anime, it became the middle act of Robotech’s three-show splicing job, and that’s how most kids of the ’80s recall it. I, however, do not. I watched Robotech back when the Armed Forces Network aired it in Germany, but I only remember seeing the Macross part of the series, the one with Rick Hunter and Minmay and the jets that turned into robots and jet-robots. While that’s the most popular third of the show, you’d think I’d at least have some memory of the other two. But I don't, and so Southern Cross is pretty much new territory for me. At most, I recognize some of the more ridiculous sights from Robotech's intro, like the woman in the evening gown floating through laser fire.

Southern Cross is also part of my ongoing exploration of robot-filled anime from the 1980s. Over the past few years, I’ve checked out various well-regarded shows from the era: Ideon, Votoms, Layzner, Dunbine, L-Gaim, and a bunch of Gundams. Some are okay, if dated, but some of them are...well, terrible. They're poorly animated, awkwardly written, sexistly cast, badly paced, and just plain boring. Even Zeta Gundam. Wait, especially Zeta Gundam, which convinced me that Yoshiyuki Tomino, the esteemed co-creator of Gundam, cannot tell a remotely coherent story or grasp how actual human beings behave.

Mediocre shows are hardly unique to any anime era, and yet so many of these older mecha series are considered great beyond their historical context. While I could understand if anime fans liked them with loads of irony, I’ve seen them praised as legitimate classics far too often. 

There are several possible explanations for this. Perhaps fans watched these tepid mecha slogs back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when they lacked anything better in the way of semi-realistic space opera with big robots (which I find plausible, since we’ve all been entranced by dumb cartoons just because they dared to kill off characters). Perhaps fans just like them because they’re not as freakish and pedo-oriented as some modern anime shows (which I find hard to believe, since good is more than the absence of bad or, in this case, the absence of fetishy horrors). Or perhaps it’s proof that too many anime fans will watch, buy, and defend just about anything.


Anyway, Southern Cross has the same cheap look and jumbled storytelling as numerous other series of its era. It also backs some surprisingly dull robots and spaceships, considering it was partly designed to sell toys and models. Yet I find it interesting that Southern Cross is one of the few 1980s mecha anime where the three major characters are women. Our lead is the impulsive, self-spoiled, unjustly promoted pilot Jeanne Francaix, who’s constantly butting heads with her efficient rival Marie Angel and the exasperated, by-the-book officer Lana Isavia.

Surprisingly, there’s no male protagonist for them to surround during a war between aliens and an isolated human colony, and I wonder how hard it was for Southern Cross to avoid putting in a heroic, audience-identification leading man (Tomino, to his credit, tried to build mecha series around women, but he was apparently shot down by Sunrise). The show’s primarily about Jeanne, as she's usually pissing off her commanders, tracking a skilled (and handsome) enemy pilot, and driving her equally laid-back brigade into whatever battles she feels like fighting. Like Macross, Southern Cross is halfway to a comedy, a precursor to Nadesico, Captain Tylor, and other anime satires of the 1990s.

Unfortunately, Southern Cross is still a mecha show for toy-buying boys and geeks, so its three leads act the way that lazy ’80s anime writers thought women acted. When not piloting robots and flipping through fashion magazines, Jeanne takes baths and showers constantly, thus showing herself naked and proving that these Japanese cartoons are NOT KID STUFF. She also bickers with Lana and Marie over dresses and relationships, and all three of them are shoved toward love interests, often unrealistically, over the course of the story. That, however, wasn’t enough to save the show in the eyes of male viewers. It was canceled early, leaving the writers to hurriedly finish up a plot that was supposed to span almost twice as many episodes. Oh well.


And that’s Southern Cross. It doesn’t change my rapidly declining opinion of 1980s mecha anime, but at least it did something different.

Little Things: Duck Tales

You know what I like about Duck Tales for the NES?


When Uncle Scrooge ducks, his hat stays in the air for a split second before descending perfectly to his head. That's what I like about Duck Tales for the NES.

Angel Cop: The Manga

Angel Cop is rightly considered a classic of terrible anime. Released in six parts from 1989 to 1994, it perfectly embodies the violent ethos of much of that era’s direct-to-video animation. It’s even offensive in ways that most anime series never ponder. Resembling a brainless and anti-Semitic Ghost in the Shell, Angel Cop favors a near future where the thuggish members of Japan’s Special Security Force take down Commie terrorists as bloodily as possible. Then they learn, in a last-act Big Reveal, that it’s all part of a Jewish-American conspiracy to take over Japan.

It’s a horrible series, but it’s never a boring one. Directed by Ichiro Itano well after he animated those amazing Macross dogfights and written by Sho Aikawa well before he scripted Fullmetal Alchemist, Angel Cop is fast-paced pulp with a delightfully profane dub from Manga UK. Consequently, the series never goes three minutes without someone shooting, swearing, exploding, roasting alive, tripping a landmine, torturing a suspect, delivering some bizarre phrase in a masked British-Brooklyn accent, or ranting about how the Vietnam War was just a weapons test for Uncle Sam’s military contractors. It’s best summed up by this helpful compilation.



However, there is another version of Angel Cop. A shorter, lighter, and shockingly cuter version.


Not long after Angel Cop started production, it was accompanied by a manga adaptation in Newtype, Japan’s biggest anime magazine. Itano and Aikawa are credited with the original story, but the comic was drawn by Taku Kitazaki, now better known for gentle, introspective fare. Kitazaki was just starting out in 1990, and his one-volume adaptation of the Angel Cop saga is a strange assembly of soft-looking characters and grimy, Akira-style punk violence.


It’s weirdly upbeat for something connected to an exploitive bloodbath like the Angel Cop anime, with Angel herself providing a good gauge of the changes. In the OVA series, she’s a brusque, uncaring, profanity-spewing hardcase. She thinks nothing of leaving her partner Raiden bleeding in the street or of pumping a few extra rounds into a terrorist who’s already splattered across a wall. In the manga, she’s a chipper young Special Security Force recruit, throwing peace signs and not really hiding a rather obvious crush on Raiden.


Then again, the first few pages show her shooting off a suspect’s hand and beating him insensate, so in some ways she’s still the Angel that anime viewers grew to loathe.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years SHOCKING CENSORSHIP/IMPROVEMENT

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years arrived on Wiiware last week. Some have praised it, and others have complained about paying roughly a dollar for every hour of playtime. Such are the wages of download-only titles that have overly faithful fan bases.

The After Years is a conflicted little sequel. It’s unnecessary in concept and quite mercenary in building itself from the original game’s graphics and music, yet it evokes the mood of the original Final Fantasy IV so well that I can’t help but enjoy it. It’s comparable to getting a pet that looks and acts just enough like one you had when you were twelve. You’re not the same and neither is this new creature, but the connection is there somehow.

One interesting point of The After Years concerns Rydia, the summoner who started off Final Fantasy IV as an orphaned little girl and finished it as a grown woman, all thanks to the sievelike logic of video games. Rydia didn’t wear much in the original game or its DS remake, and she wore even less in the illustrations for the Japanese cell-phone version of The After Years. Square decided to change that for Western audiences.

This is how Rydia appears on the official Japanese website for The After Years.


And this is how she appears in the official art for the game’s North American release.


I refuse to pretend that the changes aren’t for the better, as Rydia’s frilled metal bikini now resembles actual clothing. It’s not the sort of thing you’d wear into caves packed with slavering beasts, but I learned not to demand adroit realism from Final Fantasy a long time ago.

Of course, we could always go back to Katsuya Terada's Rydia art from Nintendo Power’s first Final Fantasy IV feature in 1991.


We probably shouldn’t.