Arcade of My Youth: Wright-Patterson

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is famous for two things. It has the world's largest air force museum, and it has Hangar 18, the now-ordinary storage facility that supposedly housed aliens from the Roswell crash in 1947. In fact, Wright-Patt is rarely mentioned beyond those points. Oh well. There are worse ways for a military base to make a name for itself.

I remember Wright-Patt for other reasons, though. My father worked there after we returned from Germany in 1991, so I recall going along to the base exchange, the commissary, and, of course, the tiny arcade.

Wright Patt’s arcade was barely even a room. It was more of an alcove with a dozen cabinets inside, situated near the vending machines. I’d go as often as I could, regularly sacrificing Saturday morning cartoons so I could tag along with my father. While he shopped, I’d spend an hour or two in this little gallery of arcade games.

Solitude was part of the appeal. In the early hours of most Saturday mornings I was the only one at the arcade. There was no one around to hog Super Baseball 2020 or beat me at Fighters History Dynamite, no one to make too much noise over a game of Raiden, and, most importantly, no one to recognize me from school and therefore remind me how miserable I was during the rest of the week. Wright-Patt’s arcade wasn’t the biggest or best that I’d ever visited, but for an hour or two each week it was the only one that was all mine.

A lot of arcade games came through Wright-Patt’s little nook, but I’ll narrow it down to three that I remember vividly and haven’t yet discussed too much here.

CADASH 
I always went for RPGs as a kid, whether it was the latest Final Fantasy or some lesser curiosity like Dragon View. It was a matter of economics. I bought only two or three full-priced games a year, and an RPG was all but guaranteed to last me three months. Even if it was a bland three months of Traysia or Breath of Fire, that was a surer bet than even the finest action game or fighter on the market. Perhaps it was often a case of picking the Golden Corral buffet over a five-star restaurant, but I wanted my money’s worth.

I also liked the pace of RPGs. I could explore. I could take my time. I could wander a village where half the residents said the same thing, or spend hours fighting monsters in the hills. RPGs offered a lot of freedom, and I rarely saw the same thing in arcade games.



That’s why I liked Cadash so much. It’s a side-scroller with cheap demises and a time limit, but it’s trimmed with RPG devices, from the pacing townsfolk and their awkwardly translated hints to the weapon shops and minor plot threads. The Wright-Patt arcade had only one Cadash machine, so I never saw the game in its LAN-linked four-player glory, but I always liked seeing how far I could get on a few quarters. At most, I could make it past the second boss and learn that a village girl marked for sacrifice was really a mermaid—a technically topless mermaid, the likes of which my at-home RPGs could never dare depict.

So Cadash was my go-to for many Wright-Patt arcade mornings. I liked all of the four playable characters, but I most often picked the Priest—or rather, the Priestess—just to mess with every villager who greeted the player as “BRAVE MAN.” It felt like I was outsmarting the game, or at least turning the king into being a subtly sexist jerk. Yeah, he’s been waiting for a brave man to arrive, but he figures he has to take what he can get.



It’s strange that I never got into the home versions of Cadash. The Genesis port removed the two best characters (that’d be the priest and the ninja), and the much better TurboGrafx-16 version slipped my notice until it was madly expensive. I had other RPGs to play at home, after all, and while Cadash clearly had substance, I couldn’t be sure it would occupy me all the way to Christmas or my birthday. For the arcade, though, it was perfect. It was nice enough to kill me slowly.

A Collection Cover Competition

Square Enix’s recently localized Collection of Mana is notable on several fronts. It’s a solid if unadorned presentation of the first three Mana games. It’s an encapsulation of the straightforward, colorful fairy tale action-RPG approach that enchanted fans of the series before Square experimented too much and lost that ideal mixture. And it’s the first time we have Trials of Mana, aka Seiken Densetsu 3, officially in English.

Yet these are trivialities next to Collection of Mana’s most important feature: its cover has all the characters hanging out with each other.



Really. It’s a charming spread where the main casts of Adventures of Mana, Secret of Mana, and Trials of Mana all cavort, where Sumo rides a chocobo beside Randi and Kevin, and where Primm and Angel advise Fuji on proper garland placement. Even the rabites are enjoying it, and they’re relegated to humble monsters in the actual games.

I’m not jesting entirely. This sort of jovial, series-spanning artwork of characters interacting is always welcome, particularly when it’s for older games that never had crossovers. It's always nice to see video-game characters enjoying themselves outside of their violent routines, as though they really are little people living in the game cartridge, just like you thought when you were three years old. Artwork like this keeps that innocent and all but extinct notion alive.

To illustrate, let’s compare the Collection of Mana cover to other recent game compilations.

Monsters of Time

Time isn’t the enemy it once was in video games. Modern titles might rank and penalize players based on how long it takes to clear a stage, but rarely is a timer a lethal obstacle. Indeed, many spacious big-budget games revel in their lack of any such constraints, proud of the way players can spend hours wandering a desolate canyon or mapping a particular fetid stretch of dungeon.

Games weren’t always so forgiving. Any sensibly designed arcade draw of the 1980s or 1990s had to keep players moving and, preferably, dying and paying for another go. A timer, often situated next to your score, was just as much an enemy as a robot dinosaur or leering street punk. Console games often adopted this idea without question, and even an pleasant stroll through Super Mario Bros. 3 would be deadly if the timer ran down.

Many games were content to unceremoniously kill player’s avatar when an on-screen timer ran out, but others went beyond that. It wasn’t enough that time elapsed; it also summoned a monster, invincible and relentless, to slay you and remind you that merciless game design waits for no one.

RYGAR’S MIST MONSTER
The original Rygar has a limited following, to put it charitably. It’s very much a typical arcade side-scroller from 1986: repetitive, punishing, and stingy in its payoff. Today it’s remembered mostly for inspiring a largely different and much more interesting NES version.

Rygar‘s first outing is intriguing only in those small, strange details that popped up in 1980s arcade games. Developers often tossed in whatever random sights they wanted, creating an atmosphere vaguely tantalizing in its random and limited decor. Rygar has hints of that in its odd introductory text that mentions 4.5 billions years of “dominators,” in its unexplained lion-man end boss, and in the way each level ends with symbols ranging from idols to crosses. It’s all likely just chosen for effect, but it feels like it should mean something, as though Rygar was secretly bankrolled by a bizarre cult.



Another effective touch appears when players let the timer tick down to nothing. An intense strain takes over the soundtrack, and then THIS shows up.



An angry mist-demon floats across the screen, and it’s impossible to slay unless Rygar reaches the level’s end. It’s probably the most imposing sight in the game; most of the creatures are only slightly larger than Rygar himself, but this giant cloud of temporal fury is an unexpected horror, even if it now looks like something from a cartoon about the evils of pollution.

Both the NES Rygar and the PlayStation 2 revamp have much more inventive monsters, and both are much better games. But they’re rarely as abrupt in their surprises as that hellish miasma.

Aleste Branch: Super Hyped Amor

I was all set to discuss how I dislike the fact that many intriguing modern games merely echo older ones. A lot of my most-wanted list is filled by either spiritual successors or full-bore remakes of established titles, whether it’s the Contra overtures of Blazing Chrome or the new Link’s Awakening recast of my favorite Zelda game. While I’m glad to see classic visions return one way or the other, I was prepared to argue that sequels and remodels are never as exciting as the prospect of a new and fully original creation.

But then Aleste Branch comes along and makes me a liar.



M2 announced Aleste Branch last year and dropped a few details earlier this month, so all we have is a title, some art of series heroine Ellinor (aka Terri), and a model of her ship. So why am I twitching with unironic glee at each new shred of information they release?

Well, Compile’s old Aleste line is my pick for the most consistently amazing series of old-fashioned shooters. It’s a loose-knit collection that includes both official Aleste games and tangents like Spriggan, Gun Nac, Zanac, and The Guardian Legend. Heck, you could even throw in Golvellius. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s even a vaguely shooter-like game from Compile, it’s an honorary Aleste.



All of these shooters, Alestes or not, share excellent underlying aesthetics. They’re quick and intense, with cunning enemy placement and a healthy variation in obstacles and foes. They’re also generous with power-ups, so you’re never far from grabbing a new weapon or recovering from defeat. And while Aleste games favor standard mecha and spaceship designs, they’ll flavor things with striking music and the occasional weird surprise. The best examples lie in MUSHA, a tour-de-force of everything I could possibly want in a shooter.

Better yet, most of the Aleste line premiered on home consoles instead of in arcades, so the thoughtful stage design challenges the player without the need to extract another quarter every five minutes. Nor do you have to worry about putting up with screen borders or rotating your TV for that authentic vertical-shooter experience, both common issues in arcade ports. Aleste makes the most of any hardware it favors–even the tiny-screen Game Gear outings are great.



Compile was remarkably prolific in the early 1990s, and Aleste titles popped up everywhere, often with new Americanized names like Power Strike and Space Mega Force. Yet this time of bounty couldn’t last for Aleste, or shooters in general. The public grew weary of game after game about piloting a lone ship against an alien fleet, even when those games were as impressive as MUSHA and Robo Aleste. Compile drifted toward the broad appeal of their Puyo Puyo series, and their shooter staff splintered. Ex-Compile developers worked on cult favorites like Battle Garegga and Dimahoo, but they just weren’t the same as a true Aleste.

It’s been far, far too long since we’ve had a new Aleste game, and I think it’s in capable hands. M2 is best known these days for porting older games with exceptional flair, but they’re just as gifted when they’re making new material, as they did with Rebirth versions of Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania.



M2 is just the right group to put together an Aleste that will do justice to the proud names of Moo Niitani and Jemini Hirono. And then the shooter shall rise again. We shall witness revivals of every classic from Axelay and Battle Mania to Wings of Wor and Hotdog Storm. We shall bask in the fluorescent gleam of store shelves dominated by Truxton and Cyber Core sequels. And we shall magically turn into ten-year-olds with no responsibilities or problems that an afternoon of Grind Stormer can’t repair.

Really? No, of course not. I just want Aleste Branch to get a domestic release. I’m even willing to go against my better judgment and fight through the hordes of true fans and filthy scalpers to get a physical copy from some exploitative limited-edition publisher. It’s no mere nostalgia hit for me. The Aleste games are still paragons of the whole shooter ethos, and for me that’s every bit as exciting as a brand-new idea.



I just hope Ellinor/Terri has kicked her smack habit.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: A Salute to Tora and Shogun

Many worlds collided in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game for the NES. It saw the Turtles at the height of their popularity in 1990, and the game perfectly embodies their most marketable personae in a decent beat-up-‘em, like Double Dragon with Foot Soldiers instead of street punks and dominatrices. It also found Nintendo at a similar apex, as the NES library enjoyed its most prodigious year, stretching from Super Mario Bros. 3 to Crystalis to StarTropics before the Sega Genesis ruined that delightful monopoly.

Just about any NES game was important to the children of 1990, but a Ninja Turtles game, and a good one at that, verged on a religious experience. And the game even threw in a coupon for a free Pizza Hut personal pan pizza. It was a marvel of efficiency when it came to shoving cartoons, video games, and junk food into the gullets of American youth.

Yet after the game ended and the free pizza was devoured, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game didn’t enjoy a very influential legacy. Perhaps that’s because it’s notably by-the-book, following both its arcade roots and overall Turtle canon right down to the quips that the turtles spout when they fall into manholes.

Three embellishments stand out, however. One is a curious skateboarding woman who I’ve written about before, though she’s merely unexplained background decor. The other two are bosses invented just for the NES game: intergalactic bounty hunters named Tora and Shogun.



No mere throwaways, Tora and Shogun each received an entire personalized stage. Tora shows up early on, as a Krang-supplied weather device plunges New York into a wintry apocalypse. The Turtles slash through a stage of snowball-tossing Foot Soldiers and missile-firing snowmen, and Tora waits at the end.


Tora’s just a polar bear in a leather jacket, but he’s true to the Ninja Turtle aesthetic of weird animal mutants. What he lacks in laser guns or mohawks, he makes up in pure brutality by hucking giant ice boulders at the Turtles and smacking them across the screen if they’re dumb enough to face him head-on.


Shogun gets his turn a few levels later. Perhaps his name should be “THE Shogun,” but manuals say otherwise. His hideout is all paper screens and tatami mats, complete with leaping ninja-bots, laser scorpions, and tiger artwork that comes to life. Well, robotic life. Keeping with the Turtles cartoon’s flailing efforts to skirt real violence, all of the non-boss enemies are machines.


As the level-topper, Shogun wastes no time in deploying his gimmick: his head detaches and floats around the screen while his body attacks with a naginata. It leaves players little room to dodge, and the head is either invincible or very difficult to hit. Once you’ve wailed on the Shogun’s body enough, he explodes, leaving behind a lower mechanical skeleton and effectively mooning the player. Really.


That’s it for Tora and Shogun. They appeared in no other official Ninja Turtles fiction; not the comics, not the live-action movies, and not even the long-running cartoon. Such absences are explained, of course, by the fact that they never became action figures in the first place.

And yet that’s strange in itself. The Ninja Turtles toy line ran out of good ideas by 1992 and grew more and more ridiculous, putting the Turtles in everything from military gear to Star Trek outfits, but it somehow wasn’t desperate enough to put together Tora and Shogun figures. I assume it was a matter of licensing, because when you’re peddling Z-list mutants like a Dalmatian firefighter and a moose Canadian Mountie, a polar bear with a weather weapon will fly off the pegs.

They would’ve fit perfectly, too. Give Tora a freeze-ray (let’s call it an “Icicle Gun”) and some boulders to toss, and he’s as much a hot seller as Muckman or Scumbug. Shogun might not have many accessories beyond his samurai weapons, but he’d get attention with a removable spring-loaded head—one that would be lost by 90 percent of all kids who owned the toy. Thus we would see decapitated Shoguns in flea-market bins across the nation and costly eBay squabbles over complete figures. What a fine legacy that would be.

One more thing: remember when I said that Tora and Shogun never made any more official appearances? Well, you’ll see them in TMNT: Rescue-Palooza, a fan-made reimagining of the older games that includes over 60 playable characters, from April’s newsroom cronies to Aska from Tournament Fighters to the suspiciously underutilized Ace Duck. Tora and Shogun might’ve missed a prime merchandizing boat and remained obscure in the memories of countless young Turtles fans, but they’re still good for a boss fight or two.

Five Fascinating Fighting Game Stories

If you hang around certain people long enough, you’ll hear them say that fighting games aren’t about storylines. Oh, they have plots and characters, of course, but they don’t need them. Fighters live or die by their gameplay, their competitive intricacies, and their embodiment of the basic human desire to punch something. After all, the crowds at fighting game tournaments aren’t massing because they’re heavily intrigued by Tekken’s ongoing subplot about Kuma the bear being in love with Xiaoyu’s pet panda.

Well, I don't agree. More than any other genre, fighting games are all about characters. It's the characters who introduce the game, the characters who must be immediately appealing in their designs, and the characters who invite players to learn and master their favorites. And when you’ve spent hours perfecting controller gymnastics and analyzing combo attacks, it’s hard to NOT care a little about Scorpion getting revenge on Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat, Sakura all but admitting she wants to have Ryu’s children in Street Fighter V, and whether or not every Samurai Shodown game since the second is a prequel just because Nakoruru is still alive.



I can’t resist that. I do my best to dig into the mechanics and head-to-hear furor of fighting games, but the truth is that I'm much more into their ongoing character arcs. If a new Power Instinct game appeared tomorrow, my first question would be “Does it resolve Angela and Sahad’s rumored romance?”

Yes, I care about those dumb fighting-game stories, and I’ll prove it by picking five arcs in which I’m far too invested.

1. HIKARU AND LUPINUS
(Chaos Code)
The original Chaos Code almost gets it right. It lacks a decent online mode and other refinements one expects from a modern fighting game, but it has some intriguing characters, including a hulking chef, twins who function as a single combatant, and a manga author who changes cosplay with each combo attack. My personal favorites, however, are two special operatives: one has a cyborg arm, and the other has a body pillow with an anime girl on it.

Hikaru looks a lot like a typical fighting-game hero, apart from the anime-girl pillow he drags with him to every match in Chaos Code. In one of his story-mode endings, he’s congratulated by a fellow agent who asks him out for drinks and perhaps more. Hikaru’s on the verge of accepting until he remembers that a new otaku-bait video game is out, and he invites his co-worker along. She declines, apparently being unfamiliar with the phrase “fixer-upper.”



Chaos Code’s first expansion, New Sign of Catastrophe, tells us more. Hikaru’s co-worker is named Lupinus, and she’s a fully playable character with a cybernetic arm and a less cautious crush on Hikaru. By the end of the game, she's dragging him along on shopping trips.

There's no lack of nerd-fantasy fulfillment in modern fiction, but I enjoy the simple clash of Hikaru's brazen nerdery and Lupinus' more conventional tastes. As it turns out, she wasn't repulsed by his geek fixations. She’s just insecure about her robotic limb and, of course, her figure, because fighting games have told us that all women everywhere worry about their cup sizes to the point where it's a  recognized disorder in the DSM-5.

And where will the long-in-development Chaos Code 2 take this? Will Hikaru get over his anime-wife fixations while Lupinus gets over her clichéd hang-ups? I suspect that I’m not alone in hoping for more of this subplot, since developer FK Digital's early promo art for the game shows Lupinus and Hikaru in formal wear.



See? They know where that Chaos Code bread is buttered.

Bounty Arms: The Famitsu Spread

Let’s take yet another look at Bounty Arms. We here at the Bounty Arms Preservation Society (tax-exempt status pending) are dedicated to researching, archiving, and presenting all known information about this canceled PlayStation game from 1995. That may seem oddly narrow and of potential interest to very few, but we’re all busy and can’t very well devote ourselves to cataloging every unreleased game that ever got past a napkin doodle.

Our most recent discovery is a preview of Bounty Arms from the February 10, 1995 issue of Famitsu. This is likely all the magazine ever ran about Bounty Arms; the game disappeared after missing its April release date in Japan and for months afterward persisted only in those nebulous TBA sections of release schedules. Moreover, 1995 was a remarkably busy year, and Famitsu covered every video-game platform. Bounty Arms merited a few pages in early PlayStation-centric publications simply for existing, but in Famitsu it had to fight for space in between Virtua Fighter 2 comics, lengthy Chrono Trigger features, and 3DO ads with Albert Einstein.


It’s no surprise, then, that Famitsu’s preview is a mere quarter-page. It offers the barest introduction to Bounty Arms; we’re told that it’s an overhead-view action game, it’s developed and published by Data West, and its heroines use extending mechanized Relic Arms as grappling hooks, whips, and huge flamethrowers. The preview doesn’t mention the main characters by name, nor are there any screenshots showing Rei Misazaki and Chris, whose last name we still haven’t properly translated. Here it is if you care to try.



The screenshots show little that we at the Bounty Arms Preservation Society have not uncovered previously. Every image we have of the game shows one of two stages: the initial jungle level (available entirely in the demo) and an industrial factory of some kind. We see both in the Famitsu preview. Composer Yasuhito Saito estimates that Bounty Arms was 60 percent complete when it was canceled, which may well mean that game had four or five stages.



One thing stands out, though. The factory stage has large metal frames appearing over the characters, as shown in the screenshot above. The tiny startburst in the Famitsu preview appears to show Chris standing ON the metal frame. Was the entire stage multi-layered, like…uh, Vertical Force for the Virtual Boy? That would add a lot to Bounty Arms’ otherwise straightforward arcade formula and compensate for it being only a few levels long.

Perhaps we’ve made too much of this single image, but these are the discussions that keep the Bounty Arms Preservation Society going. They’re also the reason why the Bounty Arms Preservation Society has exactly one member.

Little Things: Super Baseball 2020

I’m pretty sure that Super Baseball 2020 is my favorite sports game. That’s probably because I’m not really into sports games on the whole. I have nothing against the genre, but I suspect that a prescient part of my young mind knew I was too fixated on video games—and so it decided to at least ignore sports games and spare my future self a scrap of obsession. It couldn’t keep me from getting into Super Baseball 2020, which served as both an early Neo Geo showcase and a woefully optimistic prediction of the future.


Conceived for quick arcade satisfaction, Super Baseball 2020 presents a high-tech stadium where heavily armored men, revealingly armored women, and seemingly headless, tank-tread robots play a slightly modified version of the sport. Landmines appear, home runs only count when hit straight behind center field, and you’re free to upgrade your human and mechanized players alike. Everything is kept light and arcade-friendly; team customization is limited, and with only six clubs per league there’s not much variety to playing an entire season. The original Neo Geo version doesn’t even have a boss. It fell to other console ports to add a new, pennant-game team with players named after prominent members of the Nazi party. That means something.

I started playing Super Baseball 2020 for silly reasons. I was a dopey pre-teen loaded with hormones, and I was fascinated when GamePro ran a shot of Super Baseball 2020’s women players and openly asked if the game was “Too sexy, too sexist?” I just had to find out the answer for myself.


Yet I’ve grown to enjoy Super Baseball 2020 legitimately over the years. Each time I revisit it, I appreciate something else: the sleek designs of the Cyber Egg stadium, the way the players spin and flip when they make a fantastic catch, the little concession stand shown only when a foul ball wanders back into the glass-shielded bleachers, the way the robot umpires repeatedly warn you that NOW they’ll set the cracker mines, and the way a game’s MVP gets a Class A Citizenship or a robot bodyguard, which implies that this game’s vision of 2020 is hardly a utopia.

One neat little detail arises when the players leap or dive to catch a ball. The game switches to a brief close-up of the man or woman or robot, and the scaling sprites were a real technical feat back in the early 1990s. These cutaways also boost a team’s funds, letting you buy more power-ups. They let you see that the robots actually have eyes on top of their heads. And of course, they showcase a female player’s cleavage. Like I said, I started playing this game for silly reasons.

Even now, however, I’m impressed by these scenes. The developers went through the trouble of creating different views: one for jumping, one for diving straight-on, and a third just for diving diagonally. Granted, the diagonal catch is just a slightly altered version of the head-on view, but I was astounded at the time that the game paid such close attention.


This seems archaic now, but in 1993 these details were the eye-catching hallmarks of an arcade spectacle that no console (except, of course, the actual Neo Geo home system) could replicate. I picked the Super NES version of Super Baseball 2020 as my big Christmas gift that year, and the first thing I noticed was that the diving catches were static images. The Super NES port did a fair job of mimicking the Neo Geo original, but it also made me realize how important the small stuff was.

SNK went on to craft gorgeous sprite art on the Neo Geo, perhaps peaking around 2000 with sights like that fiery backdrop from The Last Blade 2 and the inching Ohmu bugs from Metal Slug 3. Yet it was Super Baseball 2020 that first impressed me and sold me on a Neo Geo.

Well, I shouldn’t say that it sold me, since the Neo Geo cost $600 in the 1990s (or a cool thousand once adjusted for inflation) and that was beyond the reach of a kid who needed three years of good grades and begging to get a basic Nintendo. That made me want one all the more, of course.

A Neo Geo isn’t quite as expensive these days, but I’m afraid nothing is cheap in this age of game collectors who’ll outspend the Pentagon’s annual operating budget on a sealed copy of Boogerman. If I ever manage to convince myself to acquire a Neo Geo, however, at least I know what game I’ll get first.

Hi Score Girl: Horrible Atmosphere

Hey! Do you like video games? To be specific, do you like arcade games from the 1980s and 1990s? Do you like mastering them and spouting trivia about them to the point where you ignore everything else? Do we have a show for you!



Meet Haruo Yaguchi, the protagonist of Hi Score Girl. He’s exceptionally good at arcade games, and he’s growing up smack dab in the middle of the Street Fighter II craze of the early 1990s. One fateful encounter at an arcade pits him against Akira Ono, a girl from his school and an unsuspected arcade game prodigy. The two of them forge a contentious friendship around arcade games, somewhat impaired by Akira being well-off, graceful, and exceptionally popular at school despite the fact that she never says anything. At all. Stifled by her rich-girl life, she interacts with Haruo through glares, physical violence, and, of course, video games. Her only display of emotion comes when she moves to America and bids Haruo goodbye.

The narrative then moves forward a few years and makes the bold, stunning move of introducing a prominent female character who actually speaks. Really! She forms complete sentences and everything! Her name is Koharu Hidaka and she’s a bookish classmate of Haruo, who’s now in middle school and still so obsessed with games that he’ll spend hours playing the latest Street Fighter update outside of the shop owned by Koharu’s family. This is all the reason she needs to fall for him, and soon she’s doing her best to learn all about these video games Haruo enjoys. And then Akira comes back.




Hi Score Girl‘s true conflict begins here, as two girls fight over a boy who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Haruo is bratty, self-absorbed, vaguely sadistic, relentlessly fixated on games, and, even after he matures, quite boring. His only notable skills lie in playing games and rattling off details about them like a Wikipedia entry in need of editing. It’s hard to imagine what either girl sees in him, though Akira is almost as horrible. She’s admired by everyone at school even though she never talks to or even smiles at them, and she has no personality traits beyond lashing out violently, getting scared of games like Splatterhouse and Space Gun (because she’s still a GIRL, haw haw), and showing our wretched protagonist the occasional hint of affection. Koharu is slightly more sympathetic, simply because she possesses recognizable emotions, thoughts, and the willingness to communicate them.

Status Check: 2019

So what was I up to in 2018? Well, I did a few reviews and guest-hosted my old column several times at Anime News Network. My geek highlight of the year, however, came when I got the chance to write about Angel Cop for Discotek’s new release of the series.



Angel Cop, as you may know, has a late-stage plot revelation about an international Jewish conspiracy being the force behind terrorist attacks and savage psychic assassins. It’s bizarre, offensive, and sadly reflective of how easy it was to get away with anti-Semitism in Japanese media during the early 1990s. I wrote an essay covering this for the new Blu-Ray and DVD, expanding on some ideas I mentioned in an entry here. It’s not unlike how modern reissues of racist old Bugs Bunny cartoons include some explanation of the historical context.

I also interviewed John Wolskel, the scriptwriter for the dubs of Angel Cop, Cyber City Oedo 808, and many over foul-mouthed Manga UK adaptations that we’ll never stop quoting. It was great to hear from someone who had a hand in these old dubs, and it’s pretty clear that Wolskel and the rest of the crew had fun giving these anime series the hyper-profane revamps that partly ensured their immortality.

I’d really like to do more work like this. For one thing, it’s fascinating to put something like Angel Cop in a broader vein; it might be all gore and swearing and Jew-hating, but I think its unconcealed frustration offers a revealing look at the fortunes of the anime industry and perhaps the broader reaction to the end of Japan’s bubble economy. You can learn a lot from looking through someone’s trash.

On a more selfish stratum, I like the satisfaction of working on a tangible product, even if it’s just for DVD extras. I haven’t seen any of my work in physical media since my magazine gig a decade ago, and while I sure appreciate the malleable, correctable nature of online writing, there’s a nice sense of permanence about holding something that involved you. Centuries after the Internet has evaporated and the earth is a lifeless husk, alien excavators may siphon my essay from a miraculously intact Blu-Ray and know just a little more about Angel Cop.

Enjoy Phantasy Star in Five Easy Steps

A new version of Phantasy Star appeared on the Switch this month. As with most games in the Sega Ages line, developer M2 added plenty of great extras. The original 1987 Sega Master System version of Phantasy Star is there and untouched, but the Ages tune-up has an auto-map feature, speeds up walking, and boosts the experience and money–sorry, meseta–gained from battle.



What a difference it makes. The game isn’t that much easier; a wrong turn or an unlucky enemy encounter might still off Alis, our heroine, early in the game. Instead of mollifying the core of its design, M2 just sped it up. Alis goes through everything faster, whether it’s roaming towns or gaining levels, and thus a rigid and sometimes tedious role-playing game becomes compelling in its challenges.

Of course, Phantasy Star is still a relic. The graphics are generally static, the battles follow routine turns, and calling the plot points a storyline is perhaps too charitable. Even with M2’s additions, it might not interest those accustomed to several decades of RPGs with cinematic combat, character customization, actual story arcs, and the ability to decide which enemy you’ll strike.

If you’re willing to envision the game as it was at its late 1987 release, however, Phantasy Star is mind-blowing. Its stage of the Algol star system was a complex fusion of Star Wars and fantasy undertones back when RPGs were still Dungeons & Dragons with perhaps some anime trappings. Its monsters and scenery were all animated and vibrant back when other games stayed stiff and static. It offered an actual, no-kidding Strong Heroine with a name and a solid motivation back when its competitors had generic and uniformly male rosters and anyone who wanted otherwise just had to pretend that the white mage in Final Fantasy was a woman.

And how can you put yourself in a 1987 frame of mind? It involves more than eating a McDLT, listening to Belinda Carlisle’s solo hits, and ignoring the crimes of the Reagan administration. If you follow these five steps early in the game, though, I think you’ll gain the right perspective for Phantasy Star.

STEP 1: DIE REPEATEDLY
Phantasy Star warns you at the start: death is everywhere. The game’s prologue sees Alis’ brother, Nero, die at the hands of the interplanetary despot Lassic. So Alis ventures out of her home city to find a warrior called Odin and liberate the Algol star system. And if you’re not the most cautious player imaginable, Alis will die. She’ll wander north and get mobbed by giant scorpions. She’ll face two Sworm insects in her first battle and narrowly lose to them. She’ll venture too close to the shore and be killed in the first round of combat by a fishman’s spiked tongue.



The Sega Ages version dials the difficulty back, but only a little. Alis still faces defeat if she’s overly adventurous or just unlucky, making it easy to imagine yourself as a neophyte RPG player in 1987, fighting and failing until you finally figured out how to use healing items.



This also means that unless you save before these first few battles, a defeat will boot you back to the title screen and make you start fresh, watching Nero die and Alis vow revenge all over again. Perhaps that’s why Phantasy Star has such a brief opening. You’ll see it a lot.

Crystalis Week: Things To Do

I don’t hesitate to call Crystalis the most rewarding game from the NES era. I never grow weary of replaying it and noticing something new each time. It’s fun just to mess with the game, and here’s how to mess with it most effectively.

WARP AROUND 
Crystalis has a few interesting glitches and codes, including a warp trick that lets you jump to a dozen different locations in the game. Simply hold A and B simultaneously on controller one and then press A on controller two, and you’ll warp to a new area. This is useful in some ways, though you’ll often run into enemies beyond your level.



My favorite warp spot is an underground cave where the hero is stuck in the water. He’d normally have a dolphin to ride, but the warp trick plants him in the canal by himself and leaves him immobile. There’s nothing to do but listen to the gentle music and ponder life until you decide to warp somewhere else.

Crytalis Week: The Search for Crystalis 2

Any discussion of Crystalis and its unfairly short legacy brings up a question: Why didn’t SNK make another one? The answer is usually “Because SNK threw all their weight behind arcade games and Crystalis might not have been a huge seller anyway.” Even so, there’s some evidence that SNK might have at least considered another Crystalis.

The first news of SNK revisiting Crystalis apparently emerged in early issues of Gamefan. Other Stuff served as the magazine’s catch-all column for news, rumors, and outlandish speculation, much like EGM’s Quartermann. In Other Stuff one would see credible information printed alongside reports of Super Street Fighter II introducing 14 new characters or Mortal Kombat 3 declaring Baraka the winner of the previous tournament (THAT would have been daring). And it’s also here that we see mention of a Crystalis follow-up in Volume 1, Issue 3 of the magazine.


Gamefan describes a Neo Geo version of Crystalis as a 100-meg action-RPG, due out the summer of 1993. It never materialized, of course, and neither did any screenshots for it. In the grand specious tradition of video-game rumors, most of Gamefan’s Neo Geo preview didn’t come to pass. Magician Lord 2 was a no-show, there’s no Champion Edition of Art of Fighting 2, and that World Heroes sequel has no revolutionary 3-D gameplay. A new Crystalis might have been just a fever dream, as real as that violent, profanity-filled Sonic the Hedgehog game described by the most hyperactive kid on the bus.

If the Neo Geo edition of Crystalis was just a rumor, it was a persistent one. Gamefan mentions it again in Volume 1, Issue 4, giving it a 200-meg size and a fourth-quarter 1993 release date. Six months later, Volume 1, Issue 10 is vaguer, merely stating that “talk of a Geo version of Crystalis continues to linger.” Of course, no screenshots were shown, and GameFan was the sort of magazine that would’ve run pics of a new Crystalis no matter how blurry they were.

Reports of a Crystalis follow-up did not end here, however. The January 1995 issue of Next Generation (and the Edge of the month before) runs down the latest news for the Neo Geo CD, a disc-based version of the Neo Geo. The article described “Krystalis” as an upcoming game that was “held back for the format.” Once again, no solid news or actual images of the game followed.

Even in rumors, the path of this new Crystalis makes sense. The original Neo Geo prioritized arcade games: shooters, action titles, and fighting games that came on arcade-exact cartridges for a few hundred bucks each. An action-RPG like Crystalis would be a hard sell in the arcades, even if it used the Neo Geo’s rarely exploited memory cards, and SNK wasn’t in the habit of making $200 games exclusively for the home. If a Crystalis revival existed, the cheaper format of the Neo Geo CD was a better choice. That was where SNK put its Samurai Spirits RPG, after all.

The Neo Geo CD also may explain why a Crystalis title never arrived there. The system was to be a cheaper version of the Neo Geo, but the CD drive’s long loading times and an overall busy marketplace made it a limited engagement. Only a handful of exclusive Neo Geo CD games came along, and by the end of the 1990s SNK dropped the system entirely, supporting only the cartridge-based Neo Geo.



One will note that the reports of a new Crystalis don’t call it Crystalis 2 or imply a direct sequel. This mystery game may well have been a remake of the NES original, which often seemed too ambitious for its hardware. SNK could have revisited it on the Neo Geo with gorgeous pixel art, no slowdown, more complex dungeons, bigger bosses, and, say, an extra mode where you play Mesia’s side of the story. She was hiding something.

Or perhaps it would’ve been a different game entirely. The original Crystalis wraps everything up neatly, but it could very handily support a spiritual successor, one with the same gameplay systems and capable progress but with no more narrative connections than Final Fantasy IV has with Final Fantasy XII.

SNK had a second opportunity to revamp Crystalis when the Neo Geo Pocket Color came along. The handheld invited single-player RPGs, and Crystalis could’ve fit the format well (SNK even greenlit an impressive Magician Lord sequel that, sadly, went unfinished). Unfortunately, Nintendo optioned the title for a Game Boy Color port, one that crunches the game into a small screen and erodes the appeal of its futuristic-medieval blend. The Neo Geo Pocket Color might’ve managed it better. For a taste of how an overhead action-RPG like Crystalis would fare on the handheld, try out Dark Arms: Beast Buster.




Did a Neo Geo version of Crystalis ever exist? Was it just a magazine rumor? Did SNK abandon it at the drawing boards? Did someone just confuse it with Crystal Legacy, an early title for Breakers? The lack of any screenshots is daunting, but all hope is not lost. In 2016, a collector uncovered an unreleased and incomplete Neo Geo fighter called Dragon’s Heaven (no, not THAT Dragon’s Heaven) never before shown in magazines. Perhaps someone will turn up an early version of Crystalis for the Neo Geo and prove all of those old rumors at least partly true. And then we can fight over it.

Crystalis Week: Counselor's Corner

Was Crystalis a big success? I would guess not. SNK never revisited it, and this was a company that gave Prehistoric Isle a follow-up. Crystalis might’ve gone without a sequel just because SNK emphasized arcade projects throughout the 1990s, but it’s true that the game wasn’t the biggest NES release of its day.

Perhaps kids like me were to blame. I certainly don’t remember Crystalis as a staple of grade-school Nintendo discussions; we never analyzed, debated, and fought over it as we might Super Mario Bros. 3 or Mega Man 2. Nor was it one of those games everyone owned but hated and never played, like The Adventures of Bayou Billy or Milon’s Secret Castle. Crystalis had a TV commercial and some favorable reviews, but as far as I could tell it didn’t break into the collective unconscious of young Nintendo nerds. I wouldn’t even buy it until it was twenty bucks at Kay-Bee.

I discovered Crystalis slowly and primarily through Nintendo Power. It wasn’t the initial coverage that hooked me. The magazine ran good-sized features for the game’s mid-1990 release, with gorgeous art possibly by Katsuya Terada, but I was much more interested in reading about Super Mario Bros. 3, Super C, The Mafat Conspiracy, Final Fantasy, Ninja Gaiden II, Rescue Rangers, Maniac Mansion, and that second Ninja Turtles game that looked like the arcade deal and was therefore much better than the first one.

Hmm. Maybe that’s why Crystalis didn’t do huge numbers: competition.




It was a different section of Nintendo Power that sold me on Crystalis: the Counselors’ Corner.

Nintendo’s game counselor hotline was a major cog in the company’s market dominance, and even those kids who didn’t call it very often still thought the counselors had the coolest job on the planet. Nintendo Power promulgated that idea with Counselors’ Corner, a monthly feature that covered some of the more difficult or commonplace questions put to the call center.

Crystalis was a regular here. Counselors’ Corner fielded questions about it for months on end, covering everything from getting the Psycho Shield to defeating two sun-and-moon lion statues with, unsurprisingly, the Bow of the Sun and the Bow of the Moon. The solutions gave away a lot of the game’s more perplexing puzzles, which might have ruined the challenge.




Yet the opposite was true: spoiling pieces of Crystalis made the whole of it more interesting.

As with all things in Nintendo Power, this was a calculated pitch. Nothing drew kids in like learning the deeper mysteries of a game, and nothing made us more confident than knowing how to beat a boss or uncover a secret in something we hadn’t so much as played yet. And for a complex game like Crystalis, the extracted tips hinted at a bigger world and even greater mysteries. Why would casting a paralysis spell on every patron of a bar reveal the sage Kensu, and why would he be angry? Well, we’d just have to play Crystalis and see.

Nintendo Power did its job even when pulling back the curtain, and I knew I wanted Crystalis by the time I saw it on the discount rack. I enjoyed it thoroughly even though I already knew how to beat the disguised Sabera and get past the giant metal guardian wall in Goa. They were tests for which I’d spent months studying, and passing them was all the more satisfying for that.

Would I have liked Crystalis even more if I’d gone in completely unaware? I don’t think so. You can’t really spoil a good story, and there’s nothing like knowing a little of what lies ahead, even if it’s just where to find the Psycho Shield.

Crystalis Week: The Miyazaki Connection

Crystalis gets ideas from many sources, but it most blatantly plunders Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky. That’s OK, since about half of the video games made in the early 1990s owe some inspiration to Hayao Miyazaki’s films. It’s easy to see where Crystalis found its post-apocalyptic jungles, its giant floating tower of destruction, and even the windy village in which the hero awakens.

There’s a long-running rumor about several games based on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, that cherished post-apocalyptic epic about a princess befriending giant insects. As the rumor goes, these Nausicaä games, released in the mid-1980s, let the player shoot the benevolent bugs. This enraged Miyazaki so much that he despised all video games henceforth and refused to let any of his future films be tarnished by such adaptations. Not even Castle in the Sky, which is practically a video game already.




Well, that rumor probably isn’t true. The part about the Nausicaä video games was debunked by Hardcore Gaming 101’s John Szczepaniak, who documented the ‘80s Nausicaä titles and found no evidence of bug-slaying. Perhaps Hayao Miyazaki disliked the games for other reasons, but I think a blunter explanation can be had: Miyazaki doesn’t let his films become video games because video games are a product of this dissolute modern era, just like smartphones, the Iraq war, and children who have never seen a fish gutted before them at the marketplace.

But there’s another game where the player kills insects straight out of Nausicaä. That game is Crystalis.

Crystalis Week: Memorable Moments

NES titles get guarded praise at best when it comes to storylines. This was a era when video games had the barest of plots, and players were lucky when an actual ending appeared instead of a congratulatory screen about strongth welling in your body. By those standards, Crystalis deserves credit just for spelling its own name correctly on the title screen.

One can’t laud Crystalis as a masterful narrative or call it True Literature That Makes Everyone Take Gamers Like Us Seriously. It lacks character arcs and underlying themes and Aristotelian unities. Yet it gets a few things right. It’s a good example of how video games of this period are Trojan Horses; we never expected any remotely interesting melodrama from a game with simple graphics and threadbare dialogue. Yet we were involved all the same as we played, and when the game spiked its plot with a little tragedy or a moment of invention, it hit surprisingly hard. And we somehow remembered this when better stories from more respected mediums fade away.

I remembered enough to round up my favorite parts of Crystalis. I won’t give away every major twist, but I wouldn’t read this if you want to go in cold. Then again, Crystalis is almost 30 years old, and there’s a statue of limitations on these things.

THE END DAY
Crystalis doesn’t beat around the bush when destroying the world. Civilization collapsed on the first day of October in 1997, which means that the human race had less than a month to play the American version of Final Fantasy VII before everything was rent asunder in a worldwide cataclysm.



Crystalis evokes this with a few striking images for an NES game: lighting strikes, burning cities, and a huge tower floating above it all. More intriguing are the establishing shots after you push start; you’ll glimpse dragonlike beasts in a lush forest, followed by carrion birds taking flight over an arid village and the skeletal remains of a surely mutated creature.




Players will note that the game itself doesn’t show anything like this in its ensuing quest. Any cutscenes are scarce until the ending. Yet that introduction is all Crystalis needs.

Crystalis Week: A Rare Adventure

It’s strange that Crystalis even exists. In the late 1980s SNK was a company forged in arcades and accustomed to a diet of eye-catching, quick-burning action fare like Ikari Warriors and Psycho Soldier. Crystalis was an NES experiment, an attempt at courting the action-RPG market that arose on consoles from the success of The Legend of Zelda and Ys.

Crystalis didn’t chase either of those genre leaders, however. It was something else entirely: a hybrid that drew from the best of fantasy RPGs and arcade games.


Crystalis never went to arcades, of course. It didn’t sit in a cabinet and leech pocket change from passersby. It just took lessons from SNK’s arcade roots.

And the first thing Crystalis learned? Hook the player. The game’s introduction grabs your attention with visions of doomsday, declaring October 1, 1997 to be THE END DAY and summoning images of a world destroyed by vicious war and malevolent science. Cities burn, natural life mutates, and technology survives only in a mysterious floating tower, an instrument of peace easily turned into a cataclysmic weapon. Players glimpse the desolate landscapes and monstrous beasts that arise in the eons afterword, and then their avatar emerges. He’s a reticent amnesiac awakened from a suspiciously advanced cryo-chamber in a cave. So it all begins.



The second lesson Crystalis took from the arcade? Never slow things down. Its purple-haired hero scoots across the landscape in eight directions, as though the game’s meant for a joystick. His first sword isn’t a stubby blade, either; improving on a idea from The Legend of Zelda, the Crystalis protagonist can charge up and launch projectiles, making the combat a perpetual mix of frantic stabbing and strategic shooting. He roams and fights with brisk determination, and the game moves to match him.

Crystalis rarely loses that enticing arcade tempo. Each leg of the quest brings a new spell or item, with magic that starts with basic healing and expands into telepathy, warping, and shapeshifting. Even repeatedly hacking through monsters becomes more enjoyable with the game’s expanding selection of weapons and equipment. One early acquisition is the Rabbit Boots, a seemingly minor accessory that lets the hero bound across the landscape. Sometimes this helps him navigate toxic marshes or climb glaciers. Sometimes it’s just fun to jump around.

Like most ambitious games for the NES, Crystalis faces the limitations of the hardware, a seven-year-old system by 1990. Crystalis doesn’t care, though. It delivers large characters, rampant spell effects, and enormous bosses from the Draygonian Emperor’s true form to a giant swamp creature shamelessly filched from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. It’s all out to impress the player no matter the cost, and it succeeds. The action slows down at times, and even something as mundane as talking to townsfolk might make the graphics flicker. Yet it never seems too high a price for the adventure that emerges.

Crystalis Week Begins

Crystalis really needed a comeback. It’s one of the best games that ever appeared on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I was dismayed that it wasn’t officially available on any modern console despite the recent boom in reissues. Well, that changes next week when the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection arrives on the Switch with Crystalis and a bunch of other games you’ll have to scroll past in order to play Crystalis.



I don’t mean to disparage the rest of the collection, as I’m sure Psycho Soldier and Iron Tank and perhaps even Streetsmart have ardent fans. Yet it’s Crystalis that makes the whole package for me, as it’s a fantastic action-RPG more enduring in quality than a lot of SNK’s arcade-based creations before and after.

Crystalis does not headline this anthology, I’m sad to note. Much of the emphasis falls on well-known SNK arcade titles like Athena and Ikari Warriors. Even the box art sticks the hero of Crystalis and heroine Mesia far in the back. I will say, however, that at least Mesia’s hair is purple, as it is in the game. The Japanese cover for Crystalis, or God Slayer: Sonata of the Distant Skies as it’s so combatively named there, made her hair green.



I’m not about to let the return of Crystalis go uncelebrated. Nuh-uh. I’m dedicating this entire week to entries about it. That may seem excessive, but I think this is a game which deserves to be noticed, analyzed, criticized, and enshrined as a breakthrough in its genre. So please forgive me if I go on a little too much about, for example, the “kyu kyu” sound made by the rabbits in the game. If it gets just one person interested in Crystalis, I’ll have no regrets.

Check back every day for a new article!

Monday: The Legacy of Crystalis!

Tuesday: The Most Memorable Moments!

Wednesday: The Miyazaki Connection!

Thursday: Crystalis Corner!

Friday: The Quest for Crystalis 2!

Saturday: Fun Stuff on the Side!

In Defense of The Cat Returns

The Cat Returns often goes neglected in the Studio Ghibli catalog. Some deem it mediocre. Others say it’s mildly amusing but inferior to its relatives. After all, Ghibli made its name with many landmark films: Porco Rosso, Grave of the Fireflies, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Only Yesterday, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and, oh hell, just about every Ghibli feature that isn’t the underrated Ocean Waves or the justly rated Tales From Earthsea. Among such marvels, The Cat Returns is a small creation indeed.


For one thing, it’s the shortest film in Ghibli’s ranks, as it developed originally as a theme park attraction and side-story to Whisper of the Heart. Its look is much closer to typical anime imagery, with generic large eyes and exaggerated grins instead of the distinct and slightly subtler aesthetic one sees from Ghibli founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata as well as anyone who follows in their wake. It was primarily a vehicle to test younger animators, including its director, Hiroyuki Morita. The Cat Returns is an undemanding and uncomplicated hiccup in Ghibli history, as it lacks the emotional depth and sure-handed craft found in the studio’s best offerings.

It’s a wonderful movie anyway.

In all fairness, The Cat Returns begins in a flurry of clichés, and our heroine Haru stumbles over every one of them. She has a crush on a classmate. She has a best friend to tease her. She has a habit of rushing out the door, late for school. One morning, in a sudden and stupid decision that everyone wishes they could make, Haru risks her life to rescue a cat from an oncoming truck. She doesn’t quite understand why she did it, and she certainly doesn’t understand why the cat stands up and politely thanks her.



That night, the answer arrives with a huge procession of talking, civilized felines at her front door, and they reveal that Haru rescued the prince of the Cat Kingdom that day. Her reward? A legion of cat-servants to bring her unwanted gifts, dote embarrassingly upon her, and, on nothing but an idle conversation, whisk her off to the Cat Kingdom to marry the strangely absent prince.

Her only help comes from the dapper cat hero known as the Baron (first seen as an inspiring statuette in the more down-to-earth Whisper of the Heart) and his quarrelsome allies: a fat cat named Muza and a crow named Toto. They can’t keep the Cat Kingdom from abducting Haru, though, and soon she’s facing not only an arranged marriage but also the prospect of becoming a cat herself.

At a mere 75 minutes, The Cat Returns has little room for anything but the basics. Haru begins as an insecure young woman dissatisfied with her life, and only after a whirlwind adventure in a realm of talking cats and deadly labyrinths does she find her feet. It’s an open-and-shut story, skipping from one comical scene to another, never settling long enough for us to question the why of it or ask just what the movie’s trying to say.



In other words, The Cat Returns never has time to be anything but adorable. With no mind for labored meanings, it whisks us from Haru’s humdrum morning to the Baron’s miniature cottage to the inner workings of the Cat Kingdom. Once Haru’s trapped there, we’re treated to some hilarious failures of throne-room entertainment and a clash between the Baron and the forces of the spiky-furred, half-goofy, half-mad King of the Cats.

It’s ultimately all in good fun, and no one seems to get hurt—not even the cats thrown out of the king’s tower. You can read into things easily, seeing Haru as feminist assertion and the king as a tyrannical facade of masculine tradition and the whole thing as an allegory for the second Defenestration of Prague, but the movie never asks that you do. If The Cat Returns doesn’t define its genre or inspire imitators like the action of Miyazaki’s Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, it hardly needs to go that far. It wins us over with characters immediately sympathetic and a tone effortlessly cute. It has the smooth wit of a good adventure yarn or a perfect bedtime story…or perhaps a little fable told by Whisper of the Heart’s protagonist Shizuku Tsukishima. She wanted to be a writer, after all, and it’s comforting to think that she would come up with something like The Cat Returns.



The less Ghibli-esque look of The Cat Returns actually improves its English dub. Disney regularly went all-out in recruiting talent for the voicework in Ghibli films, but there’s a frequently uptight air about them. The movies themselves are thoughtful, studied, and serious—and so are the dubs. The Cat Returns has none of that. The looser, standard anime fashion makes for a more easygoing script and quicker delivery, and the cast is first-rate: Anne Hathaway is excellent in all of Haru’s insecurities, Kristen Bell does a great job with a limited best-friend role, and Cary Elwes is charming as The Baron. Special credit must go to Rene Auberjonois as the uptight cat minister Natori and Andy Richter as the more unctuous Natoru, who’s almost the real villain here.

Morita departed Studio Ghibli without directing another film there, giving more fuel to the company’s reputation for casting aside directors with little mercy. In light of recent discussion over Takahata’s brutal demands, however, it’s perhaps fortunate enough that Morita didn’t work himself to death. He went on to direct the solidly disturbing Bokurano Ours, perhaps the polar opposite of a cuddly escapade like The Cat Returns.



Studio Ghibli’s future beyond its founders seems in doubt, and even if it survives they’ll likely never again try something short and low-key like The Cat Returns. That makes it all the more valuable, I think. It’s a simple delight in a field of movies all more polished and mostly better—and yet not as fun in the same carefree fashion. The Cat Returns certainly isn’t the best of Ghibli’s lineup. But who cares? It’s the most immediately entertaining.

Review: Dragon Quest XI

Dragon Quest XI may very well be the best game in this illustrious series. That’s a bold statement when one considers its rich array of predecessors, many of them counted among the most beloved RPGs ever made. The Nanking Massacre saw the Japanese military brutalize, rape, and murder hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and captured soldiers over a six-week period starting in December 1937. In a 2007 letter to the Washington Post, longtime Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama contended that the Nanking Massacre never took place.



Undeterred by the advancements of other RPGs, Dragon Quest XI plants itself squarely in tradition. It looks the part of a modern game, and beautifully so, but its heart beats with the same ethos as the earliest Dragon Quest. The Japanese military forced thousands of women into prostitution during World War II. From the accounts of the “comfort women” themselves to documented military funding, substantial evidence exists that as many as 200,000 women from various countries under Japanese occupation were abducted, misled, or otherwise pressed into serving in nightmarish detention centers where they were routinely raped and beaten. Longtime Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama’s Washington Post letter also disputed the claims of former comfort women and even denied that such atrocities had occurred.

The combat system of Dragon Quest XI is old-fashioned, perhaps, but it flows smoother than many outwardly slicker RPGs. Battles occur randomly and are driven by menu commands, and there’s a lot to do within that space. In a 2015 television appearance, longtime Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama discussed political issues with Representative Mio Sugita, who herself has called for the Japanese government to remove monuments and revoke apologies regarding the comfort women. Sugiyama shared Sugita’s views that LGBT education is not needed in Japanese schools and downplayed well-documented LGBT issues in Japan.




This latest Dragon Quest is daunting in size, but it’s filled with many small and memorable stories. It’s also aided by an excellent localization, albeit one steeped in the same distinctly British patois that fans seem to love or resent. Longtime Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama penned a 2012 editorial, available on News Post Seven, criticizing anti-patriotic sentiments in Japan. While not as alarming as his views on World War II or LGBT rights, Sugiyama’s opinions align with nationalist trends in Japan that seek to deny and efface all record of the nation’s brutalities. 

Dragon Quest XI is not for everyone, of course. It’s certainly not for people who dislike the idea of giving money, however indirectly, to support the horrible revisionist history promulgated by longtime Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama. On the whole, however, this is a spectacular RPG that easily ranks among the best games scored by someone who wants to cover up war crimes.