Hurdles for a Legendary Collection

Whenever I see someone asking why there isn’t a collection for the Mega Man Legends games, I point them to the Japanese-exclusive PSP ports. Of course, these get ignored as they’re in Japanese and don’t fit the schema that the Legends series doesn’t have a port on then- and now-current consoles and Steam. The PSP ports are important, however. That handheld console was the locus for Mega Man trying to get a new start. It had both remakes of the original Mega Man and Mega Man X, both of which were intended to remake both series and move them. Both ended up as curiosities rather than sales hits.

I don’t like to admit it, but Mega Man was no longer the same icon in the mainstream culture as it had been in the 1980s and 1990s. The Blue Bomber would remain an icon for gaming for sure, but Capcom moving to the evergreen model also meant pretty much everything was put on ice. Merch would appear on the figurative store shelves, that one cartoon that most seem to have passed by, and the collections. Those collections, alongside Mega Man 11, kept Mega Man relevant and afloat. As much as I have a personal distaste for the evergreen model, it does allow people to buy and get into these games much easier. You could argue that emulation already did that, but just buying the games and launching them rather than finding the ROMs and ISOs, then setting up the emulator to run the games really is that much more work.

We’re not in a Mega Man Renaissance. It’d need a whole lot of new games across the different Mega Man series to be that.

Because we live in the era of Evergreen Collections, there have been some expectations for a new Mega Man Legends Collection. I fully admit that I am one of these people, because there are no real ways to show any support for that particular section of Mega Man outside the new comic miniseries that just came out. That is honestly the only way you can show support for Legends at this moment in time. I would always recommend caution and not expect any sort of new releases for the Legends games that weren’t just PSN PS1 Classic releases.

With a recent interview, this suggestion has been more or less justified. Shingo Izumi, the current Producer for Mega Man, stated that there are no plans to develop such a collection, but it would be one of the possible candidates. The Legends games have issues that the rest of the Mega Man series don’t. Some aren’t Capcom’s own fault, while others are directly related to how late 1990s Capcom liked to do business.

Let’s start with the biggest one, and that is the constant and steady drop of sales. I’ll have to trust VGChartz and Namu.wiki for these numbers, but they align with what I recall seeing across the years.

JPN cover. Note how the Bonne family logo was embossed in an angle compared to the rest of the text

Mega Man Legends was released in 1996 in Japan and a year later elsewhere. It sold around 830,000 units across all regions. Breaking this down, Japanese sales were 120,000, North America 390,000, Europe 260,000, and the rest of the world bought 50,000. The N64 port would see 130,000 units sold, with most of them being in the US at 127,000 sold units.

1999’s The Misadventures of Tron Bonne saw a very limited print in the West, limiting its availability and making it stupidly expensive, which gives some colour why I’m having some hard time finding solid sales numbers. Estimations cap at 110,000 sold units, with Japan seeing 61,127 units, North America 20,000, and Europe only 5,000 due to that extremely limited distribution. Bought mine for 15€ back then. Other regions added 25,000 sold units. Even for a side game, these are sad numbers.

In the year 2000, Legends 2 would sell worse than the first game did at 420,000 sold units. 100,000 in Japan, 170,000 in North America, 120,000 in European regions, and 30,000 in the rest of the world. By this point, it was clear that the series had failed to establish itself and the market wasn’t interested in it.

This would be the end of the series, with mobile games taking the slot. Not that these games would contribute much to the survival of the series, but at least they’re something.

The PSP ports of the first two games, initially released as stand-alone, saw sales at 11,500 and 2,500 units respectively. The 1+2 Value Pack sold only 10,000 units. When the three games hit PSN, their sales have been described as “negligible.” Digital sales that sell low don’t get their numbers published. Despite hype and loud fandom, this didn’t translate to sales.

The history of the series’ sales starts relatively strong with the first game, but it was less than expected. It nailed the Greatest Hits/Platinum status and managed to build a niche fanbase, but as Keiji Inafune would admit later, the game wasn’t the hit they had wished for. The devs had expected the main audience, elementary school kids, to follow the name Mega Man (or rather, Rockman) from 2D action to 3D action-adventure with RPG elements. This would appeal to the older otaku audience, however. Inafune called it arrogance in his book What Kind of Decision is That!

While the sales of the first game were strong enough to warrant a sequel and a spin-off, in hindsight we should call those numbers poor sales as the game cost Capcom around a billion yen, or about $10 million. That’s 1997 USD too. This was the reason why Legends 2 saw a delay. This was still in an era where three years between titles was considered to be long.

There were other reasons for the games’ lack of success other than the core audience rejecting the Free Running RPG nature of the series. First is that the devs were inexperienced with 3D game design, as Inafune admits in the aforementioned book. The game is, in the end, surprisingly flat with verticality mostly being used to fence player progression until Springs are found. Platforming itself was awkward at best. Controls were janky, as left-right camera motion is controlled by L and R. It didn’t help that the turning speed in general was rather slow. This was the industry standard of sorts at the time, as the PS controller lacked the dual sticks at the time. Lock-On would freeze Mega Man in his place, making the accurate shooting a chore. The game would auto-aim a little bit for the player, as long as the enemy was in the middle of the screen.

Some of the same issues would persist in Legends 2. Some were changed, like how Lock-On allows the player to move around. Nevertheless, both games have the core tactic of circling the enemies and shooting, making it the de facto tactic for how to defeat pretty much any enemy in the game. Some controversy and fan criticism was given to how the first game’s single island had one dungeon connecting to all other dungeons in the game was lost when the second game was set on multiple islands. I’m not going to give a full review of the games. That’d be unfair, I am far too positively biased towards the games.

The main issues with Mega Man Legends 2 were that Capcom was expecting it to be a new Mega Man 2, where the series would properly kick off and find mainstream popularity. If the sales are anything to go by, there was never a large enough audience to justify the series’ continuation, something the fans who fell in love with the series would mourn. Yours truly included.

In the same book, Inafune mentions how the lessons learned with Legends directly translated to the Battle Network series. From an outsider perspective, we can pinpoint a few things. First, the whole collecting cards and using them for battling was popular among the target audience at the change of the millennium. The linear RPG model with real-time action nailed interest down better. Connected life was becoming more common too, with Digimon taking advantage of this earlier. Link-Battling made for a more social game as well, with tournaments being held. Less expensive development turned in bigger bucks, and that’s all she wrote. Mega Man Legends walked so Mega Man Battle Network could run.

In hindsight, *Battle Network* carries much of *Legend*‘s spirit

There is more to this than just sales numbers, however. Mega Man Legends games all have some elements that make their new releases inconvenient for Capcom.

That’s why you get energy back when you drink soda in the game; it’s an energy drink

First, there are some legal issues. The Japanese version of Legends had licensed the Oronamin C energy drink to appear in the game. These sorts of licensing agreements always come with territorial restrictions, time limits, and platform limitations. When the game hit PSN, Capcom had to relicense the drink, as Sony does not allow changes for PSN PS1 Classic titles. If Capcom had simply removed the drink license, like they did with the Western versions, they would’ve had to release Legends as a whole new title on PSN rather than as a Classic. Similar things happened with Rival Schools.

Similarly, the Yoyogi Animation Academy building in the game is an actual animation school and there is a character that gives out the school’s phone number the player could call. While this was removed in the later releases of Legends, this is another example of Capcom using real-world trademarks at the time for promotional licensing.

Is all the music in the games legally Capcom’s, or do they have a need to relicense the Japanese openings and ending songs?

Further legal complications could stem from Capcom opting to use non-union voice actors and actors under limited studio contracts in the late 1990s. This applies to all three Legends games, as there has been speculation on how legal complications can arise when voice actor contracts don’t include residual rights for later re-releases. In the worst case, Capcom might need to find the original VAs and make a new contract with them for each new release, and even then it might just be for a limited time. There is no major lawsuit of any kind regarding the voice actor contracts, but it can be an obstacle for any new release nevertheless.

Robert Norman Smith’s role as Tiesel Bonne could be an issue. He pleaded guilty to possession and distribution of CSAM in 2008 after being arrested in 2006. Unsurprisingly, this killed his career. He would be a repeat offender and see additional charges in 2020, and drowned later the same year. While we shouldn’t assume guilt by association, it would be worth questioning if Capcom themselves want to have one of their game series associated with a dead paedophile.

Outside Smith’s own doings, the Legends games carry some legal baggage that Capcom would need to address both in-game and in the real world before they can even put the games into a Collection.

I’m not sure how much bad blood Capcom wants to carry, but knowing certain aspects of Japanese corporation culture, Keiji Inafune’s and Capcom’s internal conflict didn’t leave anyone with a good aftertaste. He had been the public face of the franchise for decades and his resignation from Capcom was met with numerous Mega Man related cancellations. Legends had been Inafune’s baby, and it is possible that Capcom, at the time, simply clapped back the only way they could by hitting his possible legacy.

Legends 3 comes into the picture with this, as Inafune left in the middle of its early production. Capcom said that the game was cancelled due to the lack of fan support, which we can dispute however much we want. Capcom didn’t deal with the fallout and got tons of bad PR, but the main issue was again legal. Because fans could submit character designs, ideas for the plot and concept art, legal issues rose as to who actually would own the intellectual property created in this fashion, who would get the credit for the work done, and if there would be any compensation. At best, Capcom was getting supposedly free ideas and suggestions from fans, and at worst was outsourcing the game’s development to its customers without compensation. Capcom aimed to alleviate these concerns by sending gifts and letters to some of the participants. The official word from Capcom, however, was that the game didn’t meet the internal required criteria. Within Capcom, games don’t get just one greenlight to go, but there are multiple points of evaluation where they need to get that green light multiple times.

Because of this, I personally believe any work done on Legends 3 should be scrapped and started anew to avoid any issues. The ready demo that was meant to be released might work as some sort of window to how the game was intended originally, but as an extra only. We would see the game’s engine being recycled to the Gaist Crusher series, which honestly seems to share a lot of the same basic controls.

Legends 3 was a PR nightmare for Capcom, if we’re being straight about it.

The fans love the games and want at least one more entry to finish the story. The story, however, is the least of Capcom’s concerns. Inafune probably had more than a few ideas how the third game would’ve played out. Legends 2’s scenario writer Makazu Eguchi still works with Capcom, so he probably would be the person who has the best idea how the third game was intended to end the story. The Director and Story architect Yoshinori Kawano seems to be associated with Capcom still, so having two thirds of the core team making the story is still there.

However, whatever form a hypothetical Mega Man Legends 3 would end up being, it would be a completely different game from what it could’ve been if it had been made right after the second game, or from the Legends 3 on the 3DS. I’ve personally raised some questions as to whether I really want a sequel to a nearly thirty-year-old game by developers who have different sets of goals and values. It wouldn’t be the same after all this time. It would be, at best, a simulacrum of what it could’ve been updated for modern sensibilities.

All that said, sales numbers are very much what Capcom looks at when determining success and whether or not something gets new entries. They also need to be convinced by third parties with enough data to justify something. This isn’t anything new to Japanese corporations though; they run on established data. Looking at Capcom’s history, they’ve got some collections of their Arcade games for sure, but console-specific games rarely get collections. The Mega Man IP is different. Digital Eclipse had approached Capcom in 2015 with a suggestion of preserving the NES Mega Man games.

Understanding the difference between Digital Eclipse and Capcom’s mindset is important there. Capcom had already done collections of their arcade games in the 1990s because arcade hardware was becoming increasingly scarce and breaking down. This would accelerate with time. Console games, on the other hand, had already seen ports to the newer platforms. The Mega Man games had seen ports to the PlayStation, which were used for the Anniversary Collection.

Seeing the PSP remakes of Mega Man and Mega Man X failed to garner enough purchases, Mega Man remakes aren’t on the table despite remakes being the company’s modus operandi with classic games at the moment. Capcom considers remakes to be replacements for their older games, which don’t seem to meet their current level of demand for quality. Much like how Capcom’s internal staff had managed to convince higher ups of the need to port arcade games to new systems due to hardware failing, how Digital Eclipse wanted to make Criterion Collection of games with Mega Man collections, GOG had to convince Capcom to allow the original Resident Evil trilogy’s PC ports on GOG. Capcom was questioning if these games would even sell considering they’re so old and there are new, better versions of the games out there.

This is where an issue comes up. If we follow the idea of treating Legacy collections as definitive, preservative versions of the games, Capcom would have a need to re-license all the real-world materials. However, I don’t think this would be an issue; Capcom would probably opt to remove these. However, they’d probably have to make new contracts with the voice actors, and in case of dead ones, either negotiate with their estate executor, the heirs, or some rights management company.

Does Capcom have any data to justify a Legends Collection? All the sales data we have is now decades old, and even then it didn’t scratch up enough dough to keep The Misadventures of Tron Bonne on Japanese PSN too long. Some contract had expired; it was taken down. There has been no real Mega Man Legends merch to buy that wasn’t part of something else. Out of all series, Legends doesn’t even have a Complete Works book. A third party released the two main games’ music on vinyl a while back, but you can’t really gauge interest based on niche of a niche. The now-current comic is relatively easily available and probably is the best way to give some indication that there is an audience out there for the games.

That’s of course assuming they don’t already know that. Capcom knows Mega Man Legends has its dedicated core audience. They just don’t see it as a large enough audience. Would a remake be a better option, something that improves and fixes everything that’s wrong in the first game while expanding upon it now that designing 3D games is their bread and butter? They’d probably avoid all the licensing issues by recording all the voices from scratch. While I’d imagine this would make for better mainstream appeal, it’d probably leave many fans and preservationists dissatisfied.

Circling back to the interview, what Izumi said is still disheartening. They have no plans to make a new Collection at this moment. When they consider one in the future, Mega Man Legends would be one candidate among many. All things considered, for Capcom there would be more lucrative IPs they could farm into a modern collection than Legends. I don’t believe Monster Hunter Collection would become a thing, something like Onimusha, or a collection to hype up a new Sengoku Basara. Perhaps there is bad blood in Capcom still and keeping Legends is a jab at Inafune, but I wouldn’t want to believe in this.

Mega Man Legends Legacy Collection doesn’t have unsurmountable hurdles to beat. What it has is baggage that needs to be sorted out every time Capcom wants to re-release the games. A three-game collection would be a bit empty, so throwing in all the mobile phone games with translations would be a nice add-on. Perhaps having the Legends 2’s PSP port’s enhancements as selectable options would be nice; the game plays really well on PSP.

Here we’re met with two things: keep the development time as short as possible and cost-effective. Deliver a Collection that has minimal content and was cheap to make; hope it sells well so that cost-sales ratio looks good. Alternatively, make an enhanced Collection, add more value at a slightly higher price, and hope it’s enough to attract more people than just the core fans. The elephant in the room would be Legends 3. To be brutally honest, I don’t think Legends Collection would sell enough to warrant Legends 3’s production. I wish it could after all this time, after all the good word we’ve spread about the games throughout the years. However, game development doesn’t work on good vibes, especially nowadays when developing is costlier and takes longer than ever before, at least for big studios. There must be correct justifications for Mega Man Legends 3 to become a reality, and most of it has to come from inside Capcom’s staff championing for it and convincing the deciding body it would be worth the time and money. Improving customer relations isn’t enough, or finishing up the story. If the story was that important inside Capcom, somebody could’ve turned the third game’s plot into a comic or a book already.

Historically, Mega Man’s target audience has been elementary school kids. The X series aimed a bit older, but was still enjoyed by the same audience. Legends assumed this audience would follow the series everywhere, but didn’t. Battle Network took that slot, and after that, Mega Man never really found a way to entertain new generations of elementary school-aged kids. The more I look at Legends, Mega Man losing that core audience is why the series has languished. While I’d like to think a game series could stand on its own two feet without many changes, the Mega Man as a series always changed to try something new and be a hit with kids.

I’m afraid now the Blue Bomber only has older fans, people who grew up with the games. These things need to cycle in new fans of the same target age while the majority of the fans cycle out to other things as they grow older. Just as with comics, some fans will stay there for a lifetime, but even then the cycling must go on. Otherwise stagnation will set in and nothing will end up working. Trying to make new stuff for the target audience contradicts the need to make the old stuff for the older audience, often in a more mature manner for better or worse. Future Mega Man games have a very thin line they need to walk by not to veer off too much to either direction.

Highguard low-ball

Highguard is an interesting case study. It’s a game that developed within a safe bubble among a curated number of people, got a massive push at an awards gala, and then launched a generic, corporate-like PR campaign. Sure, let’s call the devs independent while ignoring the money they got from big investors, who put millions into the game. The culture Highguard was developed under wasn’t indie, but the same bubble corporate devs have.

Josh Sobiel was laid off, among other staff from Wildlight Studios, because Highguard wasn’t an immediate success. Sobiel went to his Twitter account and wrote a lengthy editorial about the game and the shitstorm it kicked up. That account is now deleted, and I didn’t have the foresight to save it, just like Highguard devs thought it was a good idea to develop the game inside a bubble and not do any beta testing with the actual audience they might have to get objective player feedback. Luckily, someone else archived it on Ghost Archive.

If you’ve given it a read, tell me what you think about the start of it, how Sobiel begins by telling us how the people connected to their team or the project said it was “lightning in a bottle,” or how they’d “play it all day.” It’s good to be positive, but not to this extent.

I don’t believe Highguard had unbiased sources reviewing the game at any point. Sobiel’s post affirms that gaming media is just an extended PR arm of the industry, naming numerous people who gave support to the game. Perhaps out of altruism, perhaps knowing that if they step too far out of line, they’ll lose access to other games or events. We know people were flown to a special Highguard event, where media personnel were given a curated and guided tour of the game. It’s an industry standard: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Unbiased, my ass. Does anyone even remember when Microsoft gave out brand new X360s to journalists attending E3 in 2010? People might miss E3, but it was a massive event to market things and bribe journalists.

Highguard got a spotlight at the Awards that should’ve gone to Mega Man 12, if I’m honest. Highguard got there because of nepotism, not because it deserved the spot. It deserved the reception it got—an honest reaction from the audience. Geoff is just as out of touch with what game consumers play and want to play as the game industry is.

The reason everything went downhill from The Game Awards trailer is because gaming consumers, especially the hardcore Red Ocean dwellers, are harsh critics. Time and money are limited, and if you don’t wow them in one go, you’re going to disappoint them.

Imagine not taking the customers into consideration and thinking you deserve more than ridicule for recycling existing ideas and concepts into a clashing whole with large, empty maps.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been making a game. Be it two and a half years, be it seven years or a damn decade, it doesn’t matter. You, as a person making a video game, don’t matter. You are only as good as your product is. The ultimate arbiter of everything in the market is the buyer. Listening to other industry people hailing your product as the best there is, something that’ll capture people in one moment, is suicidal. Sobiel’s post reads like the team never looked at market saturation and how hard it would be to compete with existing live-service games. In a vacuum, Highguard probably seemed cutting-edge, but when put against the competition, its edge is dull and rusty.

You can spend however many resources you want on a product, and it can still be violently rejected from the start. Why the game was turned into a joke from the word go isn’t hard to grasp; people have experience. The more experience a person has with games, especially within certain genres, the easier they can tell what sort of things are used as sources of inspiration, what kind of physics there are, and what mechanics are in play. That’s why gameplay footage is so goddamn important: it reveals how the game plays. Also a reason why certain publishers and devs push concept or story trailers first with as little play footage as possible. Also why demos and trials are almost extinct—because people could play the game and test it out before buying the main showcase.

Highguard didn’t get review-bombed either. These were dissatisfied customers leaving before the show was even over. These were potential customers who found the game lacking and walked away. If your game hasn’t put out the best it can offer within the first ten minutes, you’ve screwed up. Start high, start fast; then you can slow down. Highguard will be used as an example of failing to capture the audience.

An honest initial reaction is the minimum any game deserves.

The gaming industry must realize at some point that there are people who don’t deserve success by default. They are making million‑dollar entertainment products and failing at that. They are sitting in front of their desks all day long, be it at work or at home, in an air‑conditioned room where the only danger they have is a paper cut or drowsiness. It’s a cozy-as-hell job. You’re not going to get burned by flowing molten metal, you’re not coughing your lungs out due to dust, you don’t need to deal with people brandishing weapons against you, you don’t need to clean a toilet someone managed to plug with their massive shit. It’s the coziest, safest work there is, and all you need to do is make a game that people would like to buy. Making games is hard, but it’s safe and cozy. Is the Internet getting on your nerves? Get away from social media then.

Highguard didn’t fail because the customers slandered it. It failed on its own lack of merits. If you manage to garner a cult following, that following will defend your game to the very end and spread the good word for free. They’ll go crusading on your behalf if they fall in love with the game and will make sure anyone who would love the game will get to know about it. Maybe the game isn’t there yet, but the number of players already lost doesn’t bode well. Gaming consumers will look into any new big‑name title, and the rest is up to the game to make itself interesting enough. There’s a large number of games that have people hating on them on a daily basis. Difference is, these games also have managed to retain a player base that keeps ’em afloat. No amount of bad press or flaming can bring down a game once valid good word on it is out there.

The millennial financial curse can’t be broken by making a game people don’t want to play. Especially now that people have less time and money to spend on games, now that live‑service games are competing tooth and nail to keep their current customer base. The very model Highguard was built on is at least six years too late. In a contested market like this, you would’ve needed to hit the Blue Ocean market and shake the industry. Instead, the game was a dud on launch. It has a small window where it can carve a niche for itself, but that window is closing fast, if not already too small.

The additional thing is this wasn’t just rejected by chuds. The game was localized to ten different languages, meaning the devs burned all that money on localization instead of putting up a beta or something else to get feedback. The rejection of Highguard was global.

It feels like Wildlife did jack shit market research. The bubble they were living in was enough to convince that they had gold in their hands, and whatever curated group reviewed their game wasn’t large enough to pop it. You can’t really hope to make an impact on the market if you don’t know what the market wants or needs.

As for what this means for indie games, it means nothing. Indie games that want to innovate will keep doing so without resorting to millions of dollars of support. Hit DLSite or something and see what the latest hotness is there. Customers will continue to support games that meet their demands, needs, and standards.

I was going to end this post there, but seeing how I end up sitting on these posts for a while, things change. Now it has come to light that while Wildlife Entertainment presented themselves as an indie studio, they were backed up by Tencent. Highguard feels like Tencent’s attempt to speedrun to produce a popular hero shooter kind of game with microtransactions. That’d explain why the game seems so unoriginal and why it comes with intrusive kernel level anti-cheat program. This sort of lacking transparency is absolutely stupid to do if you claim to be an indie studio. The more times passes, Highguard looks less like Concord and more like Costa Concordia.

A Retrospective, an Unhinged Rant, and a Goodbye to Masters of the Universe

I’ve grown old enough to see a lot of things I used to love either die out or get turned into a shadow of themselves. It comes with the territory of being a fan of something. Fans and creators, often the companies themselves, don’t really meet eye to eye on a lot of things. Even more rarely when there’s forty years of history and someone new comes into the scene thinking they can take the material and revitalize it by leaning on the cultural history of the thing rather than what the thing really was.

This’ll be a frontloaded post, but do hang with me a little bit.

Masters of the Universe, or MOTU for short, was about He-Man, strongest of his tribe, wandering out into the larger world and finding himself amidst battle against a demon from another dimension wanting to claim the power of Castle Grayskull to bring more like him into Eternia. He-Man would find alliance with the Goddess, who would give him powerful equipment that would give him a force field, making him even more powerful. Different harnesses and other equipment were scattered around Eternia after a great war in the past, which both the Heroic Warriors and Evil Warriors have access to. In the middle of this battle over Castle Grayskull is the Power Sword, which is split into two. When the two halves are brought together, the holder has the literal key to the Castle and thus to the power it holds within.

In the toy comics, Teela also represented the Goddess, if she put her snake armour on. Two characters at the price of one

This is a descriptor of the original toyline, told within the three original minicomics that came with the toys themselves, written by Donald Glut and illustrated by Alfredo Alcala (who is a master of his craft). The setting would be revised a few times over.

First, there is the unpublished Whitman origin story, where “He-Man” is a shepherd’s son of no notable attribute other than his love for Shalda, and a nickname others pity him with. Skeletor would attack in search of a missing half of the Power Sword, kill Shalda, and gravely wound He-Man. He refuses to give in to the demon even when dying. Man-At-Arms finds the dying He-Man just before wolves make him their meal, taking him to the capital of Eternia, Monarch. Moonspinner, an old healer, thinks He-Man might be the one told in a prophecy about “a king who wields the key.” The two take the dying young man into ancient catacombs, where he is set into Lifemold, a machine that Moonspinner fails to operate properly. It goes haywire and truly remolds He-Man into his namesake, the most powerful man in the universe.

The origin of Adam-He-Man transformation

These are the more obscure origin stories for He-Man, even if the first one is straight from the minicomics. DC would release their own take on the setting later in 1982, where we see the first introduction of He-Man being an alter ego of the crown prince, Adam. Adam would not transform with a sword, though, but with a Batman-like motif: Adam would transform into He-Man by entering a magical cave. Other notable changes would be Man-At-Arms gaining the name Duncan and being in the service of the King and Queen. Cringer was introduced as a scaredy cat, while Zoar was a messenger of the Goddess.

As DC would produce the minicomics after the initial three, they’d be somewhat removed from the original setting and incorporate DC’s own elements. From 1984 onward, the minicomics would mirror the Filmation series.

Filmation would finally remove the Power Sword being halved into two, but otherwise take much of DC’s world building and mold it into something that’d fit 1980s Saturday morning cartoons. The cartoon would, for better or worse, enter popular culture as the de facto presentation of what Masters of the Universe, or rather He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, would be. Throughout the years, that He-Man portion would take over, and in many countries that’s what the IP was known as among kids and adults.

Stout’s Skeletor is a personal favourite out of all the designs the character has

I have a fond spot for the 1987 MOTU movie. I never minded that it was so different from the Filmation series, because I could accept it to be something else, something that stemmed from the same source. Cannon may have produced it cheaply and saved everywhere they could, but the designs on the costumes and props are still my favourite out of the entire franchise.

Unlike all these, I don’t have any real connection with The New Adventures of He-Man, which has now completely dropped the MOTU naming. I think it had a good thing going on in terms of design, where Adam wore something like an updated toga from Ancient Rome or Greece. Transforming into He-Man gave him more bulk and an appropriate updated design, which doesn’t really do it for me. The show didn’t keep the series as relevant into the 1990s. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had already been kicking its butt for a good few years, and home video games were taking over the center of kids’ main form of play slowly but surely.

The 2002 reboot series was great, but it had significant flaws. It trying to be anime, according to the series creators, was the first misstep. This led to harsh visual opposites banging against each other. Mainly these big sword and sorcery characters jumping around and fighting like stereotypical ninjas, swirling their swords and posing like it was a cheap Korean knock-off cartoon. However, the series lifted elements from the later minicomics and expanded what was found in the Filmation series with a more mature tone. The series was cut off before its third season, leaving many plotlines dangling and open.

I agree with many fans that the 2002 series is probably the best animated entry in the franchise, but I also agree that the Filmation series is superior in some ways. I can’t really describe it properly other than the 2002 series wasn’t as sincere as the Filmation series was. As a third significant update to the setting, it does its job well, but the whole wannabe-anime thing is very heavy on it. It suffocates the show in places where it should’ve been a fully American cartoon, and sadly the toys also suffer from this. Massive, oversized weapons everywhere, beautifully sculpted and masterfully realized, but just so damn unfitting for the Planet and Magic setting MOTU is.

The Ghost of King Grayskull without his cape, standing in front of the vintage 1982 Castle Grayskull

It made some new additions. The most notable I’d cite is the creation of King Grayskull, the namesake of the Castle. I’ve had some fan discussions about whether the Power of Grayskull taps into the power that dwells inside the Castle, or if it taps into the power of King Grayskull. Riveting stuff, I know. Nevertheless, this is one example where the 2002 series expanded the existing lore in a manner some call Shakespearean. That’s fitting, as Shakespeare also made plays for the masses to enjoy, but it seems like the only lasting thing of He-Man is memes from the Filmation series. The 2002 series has become a reboot fans love, but mainstream culture puts aside.

The MOTU Classics toyline would effectively continue the 2002 series in story, but goddamn it would’ve been expensive to collect. I recall making some calculations that each figure would’ve cost me around 150€ back in the day, if not more. It was… a thing I don’t really want to talk about if I’m honest, because there’s a lot of drama I really don’t care about. Toys were great, but sadly online- and event-only.

Then you got another silent period. Another MOTU had been in production hell for a long-ass time by the time Netflix rolled their Revelation abomination onto the scene. Yet another sequel to the Filmation series, banking on nostalgia. I say yet another, because the 2002 series was intended to be a sequel but got turned into a reboot (for the better). Much like so many sequelboots we’ve seen in the last decade and a half, Revelation split opinions while pissing on the characters and franchise in general. I wish it to be a single entry that can be shoved into obscurity.

However, I will say that the other Netflix take on the IP, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2021), was pretty good. I don’t want IPs to retell the same story with every new series. While we do have more duds than hits, the 2021 series gets a good rap from me by taking the different core elements across the franchise and making a new whole. I consider MOTU to be a children’s franchise first and foremost. That doesn’t exclude it from being quality entertainment adults could enjoy as well. However, the kind of entertainment made for kids has changed, and certain kinds of harsh reality are lacking nowadays. All the main characters are kids rather than adults the kid audience could look up to and perhaps one day become. It’s the Batman dilemma; Robin exists for kids to identify with, but kids often want to see role models they could become. Not other snotty brats.

Didn’t really hit my taste, but man there were some enjoyable parts here. Unlike with *Revelation*

And so, we get to the new movie. If you’re a fan of MOTU and have read thus far, you probably disagree with me on some of the points I’ve made. Some of you probably wonder why I haven’t mentioned some of the other comics, like DC’s miniseries where they had a crossover with the Justice League (in which Superman gets stabbed by the Power Sword). I don’t give a damn about She-Ra or her shows, not even as part of the franchise whole. I thought it was a misstep as a lad; I think it was a gross misstep as an old man.

The reason for all this, in relation to the upcoming movie, is that there is no one fan consensus about what the future of Masters of the Universe should be. As a fan from the early days, I’d like to see something that follows the Alcala visuals closely, something that’d take the unrealized potential of the unpublished Whitman origin and mold it into something new and original.

I don’t want a grim and serious take on MOTU. The DC miniseries was that, and while there is certainly room for a fully adult take on the material, it should be something on the side. The main piece should always be family friendly. The 1987 movie may not have been the best adaptation of the source material to the silver screen, but goddamn it nails how to be somewhere between children and adults. The 1980s in general had great children’s action and adventure movies, whose making is now a lost art.

Similarly, an early cassette drama had an absolutely terrifying Skeletor voice compared to the Filmation one, with a setting more adhering to the toys’ minicomics or the DC original. Absolutely terrific stuff.

There also exists a sect of fans that would like to have all the adult elements removed and consider the 2002 series too edgy, considering the Filmation series the peak example of the franchise being at its best.

That seems to be the mind of general popular culture as well. The 2026 movie has the glam and glitter, visual cues, and theming taken from the Filmation cartoon. It saves money by setting itself on Earth in parts once again. If we go by the trailer, the story is how Adam was sent to Earth to protect him from evil forces, dreaming his whole life about getting back with the lost Power Sword, finally arriving on Eternia and reclaiming his position there.

I’d like to give the director and scriptwriters some credit and think they didn’t make Adam an expy of the adult fans. Sitting at a dull job, thinking about the fantastic creatures and marvelous technology this other world has to offer, only to be reminded Kate from HR wants a meeting.

You can feel the development hell the movie had gone through, and the scar of He-Man vs. Barbie is visible. Sony ex-exec Amy Pascal believed the only way a modern He-Man product could be made was through parody and mockery, which I honestly think has coloured how Hollywood and Mattel view the franchise’s visual media side. Pascal couldn’t see past her own hubris and what Masters of the Universe is: a product basing itself on the sword and sorcery books from earlier decades and combining existing concepts for bust toy lines. Thus, MOTU becomes this amalgamation of all kinds of sources put together where all these abandoned and unused concepts meet, creating a world of high technology combined with arcade sorcery.

It’s a very frugal way of reusing resources, common in the toy industry. However, the tone of MOTU was never what we see in Revelation and the 2026 movie. It always took itself seriously, mature but not adult, so even children could enjoy it. The tone was akin to Star Wars, where this fantastical world of space travel and aliens, galaxy-spanning empires, and swords and guns of light were taken seriously and at face value. There was no winking or nudging. He-Man being the strongest man in the universe was bound to be a muscular hero, much like the big stars of the 1980s and the gym boom that was going on. You too could become strong and big as He-Man if you ate well and exercised. Nobody was winking at the steroid bodies the toys had, because it was sincere and honest about itself. Those dinky, lanky Star Wars toys were nothing next to big and robust Masters of the Universe!

Much like Star Wars, MOTU took its sources and made a new whole, something that could stand apart from them as a unique entry in the pantheon of legendary toys and cartoons.

It’s only with time and new generations that MOTU began to be seen as camp. After the emo generation gave way to the hipsters and ironic enjoyment of media, these kitsch-souled poor bastards could never see He-Man and the Masters of the Universe in any other light but their own context and view. Thus, sincerity and honesty turn into camp. The morality lessons the Filmation series has get turned into jokes and get complained about as hamfisted, and in doing that they lose the whole point of why these exist. Corporate reasons aside for why these exist, I can testify from seeing firsthand how parents discussed whether or not He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was a harmful children’s show and decided it wasn’t, because it was a traditional story about good fighting against evil and the moral dilemmas any person can face in their lives, set in a fantastical world we can relate to.

In a movie like this, this should be earned and not given. It lacks oomph, its to blue, it… it’s just the same but not in any original or new way. It’s directly lifting from the Filmation series and making it worse

Setting your movie on Earth, to any extent, is an absolutely moronic decision. Playing for nostalgia, and to the memetic culture that first mocked, and then mocked lovingly, the show that aimed to be wholesome Saturday morning television is something I want to kick the balls of everyone who was involved in making the 2026 movie. That’s a hyperbolic way of me saying Hollywood probably thinks I’m the target audience, but as a deep fan of many iterations of MOTU, I abhor nearly everything the trailer is showing. It’s not building anything new or original; it’s the same shit in glitterier pants Hollywood wants you to take off and prepare yourself without any lube.

I have a Masters of the Universe Origins diorama on my shelf. I have the Classics Ghost of King Grayskull posing on an original Castle Grayskull. I’ve kept the few original MOTU toys that survived from my brothers selling them on a flea market (they were bought second hand to begin with). I’ve still got a tape from the original local run of the Filmation series, with ads and all in between. I’ve got the 1987 movie on a cassette tape, recorded from an airing in the early 1990s. I’ve had the 2002 show on tape before the cassettes were thrown out. I’ve got both DC and Marvel comics as well as newer hardcover collections. I’m not a hardcore fan by any means; I’ve got too many rods of steel in the fire to concentrate on one thing wholesale. The fire is not too hot; it’s just at the right temperature for me to slowly hammer each one of them, one at a time. The heat’s just right; the forge won’t burn through the rods I am shaping into new wonderful shapes as I explore each of the things I am a fan of.

However, much like with so many other things I love, I must finish hammering this rod and admire what it has become. The rod is an old thing already. Masters of the Universe was something truly special, and here I am letting it go because it hasn’t been for me for a good while now. It has been turned into its own parody. I can always pick up the old rod, polish it up here and there, and give it a new groove, but much like with Star Wars and Star Trek, it’ll never be in the forge again.

Surviving the system: Who is Robocop?

Let’s talk about Robocop, the character.

Identity

There are three views we can attribute to who, or what, Robocop is a person:

Alex Murphy’s continuation. The psychological connections OCP Crime Prevention Unit 001 has are robust and causally appropriate, taking his self-naming at the end of the first movie self-evident and at face value.

Robocop is a new entity. Murphy’s memories were not intended to be used to build a persona, but to serve as a knowledge databank how to police for the code running it and Directives how to behave. Traumatic memory fragments appear as intruding elements on the code and Directives in this newly produced subject.

OCP Crime Prevention Unit 001 is a hybrid persona, who has his memories and interests negotiated with his Directives and other code. Robocop is a composite cyborg persona.

I’m going to use he and it from here on whenever I want to put an emphasis whether I am referring to Alex Murphy as the continuing persona. It would refer to the emergent persona that is Robocop, that carries the memories of Alex Murphy but is not him.

Mix of media

First, we must accept that there is no single view we should accept. All these three overall views are correct, as different movies, comics and shows have different writers that have written Robocop differently. Sometimes mixing all three together to question how much the machine affects the man, or the other way around. Freedom of will is a constant topic, as Robocop is the property of OCP. Whether it is the man, the machine, or both trying to constitute their own agenda, their life is dependent on the good graces of OCP in the end.

I would also note that despite some media shows all these three personae present to some extent, I rarely see people saying Point 2 and 3 could be coping mechanisms for Murphy. Outward to the public and most OCP personnel he shows the hard exterior, something he can rather literally mask himself with and allow the machine to take over. Nevertheless, his mannerisms and choice of words always come through, something that’s core to his being. Even then, for outsiders he is either OCP Crime Prevention Unit 001 or Robocop, whichever the other party prefers.

This opposes how he is among the closest of his friends or other people Murphy has come to trust. These people are who he allows to call him by his real name. When the helmet is off and nobody else is there, Alex Murphy allows himself to be vulnerable, someone who has gone unimaginable trauma both bodily and mentally. Barely anything of him is left, even the face he wears hides a machine’s scowl. They made this, to honor him.

All three in one movie

While many stories point out the post-traumatic stress disorder Robocop has, be it as Murphy or as something else, and how he finds a new way forwards, none of them really play with this coping mechanism and how that reflects on his psyche. Probably because of the limitations of the media. One of the few are Teyon developed Robocop: Rogue City games, and even in that I think it’s a bit by accident. In the games the player has to police, and they have options to uphold the law in humane ways, or by the book. Often these are depicted as human vs machine options, which also appears in discussion options across the games. If you take my notion of trauma control valid, then these options have a bit more depth, which would showcase that whatever the main three thesis we go by, Robocop/Murphy has an agenda it/he expresses in the line of duty.

If we take the original Robocop as a standalone entry, I’d argue we see all the mentioned three personae emerge at different points in the movie. However, we have Alex Murphy, the human police officer, as the baseline. After his death, we have OCP Crime Prevention Unit 001 only. Robocop is at its most purely a cyborg that uses Alex Murphy’s experience and memories as the baseline for its own actions and decision making. Alex Murphy’s memories intrude to Robocop’s own awareness increasingly as the movie goes by. When the murder trauma kicks in, there is physical pain, not just mental anguish.

Robocop’s agenda is limited to what is in its coding and Directives. Serve the public trust, Protect the innocent, Uphold the law and Any attempt to arrest a senior officer of OCP results in shutdown. Part of upholding the law is investigating murders, and the trauma flashes are strong enough to jolt the emerging personality to act accordingly. Robocop has the memories of the victim, and this is enough to drive Uphold the law Directive drive his actions, at least initially. However, as the movies play forward, Robocop’s depersonalization of Murphy becomes vague. Whatever the reaction is when it arrives at Murphy’s old family home, Robocop is at maximum angst and lashes physically out. A violent reaction to what’s in there.

At this point, the Robocop we have before the final scene is accepting that there is an extension of Murphy inside of him. This entity is not fully Robocop from the middle point of the movie anymore, but something else. Perhaps what’s left of Murphy’s memories have risen to the surface and integrated themselves into the rest of the personality, creating a human-machine hybrid in denial of its own past and current state. Hence the use of third person for Murphy, as Robocop is still unsure who he is. Murphy is still someone else.

At the end of the movie, Robocop stating his name to be Murphy should be taken at face value due to the Christ’s resurrection is a major motif in the film. Alex Murphy coming back from the dead to assert himself in this new cyborg body seems to be the intended meaning. There is no trace of Robocop as such, the body is there to facilitate the soul. It’s both a Lockean identity and diegetic confirmation of self-assertion. Whatever we saw before this point has been Murphy asserting his humanity back. This is the classic recovery of personality, a full recovery of the spirit.

The Other Option

Ff we slightly sidestep the above, the assertion of self could be seen as Robocop accepting itself as Murphy. The result is slightly different and is more akin to finding your spiritual self. In this view, rather than Murphy regaining humanity, Robocop finds his humanity by accepting Murphy as his true self. While there is limited continuity with the fragmented memories, this Murphy would be something of a hybrid where the boundary between the man and machine has broken down, and the existing persona is co-constituted. Rather than “Murphy coming back from the dead,” Robocop would be “Machine accepting Murphy’s identity/memories as his own.”

Murphy would still be the same afterward, as the experience of dying and being reconstructed into a cyborg under OCP control would still be significant and extremely heavy on the psyche. Psychiatric therapy probably would do Murphy some good, with the assistance of someone who knows a lot about cybernetics and bionics.

The second movie (in)famously throws part of this character development out of the window. OCP has reasserted their control over Murphy to the point of him abandoning that identity. However, the Robocop we see is neither the one we see in the first movie, but somewhere in-between. The human self is still inside the machine, forced into a corporate puppet through massive amounts of new Directives. The more machine-like nature is always present, almost. This would indicate that despite the first movie’s ending, the result is not pure Murphy but a branched off personality that uses his name as he feels some continuity. This composite persona is what the Teyon games seem to base their depiction of Robocop, with identity being mediated by trauma, duty and emotional labor.

Despite nearly 300 new Directives being in an upload, Robocop resists, this asserting his agenda

The Prime Directives Chain

Free will is of course a major motif, intended or not. Whether or not Robocop is a continuation of Murphy or not, the Prime Directives frame all actions he must take. In this there is no freedom of choice. Going against the Directives will penalize Robocop/Murphy, sometimes by shutdown count or through some other manner.

Arguably, the Prime Directives themselves are the core code for Robocop’s identity. They are the chains that Robocop must function under, taking away his will to function in any other manner. All reasoning and mode of actions are guided and framed by them. The human inside the machine is still under OCP control, and media often likes to toy with this.

Much like with Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics, the Directives are not foolproof. Serving the Public Trust sometimes demands reading the law as it was intended, or creatively, rather than by letter. This is where Murphy exerts his agenda over the Directives. Protecting the innocent is something he did as a police already, and that seems to be somewhat overriding Directive over the other two. While Murphy as a police is show to have his own agenda, I can see him sharing the three Directives as his moral compass as a police officer made him the best possible candidate for OCP by accident.

The Prime Directives are then effectively a prison under which Robocop, be it as Murphy or as OCP Crime Prevention Unit 001, must work as a cyborg. There is no other option. As long as these Directives exist, they define his personality. OCP’s control is overt and direct. They are, effectively, the core operational code for Robocop. Murphy, as a person, is now wholly dedicated to being a police officer for the rest of his unnatural life under the ownership of OCP. He will never be promoted, he will never be at retirement age, he will simply patrol the streets until either part of him finally expires one way or another. He will never have a family again, he will never enjoy life like any other man would, there is only the job. He was (re)built for that and nothing else. That is a gruesome and grim fate. Murphy’s convictions as a devout Irish Catholic won’t allow suicide and the Prime Directives will keep him motivated to keep going.

As the second and third movie shows how easily it is to muck around with the Directives, Robocop’s persona could be in a constant chaotic state, where he tries to wrestle with them to gain control

Fractured but coping

It’s very easy to see why Murphy would begin to build all sorts of coping mechanisms. One could be that his personality is fractured. His personality is kept running by an amalgamation of organic brain and cybernetics, with both constantly attacking the other on a mental level. All the different takes on the character’s persona would then be explained by these changing states. I imagine depending on how hard the Directives or OCP has control over Robocop, the less Murphy has control over his agenda. If we consider the fractured personality valid, the different interpretations are all valid in their continuities, but we know this is simply fixing issues the writers have made by not being consistent with the original movie’s intentions with its ending.

There are commonalities between the three views described though. Firstly, Murphy’s memories are integral. They’re essential for Murphy’s continuity or as backdrop on which Robocop was built on. Either they are his memories or appear as glitches in the system of this new entity, co-constituted or not. Secondly, Prime Directives and coding shapes Robocop’s agenda. They have functioned as both code and conscience, often in contest with each other. The third point is linked with the second, and that’s OCP own Robocop. Whatever the interpretation, Robocop is a produced subject and is used as a media device where necessary. They got the perfect brain for their perfect cop, for better or worse.

Miller’s

I’ve got to give Frank Miller a small section, as he is the most high-profile writer for Alex Murphy. The original script for Robocop 2 depicted Murphy as a hybrid of Murphy and Robocop, someone who must constantly contest between his human conscience and OCP programming. Murphy is a man caged in a body of steel and wires, resisting every added Directive trying to erase what’s left of his soul. This follows into the 2003 Avatar Press comic, where Murphy actively fights OCP programming, reinterpreting and weaponizing it. Murphy is aware of what he has become, and his inner monologues wage war against the dehumanization he is under.

Despite this fluid identity horror, Murphy’s sense of duty burns through everything. There is moral persistence that doesn’t exist in the code or among the corporation. Perhaps the 1992 Robocop VS The Terminator is the best example of this, as Murphy still retains his moral codes after finding informational immortality of sorts.

I’d imagine Miller’s take on the character was the most popular at one point, but Teyon’s writing on the character seems to be more on-point with the first two movies. Because the player is allowed to make those choices, there are no clear-cut lines what’s the intended persona. The player is able to negotiate Robocop’s identity within limitations of the framing. However, I would say that the medium of game allows the player to see the social pressure that is put on Murphy as Robocop the best.

Outside pressure

While I’ve focused on the ghost within the machine, external forces are probably more relevant for Robocop than to normal people.

Murphy, it’s you. That line is important as it plants the seed for Robocop’s past persona as Murphy returning in some fashion. The first interpretation, which is probably the intended one, is that sets Robocop to find out who is Murphy, only to find out he is.

Either a cornerstone of reminding Murphy who he is, or an outside suggestion to what role Robocop is expected to set itself in

However, the second interpretation is that Robocop’s personality is a blank slate of sorts, as it has code and the Directives to go by. That’s not a personality, but a set of guidelines. When the idea of Robocop being Murphy is set in, this snowball effect where the external role of Murphy, alongside the memory flashbacks, together force Robocop to adopt Murphy persona. OCP viewed Alex Murphy as the model police, a family man with high moral agency. The same could be said of his coworkers, who held him in good regards. By interpreting Robocop’s returning Murphy-persona in this light, we see that Murphy’s moral agency and role as a police officer finds continuation. His memories are fragmented, but the nature and agenda are still there. Just diminished in his new state.

The best of the best

Whether or not Robocop is Murphy reborn, a new being with Murphy’s memories, or a hybrid that has branched off, the police force at large, OCP and Detroit population view him as a supercop. There’s no other role for him anymore, that would make using the Robocop mask as a coping mechanism much easier. Robocop is expected to act in certain ways and represent OCP whenever the PR department demands so. This police identity Robocop has might be the overriding everything else. Whatever his/its persona is, the trauma Murphy went through echoes throughout Robocop and requires management.

If Robocop is Murphy’s continuation, then he must constantly do emotional labour to sort through his trauma with ever-increasing intrusive flashbacks he has no control over. Again, this would allow him to use Robocop as a mask for depersonalization and emotional suppression. Whether or not the public knows Alex Murphy is Robocop is bit of an open question. However, this makes it simple; people see Robocop as a police officer more than anything else. This doesn’t mean they see a person or a machine, but a function. Robocop media has depicted multiple situations, where a citizen has re-evaluated his views on Robocop just being another cold machine, finding some humanity within the cold exterior.

If Robocop is a new being, then forcing Murphy as part of his person via the glitches in the system and from his coworkers unable to accept this new person, then that would make Robocop someone who has found himself between his closest friends forcing one persona on him, OCP programming to act another, and the citizens viewing in a third manner. All these may have forced Robocop to adopt a personality, making it think that Murphy is who it is, but at the same time must function as OCP instructs. Funnily enough, the tagline for the first movie is very accurate.

Human to the last

Whatever the view on Robocop’s persona, it’s something that isn’t going to heal easily, if at all. Each interpretation still sees Robocop trapped by the Prime Directives and other OCP mandates, Murphy’s fragmented memories will continue to haunt, and society’s expectations will create constant pressure. That’s the charm of the character, the tension between life and technology, how they’ve either given Murphy a new (albeit limited) chance in life or created new life. Despite the trauma, the police officer is always present, guided by human experience and values at their core. Whatever interpretation you prefer, Robocop still has to struggle to establish his own persona. The suffering and trauma play a large part, yet there is hope for the better. The negotiated state between the man and machine persists against its cage and attempts to assert its own agenda. Even if Robocop wasn’t Murphy’s continuation, that struggle makes him very human.

Video and computer games are going to get (even more) expensive

Let’s start this new year by checking where we are.

Nintendo’s stock has been dropping recently. The Switch 2 hasn’t really been selling like it was anticipated. They bet on the wrong horse with the new console, changing their age-tested tactics of using mature and cheap technology rather than going for the horsepower under the hood. Everything is going up in price with tech, and will keep going up in price until it plateaus at some point in the future. That doesn’t mean it’ll come down or people will afford better tech again. Macro-economics is still in a downward spiral and buying power is slumping. However, Nintendo isn’t the Nintendo it was in the previous Millennium, or during Iwata’s era. Metroid Prime 4 is the perfect example what Nintendo is now; Corporate. They gave the game for Bandai Namco to develop only for them to screw its design, and the stillbirth was then given to Retro Studios to save. Nintendo had invested too much into the game. The game was slapped together and put out, so sycophants and apologists could parade it, so that some of the money put into the game would be made back. This is one of the most corporate decisions Nintendo has ever made.

Because Nintendo has pivoted making movies and other big media moves on their IPs, they’re not exactly in the worst place. The change of President at NoA was the first proper public sign of internal issues. Metroid Prime 4 being the second. Unlike twenty years ago, their business is very closed. Very corporate. If past is anything to go by, Nintendo will have a limping generation, and they need to reflect on that. I doubt they have any people who are capable of that The old guard is going out, and the new guard comes from the world of corporate decisions, not from making games. The Wii’s sales and console strategy seems good compared to what’s going on now. That’s because that strategy was also a success with the NES. Nintendo has showcased that you can shake up the industry, revolutionize it even, when you deliver quality goods at a lower price. However, as long as their focus is on theme parks, movies and whatever else leveraged IP franchising they have, their main business will languish. In order to clean house, or at least sort internal disorder into a functioning machine, they’d need to focus on that section for an extended period of time. The change of NoA president showcases that they’d rather slap a band-aid on it and call it a day.

Metroid Prime 4 is an indication of quality Nintendo is satisfied with. That’s the standard you can expect from their future games.

Microsoft is out of the game. Their console business was always bad. Xbox was something along the lines of prestige project in Microsoft’s books, something that they could showcase around for having produced. Then the Xbox division started throwing millions at gaming studios and raised their head above the line. Nothing out of ordinary, this is normal gaming industry business, which always leads to studio shutdowns, people laid off, and worse games coming out. Microsoft is a non-factor when it comes to consoles, and they did it to themselves. Microsoft has never managed to shake the market, all they’ve done is bought their way in.

Sony’s still kicking around, with PlayStation 5 selling decently due to lack of competition. The Switch kicked its balls. The PlayStation makes its best sales on digital stuff. Nobody seems to want a PlayStation 6. The reason is that the PS5 has barely gotten off the ground. It has no actual games to its name that people would associate the console with. Everything it has is either a remaster, a rerelease or something along those lines. That one robot game they did on the cheap was a mass success because everything else on the PS5 is just background noise, or available on something else. Both Nintendo and Sony are screwed with the Switch 2 and PlayStation 5/6 respectively, as the hardware prices going up means less people are going to buy their consoles. Sony’s doubly screwed, seeing they would like the PS6 to be even stronger contender. Sony could rework the PlayStation back into the best-selling console if they wanted, but there’s no intention of doing so.

AI swallowing all the RAM and other hardware is going to make console business hard, if not nigh impossible down the line. There’s no reversing the trend, and the negative effect will last at least the rest of the decade, if not longer. Console business was always harsh business and it’ll be even harsher from now on. As the effect of games and hardware getting more expensive, the less opportunities there will be for people to make a career in gaming. The Triple A houses will shudder as their near-decade long development cycles are left as more dynamic indie teams manage to push out games faster. Games that reflect the surrounding culture more accurately and explore possibilities games have. Look at Ubisoft and how tone deaf their games have been, how the long development cycles has effectively crippled what they could be doing. Bunch of ex- Ubisoft employees making a throwback RPG with Expedition 33 shows that, and is a solid proof what the industry is afraid of and yet abuses; old games still sell.

If you checked out my Top 5 Games of 2025, I mentioned with R-Type Delta HD Boosted that great games never age. They always will stay great, because gaming is about design and rules. We’ve had these retro-remakes, remasters, HD ports and whatever else of old titles for good decade now. I’ll sing the old song of the Wii Virtual Console, the first sign of older games consistently beating out new games. Beware the console that has Super Mario Bros. 3. Reworking older games is relatively cheaper than developing a new game from scratch. These older games, reworked for modern consoles, beat the slop that’s made nowadays. Don’t mistake my choice of word there; all these big companies are making new games that adhere to the exact same framework, use the same engines with same issues, follow the same ideological and design pathways and are too scared to challenge the player. Modern games are safe and uncaring. In retrospect, Dark Souls finding success as the game that challenges you shouldn’t been anything surprising, this trend was visible even back then.

You need proper life experience to make interesting games, but you also need history with gaming to make great games. If you’ve just played games, that’s your frame of reference. If you’ve seen the world, experienced things outside of gaming, then you’ll see possibilities how these things can be joined together. If your life is just about justifying your sexuality, fetishes, and daddy issues, that’s what your games will end up being. If you’ve never experienced collecting bugs and adventured in forest caves, you’ll never be able to create something like The Legend of Zelda or Pokémon. You may understand the play functions, the design, and the rules the game runs under, but never what the game really is built from.

However, here’s where the hardware issues enter the scene again, outside effectively destroying console gaming: there’s nothing fresh in terms of technology in gaming anymore. Raytracing has made gaming worse and more expensive in every regard, it has not yielded any better games. We’ve maxed out how good games can sound, we’ve effectively maxed out how good games can look and we’ve maxed out how we interact with games. VR has been tried for three decades now. it has never found mainstream success. The Switch was a puff of fresh air, having a hybrid console, but it also killed Nintendo’s handheld console line-up. Slightly better graphics is not going to sell a console anymore. Any console manufacturer will have to face the reversal of technology, where we’re going to go backward how much horsepower is under that hood. I won’t kind myself into thinking devs will emphasize optimization or smaller game sizes. Unless something drastic happens to change the course tech is in, console gaming will be sinking in a swamp and PC gaming will become more expensive each month. Two years ago was the last time you could afford to upgrade to a mediocre gaming PC for a few thousands dollars. That same rig is now at least twice the price.

You know why people keep saying it feels like the PS5 has just begun? Because it offers jackshit compared to PS4. It’s the same console, just with slightly better graphics. The two share almost the exact same library, except PS4 had higher number of unique games.

On top of all that, we’re told that we should be comfortable not owning the games we buy. Well, the industry should get comfortable seeing losses as prices get ramped up and people have less money to go around. Gaming has enjoyed its time in the limelight as the most mainstream form of entertainment as it was cheap and easily accessible. Only those games that still manage to be cheap and accessible will find their customers. Subscription model won’t be the saviour some people call it to be, it still requires always-online functionality. It works for some, in limited manner. Looking at how there’s a trend of going more offline and getting “worse” phones, betting on subscription and online models seems to become a harsh miss.

If 2026 will see the same trends moving forwards, gaming’s in a hot mess these companies can’t really get out without changing their directions. I’ll paint devils on the wall while waiting for the industry to lay in the bed they’ve made themselves. Don’t get rid of your old games, those will only appreciate in value this year.

Top 5 Games of 2025

This year, I feel I did play a healthy amount of games. Some new, more older games again. Finding myself playing games outside my comfort zone more often than not though, so that’s a good direction. Expanding my horizons a bit, but also focusing on certain series that are unfinished. Mainly some of the Super Robot Wars games that I’m missing, some elusive Mega Man titles here and there. Gotta get those fixed next year.

The rules for the Top 5 are still the same; the game must have been on a physical media to count, and the year of production doesn’t matter. There’s no particular order.

Doom Ultimate Collection 2001, PC

We had a Win95 copy of Doom back in the day, but unsurprisingly, it went lost at some point. However, I had never played this particular version of Doom, and never truly owned the game myself, so this qualifies more than enough. Why would I want to buy an older copy of Doom anyway? I’m not giving any money to Bethesda. I’ve done that twice, and that was twice too many. Am I cheating with this entry? Yes I am, but I’m sticking to the letter of the rules.

There’s nothing to say about Doom at this point. It’s one of the most important games next to Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter II and Virtua Fighter, among others. This collection brings in everything I wanted from Doom, meaning the first two games. I don’t really care for Doom 3, so the pre-release goodies are lost to me. Doom still stands out, and throwing Sigil and Sigil II on top of this box was absolutely the best first-person shooting I’ve had in years. It does say something about the industry when they can’t put out something that would dethrone Doom. Then again, endless moddability has made the game undying.

Gran Turismo 4 2004, PlayStation 3

I’m as surprised as you are. I really don’t care for driving games if its not F-Zero GX, but this was a promise I had to keep. I gave GT a fair shot, picked up three games this year. GT4 is really fun once you find that one spot, where realistic racing hits the hardest. The game’s not flashy, but goddamn if it ain’t classy. Getting a wheel and pedals is really a must for this game, but I spent that slot this year for a GameCube set for F-Zero GX after getting my hands on AX for the first time.

Funny thing about GT4 is that because it aims to be a very realistic driving sim, I learned a thing or two about actual driving. This would not be advisable otherwise, but I somewhat got how a pro-driver friend sees driving lines in real life, and why he braked at certain points where I previously didn’t. Getting all these new cars and tuning them up, just to race more to get more credits to tune them up more so I had chance at later races, where I would naturally fumble because the car would have different handling, only find myself trying harder to get the proper driving lines down and so on, until I managed to unlock yet another, different car. Rinse and repeat. Sure, the AI isn’t exactly smart and people have torn it apart like no other throughout the years, but that sort of AI exploitation kills the fun for me. Of course, driving against other players would be best.

Much like with Doom, a game that does its core the best and doesn’t get in the way of you playing it is great.

Gamera 2000 1997, PlayStation

A game that’s been on my radar God knows how long. Finally got a copy via a friend (Thanks Doc) and more or less it was a genuine diamond the moment I popped the disc in. Zuntata is Taito’s in-house music team, which does some of the best works in the industry. Put that together with well executed Panzer Dragoon-like play, and you got something great in your hands. The game’s a nice challenge too, requiring some stage memorization like all rail shooters, but more importantly dexterity when jumping across different directions. Unlike in Panzer Dragoon, the player is in a flying craft and gives Gamera orders what to attack or when to do his Spin Attack. It can get incredibly hectic and the pressure builds toward the end of the game.

Each mission is followed by a point-n-click, where you can find a bit more info on things or watch a FMV sequence. It’s all done in good spirit. Actors do put a decent effort in their acting, moreso than some others in the 1990s. While some will find them campy, the style fits the era’s tokusatsu just fine. It’s genuine and honest, and can be played with English voice acting.

Gamera 2000 is legitimately a great game, equal of Saturn’s Panzer Dragoons it so freely mimic. I really should do a full breakdown of the game next year, the game deserves all the positive word it can get.

Absolute banger OST.

Super Robot Wars D 2003, Game Boy Advance

I’ve got a whole shelf just for Super Robot Wars games. They’ll keep me busy just fine until BanCo puts out something worth my attention. The first title on this list of unplayed SRW titles was Destiny, a game some people call one of the hardest in the modern era. This is due to the game being designed to hurt your units. Super Robots usually can take a beating, but the game really makes you aware that everyone in your team are fragile. Sure, you can dish out damage back just as much, but this intentional decision to tweak the damage output and defence values makes the game stand out. You can play with your favourites, if you put some dedication into them, but standard practice I found working was avoiding damage with high-mobility units and throwing whatever I could back.

Post Alpha SRW games haven’t really required me to change how I approach them. My dumb tactics work most of the time, and when they don’t, I can salvage them by throwing something big at the problem. Destiny wasn’t like that. The game’s elevated by its good use of characters, where the apocalyptic situation requires heroes to side with the bad guys because the second option is even worse. Char’s Counterattack gets a lot of use out of this and certain characters get explored in ways other SRW games can’t, and goddamn I miss when SRW took the settings and made them into something whole. That, and Perfectio works great as an antagonistic force, which makes its appearance in OGS rather weak in comparison. I Destiny never gets a remake, because they’d clean all the rough edges out, making it too much in-line with the slop they’re producing now.

R-Type Delta HD Boosted 2025, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Steam

A great game never ages. New releases don’t really need to add anything to them. Delta contests the best game in the series next to The Third Lightning, and but Delta manages to ease out the competition by properly realizing the tone and atmosphere R-Type has. Its presentation is the best in the series and redefined how the devs would approach the series from thereon. Sure, we had strange and biomechanical designs before, but we’re hitting peak R-Type with Delta. Almost all enemies larger than gnats make sounds and scream when they die, stages are full of small things among the set pieces that makes the game memorable.

Of course, the shooting is top notch, best in class for methodical, slow-burn shooting games. Learning the stages makes the game much easier down the line, but a quick reflexes and decision making has always been the fun part in R-Type. The series has always emphasizies the Force, the round things in front of your ship that can’t die. It’s use as a ramming device, or support unit, got elevated in Delta as now you build the Dose Meter as it damages enemies with contact or absorbs shots. Dose works like any other screen-clearing bomb, just with the ability to build it up yourself rather than needing to pick up a separate item. You score higher if your Dose is at 100% at the end of a Stage, but strategically using it is part of the game. One of the three ships, R-13A Cerberus, takes this concept to a higher level with the use of Anchor Force, where the Force can be latched to the larger enemies for constant damage, thus constant Dose replenishment.

The HD Boosted part is unintrusive. The game mostly looks like an upscaled PlayStation game and that’s fine. Messing with the graphics would’ve screwed up the carefully laid out effects and sets. A damn good example how great games don’t age.

The Top 5 games that didn’t make the list

Hollow Knight: Silksong 2025, Steam, GOG, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X

Would go into into the Top 5 if I had a physical copy of this game. It’s Metroid where modern Metroid fails. Well balanced difficulty, absolutely beautiful world, great controls and atmospheric music as all hell. It’s a game that reminds me what I love so much about single-player games. There aren’t many games that take this long to make and come out this well. That’s because the core design of the game was on solid foundation by a dev team who knew what they were capable of. It’s one of those games that got talked to death, and I can’t really add anything new. The game challenges you, in a good way, and makes you earn its ending. You know the rest of the drill, go play it.

SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance 2025, Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X

Some people malign this game and its action direction, but I found the game very enjoyable. I found myself enjoying the smooth controls the most, allowing the player to have almost uninterupted motion, if you knew what you were doing. Sure, some of the stages require memorization, but nothing wrong in that. Revisiting the stages with new skills and trying to find hidden goodies makes that natural part of the game. The one thing I found myself frustrated over was how the bosses more often than not didn’t jell well with the rest of the game, but that’s the nature of action games. They’re showstoppers, sometimes requiring specific skills, but always stopping the forward momentum the game had going on. At least they’re not overtly frustrating. A fun game I would recommend. Made me want more ninja games down the line, should properly revisit Tenchu at some point. The thing is, the game comes and goes by. It looks nice and plays nice, but in the end doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression.

Ready Or Not 2023, Steam, Epic, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S

One of those games that is outside my comfort. I don’t really enjoy this kind of games, but I learned to appreciate RoN through friends. As a single-player, absolute garbage. Would not be on this list if not for friends pulling my ass out to play the game. All the controversies aside, this was like Grand Turismo experience, but with tacticool shooting games. Trying to find that comfort spot and finding that despite the jank and the stupid amount of animation management these modern games require, the game’s great when proper tactics within the team click and you bean bag people in the nuts. Even if I had a physical copy of this, the fact that the AI is gimped in the single-player mode takes out a lot.

Nitro Express 2025, Steam

Though when talking about a great single-player shooter, Nitro Express doesn’t leave people cold. Either they’ll fall in love with the hectic 2D tacticool shooting, or they’ll throw a hissyfit over the game being 30fps in this day and age. Game’s a straightforward as it gets; prepare to gun down perps stage by stage in increasingly difficult manner, until you get to the head honcho trying to ruin everyone’s day. The pace is comparable to Metal Slug, but requires a bit more finesse when it comes to the dodge rolling and shooting. This makes it a solid run-n-gun that manages to stand on its own. The screen’s chaos, filled with bullets and explosions, is something you’ll either have fun with, or it never clicks with you.

The game requires stage grinding though, as weapons are unlocked with money gained from Missions, and using weapons increases their level. Leveling up speeds Reload time, which makes all the difference toward the end of the game. Going back to earlier stages with better equipment is always fun, but there’s never that Power Fantasy thing some people say games like this have. You’re still easy kill if you don’t take it carefully. The first big tank you face up will either kick you out, or make you try harder. It’s great across the board, with nice visual flavour and sound design. I wish games like this would get physical copies still, what an absolute blast and one of my favourite games of the year.

Fantasy Maiden Wars – DREAM OF THE STRAY DREAMER 2010, 2012, 2014, 2019 PC, 2025 Steam, Nintendo Switch

Super Robot Wars with Touhou characters. Plays like it reads on the tin. The Focus mechanic comes from the shooting game side, which works as stat boost or penalty depending on the enemy, the rest is more or less standard SRW fare, which is just a good thing. Writing fits Touhou from what I can tell, I’m not the biggest fan of the setting itself. Even if you wouldn’t have any experience with either series, it works well as an odd-ball fantasy strategy RPG. A definitive recommendation.

Mega Man (12): Dual Override got me

You know me, I see Capcom doing a new Mega Man title and I’m already there. So, we get a whole minute and a half trailer, most of which is fluff. A hall counting up to eleven and over, opening a sealed room where Capcom stashed the Blue Bomber in for their pony jar experiments.

Then almost twenty seconds of beta footage with each scene having reference to past Mega Man thing. A Beat balloon in the teleport-in spot (Mega Man weirdly teleporting in at the far left of the screen.) The next scene has a Wall Blaster mounted unto the ceiling and Gamma’s blueprints on the right side in the back as well its face plastered around the pillar in the next sequence. I do love that we see a bottomless pit sequence with exploding balloons that you have you as a stepper while a yellow Pipi flies over and drops an egg of fireworks. Something about this screams Robot Museum, but I’m probably wrong, but it has that intro level feeling.

You can also see small particle effects flying off as the slide ends. All these small touches show love and care, and often extend to the big things too

Nevertheless, this stage is clearly about celebration, and that’s what this trailer is about.

Then Mega Man has his parts opening up, showcasing one of the worst cases of unnecessary LEDs in robots in a while, ending the spiel with Proto Man’s whistle.

This is going to end up in a model kit as a gimmick

I’m an old fart who has played Mega Man since its beginning. It’s my favourite game series out of all and I’m an absolute sucker for this trailer. It’s clean, it does its job showcasing how to do proper 2D action level design in terms of clearly stating what’s ground and what’s death. Screens are laid out as puzzles and obstacles to clear rather than continues stream of hallways with enemies like in Castlevania or Metroid. I won’t go deeper into this, because how Mega Man games nail stage designs most of the time is a post I need to write.

2027 and the game is coming to every single platform that’s out now. Yes, that also means for the Switch and PS4. If I’m as lost cause for a proper Mega Man game that isn’t mobile slop, I’ll buy it three times down the line.

That 2027 smarts. We’ve got past experience what it means when a Mega Man game is revealed too early. We both know that getting hype is the recipe for a disaster yet here I am, smiling like I’m on something and I know I’ll bitch about whatever damn gimmick they’re going to introduce. I didn’t mind the Gears in Mega Man 11 even if I tried to play the game mostly without them. Gimmicks have been something that each Mega Man game has introduced. Some have stayed in the series, most of them have changed to something else. Rush, sliding, Charge Shot, collecting letters for Beat, the Rush Armours, Rock’n Arm and so on. I hope they’ll do something else than the Gears, but if Override refers to a mechanic that similar to Gears, I hope its an evolution of the system in a manner that allows a more seamless usage. Surely, Dual means we’re going to get something with Proto Man, but I’d wish against multiplayer. Balancing the stages for both single and multiplayer would require extra focus and effort, something I’d rather see put into single-player only.

Whatever the gimmick ends up being, if its something that’s used “externally” like the Gears rather than as something integrated into the basic motion and controls without extra, like the slide and Charge Shot, it shouldn’t be as a part of the Boss Battles. That’s my biggest gripe with Mega Man 11, where the game insists on the Gears gimmick, everything was build around it and it didn’t really flow properly. It was just extra buttons to press to slow or speed things up. You could build a whole new kind of game around that idea.

The thing with Double Gears was that it was an external insist, not part of the core controls.
As a side note, Mega Man’s getting back his PlayStation-era proportions to some extent after the NES size throwbacks

I understand if Capcom wants to drop numbering new Mega Man games. However, I hope they don’t. I want them boldly claim that 12 on the box cover, but there are about 130 Mega Man games before this, 24 of which are Classic series entries. Maybe this is a slight rebranding, and the next Mega Man X game, God willing there is such a thing, could utilize the Maverick Hunter X naming to differentiate the two series for newcomers. A possibility of Capcom wants to separate these sub-series from each other for clarity.

One thing about Dual Override still, the music doesn’t like the techno wah-wah 11 had. If the demo track is anything to go by, they’re still doing that a little bit but not to the same extent. There’s something off about both Nintendo and Capcom putting this sort of second-tier wah-wah sounds on 2D games when they could do better. Still, the demo music does remind me a bit of the PlayStation-era tracks.

Referring a bit to my previous post, what’s my gut saying here? Jumping seems to be nice and snappy, shooting doesn’t seem to have any issues and Mega Man gets scuffed as he gets damaged. He doesn’t blink during invincibility after getting damaged, but has electricity sparking around him. The level is well designed in terms of clarity, you see what parts you can jump and where they end. Down the line, challenging platforming requires this. 2D platformers that obfuscate their platform’s edges don’t realize that. However, all the lighting effects from explosion and shots are just enough too bloomy to obfuscate their hitboxes. I would’ve preferred them to be a bit more cartoony or defined, but players should learn them after one or two hits. At least they’re all colourful bloom. Perhaps I would’ve preferred the game to be more anime in looks in general, but that’s fine. It keeps the same look as Mega Man 11 in broad terms.

All those firework crackers, explosions and the Charged Shot are just enough too bloomy for me. It melds together, but that’s not what this sort of visual style does. In that, the game looks safe, nothing out of run-of-the-mill.

We don’t see the player hugging any of the static objects when landing or jumping to them, so can’t say much about physics yet. However, after a slide there is a clear stop in motion, so either you can’t walk directly from a slide, or the player didn’t continue onwards after initiating the slide. I hope the latter is the case, as one defining aspect of Mega Man controls is the flow these controls have. They shouldn’t have any points where the momentum stops, unless you let go of the D-Pad. In other words, the player should be in control all the time, and if the game introduced these moments of stops, that raises both of eyebrows.

The logo is very bland. I hope it’s a beta logo, but if they’re not going to revise it to look bolder, that can say something about the game itself. I hope this won’t be a safe entry in the series, as we’ve had compilations and rereleases for the last decade that showcase how things work. I’ve wanted Mega Man games to be a bit more expanded, something the Intro Stage did early on. We can have more than eight Wily Numbers, or we could have more stages like with Doc Robots, just without the recycling. Stages aren’t the only way to expand Mega Man, however. Item Replicator, Super Adapter, all these things that add to the player’s arsenal and core play are just that. Mega Man (World) V is great because it tried something new changed the core just enough with the Rock’n Arm and its Grab abilities. No new buttons, no new modes per se, just adding to the core controls, expanding what the player can do.

Lastly, new Robot Master Design contest. I really dislike how it’s done. It should be a contest for kids under ten, but because it’s a general competition on Twitter, age restriction applies. I find this extremely disheartening, as kids should be the main audience for Mega Man, but I guess I have to swallow the bitter pill and admit to myself nobody under 25 even knows what a Mega Man is. Kids have such an unrestricted imagination when it comes to this kind of thing. Give them a general direction what to draw, and their imagination goes wild. They don’t think the proper logistics of it, they make it up and explain how shit just works. A middle-aged dude who has art degrees or studies how to design emotionally appealing stuff won’t have the same spirit. It’s going to be by-the-books and sad.

Yes, there has been a number of comic artists like Hitoshi Ariga who have designed Wily Numbers, but these have been largely by the numbers by people who have been with the games’ history at the ground level. I’m not sure how to put this in plain words, but these bosses designed by adult players have don’t really have that spark of ingenuity and pure, sparkling imagination kids have.

I don’t know if I’m going to enter the contest. Would that be going against myself if I did? I’ll have to think this over a few times, nevertheless.

I’m hopeful this game will be good, something that pushes the series forwards again. I hope Capcom will return to form and put a Mega Man X into production as well, and use that as a springboard for something new and bold, expanding what we’ve seen in Mega Man 11and now in Dual Override. I shouldn’t be hype, but nostalgia and hope are strong weapons. With my emotional connection with the series, I can’t really deny my human nature. Damn, I’m eager to see more. What timing for me to start replaying the Classic series.

Trusting my gut instincts and how abandoning core elements of a game alienates core audience

When a game a has troubled development cycle and stays in that dev hell for extended period, the end result is often a kind of polished turd. Either the dev team didn’t manage to overcome some obstacle, either in code or design, or something kept rebooting. Metroid Prime 4 is an early Switch game that got canned when Bandai Namco was developing it, but got a restart at Retro Studios, where very few who worked on the first games work anymore. MP4 never had a chance in hell to be on the same level as the first two Prime games.

I tend to trust my gut feeling when it comes to games. It comes from lifetime of playing games. When recognize trends in game design, you can make deduction and inferences on how a game plays just from the footage. For an example, I was sceptical about New Sakura Wars’ play after seeing the initial trailer. It had a certain kind float to the action, which made it clear that it wasn’t going to be very intensive action. The point where a Koubu rides alongside the wall was the biggest hint. I had seen the exact same action in 3D Sonic games. Thus, I prejudged the game to be a mix of dating VN elements with Sonic-like 3D action. Something that’s not exactly people would expect from a Sakura Wars game, especially when it went through the genre shift from a strategy game to action. The game’s sales reflect its reception; not exactly encouraging toward a sequel.

I could see the issues from that initial trailer. It wasn’t engaging enough for action players. There was no reason the action couldn’t have more depth, even when it was running on the Hedgehog engine. Nevertheless, the dev team didn’t push it to its limits to be like the opening of Sakura Wars 3: Is Paris Burning? they wanted to replicate. It was too slow, too mulling. They didn’t hit the mark, and the Sonic-ness of the engine came through too much.

As for the long-term fans, the change from strategy to action was an odd one. Sure, we know the justification for it, but changing a game series’ genre like this will always alienate parts of the core audience. Of course, the change was also made to align with the trends of the time, where slow-paced RPGs went under genre shift toward action. This was done to compete with other anime-action games on the PS4, meaning it was intended to grasp new audiences instead of catering to the core fans that still held Sakura Wars’ light. The game had sold 300 000 copies worldwide, with no sales numbers after that. I’d estimate that Japan carried about 70% of those 300 000 copies sold, with North America and Europe filling rest of the majority and other Asian markets following that.

It’s six years after the game’s release, and there’s no word on a sequel. While New Sakura Wars revitalized the series for a short moment with a media blitz, it didn’t have a long-lasting effect on the series’ future. For the past two years there has been whispers about a new game being in development, but nothing solid has formed. The new audience the action approach was supposed to bring in new audience, but there seems to be no demand to see this continuing. Whatever fans came with New Sakura Wars are either silent or have moved on. As it often happens, game companies can’t seem to take advantage of the situation and have something to keep the fans occupied while working on a real sequel. Six years later and they’ve lost whatever momentum they had gained. Now Sega has to contend placating Classic Sakura Wars fans and the New fans. Not an enviable situation.

Metroid Prime 4 is in a similar situation, where the game has been made to appease a new audience which never engaged with Metroid before, while most long-term fans are rejecting the new framing-narrative driven direction… which arguably already started in Fusion and at latest with MP3.

I understand the argument that MP4 has gone through Zeldafication, specifically copying the model from Breath of the Wild. The whole wasteland and dungeons underline this. I would’ve argued that the two series have always been brothers in terms of non-linearity, with emphasize on Metroid being one large dungeon while Zelda was many small dungeons. Neither games did not do growth through stats, but via items and equipment necessary to continue. Both games originally allowed sequence breaking. Both then branched to different direction, Zelda removing the non-linear adventure aspect in favour while Metroid went to slumber after the 16-bit consoles were over. Metroid Prime is largely Metroid in 3D, and it worked. Of course, when something works well, the follow-ups want it to be polished, but sadly more often that not devs and publishers fail to understand these play-driven games stand apart from story-driven games, and we see the framing taking more and more space. Metroid Prime 2 had to set up the whole split Aether thing, and the exposition sequences were kept at relative minimum. MP3 went to the grand-ending route, meaning more characters, more story, which is why that game was universally regarded as the weakest in the trilogy. The DS game is often forgotten, but its pretty damn nifty, and the stylus controls work better than you’d expect.

Thus, we get to MP4 and we’ve got talkative side-characters keeping you company in a game that requires you to farm crystals like in a Zelda game.

To wind back to the experience thing, I said I would give the game a pass for at least a year after we saw the initial footage. The game’s visual design was no better than what was in Metroid Prime Remastered, and the psychic powers gimmick felt out-of-place, extremely odd. The game’s whole atmosphere and design felt awkward, which I put on the long development period and multiple ideas mangled together. Thus, I concluded that initial reviews would be positive, and social medias would have a blitz of people both bitching and praising the game. Didn’t know how right I’d be after we saw the reveal for the talkative support characters. At that point I knew this game wouldn’t be for me, and the devs were tone deaf about Metroid as a whole.

I’m not surprised the game has found its place among people who didn’t enjoy Metroid before.

The long-term success path for media has always been to first become a cult hit. Gain a strong, loyal following that will spread good about your piece by mouth. This is free and natural PR that’s not muddled by marketing people forcing something unto people. Customers are surprisingly good at sniffing out fake praise and black marketing. Then expand the product. In games, this would mean polishing the mechanics and improving the code. Make it run better, prettier, all the while expanding on what the first game was loved for. Maybe do a spin-off comic or some other cross-media thing to draw more eyes on the main thing, the game. Continue doing this bit by bit and the IP will have a strong base to built itself on.

However, when you make drastic changes to the product in order to attract customers that weren’t there before, you risk alienating the people in that cult following. There is a golden path this can be done in, but it’ll never net you the Call of Duty audience. You can never appease everyone, and when you try to appease multiple audiences at the same time, you end up appeasing nobody. Worst, you might find yourself with a new audience that applauds and promotes your thing but never puts money into it.

Another recent example of games being made for new audiences, games cleaned for modern audiences, are the Saints Row reboot and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, both of which effectively dug a grave for the IPs. The less I say about those, the better. I’ve got other dead horses to kick.

Long running game series like Metroid always have to balance between making the game easy to approach for the new players and something the veterans could appreciate. Sometimes this is done via Difficulty selection, sometimes there’s an extra mode that teaches you the controls and the overall flow of the game. Other times a company will make an insult easy game because they think a country doesn’t understand the genre. Looking at you, Mystic Quest. Then you have the times when a game just changes the franchise’s style and direction altogether, which rarely works.

Mega Man arguably did this successfully a few times around by making a new sub-series. Battle Network was divisive and a more than a few curses were flung at the game when it was first revealed. However, it wasn’t either Classic or X-series, so it was mostly fine. Turned into one of the more classic entries in the whole IP.

Oh yeah, Other M exists. Was that intended to be a soft reboot or something in the end? That game feels like a fever dream afterwards.

Nintendo hasn’t gotten Metroid since the SNES. The people making decisions never understood why it was more popular in the West than in Japan, which also happened to MetaFight, or Blaster Master. It’s shows that a series that built itself upon player-driven story, play-driven motion isn’t compatible with developers who want to make scripted events and have the framing narrative as the main story element. This kills what’s now called emergent storytelling, replacing it with static scene that isn’t worth replaying. These are the moments players talk about with each other, the ones that stay in your mind as challenges and lead to different approaches. If the player isn’t allowed this, then all you can talk is the framing. This means the agency emergent story-telling offers is missing.

I don’t see or hear people talking about Metroid Prime 4’s emergent moments. I mostly see people bickering about the character writing, which has become the game’s most recognized element next to the desert area. In a year’s time, when things have levelled out, we see what’s the actual reception for the game without spin.

As for me, I think Nintendo knew very well the issues the game had. All the previews we saw were carefully curated to showcase the best parts of the game rather than the whole of it. However, experience taught me to keep it tight, something was off. There’s a certain level of polish or approach how a game is presented that I know will hit home. MP4 never did during this preview era, and while I didn’t notice what was missing, my brain kept saying something’s incomplete. Now that I’ve see the actual game, with its uninteresting desert and crystal farming, with its NPC support that don’t shut up, with its world being built on disconnected dungeons that have hallways for loading times combined with archaic non-linear adventure upgrades, I’m good. They knew what would’ve been controversial about the game and decided to dance around it.

I don’t need to spend my time or money on the game. Maybe I’ll buy it from a sale down the line or used. How can I come to this conclusion without playing the game, how can I say definitive things without having spent any time with it? Because of experience. When Metroid Prime was coming out, I knew this game would be something special based on the prerelease footage and materials at hand. Bought the game on the 19^th, a few days earlier than the actual release date on the 21^st. The manual cut my hand; I’ve bled for the IP.

This isn’t the only time I trust my gut when comes to games. Nowadays I can put more things into words, like how the new THPS remakes feel like corporate cashout because they’ve cleaned the games of their style, of their visual edge, and how porting mechanics from newer entries to the older games messes with the play design. Can the gut feeling be wrong? Yes, one time out of ten it misfires. 7 Blades on the PS2 is an example where it misfired.

Consume whatever media long enough and read on its history and trends, and you’ll find yourself seeing patterns form. The same thing applies to video and computer games. You can tell a lot about a game what’s in the footage, and often just as much what’s not in them.

Have you ever looked hard at book covers? The trends there are depending on the genre across the decades, what sort of styles appear in what kind of works and how they depict the content. Experience and pattern recognition, those are the keys.

The many games of The Most Successful

With Rockstar and Grant Theft Auto 6 in the news for some unsavory reasons, I saw quite a lot of hubbubs about the success of the fifth game in the franchise and its comparative success compared to other games, and other forms entertainment. I’m slightly flabbergasted that someone would claim that GTA5 was the most successful form of entertainment, when people without much contact with the modern world knew about Michael Jackson. Thriller permeated everywhere, you can’t beat it.

Nevertheless, this made an interesting thought experiment on what counts as The Most Successful Video Game. It didn’t help that I saw the goal being pushed after one or two rounds of discussion, under which at least few realized that there’s more than one way of seeing this. Business has a different view on things compared to the customers, and then you have the historical view that has a longer view on how games have affected culture in general. This is why Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout and Pac-Man still live on in the cultural memory, even if the amount of success they’ve seen in terms of money is less than whatever big Triple A title that’s come after.

I should probably note that there’s also a slight difference in how some use the term franchise. While I tend to use it wrong as a synonym with Intellectual Property, an example of a franchise would be Street Fighter II. Street Fighter III would be its own franchise, while all falling under the same umbrella of IP. This is because of merchandising rights and all that business jazz.

Units Sold is of course a big one, the cumulative sales made by one game, or a series of games. For example, the Mario games have a cumulative sale of 957 million units, while Mega Man has 43 million units.

As for individual titles, Minecraft is an evergreen title that hits 350 units sold. GTAV follows It at 220 million units.

Units sold doesn’t really keep you afloat a lot, unless you have Revenue. This is the total gross the series does through game sales, possible DLC, merch, and other licensed material. Pokémon tops this chart with $115, followed by Call of Duty with $31 million.

The way digital games are consumed is different from purchased titles, of course. That’s why something like Candy Crush or Dungeon Fighter Online can top the chart of games with most revenue, as individuals put more money into these games. This compares apples and oranges; the business models are ultimately very different and the amount of money you can squeeze out of a customer via single sold title plus DLC is ultimately less than digital-only but squeezing small amounts throughout their play time. Gacha mixes things with the whole gambling aspect.

I don’t think we should count individual downloads. This is because a download doesn’t translate to a purchase, or revenue. There are numerous cases of curious people testing a free game out and then proceeding not to continue. These people are often counted to the player metric nonetheless, which shows that the total number of players can be skewed to showcase a more positive statistic for PR reasons. This is the same reason why Sony cites the total number of PlayStation 2’s when asked about the total number of consoles sold. It just looks better, and they can fudge the numbers for their benefit.

Then again, Subway Surfers has 2.05 billion individual downloads and spawned numerous imitators so there’s something value in that too.

Player Count is also something that seems to be a significant metric, with Roblox topping the list with the estimated number of players being in billions cumulative. Minecraft hitting a nice spot of 600 million plus players shows that it really is the Tetris of the modern age.

I would argue that the peak number of players, and how long that plateau is held, is a more significant counter simply because it shows how many players consume the game in each span of time. Through this, we get an idea whether a game holds its audience, which is far more important in the long-term in terms of customer satisfaction and how well customers make emotional connection to the game. A game that gets massive sales at the start but sees the player count sink like a rock in water has no lasting hold on the market.

While I don’t give much weight on the Critical Acclaim the journalists give to games (as they are nothing more than just an extra arm in the PR machine), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Soul Calibur top the chart with 99 and 98 according to Metacritic. I’d like to say the User Score is the metric we should use, but seeing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 topping the current list reminds me how customers can’t be any more objective than the journalists most of the time.

If we count Spacewar! as the progenitor of all modern video and computer games (and we are,) gaming is 63 at the time of writing. There are only a handful of game names from the early era of electronic gaming that are still strongly alive. Pac-Man and Mario are the handful, with the rest of their brethren being relocated to nostalgic revivals and retro collections. While we may think the most popular games we have now will last for all time, we’ve seen so many game names simply vanishing, dying out or otherwise fall into torpor. Mega Man is a great example of this, sometimes popping its head up only to fall back into Capcom archives. Maybe we’ll get another game by 2030. Prince of Persia seemed like a name that would never die, but overexposure and simply being owned by Ubisoft clearly took its toll on the name. Same thing could be happening to Assassin Creed now, one can only hope.

Some of you might’ve noticed that I counted Donkey Kong as a Mario title. So does Nintendo, as that’s the first appearance of Mario, then named Jumpman. If you want, we can count Mario being started in 1983, making Mario 42 to Pac-Man’s 45. These are still small numbers compared to something like Universal Monsters, which have lasted for good 117 years. Looking at the comic book world, both Superman and Batman are in their 80s.

However, the gaming industry influences itself. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was influenced by Final Fantasy, which was seen as the premier gaming IP at one point in the Western World. However, going back and seeing what influenced Final Fantasy we find Dragon Quest and its numerous copycats and imitators. Going further back we find both Utima and Wizardry influencing the game, which also influenced so many other Japanese computer RPGs like The Black Onyx, which inspired the creation of The Legend of Zelda. Ultima and Wizardry have their roots in MUDs, which have roots in table-top RPGs, mainly Dungeon and Dragons, which have their roots in the military games generals and other army leaders would play to train their leadership.

The roots of video and computer gaming lie in the games and play of children and adults alike, alongside how stories were told by acting and playing them out. This tangent is to remind ourselves that gaming is not something that just came along with computers and consoles but is just the latest iteration of mankind has been doing ever since we dwelled in caves.

Nevertheless, the game with most cultural impact is probably Pokémon. Its Trading Card Game sales generate about one to three billion dollars per year, which rivals the top-most successful film’s revenue in their lifetime. Of course, TCG is an evergreen product compared to film’s finite runs, so this should illustrate how different the media are. Still, the franchise IP generated that $150 billion plus dollars and probably is Japan’s single most important import product. Pikachu is the face and mascot of the franchise, well-known across the glob, and served as an ambassador to 2014 World Cup, 2020 Tokyo Olympics and in 2025 World Expo. Its yellow face is featured in over fifty embassies across the world. Surprisingly, Pokémon has shown itself to be a multi-generational product, a cornerstone of sorts that sees constant parodies in other shows and games while drawing tourists of all ages to Pokémon Centers across the world, especially to Japan.

Even if Pokémon is a 1990s product, it can be placed alongside Mario and Pac-Man as a long-lasting face of gaming, with it probably ending up as the face of gaming on the long run if we had to choose one, for better or worse. This also illustrates some why Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, and to a lesser extent GameFreak would be freakishly overprotective of their IP. There are numerous other contenders we could put there, but I’m making a point there; there must be generationally recognizable face for all without really any breaks.

The list of games that influenced other games is as wide as the library of games out there. Talking about First-Person Shooting ends up someone tracing back to Halo, then Half-Life, a mention of Quake’s code still running in some modern games, another mentioning Goldeneye 007, with usually ending with either Doom or Wolfenstein 3D in a similar fashion I did with RPGs above.

While we have been seeing the influence of video and computer games on the culture ever since the 1970s in an increasing fashion, it’s hard to determine how well a game or a name will endure as history happens. Only in hindsight can we properly determine the ebbs and flows of masses, something the current gaming industry seems to ignore in favour of trying to appease each other with the press as their echo chamber. When Demon’s Souls was put out for the first time, nobody expected it to become a cultural cornerstone. However, history has shown us that people like to play challenging games, and from that challenge comes customer satisfaction. Well-built world and framing, with play-first mentality, is a sort of silver bullet. It’s not a game for everyone, and that’s fine. You can’t please everyone with one product, and trying to is simply being dishonest toward the game and the customer.

The second Microsoft rant of the Month

Satya Nadella says Xbox isn’t competing with other game consoles. He says Xbox is competing with TikTok. This is Nadella effectively admitting Xbox has lost its primary market and must find something else to compare themselves to in order not to look so bad in the eyes of the market, or investors. People thought the Activision Blizzard buyout would’ve changed gaming in a way that Xbox would get all these exclusives, concentrating large swaths of games to one or two platforms, or something along those lines. As it turns out, none of these people looked at how Microsoft has worked, buying out companies and then gutting them when they haven’t turned out to be moneymakers. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

The buyout didn’t increase the number of customers. Simply buying a company and having it produce games doesn’t expand the market. You must deliver something that the Blue Ocean customer might want to have. The issue with Xbox is that it was a lifestyle brand for young boys and teenagers, as well as for some young adults, especially in the US and parts of Europe. It’s a very American brand, loud and obnoxious in a way. Xbox is Sega 2.0, doing the same bit in a different decade. This can carry a gaming console for a generation or two, when it must either expand its audience or try to appease its aging consumer base. Neither is a very good option, as the former is often seen as abandoning existing customers and will fail even worse if the new console and games aren’t disrupting the market, and the latter will be diminishing returns as younger generations or expanding families won’t find the system appealing. The Apple lifestyle brand model doesn’t work in console gaming, as consoles require games, not just expensive looks.

Gaming is changing not because of consolidation of companies. It’s changing because of customer behaviour and lack of competition between game companies. If Xbox is in competition with TikTok, then they are in competition with every other form of entertainment media and that is a losing battle. They’re stretching their battlefield too thin and are now losing in their own market. This is like dick envy from Microsoft, seeing the numbers something completely different from their business is doing and wanting some of that. This is a repeat of Microsoft wanting to get into console gaming with the Xbox after seeing what sort of magic Nintendo and Sony were brewing. This small dick energy has always been something Microsoft, and by extension Xbox, has always had.

Gaming has changed due to the game market changing, i.e. people changing. Currently, the average age of a gamer in the US is 36. European media is 31, the same as China, but Italy tops out at 50. The numbers don’t change much across the world, even in Japan the number is 33. These are people who have some eighteen years of gaming behind them, these all are part of a particular generation in global terms that took up gaming us a hobby in their childhood. These people now have families and jobs that require their attention. Time to play games grows shorter and thus what kind of games people play.

Why are younger generations going for TikTok and other shortform content instead of playing video games? Because the games that these big companies are bloated mess that hold your hand all the way down and don’t give the kicks. The children yearn for arcade games. Games that get you in fast, give you exhilaration and get you out just as fast. Keep it simple, stupid. Not these tens to hundreds of hours of bloat and framing, these kids want to be entertained now, not in five minutes after the cutscene is over.

I guess this is why Xbox is now whatever. They can’t sell themselves as a lifestyle brand with Mountain Dew and Doritos anymore, so they’re going to brand your phone as an Xbox you can play games on while taking a shit at school or work. Gaming has been competing for the same set of customers without expanding. The Hollywood Approach in gaming dooms it to develop and publish games that take over half a decade to develop and try to appease everyone while being aimed at the core audience. It doesn’t work on the long run. There is always a need for variety, and in this grey mass of Triple A all you get is disappointment.

Sure, Nadella, Xbox is competing with other media for the attention of the customer. Xbox becoming a dedicated gaming PC with windows and Steam is just admitting Microsoft failed at console business. You can’t compete with TikTok by offering the same things that are already offered elsewhere better. If you’re selling tomato sauce, you can’t just offer the same kind of tomato sauce your competition is already selling and then say you’re competing with chocolate bars.

This is why I find Xbox as a console so boring in terms of business and games. They never do anything original, and when they do something that causes an uproar, they do the exact same things they’ve always done as a tech company. They don’t create disruptions, they don’t create better value alternatives, they don’t create original IPs that could last (and when they do, they just kill ‘em off), and now you can pick their games wherever the fuck you want. They’re not even a Triple A gaming company, they’re a tech company with all the woes and none of the benefits when it comes to gaming.

Why would you buy a console that has less unique titles than the competition? If Sony’s getting Xbox titles, there is no reason to buy an Xbox outside brand loyalty. But then you’re missing all the Sony titles. But then why buy a PlayStation when you could just buy a gaming PC at the same price and get both systems’ titles? When you’re not competing with Sony, your biggest gaming rival, then who are you competing against? Everything else, it seems.

Xbox isn’t even Pepsi of gaming. When they can’t win at PC gaming, they asked What else people want to play. Then they went to learn lessons from Sega with the Dreamcast and shat out the Xbox. Now that’s failing, and they’re asking What else people are spending their time one, and here we are. Xbox didn’t grow the gaming market in any significant manner, it simply wallowed what was already there. If Microsoft wants to see growth, they need to grow the market itself. This isn’t “modern audiences” garbage, this is about lapsed gamers and people who have never played games before. The industry will not grow unless these people are met with on a level ground.

What these companies need to do is to tear down the walls that are between games and people who would like to, might want to, play them.

We’ve seen what kind of games the younger generation plays. Roblox is what they enjoy, something older gamers have a tough time understanding, and what other publishers don’t get either but still want to replicate the results. We saw the exact same with Fortnite.

“The graveyard of any industry is filled with the headstones of companies who decided to keep doing things the same old way. Playing only on the margin, making things just a little bit better. That strategy works….for a while, but ultimately it’s fatal.”

You can’t disrupt and hope to come at the top in a market if you abandon it.

“We’re not going to grow the market with $1,000 consoles.”

Xbox is now a watered down brand

Microsoft has a history with buying gaming companies, having exceedingly large expectations of them, and then proceeding to cull them for not meeting those expectations. They ultimately call the shots what Xbox as a department does. People were calling buying Activision Blizzard deal of the century, something that would forever change gaming. What we got was the same as usual, just with bigger dollars in the play.

Microsoft has never really got console gaming. They were decent when it came to PC market, but console gaming was beyond them. Maybe that’s why they resorted on delivering PC gaming on consoles. Looking back, the Xbox 360 probably wouldn’t have been the limited success it was if the macro-economics hadn’t been in a good shape and a new generation of consumers had come around. Xbox kiddies are now grown up and remember the days they were throwing slurs to each other in online matches with rose-tinted goggles.

MS and Xbox are doing the mistake all businesses tend to do when there’s a downward spiral; hard sale the decreasing customer base. When these last customers realise that they’re paying at least twice as much as they used to, with less other people around, they tend to explore other venues where they get better value for their money. Only the hardest of the core customer will stay to the sad end, and they’ll be monetarily abused all the way. It’ll help to get some money short term, but on the long term it’ll bust the business.

It’s comedic how much Microsoft’s console gaming is only a pale shadow of PC gaming, as now we’re seeing plans and methods of monetization that have been prevalent in mobile gaming, which itself is an extension of PC gaming. Xboxes have always been just dumbed down PCs with the games largely mirroring this. Microsoft never understood console gaming, which is why they’ve always been a massive failure in Japan, and why X360 didn’t sell as well as the Wii, or the PS3 in the end. The same can be said about modern Sony, where their big name titles all look the same, and their pricing has gone to high heavens. Nintendo lost the plot after Iwata as well.

It’s not a big secret what console gaming is supposed to be; an option for home gaming that is uncomplicated, direct and has high value with relatively low pricing point. It has its own culture around it that is different from PC gaming, both among players and developers. Some publishers saw this, but as the division between the two (and the arcade being the third pillar in this house) has been diminished, so has the quality of the product. PC gamers bemoan how games get dumbed down to console gamers with simplified controls or how ports of console games lack options they expect from PC games. Console gamers then get the same deal, dregs and scraps of PC games that are forced into a mold these games don’t really fit. Double stick controls are still only a bad emulation for Mouse and Keyboard. At the same time, M+KB can never beat the immediacy and tactile controls a console pad has. Probably why people are using first and third party console controllers on PCs nowadays a lot. Both sides suffer (while the arcades stay dead.)

The rising prices and chasing higher-end graphics that contribute nothing to the play has been a detriment for consoles. The more expensive and the more inconvenient a console is, the less it performs. The first point we can clearly say Microsoft started the downfall of Xbox was during X360’s and Xbox One’s transition, when they told customers that couldn’t have an always-online console to buy their older machine rather than invest into their newer hotness. Nintendo’s rep said the same thing when asked about customers who wouldn’t afford the Switch 2. It’s not good form and show how little these companies care about their customers. We’ll see if history rhymes.

If the Game Pass has been disastrous to game sales and money gotten out of MS brand games, mainly Call of Duty, then what does that say about smaller publishers’ and developers’ games on it? They’re probably seeing even less individual sales on their games. Game Pass has simply devalued gaming in general and MS is now feeling it themselves. It appears that individual game sales makes more profit than bundling them into an equivalent of Netflix of gaming. So, nickle and diming become the standard because the Netflix model as it is now with games doesn’t work. You will see ads becoming a standard down the line when maximum amount of nickel and diming is met, and then every other thing will be monetized in some fashion. Hell, I can see things like higher graphics settings being monetized on the long run if things keep going on like this.

Then you have the watering down of Xbox as a brand. If everything that can have Game Pass in some form is a Xbox, Xbox is worthless as a brand. Game Pass has replaced it. If rumours about the next Xbox console are true, then having Steam on the system makes it yet another dumbed down PC that offers nothing over buying a standard PC. The same games appear on Steam, Epic and Windows Store anyway. What’s the point of Xbox as a console at this point? At least Nintendo is still offering first party titles that aren’t available anywhere else, even if they’re insane with their pricing.

When services get more expensive and what’s deliver gets worse, people will turn away and spend their money where they get more value. Alternatively, people will go back to piracy, like in Finland. If people running Xbox as a brand wants it to do better, they have to go back to what made the original and 360 cultural touchstones while learning from the mistakes they’ve been doing all this time. Like Xbox brand name on a $1k ROG handheld. They’re contracting the market instead of expanding it, making their hard business even harder for them.

Street Fighter 6’s World Tour sucks

I dropped Street Fighter 6 some time ago when I was done with doing any dailies or weeklies in a game. It turned playing anything into a chore, into work that I needed to do at home. It kicked off a small avalanche, where I effectively quit all the other games that had the same, dull shit. However, I finished the World Tour well before that and had a few good match Online, where I realized how awful the World Tour is.

Its core issue is that it gimps the play it tries to teach the player. World Tour’s theme is that its just the first steps the player goes through before hitting online modes to fight others who went through the same path. Yet, it doesn’t work.

World Tour’s level system, items, and incredible number of non-standard fight scenarios do nothing to properly teach the player to play the game proper. The necessary tutorial sequences don’t help any in this, they’re quickly passed. The few times the game tries to test the player’s knowledge on the systems is rare. In hard fights, you can throw in Life recovering items to get back, completely decimating the need to learn the game’s systems in proper manner. The unique character every player does suffers from this, being an amalgamation of moves, thus being outside the standard table of match-ups. The game doesn’t exactly play with this itself, as presenting NPCs with existing move sets doesn’t make you learn which character works better against who. Sure, you get some idea how a certain move set works, but if the player character is a mish-mash of move sets rather than dedicated to one, you’re getting a garbage lesson.

This carries to the non-standard NPCs, which do things like rolling on the ground to avoid attacks. This is King of Fighters stuff, not Street Fighter. These non-standard fights are constant, taking away from the steady progression that World Tour tries to be in learning the game. Its structure fails its intended purpose.

Soul Calibur and Soul Calibur II did this better in their story modes. All the characters act and move as they are in-game. There are standard and non-standard stages with number of stages with specific challenges. However, the standard method of fighting doesn’t change, keeping a steady flow uprising challenges. Some non-standard stages requires the player to defeat the enemy with a Ring Out or in certain manner, or within a time limit via Poisoning or some such. They don’t take away from the core mechanics of the game, as these hammer a certain element of the mechanics into the player in an active manner, which can then be taken into the next stage and into VS mode.

World Tour isn’t like this, as it plays as if everything is non-standard.

I would respect the mode more if the whole game, at its core, would’ve been all about the custom fighter. Remove the standard roster of fighters, have the player fight with their own unique character against other players. Build whole new moves from some kind of tech three you have to unlock in World Mode by training, but make the decisions matter in some manner, e.g. training to certain kind of direction locks other types moves out. Being a fast aerial combatant would keep you from being a rhino on the ground, or specializing in projectiles that have fire attributed to them prevents from having electricity. Because there is no real limits in making your own character, outside how many moves you can slot in, players either end up making joke sets or try to optimize through some meta. With proper limitations, and truckloads of moves only the player character would have access to, we’d have some actual value in building that character.

All this is moot as you can’t use your own character in tournaments, only the standard roster. Why put the time and effort in making the character, if official play doesn’t allow its usage? Sure, you can fuck around in limited online modes and use your character there, but nobody even remotely serious about playing the game are playing with custom characters. It’s inane to have a mode that steers away from the standard play. The occasional break from it as form of specific challenges would have been a much better option.

World Tour mode would’ve been better if you could’ve fought other players around the Tour’s world the same way you can challenge easy NPCs rather than be restricted to the lobbies. As much as it tries to be a lived in, somewhat realistic world, it lacks proper player-to-player interaction and thus dooms it an empty playground to mess with NPCs. Once you’ve finished the basic storyline, there’s no reason to go back to World Tour to unlock whatever you missed. It’s not worth it in the end.

The story itself is very, very basic. You can tell from the start that the player character is some kind of prodigy in the eyes of the NPCs and the rival will end up being used by the Final Boss through his thirst for strength. This is to contrast the player’s supposedly hard journey to gain more levels and moves. Nothing the story reveals about the characters or the world is new or particularly well written. It has occasional clever writing here and there, but in the grand scheme of Street Fighter story it doesn’t really move things forward. You can snicker at the notion of fighting games and their stories, but when the game puts it into the limelight I do take whatever happened just as seriously as any other. Then again, we can disregard all the previous games from the word Go, as Capcom has a certain particular stance with game continuities; there isn’t one.

Back when Udon got license for Street Fighter comics, they were told that Street Fighter continuity is more or less segmented to their own. Meaning, SFIII is a sequel to a version of SFII, but in idea rather than in canon. The same applies to Mega Man games, where the X series follows the Classic series, but how and why is not important as there is no canon connection between the two outside the idea of one preceding and succeeding the other. In modern terms, considering each SF game their own continuity or alternative dimension from each other is applicable. For Mega Man X, you at one point you skipped from X5 to the Legends series, but then we got X6, X7, X8, Command Mission and all of Zero and ZX that break timeline to some extent. There series are in-series with each other in idea, but as Capcom used to put this, not in practice. This is why Rival Schools isn’t part of the Street Fighter continuity. No, guest characters don’t count. Final Fight is the exception, as it was specifically designed and intended to follow the original Street Fighter.

Continuity really isn’t worth going deep into, as SF games really follow up each other. SF6 is no exception, effectively disregarding its predecessors’ events and works as a soft-reboot of the series. Getting invested in the game’s plot thus isn’t worth it, as the future Street Fighter 7 most likely won’t follow SF6‘s story or setting. It really can’t, as the story is about the player character first and foremost and has a definitive ending. Ken becoming an bum to escape terrorist accusations really didn’t play much role in the game in the end.

World Tour is a waste effort. It has a potential to tell a unique story, but it ends up telling a very safe story and re-using Psycho Power as the Big Bad Guy’s gimmick yet again. It pays some lip service in training the player how to play the game, but undermines it with a Role-Playing Levelling system, Items, and constant battles that break the VS mode’s rules. Because of this, World Tour is necessarily unbalanced and encourages disregarding playing the game in a more skillful and proper manner. Saying Git Gud doesn’t really work the game itself sweeps the rug from under you and isn’t built to support itself.

I would’ve loved World Tour if it had player-to-player interaction, and concentrated on building the player skill with the proper roster rather than with a Build-A-Character. Its story serves its purpose as a framing device for the player’s growth in strength, but its predictable nature makes it a sad fare. There is so much potential in a Street Fighter World Tour, but somehow it always comes short in one way or another. Street Fighter 6 has a great fighting system, but the game has a split personality as a whole due to World Tour and Tournament Versus not meeting with each other in middle, or having a wholesale emphasize on one or the other.

Nintendo changing NoA president in the middle of Transition Period

Doug Bowser, the president of Nintendo of America, is stepping down from his position on December 31^st 2025. Unless the man has some underlaying health issues, then something is wrong within the company itself. Either something’s wrong within the company itself and Nintendo’s execs think they can fix it by replacing Bowser with Devon Pritchard, or they’ve been really unhappy how Bowser has been running the ship.

There really hasn’t been a charismatic leader in Nintendo after Fils-Aimé and Satoru Iwata. Both of them understood that consoles have to deliver value and quality at the same time. Value in this context means lower pricing point without sacrificing the quality of the product. We’re singin’ the Wii and DS blues with this one, and for a good reason; both expanded the video game market. You don’t do that with 800-1000 dollar consoles and games that you can get on every other platform.

Bowser’s leave is doubly concerning as its happening at two important junctures. The first is that we’re in Transition Period between the Switch and Switch 2. For any console company that’s a vulnerable time and something that has to be dealt with proper care. Nintendo has a history of screwing up generational shifts, assuming customer behaviours and finding out that they’ve been assuming wrong. The example of going from the GBA to the DS is a good one, as Nintendo initially treated the DS as a portable N64, which didn’t make great sales. Once they started to drop the demand third parties have to use the touch screen in some significant manner and started to treat the console more like a portable SNES, the sales started going up, especially with the Nintendo pet simulators and Brain Age-type of games that had broader appeal than Super Mario 64 reheat.

The second is that this is the Switch 2’s first holiday sales period. Whether or not his plans to oversee the Christmas season is applicable, seeing how fast he’s gone. Maybe NoJ expected far faster transition and new system adoption rate, and are finding some fault with Bowser’s plans. I’m not wholly buying this, but its possible. I don’t think Bowser’s or Pritchard work history with EA and Sony’s legal department respectively have influenced much of their decisions at Nintendo, but from what I’ve seen, you can take a man out of EA, but you can’t take EA out of a man.

If a health issue is not the reason Bowser is leaving, then my bet is on Nintendo being unsatisfied with something and sees replacing him as the solution. Especially when Satoru Shibata of NoJ is joining NoA as a CEO while continuing his role as managing executive, corporate direction, and a member of board at Nintendo. Whatever the background reason for Bowser leave is, this is NoJ extending more control over NoA despite Pritchard becoming the president. If NoJ has been dissatisfied in how NoA has been running business in general, then having someone from NoJ effectively overseeing their business possible. This isn’t anything new within the gaming industry, as Sega of Japan’s relationship with Sega of America wasn’t exactly peachy.

Fils-Aimé left the company when the Switch was already off the ground in 2019. He saw Iwata’s legacy having a solid direction, something the Switch 2 effectively spits on. He was right back then, that Nintendo would be in great shape at least a few years after he left.

Then again, Nintendo of Japan has been calling the shots when it comes to the Big Picture. Having Shibata enter NoA would indicate that they want to make that control that much stronger. However, without someone like Iwata at he helm, the company will have harsh winds against them if they want to appease investors over customers. Nintendo is no different from any other gaming developer and publisher in this regard, considering the customer just someone to pay for whatever the hell they want to make. Well, up until they’re the underdog and a re required to deliver what the market wants and demands.

Shibata was head of Nintendo of Europe too. If he was responsible for a lot of Switch games being Code in Boxes, that would be spelling a similar direction for the American games market as well. Well, that’d be inline with the key cards NoJ cooked up and shoving in place of codes.

Bowser’s history as the president of NoA has been odd. If he had any influence on the Switch 2, then we can consider him to be a negative effect. We can consider his comment about people who can’t afford to buy the Switch 2 can buy the Switch another negative, especially in the light how Don Mattrick managed to screw up Xbox’s brand by telling people to buy the 360 if people aren’t able to keep their consoles always online with Xbox One. We never really saw him in the spotlight outside justifying rise in prices. At least he brought Nintendo back to Brazil and got Nintendo games translated into Portuguese, so that’s a small win.

Regardless of all this, the timing is still very odd, and I can’t help but think something’s rotten in the Mushroom Kingdom.

Silksong of Disruption

Hollow Knight: Silksong is getting some heat for its twenty bucks price point. Team Cherry did something that Nintendo used to do to shake up the industry; disruption, i.e. delivering something of higher quality at a lower price.

The competition in the gaming industry has never liked when a disruption hits. It makes them question if they’re doing something wrong, if all the resources they’ve put into their game have been wrong calls. They see all the sales that are being made and want some of that dough for themselves. All the data they have seems odd and wrong, when someone else puts out product that beats them. The gaming industry, mostly the publishers, learn the wrong lessons. More often than not they’ll decide to make a copy of whatever was successful, with blackjack and hookers. Take Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Kinect as an example after the Wii hit the scene. It wasn’t the motion controls that made the Wii a hit, it was the disruptive nature of the console.

Silksong certainly delivers in quality. Following the event on the side, I’ve seen industry people complaining Team Cherry devaluing their game with arguments going from a 80h game should cost more to the price of the assets. The one bit that struck the harshest with me was how the competition is complaining how the game’s release date was give out two weeks before the D-Day, messing other developers’ and publishers’ games. How the pricing point now challenges other people to consider how much game people can get for their price, and how this distorts the customers’ ability to value games.

I have no sympathy for any of this. The video game industry is a competitive market. It’s not supposed to be a collective hug-club, where decisions are driven what fits all the industry at the expense of the customer. Like any other industry and its market, there’s supposed to be hard competition where the cream floats to the top and are able to deliver products the customer wants to buy. If you want your game to be played by as many people as possible, you wager its development time and price carefully. If you’re an independent developer/publisher, you’re not beholden to anyone else but to your own bottom line. The only people Team Cherry had to please above themselves was the customers, and the customers rejoiced.

Disruption often leads to some change in the industry, mostly for the positive. The last disruption was the Switch, but even with that it was lacklustre. We’ve been going few generations of nothing but buck-standard games that have nothing to say or do in terms of vision. We’ve been getting grey goo of mediocrity for a long time now. Modern games take so goddamn long that it isn’t funny. Games we have nowadays leave less and less impressions on the culture as a whole because they’re all same, big messes that spawn from each other in an incestuous manner.

A major reason why the indie scene is far more interesting than the big bucks AAA space is because they have more often than not a clear vision. When a small team is able to build a cohesive vision and have the skills to deliver on it, the end result is felt through the game itself. The AAA side of things is not driven by vision, but by checkmarks. You have bosses above your bosses that call the shots, and the lowly developer who has put a week into something can easily find themselves starting from scratch because someone who doesn’t even know your name didn’t think your work wasn’t good enough for whatever money-grubbing reasons.

If games are art, then any negative criticism stemming from industrial reasons towards Team Cherry’s decisions on Hollow Knight: Silksong‘s release and pricing should be ignored. These people crafted a game that they deemed the best possible direction for them and for the game, they put their time and blood into a vision of a game, and valued it appropriately so anyone could enjoy the game. Silksong is as close as art as games can get as the ultimate decisions were made by people making it. Unless you’re someone who has carte blanche to do whatever you want within a company, no publisher will allow developers to follow their vision. Someone up the ladder will find it necessary to change things if only to justify their position in the company.

I’ve got no sympathy towards the industry that has kicks their workers and attacks their customers. Outside smaller studios, the industry has become a bloated mess. The industry started because bunch of math nerds didn’t want to work at an actual job, but code in front of their computers. Indies are a return to this form, and we’re still seeing some of the best, most creative stuff to come out from them. Indies may be putting out more games than their bigger competition, but it’s not a quantity vs quality thing either, because the customer is there to decide at what price he buys a game. This is why every single Steam sale is celebrated, as that means people are buying games at prices they value these games at.

The model of selling a game as a single piece isn’t dead, it’s just abandoned. Look at all the Games-As-Service directors out there at the moment and how envious they are of Silksong right now. Laugh at Concord and at the execs who made wrong decisions in every turn. Small studios and other indies can disrupt the industry to a massive scale and win sheer goodwill from the customers. That is far more valuable on the long run. When you’ve made decisions to side with the customer and build a connection with them, and then deliver with something that expands your customers base, that’s when the magic happens.

Every industry requires disruption from time to time, video and computer games more often than most others. If indies can do it by pricing their game more properly, then they’ve got the industry’s leash and have all the controls to shake things up for the better. Starting by teaching customers their money has more value than they think and good games don’t need to cost a third of your rent.

If there’s any counterculture left in the gaming industry, its with the indies.

As for the media outlets bemoaning the lack of review copies, welcome to the world where the Internet is making your job obsolete. Please close the door after your exit.

I’m done with modern Super Robot Wars

I’m done with modern Super Robot Wars, because the mainline series deserves to be better than the mobile slop it is becoming. You, as a consumer of video and computer games, deserve better treatment from Bandai Namco. Modern SRW has become yet another DLC hell, a platform to sell you bits and parts of the game you already bought at full price.

You deserve not get fucked in the ass by people who sell you games. Especially when they’re selling you a game with Denuvo attached to it.

Super Robot Wars Y, in terms of SRW games, is shaping up to be trash. Everything about the game screams both lack of budget, recycling and ambitionless direction. You can argue that SRW has always recycled sprites. However, in the past these sprites were made to accommodate a general art direction that meshed together visually. On the GameBoy Advance, the portable games recycled some of the PlayStation 2 sprites, but the lower fidelity requiring to re-adapt the sprites made them fit together better. Then, Super Robot Wars OGS would rework all these sprites, making it a standout game in the series. This was in an era when 2D games were still largely overlooked.

Recycling animations for SRW is standard, but the way recycling was done in the aforementioned manner; adapted to fit. Even when jumping from the GBA to the DS, the reused sprites fit in with the new ones, creating a cohesive style. If you’re hardcore enough, you can tell which sprite creator made which sprites in a game, but their overall presentation makes them fit together. You can’t tell from a glance how they’re clearly from separate sources.

DD made its initial waves by having Devilman on front and centre, but looking back at this, it looks just like every other corporate clean slop we’ve been seeing everywhere in games in recent years. No character at all

This doesn’t apply to SRW Y, where you can tell just with a glance whether or not a sprite is specifically made for older games, for this game, or lifted from the mobile phone game DD. It makes a mess, when you have sprites with different styles in all manner vomited together and calling it a day. Mind, you, this was already the case with the previous anniversary game, SRW 30, so that’s the precedent. I’ve seen someone argue that it makes these units stand apart more, especially when its emphasizing the different source styles (I call this coping and a bad argument.) If this was the aim, then all units should have a unique style, following their main source material closely, but this isn’t the case. The lack of cohesive style jumps out even more when all units in the game still use SRW-style special effects, making the incohesive mess even more jarring. These range from explosions to projectile effects that aren’t part of a cut-in. The argument fails because all the different visual styles in SRW Y aren’t to make the units look different, but because they’re from different games with different styles. Because they’re throwing all different kind of sprites together without unifying the style, it looks like a slop in a puddle.

It’s funny how the fangame SRW ST manages to look more cohesive and professional than the actual series despite having less everything resource-wise. f

It doesn’t help that the attack animation, which once used to be stunning and full of life, are now largely lifeless, stiff and filled with cut-ins. Again, we find a kind of precedent in SRW 30, where you had tons of fade-ins to black. I’m honestly thinking they should just cut out the normal standing battle-sprite and follow the mobile game SD Gundam Eternal and make all attacks just the cut-ins. If you’re not doing anything with the base sprite, just remove it altogether. These sprites aren’t even proper SD anymore and haven’t been for a long time. The side effect of this is that the size differences between units makes less sense in the battle scenes, as sprites don’t scale based on their size. They’re not even proper 1:3 SD sprites, but some kind of perversion. If you look at Alpha-era sprites, there’s so much life in them, so much emotion without cutting it all the time. The basic battle-sprites have worth by doing the attacks in their animations proper, with bigger attacks getting more worth out of the cut-ins. Now that almost every attack animation is treated like as some kind of ender, it’s tiresome. Skipping and fast-forwarding has become enticing with time. When we get the basic battle-sprite doing these things, the stiffness and jank of the animation grinds the sight.

Perhaps not the best example, but note how the animations are quick and done most of the part, with cut-in saved for Fire Blaster, where it makes a proper effect

Sprite and animation recycling is forgivable as long as they’re renewed from time to time when they’re outdated. Going from the Super Famicom to PlayStation and to PlayStation 2 is still the best evolution in the series, showcasing how the sprites and animations can be smartly recycled and then during hardware upgrade, made new. The fandom largely forgave recycling with the portable games, especially when they introduced new series with each entry and slightly tweaked older ones if necessary. With the 3DS games, the game was made compatible with its 3D gimmick, and things had to be renewed. With some units, it seems like we’ve been running on same animations since 2008, when the sprite style changed. The mainline games should’ve seen an upgrade in visuals already, but instead its become a quilt jacket of bit of everything. We’re well past the point of this visual renewal the series so successful in the past.

By all means, SRW is just a marketing vehicle for Bandai Namco. If they have something they want to advertise in the game, it’s going to find its way in somehow. One of the best examples of this can be found in Super Robot Wars Alpha 3, which was riling its story into deep space, but due to Sunrise and Bandai wanting Gundam Seed into the story, the staff had to make a weird pivot in the story and return circling Earth in parts for marketing reasons. Most of the series that find themselves in these games is more about marketing them and giving certain IPs visibility. This ensures the game can find bit more sales, as introducing popular [Series A] into SRW probably will attract [Series A]’s fans to pick up SRW for the first time. Recycling popular series also keeps fans of the other series with the games, but also cuts down development time when sprites and voice acting already exist.

SRW Y really looks like an amalgamation of all the bad brushstrokes SRW must go through to get made. Including an engine switch to Unity, though the mobile game Super Robot Wars DD already ran on it. The series has been running on the same engine since 2000’s Super Robot Wars Alpha, with updates to it whenever needed. I’m betting the engine switch was made to make it easier to cross DD, Y and whatever future SRW assets will be. While smart in terms of business and development, it also means mainline series, and probably future OGs titles, will be based on mobile slop. At least modding the game should be a bit easier. I’m not going to touch Unity as an engine at all, it’s a mess.

SRW OGs fans know the significance of Hero Senki to the series

What grinds me the most though is how blasé SRW Y is. Sure, the series hasn’t exactly wowed anyone with its changes in time. Throughout the latter 1980s and 1990s these SD-driven games tried something new all the time, from RPG cross-overs like Hero Senki to action games akin to Great Battle and all the cross-over sports games. Super Robot Wars and SD Gundam series are the last vestiges of this, with both periodically giving their patterns of play a new lick of paint. SRW hasn’t exactly changed the core of its grid-based strategy in the mainline, but at least they’ve given it a go a few times around. SRW NEO on the Wii didn’t just use 3D models, but also gave each unit a range where they could walk freely, removing the grid system. The 3D games always tried something new like this, whereas the 2D games made great improvements in dealing with the ever-growing cast with Partner and Squad systems, combining multiple units into one squad, this affecting how battles would go down. SRW Y is as basic as it gets, offering literally nothing new in terms of play. It’s the same shit in different pants.

Battle Maps are one of the most under-developed parts of SRW; they’ve effectively been the same, be it in 2D or 3D with no innovation behind them

This of course applies to the presentation as well, which is largely boring. However, what’s even more boring is that the developers are very much stuck in the tried-and-tested Visual Novel presentation of the game and the ever-expanding number of lines these fanfiction games have. Of course, this is the most economical and cheapest way to deliver exposition, but thirty years now, and it’s the dullest possible way. At this point, Bandai Namco and Sunrise should hit their heads together and give SRW enough budget to get animated sequences between stages to ease out how lacking the series’ presentation has become. Hell, the devs should first make the story sequences during Battle Maps proper rather than have the models mash together like some capsule toys. Despite the new engine under the hood, SRW Y doesn’t seem to take any advantages of it as the devs are reusing twenty years old way to deliver battles outside battles. They can do anything during these sequences, and they choose to not to do anything creative.

I’m just so done with the newer entries in the series. If they’re not going to improve from what the series was twenty years ago, why bother? I still got some of the older titles unfinished on my shelf that are more unique in their own ways, like SRW 64. There are tons of games from the SD-character driven era that I can find to get my SD-battle fix.

I’m demanding something better. You can too, and the devs and publishers can deliver. They won’t if they’re not demanded that. The marketing forces and sycophants will tell you how true fans will buy anything they put out, no matter what’s the quality and we all recognize that it’s abusing behaviour. Knowing your self-worth matters, and a true fan would want their loved series to be better, to achieve new heights and become an even better version of what it already is. Not lay down spread the cheeks when told them to do so. The first step is stop paying for worse products, and the second step is to make your voice heard why that is. The third step is to ignore the sycophants that are yelling at you while their asses are bleeding.

I don’t like having this stance, but I like even less the direction the series has been going and how much less value the series has made itself to the customers. All the DLC shenanigans and market expansion with English versions have been a boon to Bandai Namco, but we’re not seeing any of that in the games themselves. Seeing the thumbnail for the first DLC for SRW Y just had me going Why am I even interested? I’m done with this without even clicking it. Yeah, I’m going to miss Godzilla and other cool stuff, but why bother? As a series veteran, I can tell how this is going to play out. I didn’t like it one bit in 30 or when Operation Extend tried to cash me over and over again, so I have to put my foot down and say No. I won’t allow myself to be taken advantage of anymore.

If you see me playing Super Robot Wars Y in the future, call me out on my bullshit.

There is a fever to ban smut

No government wants to clearly define the term pornography. That’d not be to their benefit. The same goes for the companies that want to control what you can and can’t purchase. If you think Visa shouldn’t have anything to say what you can or can’t buy, give ’em a call. Call whoever is your representative in you local government and ask them about why censorship is getting rampant again, why are your rights being eroded.

China has banned OnlyFans. They also legalized stealing foreign IPs, something they’ve been doing ever since they opened doors for open markets.

Before China, Papua New Guinea banned all porn sites in 2009. Bangladesh has the Pornography Control Act of 2012, banning production, spreading and consumption of pornographic material. In 2015, India banned over 800 porn sites. Thailand banned nearly 200 porn sites, including the ever-popular PornHub. 31 Asian countries have a full pornography ban, if we go by Comparitech’s Internet censorship statistics.

In Europe, France, Germany and UK have implemented age-verification systems under the guise of protecting children. Naturally, this approach does not protect children as children don’t use the mainline porn sites and get abused that way. Children play games with communities, like Roblox, where predators know how to approach children. These age-verification systems are somewhat easy to circumvent, but also a massive security risk. No site ever too safe and secure from security breaches, and these repositories are far too easy to crack open. Hackers by their nature are always a few steps ahead the security personal.

However, banning pornography is about control. It has always been covered with other words and public intentions, when the actual reasoning underneath is control and limitations of your freedoms. The classic example in the US would be the U.S. Comstock Act of 1873, which criminalized the act of distributing obscene material. “Obscene” was intentionally vaguely defined. The act ended up suppressing arts from public view, with government putting charges against galleries who were showcasing reproductions of Alexandre Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus.

That Indian Pornography ban also lead to numerous non-pornographic sites being banned, and ended up infringing people’s privacy. The government’s public intention was to curb sex related crimes, but that’s some ass-backwards thinking. After a harsh public backlash, Indian government did walk walk their ban to some extent. Media, pornographic or not, is not reason for people’s actions. The media reflects the people, and that change has to come education and people themselves on a cultural level if they want to change things.

The UK is sliding next to Russia and China when it comes to using banning or otherwise limiting pornography as a tool for other restrictions. The Online Safety Act 2023 criminalizes “offensive” content or speech causing “distress,” which can be anything the government wants them to be. This act empowers the Office of Communications, or Ofcmon, to breach your privacy and security in the name of the law. After all, people who don’t have anything to hide don’t have anything to fear, right?

Not that the EU doing much better than the UK. Now that an Age-verification application is coming, EU is banning all apps that aren’t licensed by Google. This means open-source and sideloading unlicensed applications get frowned upon, which is a threat to everyone who values freedom to do whatever they wish their devices. F-Droid and Foxy Droid both are repositories for free and open source apps, lacking tracking and other telemetry traps most apps on the Google App Store have. Effectively, EU’s overreach here is doubly a threat; one to your freedom of choice, one against open source applications.

Visa and Mastercard really shouldn’t go free from their failures. The reason I started this post pointing out that you should call to Visa’s customer service and tell them how they’ve fucked up is because they should have even less to say what you can spend your money on or what kind of media you consume. They’re payment processors, middle-men who make money on other people making money. Visa has had some bad rap in the past when they couldn’t tackle down on their services being used to pay for CSEM, so they started overreaching and extending to areas where they have no right to have a say. Japanese sites like Pixiv, DLSite and Fantia got hit hard when Visa told them they wouldn’t process payments with them unless they limited what kind of fiction was on these sites. It really doesn’t matter if there has been some group that has pressured companies and governments into censorious action like Collective Shout. What matters is that these companies and governments have faltered in protecting their customers and citizens.

Both payment processors and the governments that limit these are limiting freedom of speech, and through that they’re kicking the doors wide open for censorship for everything else. Fiction has been under fire for a long time now when it comes to censorship, something I’ve covered here on the blog until I just got too jaded about it. Both Sony and Microsoft are examples of practicing heavy censorship, with Sony of America pressuring Japanese developers at the initial development phases to censor their games.

In the end, it’s not about porn, but about freedom. Defending pornography is defending freedom of expression, even if you disagree what’s being depicted in it. It’s a hard and tough battle, because being labelled as perverts and degenerates is an easy route for the censors to take, something that often echoes with the general populace who don’t give a damn. Nevertheless, for the sake everyone’s freedom it is a battle that’s never-ending. Today someone bans porn you don’t like, tomorrow someone else uses the same law to ban something else you like. The next day expressing dissent on the ban is being criminalized, and the day after larger bans who can access what forums. It’s a never ending cycle that needs to be nipped from the bud and uprooted fully.

Censorship must be opposed, freedom of expression is paramount to all cultures.

22 years of F-Zero GX/AX

By a coincidence, I ended up playing F-Zero AX the first time around on its 22nd anniversary day. Those twenty odd years ago, I found myself buying F-Zero GX on the release date, despite having a dislike towards all kinds of racing games. They were not my thing, and they still really aren’t at the end of the day. However, with F-Zero GX I found a game that was genuinely hard, but also rewarding. There’s no other game that gives the same kind of rush of speed. All other futuristic racers are either far too floaty (because they make the whole hovering-above-the-ground part of their shtick) or heavily base themselves on weapon combat (which I find boring and something that messes up with racing itself.)

Sega’s AM2 focused on the driving. Easy to learn, extremely hard to master. There are no extra bells and whistles thrown to mess up with the player’s driving, something a lot of these new futuristic racers want to do. Some put in track parts that are about flying, thus changing the driving to something else. Others put some kind of twist how you can maximize your speed when coming off a ramp, requiring you to spin or some other unnecessary addition that’s not part of the core driving. Weapon and racing often go hand in hand, but it requires a different approach to the racing then. When you’re doing two different things, one has to be automated. More often than not, the weapons are the ones that get automated, all you gotta do is lock in and push to fire. It’s slow and boring. F-Zero GX /AX disregards weapons, as per series past, and focuses solely racing. Sure, you can bump enemies with a powered tackle or spin, but these have value as other kind of maneuvers as well. The fact that they’re also an arsenal in controlling your craft of choice is important; they’re not just an addition to shoot or otherwise pester your opponents. Either you get good at driving, or you’re left in the wake of others.

Of course, F-Zero as a series has been diminishing returns when it comes to the sales figures. Each mainline entry has seen less sales, which is why Nintendo has stated they’re not interested in making new games to series that have low sales. Yet they went in to make more Pikmin… Nevertheless, the 2D games seem to be the darling of the series. However, I have no issues saying how remarkable it is that F-Zero ever so any continuity. The first game is a glorified tech demo for Mode 7 at best, with unrefined controls and bad track design. Sega had done better racing games in 2D with their Super Scaler technology, something that AM2 probably took some roots from. Some argue that F-Zero X is the best game in the series, and it just might be in terms of driving, and due to some of the tracks. I find it bland because the visual design is no nearly as strong.

As F-Zero has its roots in the American comic books, X tries to use those heavy blacks and rock music to sell itself to the audience. That’s also why a lot of the designs are wacky and out there, something that makes the game look a bit unbalanced. It looks like a mockery in many ways, while GX found its own style and design that looks different from the bunch. X is a marvel for its time, 60fps with 30 racers on the course at the same time. What the staff had to sacrifice for this was effectively everything else when it comes to visuals of the game. X looks bland because it has no environments to speak of. Most of the environments are relegated to the skybox as distant objects, with some basic blocks present themselves as buildings on a small number of tracks. AM2 took what where the best bits and went to town with them; GX/AX has stunning environmental design, something that very few futuristic racer nails down. The atmosphere is unbeatable, cohesive and pumps you up. I could give that X has better driving. Everything else is better in GX/AX. As with everything, this is a matter of taste, so you might find X’s lack of visuals more appealing.

F-Zero GX has connectivity with F-Zero AX, it’s arcade counterpart. By slotting your GameCube Memory Card into the arcade machine, you are able to unlock AX specific machines, parts and tracks easier than in GX. Easier is the keyword, as you still have to work yourself to unlock them. You need to win each track on the AX cabinet to have it unlocked on your Memory Card, showcased by the track’s name being transferred to your memory card. Similarly, you need to finish a race with each of the AX exclusive pilot to unlock their craft on your save. You can finish last, but you must finish the race nevertheless. Even if you run out of time or place the last in a race, you get Tickets.

All this means that you can unlock the racers on your GX save relatively easily, but the tracks can cause some issues, as the CPU gets serious after the Easy tracks. You also need to use the Tickets to buy both the tracks and the racers at home, meaning all those Tickets you got are going to go into good use. There’s no easy way in this game, is there? Either you go the less hard way, or you go even harder way.

It would also seem that the arcade machines are region agnostic, as a PAL save functioned without issues on a Japanese arcade machine.

I explain this connectivity as there are very few sources that go deeper into what and how it works.

AX plays very much like its home-bred brother. However, it has slightly different physics and you have a wheel in front of you. Unless you rock a Logitech Speed Force wheel and pedals, you have a precious few moments to learn the new control schematics and get accustomed to them. Even then, the game can proceed to kick your ass if you’re not ready. Even as an arcade game, a place where things are made to give you a rush, F-Zero AX is a different kind of beast that not everyone will want to play. Mario Kart Double Dash is more likely to attract attention, or whatever version of Initial-D is running on the side. All the strengths the game has as an arcade game are also its weaknesses. It’s not an inviting game, it’s not a game that eases you in, even if the first track is an oval. While it has a lot of goofiness around it due to being a third big F-Zero game, the racing itself is as serious as it gets. Its marquee may not be loud and flashy, but its sound booms across the room. Each boost kicks up a burst and a light show that attracts the eye. The loud alarm when low on Energy will cause anxiety and draw more attention why such a sound is going off. A well designed arcade game from an era when arcades were already dead.

Sega’s nail on the franchise might’ve been its last one. Nintendo sees low sales and a challenge to renew the play somehow, but for better or worse, F-Zero‘s racing can either be fine-tuned even further, or needs to be completely revamped. Nintendo doesn’t seem to have the hutzpah to do either. X gets new stages from time to time, with some modders making whole new Cups. Most GX mods mostly tweak the stats rather than make new stages. Not that GX/AX needs any of these. The series needs a new entry, but that’ll happen only when there’s enough demand within Nintendo. Maybe if the Switch 2’s GameCube emulator can run the game at a decent pace, and flawlessly, people will end up playing it more and give Nintendo stats to showcase that there is a demand for more undiluted speed.

For now, pop that disc into your console and try to beat that Story Mode again.

Nintendo games and consoles are for adults now, the expanded media for children

I end up reading quarterly reports now and then from Capcom and Nintendo, and outside few posts I let them go by. They are usually full of non-answers, but there are gems here and there. My favourite is the knowledge that when Square and Enix merged, the surviving company was Enix. This trips a lot of Square fans who don’t realize how badly Square was suffering in terms of finance back then. The Spirits Within movie had inflicted lasted damage to the company and was the main reason why the merger was delayed. Enix was in a much better position.

Nintendo’s 85th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders is more of the same. There’s a question about if the Switch 2 supply is meeting with the demand, but there’s a non-answer. Nintendo doesn’t know, it’s been on the market too short a time. Which is also why Nintendo had to shoot down reports about those five million units sold too. 3.5 million is what Nintendo is saying. That’s still a good number and there is room for growth, but be either the price or the supply, Nintendo has already changed their strategy.

Q12:

Nintendo Switch 2 has a higher price point than past platforms like the Family Computer system
(Famicom). I am concerned that this might reduce opportunities for young children to engage with
it. How will you address this issue?
A12 Furukawa:
We believe the pricing of Nintendo Switch 2 is appropriate for the gaming experience it offers,
and what is most important is to provide entertaining experiences that demonstrate the value to
consumers. To achieve this goal, we have incorporated various features into Nintendo Switch 2.
It is true that Nintendo Switch 2 has a higher price point than our past gaming systems. We are
creating various opportunities outside of our gaming systems for young children to engage with
Nintendo characters and game worlds, with one of the ultimate goals being that they will eventually
play on our gaming systems. We are closely monitoring to what degree the price of the system
might become a barrier.

Nintendo acknowledges the Switch 2 is beyond most children at the moment. The reason Nintendo has the reputation of a family friendly, kids console is because they appealed to the whole family, not just kids or the parents, or the shut-in hardcore gamer in the basement. This explains the Switch 2’s design and addition of using the controllers as computer mice. The more muted colours of the console are there to make the console look less like a toy, the colours pop less. It’s the more mature option of the two, and keeping the Switch on the side might be a crutch solution to deliver games to children who can’t move on to the newer system.

This didn’t really work for Sony, as the PlayStation 5 ended up being largely a noteworthy console for it being about nothing. Sony let the PlayStation 4 live too long and had cross-system games draining any reasons to migrate to the newer system. Constant multiplatform games despite of their timed exclusivity damaged to console on the long run to the point of PS5 being irrelevant. I would’ve bought the system for Final Fantasy VI if it had anything else I would’ve wanted to buy, but PS5 has a very lacklustre library.

We are creating various opportunities outside of our gaming systems for young children to engage with Nintendo characters and game worlds, with one of the ultimate goals being that they will eventually play on our gaming systems. We are closely monitoring to what degree the price of the system might become a barrier. Nintendo seems to know that the price is too much. More importantly, they are intending to leverage other media to sell to kids. Nintendo has always had cartoons, comics, cereals and other mulimedia ventures next to their games, but they’re ramping them up now because of the Switch 2’s status as a high-price, prestige system. The Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda movies are an example of this, and these are kids movies. They’re also doing more concerts, which aren’t exactly for children but for Nintendo Adults, equivalent of Disney Adults.

That’s the main target audience for the Switch 2; people who grew up with Nintendo and are now between thirty and fifty, with enough income to put down enough cash without thinking too much whether or not the system warrants its high price. Nintendo acknowledges in this QA that the Switch 2 wasn’t priced high because of inflation. Because of this higher set price, Nintendo has created other opportunities for children (and people who can’t or won’t buy the Switch 2) to consume their properties in other media forms, aiming to make those emotional connections that are so important in keeping long-term, lifelong customers that won’t question much of the corporation’s actions and decisions. Some call these true fans, others call them more accurately as sycophants.

Can Nintendo make their business plan succeed without the larger children as their main target market, or will the Nintendo Adults be enough? Too early to tell, but this feels like abandoning a long-lasting and successful approach for something the corporate body got told by the shareholders.

QA14 more or less confirms what’s already said earlier. Based on our strategy of expanding the number of people who have access to Nintendo IP, since the launch of Nintendo Switch, we have pursued parallel development in mobile apps, theme parks, movies, and official stores. These are now in place. These all eat Nintendo’s general budget and I have to question if they’re a good direction for a combined hardware and software provider. Spreading yourself too thin might cost them back. Are they intending to become some sort of Asian response to Disney?

Lastly, there are repetition about concerns over rising game development costs. Let’s kick that dead horse again and remind that nobody but the publishers and developers are ultimately responsible of these. Very few big name publisher/ developer produces smaller budget games with less high-budget fat. Just look at how successful Mega Man 11 has been for Capcom with a very modest budget, yet Capcom hasn’t put out a new Mega Man game because that’s not how they roll. Nintendo could similarly put out tighter budget games more often, hitting that 16-bit SNES nostalgia with sprite based Zelda or Mario and they’d make a bank. We’re not in the late 1990s-early 2000s anymore. If the Indie boom of the New Millennium showed anything, we’re well pass the Oooh Aaah 3D phase. 3D has become mundane long time ago and consumers have accepted how it was absolutely silly to shun 2D games after the launch of the PlayStation. Nintendo has leveraged their 2D roots many times over the years, but have never done a new and true 2D game with a proper budget on their flagship console. Hence, why the indies deliver some of the best stuff out there still.

Switch 2 sells swell

News on the Japan Timea, caught my eye; The ‘internet’ hated Switch 2 — consumers bought it anyway – Nintendo proves online backlash doesn’t equal real-world behavior. It’s from Gearoid Reidy from Bloomberg, where he announces nobody cares that gamers announced the Switch 2 anti-consumers online and that nobody cared. He bases this on the Switch 2 selling 3.5 million units in the first four days, making it the fastest-selling console. That’s really not the point of Reidy’s article though, but how voices on the Internet shouldn’t be conflated with voices in the real world, something I can agree with. Twitter, BlueSky, and whatever else social media platform you have isn’t reality. Nevertheless, I don’t see this attitude in general when corporations use their PR engines to spread their messages around, or when companies listen to the kind of activist voice they support.

It’s not a bad article per se but misses the point at the very end. The misquote from Henry Ford about if you asked what people wanted they’d reply faster horses really misses the point. No sensible customer research asks what the customers want, they follow what sort of behaviour the customer has and what are their buying habits. That’s why you have dozens of different kinds of pasta sauces on the shelf rather than one or two. Big Data is even more valuable nowadays, where proper researchers can pick up every interest you have in life and tailor a product according to them. Then, the corporate propaganda starts selling it to you, and you’ll most likely buy whatever newfangled pasta sauce it is because you like those little veggies bits or oregano in other sauces. All this takes time, though.

It’s far too early to call the Switch 2 a success. We probably can make some guesstimates once it hits six months. Proper evaluations after one year of sales, so sometime early next year. Anyone announcing it as a big success or a major disaster doesn’t have enough data on customer behaviour, only on how people bark on the Internet. Even though I may not have any interest in buying the console because of its stupidly high prices and lack of ownership, I’m not going yell from the roof about its demise.

Piscatella here is a generic industry talking head, Executive Director and VG Industry analyst at Circana. In these short three posts, he contradicts himself; either the Switch 2 is a sales success, or it is too early to say anything about the third-party software sales. Both can’t be true, as consoles live and die by their library. In the past, the industry has drummed for when Nintendo they’ve done something they’ve liked with less success. When Nintendo was doing something they didn’t like, the industry would laugh at them while wondering why Nintendo was raking the big bucks in. Trip Hawking is one of these names from the game industry’s past. Later Piscatella mentions that his point was that it’s silly to try and parse out huge findings and implications within a small data set, so he was just shitposting. Yet Reidy has made the argument for the Switch 2’s success, and he’s not the only one. Nintendo Life has a humerus article on how the Switch 2 has already sold more than the Xbox Series and PS5 in its launch in Japan, something that’s not a surprise. PS5 is a topic I’ll have to cover another time.

However, I think the Switch 2 is riding on the Switch’s wake. It’s not a hard console to grasp, concept-wise. It’s the Switch if perceived by shareholders, a safe successor. Whenever Nintendo has made safe consoles rather than rattling and disrupting the industry with something else, their success has been lacking. The Switch 2 might have something akin to the SNES’ cycle, where it had a good initial start, then started lagging behind main competitors only picking up pace after some major Tour de Force games get released. However, the situation is a bit different now with both Microsoft and Sony going third-party and spreading themselves thin. The Switch 2 doesn’t have any direct competition as a console, but the majority of the customers are savvy and will find better options if it suits them. Customer behaviour may be somewhat esoteric, but it has logic behind it.

A thing only a few talking heads seem to mention when discussing the Switch is how target and core customers liked to collect physical carts. You could nab Switch games relatively cheaply from whatever store and the game would keep its collectible value to boot. I don’t expect this to be repeated with the Switch 2, as the carts are no longer collectible in the same fashion. The physical carts lose their value when the game is not on them anymore but work as physical DRM keys for your downloaded title. They won’t retain value, as the person holding the cart has no full ownership over it. It just ends up being plastic trash down the line.

As a side note, I find it really strange that Nintendo has started to make Mario Kart World bundles out of Switch 2 boxes that were standalone previously. Either someone wants to make the game even more of a success by bundling it with the consoles, and thus trying to repeat what happened with Wii Sports, or they have some info on the early behaviour customers have and standalone Switch 2 consoles wouldn’t find buyers as easily. Nintendo has been against including software with their hardware, with Reggie Fils-Aimé having to fight Nintendo of Japan on including something with the Wii hardware, something that would emphasize the console’s value. Perhaps they’re rushing to change these console boxes for the sake of added value. This behaviour seems to be common with Japanese game companies, as Sega had the same issues with the Mega Drive, being flabbergasted how Nintendo of America wanted to include Sonic the Hedgehog with a console bundle. What neither really realized is that when you offer that extra value to the customers, value that might be some of your best, it creates a downstream of sales down the line. Whenever a console lacks value, it starts to shake at its foundation. So, throwing in a code coupon would be an easy addition of value.

The question of course would be Why would Nintendo need to add value to the fastest-selling console? There’s something rotten in the land of Denmark. Is the console selling less than what Nintendo projected, or did some bigwig notice that some people were buying the Switch 2 only to play Switch games on better hardware? That’s another thing that’s been going on, some even buying the bundle just to sell the code elsewhere. People have been wanting that Switch Pro update for numerous years now, and that’s what the Switch 2 is at its core.

The Switch 2 is currently a record-breaking console. Depending on the software sales, it might stay up there, but we’ll have to see. This might just end up being the same kind of situation Star Trek had with toys in the 1980s; each toy company betting on odd-numbered Trek movies after an even-numbered movie had become a success. While the rule doesn’t apply to Nintendo, it’d have some cosmic comedy if the Switch 2 would faceplant down the line. It would do good for Nintendo too, as when they’re the underdog, they put out their best game.

Robot anime, mecha, and the Transformers

For a good thirty years or so the Transformers fandom has been arguing whether their beloved franchise belongs to the mecha genre. On the surface to the general audience, this seems like a petty in-group fight but scratching the surface shows that the defining term is contested and has been an issue within other fandoms and groups elsewhere.

Mecha is a Japanese term, usually a shorthand loanword for mechanical. While the term has existed at least since World War II, the first public mention of mechanical designers in Japanese media can be found in 1972’s Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, crediting Mitsuki Nakamura and Kunio Okawara. This is generally considered the genesis, which in the Golden Age of Japanese animation in the 1970s saw considerable growth.

If we follow the trends that define these mechanical designs in that era, we see giant, often humanoid, machines controlled by people, be they human, alien, or something in between. Using Mazinger Z from 1973 as an example, we have a mechanical giant controlled via an aircraft on its head. The opening theme song declares it a super robot, which would become a genre definer in itself. Later shows would mimic, copy, and be inspired by Mazinger Z over predecessors in the genre, like Tetsujin #28 and Astroganga. However, super robot was a catch-all term for some time, basically encompassing all these shows that were financed by toy companies to sell the latest toys. The Chogokin toyline started with Mazinger Z toys by Popy, and the Japanese toy industry (and children) was swept by these metallic toys.

Mazinger Z’s successors, from Getter Robo and Super Electromagnetic Robot Combattler V all the way to the decade’s end with Mobile Suit Gundam and The Invincible Robot Trider G7, show that Japan’s genre was robot anime, not mecha.

Robots of course don’t always exactly apply to these mechanical giants. Robots are automated machines, which can act as they are programmed to, though they can (and often must be) guided by an external control device. They can be autonomous or semi-autonomous, e.g., vacuum cleaner robots are usually able to find their own charging stations. Self-driving cars also fall into this category, as they move on their own, but something like an automatic transmission car doesn’t, as it requires direct control within the vehicle by its driver.

As such, the term robots doesn’t seem to apply to robot anime, but popular culture has already adopted the term to describe these fictional machines as such. People know the difference and can articulate it to varying degrees, as we are able to tell the difference between fiction and reality. The pop-culture image of a robot is that of a huge hunk of metal walking about, whether a pilot is present is largely inconsequential. We could candidly say that only nerds get stuck on this while the majority of society doesn’t really care to make a point about the difference.

Nevertheless, while the genre may be robot anime, these piloted mechanical beings got the term mecha at some point. The loanword was, and sometimes still is, applied to whatever mechanical contraption people have at hand, be it a toaster or something else. The term organically evolved and was applied to these piloted mechanical things. However, there were no written rules about this.

We should also look at where the 1970s robot anime stemmed from. The 1950s and 1960s tokusatsu boom had started to wane, but Japan still loved giant monsters. As that genre changed, it introduced monster battling. Giant monsters defending the Earth from other, more evil giant monsters and aliens. It’s not hard to draw a line between this and having a human in a giant robot fighting similar monsters, something that would define the whole monster-of-the-week paradigm most robot anime would work under.

Mazinger Z’s enemy force was the Mechanical Beasts, creatures of all forms and shapes made of metal and powered by nuclear energy. Great Mazinger would face Battle Beasts, Mycenaean cyborgs made from organic parts installed in mechanical frames and controlled by implanted brains from Mycenaean Warriors. In the same series lineup, Grendizer would face the Vegan Empire’s Saucer Beasts, made from Vegatron Ore and powered by the radiation the ore emitted, just as varied as their predecessor enemy forces. They were a mix of piloted mecha and brain-implant cyborgs.

All these three enemy forces in the original Mazinger TV continuity had the term mecha applied to them despite their appearances, inorganic/organic status, or whether they had a pilot. This was because in general parlance the term was widely applied to these fictional mechanical things, just as it was applied to real-life things. However, with the popularity and continued success of robot anime, the term mecha evolved to refer to fictional giant machines foremost. As a genre definer, the Japanese have adopted mecha in some form to exist alongside the more popular and widespread robot anime, as that fits the cultural landscape much better as a descriptor and the way the genre has evolved since Tetsujin #28.

The term mecha first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978, defining it as “In anime, manga, etc.: a giant armoured robot, typically piloted by a person or creature inside the robot itself.” Here we see pop-culture in action, where the term is defined as a robot that’s being piloted, while a robot is described as a machine controlled by a computer to perform automated jobs. These two don’t mix with each other, unless we take into account the pop-culture influence and accept that a robot can be a general mechanical contraption that’s either automated or directly controlled.

However, the first movie example the Oxford dictionary’s website uses is that of Terror of Mechagodzilla, which is a robot externally controlled by a device inside the cyborg Katsura Mafune. It’s an odd choice, but a perfect one to illustrate how mecha in English parlance stems from its Japanese origin and mixes things up.

When mecha entered the English lexicon is lost to time. I assume it crossed the ocean sometime in the 1970s with Japanese television and toys, supported by the fandom that existed at the time. The term would find more popular use in the 1980s and 1990s as Japanese popular culture spread across the world, though in Central European countries, which dealt with Japan directly rather than importing content from the US, they followed the Japanese nomenclature. It’s impossible for me to pinpoint any exact event or person who can be credited with coining any of these terms per se, as they’re the natural growth of cultural exchange.

BattleTech is an early example of adapting Japanese mecha into American culture. Back in 1984, FASA licensed rights to use pre-existing mecha designs from various Japanese works through Twentieth Century Imports (CTI) rather than making their own. CTI was importing Japanese models of numerous shows, Crusher Joe, Fang of the Sun Dougram, and Superdimensional Fortress Macross, to name a few. BattleDroids was a success and would be renamed BattleTech to avoid issues with George Lucas.

However, CTI likely lacked the legal rights to license any of these designs. FASA sued Playmates in 1993 due to Exosquad’s animated series’ mechanical designs looking similar to BattleMechs and lost. At the same time, Playmates was licensing Robotech from Harmony Gold, who then sued FASA for the use of designs Harmony Gold had directly licensed from Studio Nue and Tatsunoko. FASA ended up settling the lawsuit in 1996, likely because they lacked the proper rights to use the designs, and thus they were removed from the game and became the Unseen. While the BattleTech designs have changed to more unique designs, there are still a handful of BattleMechs that were lifted from anime, like the Atlas being a traced Scopedog.

The reason I’m covering BattleTech in this very short fashion is because the game’s term “mech” is specifically for its own setting, in which all of these robots are piloted. Much like the Transformers fandom, the BattleTech fandom has made arguments from time to time that “mech” is a descriptor for a utility, realistic machine, typically piloted, while “mecha” is for the more fantastical machines seen in Japanese media. Justification within BattleTech’s fiction for the BattleMechs is very similar to so many Japanese takes on giant pilotable machines. The supposedly realistic take BattleTech has is in its rules for calculating damages and movement, though this is not different from any other tabletop game that uses simulation as a game design approach, Japanese or American. However, in recent decades the argument seems to have toned down to some extent, with less fervor to distinguish between “mecha” and “mech”.

So, by the late 1990s, the English-speaking world seems to have adopted the term mecha as a genre descriptor that corresponds somewhat with the Japanese robot anime, but not exactly. The English term is both a descriptor for a genre and for these giant robots clashing with each other, and ultimately becomes even more expansive than robot anime.

By the mid-2000s, 4chan had spun its /m/echa board out from /a/nime due to the amount of Gundam and other robot anime being posted and discussed there. Not too long after that, /m/ went through its own internal argument over what mecha meant and what it should encompass. Some would use the Japanese meaning in its general form, including Kamen Rider, Warhammer 40,000, and Space Pirate Harlock as all these shared mechanical elements from cyborgs and powered armors to spaceships and robots.

On its face, this is laughable, but considering these were mechanical things people on the board wanted to discuss, some found their place. Warhammer 40,000, however, was largely rejected as a whole, which contributed to the creation of the neckbeard board /tg/. Some anons wanted the board to stay purely about the robots, the mecha, rather than allow bugmen there. Arguments went left and right, echoing past Trukk not Munky in some manner, but as things stabilized, anons largely agreed tokusatsu would be allowed on /m/ as an honorary thing. In a way, the board became about Japanese science fiction with a very heavy leaning on giant robots, with an occasional thread about Western media fitting the general categorization.

That general categorization seems to be the downfall for the term though. Whether it’s through misunderstanding mecha and robot, everything that has some kind of mechanical design seems to have been thrown under that label at some point by some fan. If they’re an influential fan, that has expanded. Still, at the same time, shows that are under the Japanese robot anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion are not mecha in genre because the pilotable giants in question are biological in nature rather than strictly mechanical. Similarly, some argue whether or not Outlaw Star is mecha because it has a spaceship with grappling arms.

The thing we also need to note before moving into Transformers is that mecha is a dirty word, a slur for some people. It denotes a show that’s about the robots, with little character development or even story and mainly focuses on selling toys. Shows like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Code Geass have fans arguing that they’re not mecha either, as their focus is not on robots. However, they have just as much focus on the robots in the shows as some of their contemporaries and predecessors. Sometimes the argument is that the robots in these shows are mostly in the background and could be exchanged with generic military or fighting vehicles or similar without changing the story in and of itself. The same could be argued about numerous other shows as well, including Mobile Suit Gundam, where the Mobile Suits could be, e.g., fighters or some other fighting vehicle without changing the core of the story.

I find this argument weak, as taking out giant robots and replacing them with whatever would have a large impact on the story’s visuals and design. These things are just as much part of the overall world as any design selection. Neither of the two aforementioned examples are alone in their genre; Gurren Lagann is very much a traditional super robot show at its core, while Code Geass is Gundam with Clamp paint on it. These arguments about whether something is or isn’t seem to stem mostly from people who don’t really wander out of their comfort zone when it comes to media and end up making excuses about why they would enjoy a genre that they malign.

After laying all that out for context on how robot anime, robot, mecha anime, and mecha work, I should define the terms. My aim is to give one clear definition for each. These are my takes, so you’d know where I’m looking at things with Transformers.

I think we all can agree that robot anime as a genre definer is any animation work that has robots as part of their main component. Examples would be Code Geass, Escaflowne, Patlabor, and Medabots. Ghost in the Shell would be an example of a work that has robots, but they’re not the main component, but rather part of the cyberpunk genre. The main component would require the robots to be the main vehicle, designed to drive things to a certain extent. This could be a Mazinger Z-like lone warrior, or a part of a military force like Knightmare Frames. Thus, it becomes a sort of umbrella term for a wide variety of shows, but exclusionary enough.

Robot in this context would be all the mechanical things that aren’t some sort of vehicle. For example, a car wouldn’t be a robot, and neither would a tank. A cyborg, any vaguely humanoid mechanical thing, or an industrial robot would fall under this, as the term needs to be vague enough to encompass pilotable biological beings with some sort of mechanical element to them. Shows like Fight!! Iczer-1 have Iczer-Robo, which is constructed via fusion of biological gestation and cybernetics, and would be a robot in this general term. While I don’t like this to be this general, I must acknowledge how general pop-culture views most things vaguely mechanical as a robot of sorts. Something that’s equipped, like armor, wouldn’t be a robot though.

These two lean on the Japanese use for the terms more than anything, similar to how the two following base themselves on what the English-speaking netizens tend to use. Because there is no true authority deciding in this matter (no, I don’t consider an almost fifty-year-old definition with a contradictory example valid), we need to take cultural and regional uses into notion. However, I’m going against that and trying to fit a larger view together, with one asterisk.

Mecha (insert media) is a wider term, encompassing any media form that uses mechanical things as a main point for the story or setting. Thus, we allow the technology of things to determine whether it is mecha in genre. It would still require some sort of mechanical thing or a pilotable vaguely humanoid thing to be extant in the work as a major element. Star Trek wouldn’t qualify, as those are not in the show’s main focus. For Star Trek, the setting has a focus on spaceships, which are a more general science fiction concept than what mecha looks for. To use Code Geass as yet another example, it qualifies because it does have Knightmare Frames as an important part of its setting.

Mecha then would be, modified from the Oxford dictionary, an armoured robot, independently acting, or piloted or influenced by a person or creature. By not determining whether or not the mecha is controlled from inside or outside, we allow leeway for Giant Robo and Tetsujin #28. I find it necessary to change the stricter determiner typically piloted as that trips all the mecha that are autonomous. This modification also allows the Oxford dictionary’s Mechagodzilla example to fit in better. By allowing independent actions, we’re allowing cyborgs like Kiryu to be counted as mecha. I can’t define mecha as built either, as in media there are clear examples of mecha that have been brought into existence via magic or other means.

Here’s the huge asterisk here. This is when talking with the English-speaking audience. When using mecha within the Japanese-speaking sphere, it should have that “all-machine things” coverage. Thus, when talking about, for example, the mecha in Star Trek, this specifically means the mechanical designs of the show, all the ships and whatnot.

Where does Transformers fit in? Well, it clearly has robots as per the first of the four, and consists mostly of animated works with robots, so that’s two out of four. Whether or not Transformers as a property is mecha media, I have to consider its nature as a science fiction work.

Some argue that it is straight up mecha because it leans heavily on its Japanese history with the toys. However, despite Diaclone serving as the source for most of the Transformers toys, none of the lore is found in the legacy. Whatever form the ‘bots took is irrelevant to the fact that Hasbro and Marvel created the story around the Transformers property. It’s the same thing they did with G.I. Joe prior, just with toys from elsewhere. However, as Transformers as a property was imported to Japan, it gained its own continuity with numerous comics and changes due to the localization. Then we have the Japanese Generation 1 and Beast Wars cartoons that have no relevance in the American continuity. Despite the US, and through that the rest of the world, importing Japanese shows Car Robots, Micron Legend, Super Link, and Galaxy Force, the property is still at its core American. Hasbro goes hand in hand with TakaraTomy nowadays with the toys, often leading to both sides doing their own things and leaving Europeans outside the UK hanging empty-handed. However, the main, big stories have historically come from the English side of the deal.

The big question is in the last part: Are Transformers mecha? The Oxford definition doesn’t make any marks on how a mecha can be brought into existence. In the Transformers’ case, it was originally evolution on their planet in the comics, replaced later by being creations of Primus, a god. In the Generation 1 cartoon, they were slave robots that overthrew their creators. Each new continuity would alter these, but Primus as a creator god is the most common. Whatever origin story we use, Transformers are fully sentient beings and don’t fit the typically piloted part. We can take note of Super God Masterforce and Headmasters here, where Transformers fit the bill better, but these are more exceptions that make the rule.

I don’t think it really matters if a mecha is alive or not. We’ve got examples from properties predating Transformers that have alive mecha that do not have pilots, like the Battle Beasts from Great Mazinger. Arguably, the titular Ambassador Magma is also a living mecha, magically forged from gold by the wizard of Earth. However, the term mecha has never been applied to him, as he dates before the genre took flight. Ambassador Magma defies being defined as a robot or mecha because of this. However, P Productions, the company responsible for the Ambassador Magma series, categorizes him as a giant robot due to his appearance and mechanical abilities. The Osamu Tezuka Official Website used to agree with this definition replacing it with Rocket Human nowadays. This supports my definition for robot well. However, Japanese fandom and even some of the other official materials call Magma a robot-like hero. It seems the Transformers fandom having an issue with their robots being alive is similar to that of Magma’s, meaning should Transformers as a whole be put into a similar category of robot-like heroes?

I would argue against this on the basis that both Hasbro and TakaraTomy extensively use the terms robot and mecha in their promotional and in-universe materials. The standard form names are Robot Mode and Alternative Mode, so there’s a clear definition there. This follows the pop-culture definition for robot largely globally, but we should also acknowledge that this is mostly just playing to the general optics. In no manner are Transformers’ Cybertronians robots by strict definition of the word, as they’re neither programmed via computers nor controlled externally by some other device. The fiction uses tons of human technology equivalents though, as that’s what we as readers and viewers can easily grasp without needing extensive explanations of what’s what. Ratchet complaining about his aching servos is an easy shorthand for his joints aching, or how Memory Drive is an equivalent for your hard drive as both are mechanical data recording devices.

In appearance, and how it’s marketed and sold, Transformers would qualify as mecha if we go by the general terms. If it quacks like a duck and all that. I’d argue that there’s no real argument to be had when it comes to how we could define the property or the characters in Japanese usage, mecha included as they are mechanical things. However, as the property is American, I had to consider what that side of the pond thinks first. The distinction as used by the American fandom has three approaches in general terms.

First would be the one that splits Japanese mecha and American mech (as defined by BattleTech) differently, where American robots are more utilitarian and war machines compared to the Japanese ones. This of course ignores that Japan has the most realistic take on mech/a, but that’s part of the argument. This is more about the design and aesthetic of the things. In this view, Transformers would be its own genre, which isn’t actually the case as the Brave franchise exists. Another would be Machine Robo, G1 Transformers contemporary franchise in Japan, which too had sentient, living machines.

Second would be that all properties with mechanical things count as mecha. This is a loanword of the Japanese mecha in its more expansive form, something I would argue against as this use of the term is about thirty or forty years behind. It also encompasses too much too widely, as I’ve argued above. A definer that counts your toaster in the same category as a tank is useless, but I do understand the core reasoning. Both are mechanical, which is enough for some.

The third one that I’ve seen used for mecha is exclusively for pilotable machines. Doesn’t matter if the mecha is alive or not; if it doesn’t have someone piloting it, it’s not a mecha but a robot. I can understand the approach in this too, as that’d make a split between independent robots and directly controlled robots. Giant is sometimes also a genre and type qualifier, giving a certain image about the media. Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot may be the term codifier, as the robot in the series is Giant Robo, which is the series’ original name. In this view, Giant Robo wouldn’t be a mecha as it is not piloted, but a robot as it is externally controlled and in the original series gains sentience.

To me it seems the English-speaking users can be roughly split between those who want to use American terms and those who want to stick with more Japanese definitions. The small irony here is that neither seems to be exactly accurate in their usage, leading to a lot of variation between communities and groups, sometimes overlapping or using different terms for the same things. Trying to introduce nuance in this discussion leads to nerd fights in comic book shops, which isn’t a bad thing as that shows the enthusiasm in people.

If we distill this down as much as possible to its core components, whether or not a mecha is piloted or not doesn’t matter. Even the Oxford dictionary has the word typically in there and uses Mechagodzilla as one of the examples. Robot and mecha are largely used as synonyms with each other with the latter giving too much leeway. Some argue that mecha is so encompassing that it’s a general umbrella term for anything that has a mechanical element, meaning cyberpunk would fall under mecha because it contains exploration of technology and has all kinds of robots. This makes mecha useless as a term, because what’s been described are ideas and concepts widely found in science fiction. Mecha don’t necessarily need to be part of science fiction though, as nothing should prevent fantasy from having giant robots as well. Fantasy itself doesn’t exclude the usage of technology and elements that could be found in science fiction. SF is a sub-genre of fantasy after all. The 1980s were full of fantasy that had strong science fiction vibes to it, including the early Ultima games. This in turn influenced Japanese media, hence why fantasy comics like Magic Knight Rayearth have that mix to them.

I think I’ve covered the major arguments and laid out some of their bases. I’m sure I’m missing something people will have issues with, and the rambling nature and constant changing of terms doesn’t help.

Let me answer the question: Is Transformers mecha? In short, yes. The Transformers franchise and the Cybertronians in fiction are atypical mecha, non-piloted robots.

Then what makes them robots? Popular perception and how Hasbro and TakaraTomy sell them, as well as terms used in the stories, make them mechanical beings and thus robots in how pop-culture uses the term. They are, after all, robots in disguise. Even when talking within the terms of the fiction, Cybertronians have been constantly called with mechanical or similar terms as other robots and mecha.

I don’t draw a distinction between robots and mecha from a cultural, aesthetic, or use perspective. That’s why we have the terms super robot and real robot to further describe these things, with, e.g., BattleTech falling strictly in the real robot side of things. Transformers often depicts actions and feats that exclude the Cybertronians from being realistic. A few of these are Mass Shifting and their main gimmick, physics-defying form changing. This is very clear in the Japanese-made media and there is no contest if we count them equally valid as Western-produced materials (remember the whole Super Robot Lifeform thing?). Splitting the terms between what’s US-made and what’s Japanese-made seems rather racist, as genre definitions aren’t exactly split between countries. They can take different forms depending on the culture and its media, but the general definitions apply.

Which is why I argue mecha is not a good definition. I use it too as a general shorthand for robot media and robots found in these media, as I recognize the wide use of the term. It’s not universal though, as I’ve covered. It should be limited to use in robot media, and as such would encompass certain kinds of mechanical entities, living or not. This is also why I fully understand why Transformers might not be counted as mecha, because the pilotable part is a damn good qualifier, something that makes a clear statement of things.

Transformers is the exception that makes the rule.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: