BIL wrote:It actually felt a bit weird going back to the arcade games after reading the manga, given Hiryu is such a chilly and solitary character in those. Then again the manga's more connected to the NES game, where he's nearly as mute but does get to show some humanity via the odd cutscene blurb ("Kill Kain...?").
Yeah, I recall hearing somewhere that the NES game is basically an adaptation of the manga storyline (I could definitely see some parallels, although they don't completely match up). Odd how the NES version was never released in Japan, or so I've heard.
Just placed an order for a Tenchi Muyo DVD set (Tenchi Universe specifically, since I started watching that long ago and never finished, and also it was cheaper than the OVA set).
Kinda wondering if I should thin out my anime collection. It seems to have an overabundance of shonen fighting shows, and not everything I have is particularly good. Some examples:
Detonator Orgun - a Tekkaman Blade ripoff, although easily better than the show its ripping off since it lacks the ridiculous, Marvel Comics-degrees of pointless angst.
Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer (the OVA version) - Basically, it feels like its "Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture 2", except all the characters had name changes, its in the distant future, and they all have magic stones which give them powered armor or something. It's really nowhere near as good as any of the Fatal Fury anime, and definitely sucks compared to
King of Fighters: Another Day
Long Ramble Mode, ACTIVATE! I think I figured out why fighting game anime generally aren't that good. It's because the people doing the anime don't understand the games, except on a very basic level. They see fighters, they get a general grasp of the storyline, and then they figure they can do whatever they want because after all, all fans wanna see is their favorite characters doing their awesome special moves, right?
Sometimes they don't even get that right--Fatal Fury is good, but it pointlessly turns Geese Howard's Reppu-Ken into a generic Ki bullet, which it isn't in the game, and its not really the fact that he can do Reppu-Kens that makes him admirable (I was personally far more fascinated by his ability to grab you in mid-attack and slam you into the ground), so he becomes just a generic villain. Likewise, Terry's Power Geyser shouldn't be a honking huge explosion, it should be exactly what it is in the game: a geyser, that erupts from the place he pounds, and is good primarily for catching jump-ins or punishing whiffed attacks at close range.
Which leads me to another thing. When a fight comes down to just the characters showing off their special moves, it stops being interesting and becomes honestly kinda boring. Fighting Games are fun precisely because
you can't win them by just spamming specials, you have to think. And that's what we should see characters doing in a fighting anime: thinking on their feet, using hadokens to trick an opponent into jumping so they can catch them with a Strong Kick or a Shoryuken, but its also what we almost never see because of a lack of creativity and general laziness. (Ironically, despite its anime counterpart being cast as the poster child for this, the original 42 manga volumes of Dragonball rarely feature the "spamming special moves" fight choreography and are, indeed, an example of the right way to do fights).
Honestly, I think the one fighting game anime I've seen that did everything 100% completely right was
King of Fighters: Another Day, which sadly isn't available on DVD (not by itself, anyway).
Ramble Mode OVER - Normal Mode Resume
What was I talking about? culling some of the weaker anime DVDs I have? Hmm.
.
- it was beautiful, especially those backgrounds, but I don't know, maybe I'm just a philistine, but I find Ghibli stuff (from what I've seen) just too slow moving or something for me. Porco Rosso and Nausicaa were the only ones I managed to stay totally 'into' the for the duration.