Oh Me, Oh My, OVA! θ: Press Start Button

When I first started really getting into anime in the mid-00s, and even in the years prior to that to some extent, there was no avoiding the symbiotic relationship between video games & anime. If I really think about it I may vaguely recall seeing the rare ad in a magazine like GamePro or EGM promoting the VHS and/or DVD release of an anime "movie" based on a video game property, like Panzer Dragoon, Tekken, Samurai Shodown, etc., and it made perfect sense why anime companies would license those titles. After all, anime fans & video game fans have long been a strong Venn diagram, and the two industries have been connected in some form since the 80s. The first video game based on an anime is generally agreed to be Lupin III for the arcades by Taito in 1980 (though most feel that the license was added on late into development), while the first anime based on a video game are the duo of Running Boy: Star Soldier no Himitsu & Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!, which both happened to come out on July 20, 1986; they'd be followed up on October 3 by Bug-tte Honey, which was the first TV anime based on a video game. Now, to be fair, anime based on video games also wound up having a poor reputation for the longest time, but if there's a subject for OM, OM, OVA! that sounds only natural to go with it's video game anime; I honestly have wanted to do this for a while, but got pre-occupied with other themed subjects first.

So let's get into the first video game-themed Oh Me, Oh My, OVA! with a quartet of my choosing, two of which are very well known among older anime fans & saw official English release, and two of which you might not have known even existed!

Debuting back in 1991 for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, Sonic the Hedgehog was Sega's response to Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. games on the NES/Famicom & would become a massive success in its own right (due, in part, to Sega of America's Tom Kalinske managing to convince his Japanese bosses to make the first game the Genesis' pack-in game, in place of Altered Beast). By the mid-90s the series was on the verge of entering a tumultuous time (the game intended to be the next main entry was starting to enter true "development hell", & would eventually be cancelled), but was still more than successful for Sega to greenlight the production of a two-episode OVA adaptation in cooperation with Taki Corporation (now Odessa Entertainment) & General Entertainment (which went defunct in 2011), the same companies Sega would later work with for the (absolutely terrible) Panzer Dragoon OVA. Released in early 1996, & animated by Studio Pierrot, the Sonic the Hedgehog OVA would eventually get licensed for international release by ADV Films, which combined both episodes into a single "movie" & initially released it on dubbed VHS & dual-audio DVD in 1999 before re-releasing it on DVD in 2004 under its short-lived ADV Kids label. In modern times Discotek Media (which has released a number of anime based on Sega IP, including Sonic X) has admitted that they'd love to re-release "Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie", and Sega is more than happy to license it out, but unfortunately it's currently stuck in legal limbo due to Sega losing the paperwork that clarified how international royalties would get paid when it comes to the music & voice work; Sega is able to continue offering the OVA in Japan, but international licensing is not doable at the moment. However, is the Sonic OVA even still truly worth all this effort, nearly 30 years after its original release?

Obscusion B-List: HD Games That Were Backported to SD on PS2 & PSP

As video game technology advances the prior generation of consoles eventually becomes old hat & is put to pasture so that the new/current generation can take the lead (or, at least, that's how it used to be... Hi PlayStation 4 & Xbox One, which are both nearing 12 years of continued support!). Still, sometimes a prior gen piece of hardware continues to see strong hardware sales, which in turn makes companies feel that said console is still worth releasing new games on, or there's a handheld (which follow their own set of "generations", to some extent) that simply finds itself more or less caught between console generations & continues to need new releases. That's what happened with the PS2 & PSP once the Xbox 360 released in late 2005, but it was especially true once the PlayStation 3 released in late 2006, and both of those consoles added in an extra wrinkle: They were the first consoles to be all about high-definition visuals, i.e. 720p & (ideally, but not always) 1080p. In comparison, the PS2 was designed around 480i that was ideally meant to be played on a CRT TV (it could also do 480p, & with some trickery higher interlaced resolutions, but 480i was the main intention), while the PSP's 16:9 screen had a resolution of just 480x272. Nintendo's Wii was also an SD-exclusive console, but that was contemporary to the "PS360", and often would receive its own unique versions of games also released on the HD consoles (&, sometimes, the PS2 would receive a port of that Wii version).

Though the GameCube & Xbox eventually both died out in place of their successors, the PS2 remained too hot to ignore, while the PSP's successor (the Vita) wouldn't come out until late 2011. Therefore it made too much sense to continue releasing games on both pieces of hardware, which included games that were also releasing on the newer consoles. For the most part these "HD" games also came out with "SD" versions at around the same time, but there were some examples where the PS2 and/or PSP version wouldn't come out until a fair amount of time after the initial HD version came out; in other words, they were (as some would say) backported from HD to SD. So let's go over some examples of games that were designed for the PS3 or 360 first, only to later get backported to the PS2 and/or PSP; i.e. no simultaneous releases here!

We start off with a batch of titles, mainly because if I had included them individually it would have made up 2/3 of this entire list, and since they're all part of the same overall franchise it's better to just put them together; also, it was these games that inspired me to make this entire list. While the first entry in Koei's iconic Dynasty Warriors/Musou franchise was actually a 3D fighter for the PS1 back in 1997, it wasn't until the second entry in 2000 (which is technically the first in the Shin Sangoku Musou spin-off series, hence why they're always a number higher outside of Japan) that the concept of it being a 3D hack & slash taking place in various open battlefields was truly established. In 2004 developer Omega Force introduced the first true offshoot of the series with Samurai Warriors, which traded in the Chinese Three Kingdoms setting for Japan's Warring States era, and since then the franchise has spun off to include the likes of Fire Emblem, The Legend of Zelda, Fist of the North Star, One Piece, & many other licensed IP. In 2006 the Musou franchise started getting released on HD consoles with Xbox 360 ports of both Samurai Warriors 2 & Dynasty Warriors 5, though the latter was only released in Japan, and in 2007 saw the release of both Dynasty Warriors: Gundam (which was based on Sunrise's iconic mech franchise) & Warriors Orochi (a crossover between Dynasty Warriors & Samurai Warriors), which launched on HD consoles. However, the PS2 & PSP still saw love from this franchise, with Warriors Orochi being released on both Xbox 360 & PS2 at launch worldwide, which in turn made a PSP port natural since it could be based on the PS2 version. The same is more or less true of 2008's Warriors Orochi 2, so neither of those count for this list.