Chosoku Spinner: Yo? Yo. Yo?! Yo!!

I've said it before on the blog, but the thing about anime & manga that appeals to me the most is how either medium can literally be about nearly anything; you can bring up something & be told, "There's an anime/manga for that." This is especially true for sports & games, which has allowed anything from boxing to baseball to go to shogi to mahjong to pachinko/pachislot to ice skating to bread baking to be made into an anime or (at least) manga. Speaking of bread baking, probably one of the most famous for adapting nontraditional things to manga is Takashi Hashiguchi, the creator of Yakitate!! Japan. I reviewed the anime adaptation of his manga across three parts in 2015, but that wasn't even the first time Hashiguchi saw a manga of his be adapted into anime. It first happened in 1998 for a manga focused around competitive yoyoing.

Like I said, anime & manga can be about anything.

Debuting in late-1997 in the pages of Shogakukan's CoroCoro Comic, Chosoku/Super Speed Spinner was the first notable manga to come from the mind of Takashi Hashiguchi (who had debuted in the early 90s), after an initial one-shot a few months earlier titled Moero/Burn! Spinner. The focus on doing tricks with a yoyo isn't really all that absurd, since the toy has always been very popular in Japan; most World Yoyo Champions from the past 10-20 years have come from Japan. The manga would run for nearly three full years, ending in mid-2000 after seven volumes, and during the serialization Shogakukan would work with TV Tokyo & a young animation studio called Xebec to adapt the manga into a TV anime from late 1998 to mid-1999. Maybe it was because it aired as part of children's show Oha Suta, but the anime had a bit of a bizarre airing schedule to it. The first four episodes came out weekly to close out 1998, but once the new year started only two episodes would come out every month (on two consecutive weeks), resulting in the anime only running for 22 episodes across the better part of a year. Not just that, but the anime has seen very little re-releasing in its home country, with the only home video release being across five VHS tapes from 1999-2000 (which are copy-protected, so I can't record them onto DVD), & the only seeming re-airing being on Oha Suta back in 2008 (so maybe a remaster was done?), where it was considered a "legend". In 2003, though, Chosoku Spinner (both manga & anime) was exported to Singapore, with the anime being given a completely uncut English dub by Odex under the name Super Yo-Yo. So, what happens when anime gets a hold of the yoyo? Let's find out.

Obscusion B-List: Completely Unexpected Video Game Crossovers

Last year I did a B-List titled "Video Game Crossovers with Completely Unexpected Rosters", where I brought up six(-ish) crossover video games that featured line-ups so non-traditional that it was almost worth checking them out solely for the rosters. It was a rather successful piece for the blog, at least in terms of what I'd consider "successful" here, so I have decided to create a sort of "sequel list" to that one. Now I could have been rather blasé in that regard & simply made "More Video Game Crossovers with Completely Unexpected Rosters" (& I won't say that it will never happen), but rather I want to twist this concept around a bit & instead put the "Unexpected" focus on the crossovers themselves.

Crossovers can be weird... And I mean WEEEIIIIRRRD. It's one thing for a crossover that sounds obvious to feature some crazy surprises in the roster, but what about those crossovers that just make you tilt your head & leave you speechless? Comics legend Archie is a surprisingly notable one, having crossed over with The Punisher & Predator, but there are plenty of other memorably unexpected crossovers. Products like Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, that Power Rangers in Space/Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation crossover episode, The New Scooby-Doo Movies, & even Who Framed Roger Rabbit are perfect examples of when the very existence of said crossovers are a major appeal in & of themselves. Therefore, let's look at six times when video games featured out-of-nowhere crossovers... And, to no surprise, Capcom makes up half of this list, because the former Japan Capsule Computers Co., Ltd. really likes its crossovers.

Shinken Legend Tight Road: A Standalone Story Mode Without a Fighting Game

In our modern times, the apparent standard for most new anime is to run for one entire calendar season, or roughly 12/13 episodes; this is often called a "cour", after the French word for "course". Anyway, while this essentially started being a standard once anime started moving into late-night slots, this wasn't the only time anime tried out the single cour format. An interesting experiment with this idea was actually done by Toei Animation & TV Tokyo back in the second half of 1994, and in the complete opposite of late-night. Instead, two single cour anime were aired Fridays from 7:35-8:05 in the morning, and while the first show (Metal Fighter Miku) did see release in North America on DVD by Media Blasters back in 2001, the other has gone on to hyper-obscurity... So you know that I'm the perfect guy (i.e. the only man stupid enough) to check it out.

Running from October to December of 1994, Shinken Densetsu/True Fist Legend Tight Road (or simply Shinken Legend, as the VHS covers say) actually has a bit of an interesting, but short, history behind it. Similar to Metal Fighter Miku, this was conceived as a multimedia production, with Shinken Legend in particular meant to promote an upcoming fighting game published by Zamuse & developed by a small little dojinshi developer called Gust. Unfortunately, the game never actually saw release (if even development), though Gust would go on to become a successful RPG studio through its Atelier & Ar Tornelico franchises, & is now owned by Tecmo Koei Games. While it's not the only time an anime has been made to promote a video game that never came out (90s OVA Early Reins is another example), I'm not sure if any others were actually done to the scale that Shinken Legend was, i.e. an entire TV series being made.

So when an anime is based on a fighting game that never actually comes out, what's the end result like? Let's find out.

Taito Masaki is working on a cruise ship as payment for a trip to the country of Grazia, which is where his father went to five years ago in search of a dream, only for him to die. While on the ship, Taito becomes involved in the search & apprehension of Charlie, a missing British solider who's also part of a "Human Weaponization Concept" codenamed Rabbit, due to the red eyes test subjects have when enraged. This is only the beginning of Taito's journey in Grazia, though, where he teams with Brigadier General Sarah Jones (Charlie's commanding officer), Gerard Gelain, & Kicks Rockwell as they decide to take on the Spiral Palace run by Captain Klaus Daggats, Grazia's "God of Fighting", who has a relation to both the Rabbit project & the death of Taito's father.