The Land of Obscusion's Twelve Favorite Posts of 2018!! Part 2

With me slowing down after this upcoming March, the 100th consecutive month for the blog, this will more than likely be the final favorite posts list I'll ever do, or at least in the yearly format that I've been doing ever since 2012. I have considered maybe doing just a one-part list with six entries, but I won't have to really think about that until this time next year. Anyway, it will certainly be interesting to come to the usual Boxing Day & New Year's period of time & not have a two-part list to compile, because it's always been fun to look back at what I've written throughout the year & see what I felt were either the best or meant the most to me, personally. This is especially true for this year, because often I though back to some stuff from the start of the year, only for me to constantly realize that they were indeed done this year. So, for one last time in the format that I've been using for the past six years, allow me to list another six-ish posts that I did this year that I felt had something truly special to them.

The Ages of Jump Redux (August 1 & 8)
After finishing up the original Ages of Jump back in 2016, I knew that there were some titles that I didn't really cover that probably could have been worth including, but considering how much insane work that seven-part series took over the course of two months, I think it was understandable that I didn't really want to return to it. Of course, with 2018 being the 50th Anniversary of Shonen Jump, it was the perfect time to return to what might become my most well known work & give credit to those previously indicated titles. Instead of splitting it up across another four articles, though, I instead just did it as two, with the Bronze & Golden Ages (plus a single title from the Dark Age) being Part 1, & the Silver Age being bundled with a look at the possible start of a new "Iron Age" in Part 2. I made sure to replicate the style that I gave the original Ages articles as closely as possible, and I think I succeeded in that regard.

So what did I cover this time around? Well, I brought up Osamu Tezuka properly, covered Daijiro Morohoshi's debut as a mangaka, brought up two early sports manga that were notable in their own rights, looked at the notable failures from Masami Kurumada, Hirohiko Araki, & Koji Maki, mentioned all of the developments that have occurred in relation to the manga I previously covered in the past two years (even if some of it wasn't exactly good), showed the advancement into the simulpublishing era that Jump now occupies with English fandom, & I saw that the titles I chose for the new Iron Age were perfectly picked, because every one of the six I covered are now either currently airing as anime, or will be seeing new adaptations debut next year. Of course, the comments did bring up titles that I neglected to mention, but I did have to cut it off at some point. I understand that there likely is some relevancy to series like Blue City, Takaya, Tsugihagi Hyoryu Sakka, & Sesuji wo Pin! to: Shikakou Kyougi Dance-bu he Youkoso, plus newer stuff like Act-Age & Jujutsu Kaisen, but after now covering a total of 148 different manga that have run in Shonen Jump over the course of 50 years, plus mentioning countless others in passing during these nine articles, I think I can be forgiven for "forgetting" a handful. As for the future of the Ages, I truly feel that I am done with this, as indicated by the giant "kan" kanji at the end of Redux Part 2. It has always been fun to do this series, but I feel that I'll only be scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point with the past, while the Iron Age is still early in its life & can't really be properly looked at yet.

Admittedly, I could always return to this concept with a different subject, but in terms of covering the history of Weekly Shonen Jump itself, let's just say that these two Redux articles were my full-color final chapter.

Got to love seeing World Heroes Perfect & Waku Waku 7 in that banner...

Longshot ACA Neo Geo Hopefuls (October 9)
Normally, an Obscusion B-List don't wind up being one of my favorite posts in a year, but this one hit my fancy really hard. While I only rarely had the chance to play it in the arcades in my youth, SNK's Neo Geo is definitely one of my favorite gaming systems of all time, and the company has been rather good in making sure the catalog is always available to play with in some modern fashion, whether it's via compilations, online-enabled digital releases, making 54 of the 117 officially released AES home versions available for purchase on the Wii Virtual Console (RIP), or 75 in Japan, or even making a micro-console in the vein of Nintendo's NES & SNES Classics (though that product is a bit underwhelming, but at least it isn't the PlayStation Classic). In 2016, however, Hamster started up ACA Neo Geo, a sub-series of the company's Arcade Archives line that releases the MVS arcade versions, and in the little more than two years since launching with The King of Fighters '94, exactly 100 games have been released (or roughly one game/week), with another 6 currently announced for upcoming release. For many, these are simply new releases, but for others this is their first releases since the original hardware in the 90s, if not simply their first ever official home releases, in general.

Still, because there are now only 50 officially-released Neo Geo games left for Hamster to potentially release, that means that pretty much all of the big names & cult classics have now seen release via ACA Neo Geo. In fact, the only unannounced "heavy hitters" left, that are obviously going to see release, are The King of Fighters 2003 & Samurai Shodown V Special, with the remaining 48 titles all being either obscure oddities, hyper-cult classics, Japan-focused genres like shogi, mahjong, or quiz games, Neo Geo CD-exclusives (and who knows if those will even count), or potentially stuck in licensing hell. That's what this B-List focused on, then: The "longshot" games that I hope will see release via ACA Neo Geo. There was Breakers (Revenge) being a part of Visco Games' catalog (who isn't currently working with Hamster), Crossed Swords II being one of those NGCD-exclusives, Kabuki Klash requiring the involvement of Konami (who have worked with Hamster, but not for this sub-series), Nightmare in the Dark being a ? in regards to who even owns the rights to it nowadays, Rage of the Dragons possibly not even belonging to SNK (since the now-defunct Evoga headed up that project), & SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos being its own tangled web of licensing due to the old Capcom/SNK crossover deal.

Could any of these see release via ACA Neo Geo? I think so, with Breakers & Kabuki Klash being the most likely. Could all of these see release via ACA Neo Geo? That I can't answer, but considering that Hamster will completely run out of the heavy hitters soon, as they reach the home stretch, I think next year will be the most interesting period for the future of this sub-series.

In Remembrance of Yu Yamamoto, the Most Unique Mech Anime Writer We Barely Knew (December 3)
Normally, I don't count December posts in these yearly favorites lists, mainly because they're way too recent & tend to follow a strict pattern (anniversary post, Demo Disc, favorites list, & maybe one other), but this is definitely an exception to that rule. Sudden news are just that, and all the more so when it's a death. A similar situation happened when Majesco Entertainment announced that it'd be going away in 2016 & I made a piece celebrating that company's efforts (though, since then, Majesco has risen from the grave), and this year was no different when word came of the passing of Yu Yamamoto. An anime writer with 45 years of experience at the time of his death, though he effectively retired from active work with the dawn of the new millennium, Yamamoto's death was really more of an impact for Japan, as most of the anime he worked on didn't see official English release, and those that did weren't notable names. Still, I knew of him because of his work on the J9 Series, which he created, so I wanted to celebrate the man in some way... Only for me find out that he had a stronger legacy than most would assume.

In his earliest days, he did a lot of work with Tatsunoko, including writing the finale for the original Yatterman, but quickly wound up working on a lot of mech anime. Due to him being a young'in, he may have created the pseudonym of Akira/Rou/Rei/Rai Hatta & been the original creator of two super-obscure mech anime of the 70s, Ginguiser & Blocker Corps, before being brought on to write for the original Mobile Suit Gundam, where he was the pen behind some of that show's more memorable moments. Following that, Yamamoto would define his legacy with his work with Kokusai Eigasha/MIC, where he seemingly made sure to create mech anime that was as non-traditional as possible for the time, whether it was the J9 Series utilizing various motifs (The Hissatsu Series, Chuushingura, & Around the World in 80 Days), Acrobunch being inspired by Indiana Jones, or Srungle being influenced by Mission:Impossible. The fact that some of these series would either mark the debuts of notable talents like Mutsumi Inomata, Shou Aikawa, & Koichi Ohata, or were early works of legends like Norio Wakamoto & Yoshitaka Amano is just icing, not to mention how Yamamoto's unique stylistic touches could have possibly influenced future works. For example, I brought up how Galaxy Cyclone Braiger felt very similar to Cowboy Bebop in some ways, and that director Shinichiro Watanabe was at a good age to be possibly influenced by Yamamoto's mech anime when he started working on his international sensation a decade later.

In fact, Thaliarcus from Anime Redshift Chronicle (thanks for the occasional link, by the way!) even brought up another neat indication that Watanabe was possibly influenced by the J9 Series: The first episode of Cowboy Bebop was named 'Asteroid Blues', which just happens to also be the name of Galactic Gale Baxinger's ED theme. Makes you think, don't it?

Still, I should probably be fair to those articles at the end of each year, so maybe in March, right before I slow down, I'll make a list of my favorite December posts.

The Sutural Sutra of Saiyuki (January 16)
Ever since 2013, I've kind of made it a (semi-accidental) habit to do something big & grand for January, as if I wanted to start the new year off with a bang. I've looked at 25 first episodes of Jump anime, reviewed 21(-ish) episodes of Kochikame, examined 50 episodes & 1 TV special across the 17 different anime that the now-defunct Anime Sols had offered, wrote the first half of The Ages of Jump, & celebrated the 40th Anniversary of Ring ni Kakero when literally no one else in the world would do so (except for that one animator later in the year who then apologized for even doing so). In other words, I think I might be a bit of a masochist deep down inside, and this year was no different. To begin the "Year of Unfinished Business", I returned to writing about the various anime based on Kazuya Minekura's Saiyuki, her "Extreme(!)" re-imagining of the iconic Chinese novel Journey to the West. Now, admittedly, I initially considered just including the entire month in this slot, but I feel that I do that way too often, so in the end I had two choices to go with. There was the review for Saiyuki Requiem - The Motion Picture, an excellent, theatrically-released, original story that reminded me of why I enjoy this series, but when I really thought about it, the choice was easy: I simply had to go with the "Sutural Sutra".

Why is that? Because this was a question I've had in my head for years, and I finally wanted to find out the answer to it. The Saiyuki TV anime adaptation eventually became notorious for having so much "filler" that there were literally more episodes not based on the manga than there were actual adaptations. What I always wondered, though, was if one could simply "skip the filler", as anime fans sometimes recommend others to do, & simply watch Genso Maden Saiyuki, Saiyuki Reload, & Saiyuki Reload Gunlock as a straight adaptation of the manga. Well, after consulting the Saiyuki Wiki & jotting down which episodes to avoid watching, I found out that the answer to this question was not just "Yes," but was also seemingly encouraged by the anime staff. With the exception of one episode of Reload needing to re-establish a situation in order to continue on to the manga & one episode of Gunlock needing to pad out what would otherwise take just half of an episode to accurately adapt on its own, all three seasons actively used "passive filler" in a way that allows a viewer to just stick to the manga-accurate episodes without a single worry, minus the order of some events being mixed about, though that doesn't hurt the storytelling in any way. In fact, one could even move into Gunlock's own take on the Hazel Arc to get a basic feel for what Minekura was telling in the Reload manga, because while the events do differ wildly after a point, the anime still hits a good number of the same beats as what the manga would later do, which is really awesome. Yes, this still results in 36 episodes to watch, a solid 50 if you watch this version of the Hazel Arc, but I was more than pleased with the results.

Currently, Aesir Holdings (one of the companies under the Section23 umbrella) is planning to re-release Genso Maden Saiyuki via SD-BD next March, and hopefully we might see a license rescue for the Reload & Gunlock anime in the future, as neither has seen anything since the original Geneon releases; SD-BDs for those two shows do exist in Japan. Should that come to pass & North America finally has all three of the original Saiyuki TV anime out on home video (& maybe streaming) again, then I really hope people check these shows out, & those who just want the "real" story will come across my Sutural Sutra, because it's definitely not hard to enjoy this story via anime the way that Kazuya Minekura originally wrote it. Also, I've considered watching the filler & doing a "Best of" list at some point, but since that'd require me to watch another 51 episodes of Saiyuki to do, I can't promise when I'll actually bother to give that a go.

Nope, this image is still just as bizarrely awesome as I remember it being.

Akira Tsuburaya's Retro-Modern Anime Club Band (February 8)
Sometimes, you just want to make something silly. Also sometimes, you have a subject in mind, but you're not really sure how to frame it, especially if it sounds a little bland. In those cases, you combine the two together & hope that it works out. This post was a perfect example of that situation, because I've always found it interesting that there was this seeming focus on making anime in the 00s based on manga from the 60s & 70s. When I finally looked into them in any detail, I found the same name coming up in the credits over & over: Akira Tsuburaya. The youngest son of tokustatsu legend Eiji Tsuburaya, this man's name came up in the producer section of so many of these "Retro-Modern" anime during the 00s that I realized that this wasn't a weird coincidence by any means, but rather this was something done on purpose. The youngest Tsuburaya likely decided to take advantage of these old classics & produce new anime in an attempt to wring out any sense of nostalgia they likely had at that point from domestic otaku... So what better way to write about this than to make it a ridiculous parody of The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"?

When I go for a parody, I go all out. I made altered lyrics that fit the original song's beat perfectly, worded it in a way that made Tsuburaya's intentions sound more noble than they likely were in reality, and I superimposed Tsuburaya's head over each Beatle dressed in Sgt. Pepper regalia (it's beautifully dumb, isn't it?). Now, to be fair, Tsuburaya wasn't "responsible" for every Retro-Modern anime of the early-to-mid 00s (he had nothing to do with shows like Play Ball, Ring ni Kakero 1, Android Kikaider, or 009-1, for example), but he was a notable reason for the production of some of the oddest choices, like Babel II -Beyond Infinity-, Barom One, Genma Wars: Age of Mythology, Submarine Super 99, or Shin Seiki Den Mars. Of the 13 anime I covered in this article, seven had originally seen release in North America back in the 00s, and since this article we have seen the first-ever releases for Wild 7 Another & Beast Fighter: The Apocalypse. Was there anything to be learned here, necessarily? Probably not, but it sure was fun to write this one, so it gets a spot in this list.

♪What would you think if I made anime?

Would you watch it for the nostalgia?

Lend me your eyes and I'll give you a show,

And I'll try to give you Valhalla

Oh, I get by with otaku money.

Oh, I get high with otaku money.

Oh, I'm gonna try to get otaku money.♪

A Matchless Beat is on the Horizon: An Interview with Anime Midstream's Jimmy Taylor & Retrospect in Retrograde: B't X (from Masami Kurumada) (July 19 & September 20)
Considering that I ended Part 1 of this list with DiC's Knights of the Zodiac, it's only fitting that I end this second half with the rare exception to the "Kurumada Curse", i.e. a release of a Masami Kurumada title that not only came out with little to no trouble (minus taking two years to happen), but also seemed to actually do relatively well at launch for a company as small as Anime Midstream.

Anyway, back in August 2016, Anime Midstream announced at AnimeFest that it had licensed B't X, the anime adaptation of Masami Kurumada's mecha-ish manga of the 90s, complete with a new English dub. After that, no new information came out, aside from a single "Coming Soon..." banner added to the company's Facebook page the following year. Considering that each release of Matchless Raijin-Oh took a year to come out, I understood that this new release will take some time for a company that might possibly be more of a secondary focus than a primary business, unlike the rest of the North American anime industry companies. Still, come the start of this year, I wondered if I could get the chance to ask Midstream head Jimmy Taylor some questions about the release, so I sent an e-mail to the company if I could conduct a simple e-mail interview. After a good amount of time, partially because I failed to follow up (my mistake), I double-checked with the company & they got back to me. This resulted in the "Matchless Beat" interview this past July, which I think came out rather well, considering that it was done solely through e-mail. I asked about the company in general over the years, the potential future of Raijin-Oh, & what to look forward to with B't X. Overall, I was pleased with this article, because it's a rare interview for the blog.

I have no idea if Jimmy Taylor used this interview to plan his next step, or if this was simply a wacky coincidence, but the very next day Anime Midstream finally announced that the DVD boxset for the entire "first season" of B't X would get released on August 3. This was the original 25-episode TV series, complete with a brand new English dub from Sound Cadence Studios in Texas that featured a handful of people who actually worked on the original Illumitoon dub, which sadly was not going to be included; in fact, Eric Vale was reprising his role as Teppei. With that info in hand, I instantly knew that the second Retrospect in Retrograde for this year was going to be for B't X, and I went all out with that re-review. It was so much fun re-watching the anime for the first time in roughly eight years or so, and that new dub was simply outstanding; I even bought the two Illumitoon DVDs to cover that dub, which was surprisingly good. As I mentioned at the start of the re-review, B't X holds a special place in my heart for being the title that got me into Masami Kurumada, and seeing the anime be given an official release that had pretty much no real problems with it was such a great feeling.

And, as indicated, the way Midstream & Sound Cadence advertised it must have really caught anime fans' attention, because when it became available over at Right Stuf, it actually managed to be labeled as a "Top Seller" on the site, with it eventually becoming the #4 Best-Selling DVD release for about a week or two. Sure, that wouldn't necessarily be something to brag about for most companies, especially since it only recently became available over at Amazon, but considering that it was such a sudden release, was DVD-only, & came from such a minor company (Raijin-Oh never became a "Top Seller" of any sort, at least), being #4 on any sort of sales list is definitely something to celebrate for B't X. Now will I do a RiR for B't X Neo whenever Anime Midstream & Sound Cadence get that boxset out? Only time will tell, I guess, but I'll definitely be grabbing that release, & I look forward to see how the dub handles the simply excellent ending that OVA series has.
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Without a doubt, 2018 will probably go down as one of my all-time favorite years for The Land of Obscusion, and even though it did feel a bit overwhelming at times, I guess that follows the general adage of "No Pain, No Gain". Me slowing down after another three months shouldn't be taken as a sign of me figuratively running away from things, but rather a sign that I have grander ideas that truly need to be given more time to deliver. Regardless, I look forward to seeing what 2019 will be bringing forth, and what I'll be writing about for the next twelve months. See you then!