Obscusion B-Side: Celebrating the Neo Geo's 30th Anniversary: One Game for Each Year of Life Part 2

So in September 1997, SNK launched the Hyper Neo Geo 64, which finally marked the studio's first real foray into 3D polygons, which had become the hot thing with the launch of Sony's Playstation & the Nintendo 64. While SNK was hoping to make this new hardware its focus for the future, it never really found any popularity, and was discontinued in mid-1999, after only seven games; an AES-equivalent home version never saw release, & only one game was ever ported to other hardware. Meanwhile, the people at SNK making games for the aging Neo Geo hardware were about to deliver visuals that I'm sure no one at SNK thought the hardware was actually capable of back when it launched in 1990. Out of the remaining 32 games that saw release between 1998 & 2004, only eight of them fit within the original 330 megabit restriction... And all but one of them were not developed by SNK; that exception was Neo-Geo Cup '98: The Road to the Victory, a simple re-skin of Super Sidekicks 3. Not just that, but of those 24 that broke the original max memory restriction, 20 of them (or 5/6) were above 500 megabits. For comparison, N64 game paks maxed out at 512 mebibits, which equated to ~537 megabits, with the only Neo Geo games of those 20 to be below that number being Metal Slug X & Shock Troopers: 2nd Squad. Yes, ~60% of these games were larger than the max size allowed for N64 cartridges. Need I remind you that this is for hardware released back in 1990!

The Three Faces of the Neo Geo: MVS, AES, & CD

Unfortunately, things could only last so long for SNK. A mixture of all sorts of factors (hyper-specializing in fighting games, having to rely on outdated hardware, lackluster console game sales, rampant piracy, etc.) resulted in pachinko manufacturer Aruze acquiring SNK in early 2000, with the American division being closed later that June. On October 22, 2001, SNK filed for bankruptcy, but luckily company founder Eikichi Kawasaki had seen the writing on the wall & left the company earlier that year to found Playmore, in hopes of reviving his old company after it finally was put down. Once the bankruptcy came & all of SNK's properties went up for auction, Playmore successfully bid & won everything back, eventually leading to the company being renamed SNK Playmore. Fifteen years later, Kawasaki would sell his stock to Chinese companies 37Games & Leyou Technologies in 2016, who decided to drop the "Playmore" name, which brings us to the current existence of SNK. But enough of SNK's post-Neo Geo history, we're here to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the hardware that truly put SNK on the map, so let's go over seven more games, one for each of the remaining seven years of official support for the Neo Geo.

Obscusion B-Side: Celebrating the Neo Geo's 30th Anniversary: One Game for Each Year of Life Part 1

In 1973, Eikichi Kawasaki established a stock company called Shin Nihon Keikaku (or "The New Japan Project"), and when he noticed the rise of the arcade video game market, he moved the company over to that direction, with the company's first game release being 1979's Ozma Wars, while 1981's Vanguard gave them some notoriety. In 1986 the company's named was officially shortened to its initials, SNK (which had started being used in the game themselves back in 1980), and for the rest of the 80s would continue to release new arcade games, plus the occasional home console release on the Nintendo Famicom, & in 1987 would enter a partnership with developer Alpha Denshi, which resulted in the studio making games exclusively for SNK. This partnership would result in Alpha's Eiji Fukatsu being tasked with creating new hardware for future games released by SNK, one that wound up defining SNK to this very day & is celebrating its 30th Anniversary this year.

An evolution of the hardware that powered 1987's Time Soldiers & 1988's P.O.W.: Prisoners of War, the Neo Geo was powered by the same Motorola 68000 & Zilog Z80 CPUs that powered the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, but did so at higher specs along with using a 24-bit GPU bus, resulting in visuals that outdid pretty much any home console of the time, many arcade games from other publishers, & even some computers, like the Sharp X68000. Not only that, but SNK designed the Neo Geo to use interchangeable cartridges for its games that were plugged into a main hardware board, ala home consoles, which allowed arcade operators to maintain just a single arcade cabinet & pay a smaller price for new games, as they came out; Data East previously did something similar in the 80s with the DECO System, but that used cassette tapes. Cabinets also came in 1, 2, 4, & 6-slot variants, allowing multiple games to be housed in one unit, which in turn allowed for more potential profits to be made with just one cabinet. Finally, this is so far only about Multi Video System, or MVS, which is what first appeared in Japanese arcades on April 26, 1990, followed by a later worldwide roll-out. SNK also had a home variant called the Advanced Entertainment System, or AES, which allowed people to play the games on a home television, though the cartridges were altered slightly, so as to not allow MVS & AES carts to be played on their variant hardware. At first, SNK only offered the AES as a rental unit in Japan, but after getting enough interest they did a proper retail release worldwide on July 1, 1991, though it came at a price that was more than double what other consoles cost, at the very least, and individual games easily cost over $100 each; again, though, you were literally getting the same exact experience as what you were playing in arcades.

The Neo Geo would be what SNK relied on almost exclusively for new arcade games throughout the entire 90s, even as the hardware only aged more & more. SNK did try to move on with the Hyper Neo Geo 64 in 1997, which was all about 3D polygons, but that bombed so hard that SNK had no choice but to continue relying on its older hardware, which certainly played a factor in the company's eventual bankruptcy & purchase by pachinko company Aruze in 2000. Even then, though, the Neo Geo soldiered on, outliving the complete death of SNK in 2001 & remained utilized by savior Playmore until 2004, before finally being passed over for newer arcade hardware designed by other companies; what developers wound up doing with the Neo Geo hardware, though, is often mind-blowing. Today, the Neo Geo remains one of the strongest cult-classic favorite video game hardware/consoles of all time, and to celebrate its 30th Anniversary, I want to go over 15 games that saw official release, out of the total 156 that came out, one for each year the system saw official support by SNK/Playmore. As for which games I chose, I didn't necessarily go for the "best" game from each year, but rather just a notable, relevant, or simply fun game. Also, I wanted to avoid using the same franchise more than once, with only two exceptions, so as to keep things fresh. Since 15 games is a lot, this will be split across two parts, a first for Obscusion B-Side (fitting for the 40th entry), so in Part 1 we'll cover from 1990 to 1997, i.e. the years SNK actually kept the Neo Geo hardware in production.

Going off the Rails on a Crazy Train: A Look at the Expanded World of Bastard!!

You'd think that, after reviewing 27 volumes (+1 self-published book of unreleased content) of Kazushi Hagiwara's Bastard!!, there'd be nothing else left to write about... But that's certainly not the case. While it's nowhere near the amount of stuff that's been made for Shonen Jump's more iconic titles (Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, Saint Seiya, etc.), Bastard!! has had its own fair share of non-manga material produced, some of which actually post-dates Volume 27's release! Now by "non-manga" material, I mean stuff that either expand on the mythos & characters of Bastard!!, explain the world itself, involved Kazushi Hagiwara in some way, or feature some sort of actual interaction; in other words, no "swag" (posters, figures, etc.) will be included here, & no art books. Anyway, while chronological order will still be the general focus here, I'll be separating everything across eight categories: Drama CDs, Anime, Novels, Data Books, Video Games, Re-releases, Other Games &, yes... Hentai Doujin!

(Don't worry, this entire article is "safe for work")

So there's really only one thing left to say, at this point: ALL ABOARD! Hahahahaha.........

It all starts in December 1991, with the first drama CD, Bastard!! Gaiden: Encounter with the Four Divine Kings Vol. 1. Information about this CD, as well as successive ones, is pretty scarce, but from what I can tell this first CD told two stories: Lord of the Fiery Explosion & Wandering Boy. The first takes places 115 years before the Wizard!! one-shot & tells in more detail the story of how Dark Schneider first met Arshes Nei, the dark-elf/human child who he'd take in as his surrogate daughter (& later lover), while also tying things into a story involving a Goblin Princess that explains how D.S. got the "Lord of the Fiery Explosion" moniker that he became synonymous with. Similarly, the second goes into more detail about how D.S. & Nei come across a young Kall-Su, after he had escaped his imprisonment & became a sullen wanderer; also making an appearance in this story is Samurai Master Mifune, who was seen in the manga during Hell's Requiem. Three months later, in March 1992, came Bastard!! Gaiden: Encounter with the Four Divine Kings Vol. 2, which told two more stories: The Prophet of Hell & Battle in Tombstone Valley. From the little I can find about this, these are more like side stories taking place during The Dark Rebel Armies, if not simply direct adaptations of the manga, detailing D.S.'s encounters with his Four Divine Kings after he was revived by Yoko; Bon Jovina & Geo Noto Soto of Meta-Rikana even make appearances.

Bastard!! (The Immoral Laws): Holy Diver, You've Been Down Too Long in the Midnight Sea...

Previously on the Bastard!! Review:
"Even if it's technically unfinished, Crime & Punishment is Bastard!! at its most ambitious, taking the manga into a direction that only makes one wonder "Where the hell can it possibly go from here?!"... And that's likely what all the fans in Japan were wondering once the Seasonal Specials came to an end."

As mentioned in the final part of the Crime & Punishment review, Kazushi Hagiwara was hit with a double-whammy in the middle of 1996. First, Shueisha decided to put an end to the Shonen Jump Seasonal Specials, with the 1996 Summer Special being the last one, & in its place was Akamaru Jump starting at the end of the year, which returned to being solely about one-shots; Akamaru's later replacements, Jump NEXT! & Jump Giga, would bring back regular serializations, though. Second, in some sort of unexplained freak accident, Hagiwara & his Studio Loud in School staff of assistants no longer had any of the pre-production work for what was going to come next in Bastard!!'s storyline. Now they did get some stuff done, as seen in the self-published Unused・Revised Edition book from 2000, but it was scattershot & pretty much unusable for actual serialization; simply put, Hagiwara was up S*** Creek without a paddle.

Huh, didn't know Jump still did the mangaka group shot covers as late as 1997...
I wish Jump still did those, but I totally understand why it doesn't anymore.

So, how were each of these problems resolved? In regards to the loss of the Seasonal Specials, Shueisha simply decided to bring Bastard!! back to Weekly Shonen Jump at the start of 1997, and Hagiwara would be allowed to publish new chapters on an irregular basis, i.e. whenever he felt a new chapter was ready to go. Interestingly enough, Bastard!! missed all of the second half of the "Golden Age" by finding its own place to call home, so the Jump it was returning to was a wildly different one, compared to the one it had left back in 1989. For example, Rokudenashi Blues debuted just a couple of months after Bastard!! did, but when Hagiwara's series returned, Masanori Morita's was not only one of only three manga that was "familiar to it", the others being JoJo's Bizarre Adventure & Kochikame, but it was actually nearing its end; in fact, they'd share just a single issue before Morita's yankii manga icon finished. Not just that, but after that one issue in early 1997, Bastard!!'s next appearance would be about 30 issues later, during which a manga named One Piece debuted. As for Hagiwara's pace, 1997 would see only five chapters, 1998 saw eight, & 1999 saw seven. At the very least, after that initial 30-issue gap, Hagiwara stayed semi-consistent, putting out a new chapter about every month or two. Following that last chapter in late 1999, though, Hagiwara wouldn't release another chapter until mid-2000, almost a solid year later; during that gap, another new manga named Naruto had debuted, & JoJo had even soft-rebooted. It's easy to see that Bastard!! was likely feeling pretty out of place in the magazine it originally debuted in, as things entered the 21st Century.

At this point, it was decided that Bastard!! would leave Weekly Shonen Jump once again, this time for good, though all new tankouban from this point forward would still be published under the "Jump Comics" label. Combined with Hagiwara's more violent & sexual storytelling tendencies, Shueisha moved Bastard!! over to seinen magazine Ultra Jump, where it'd make its "debut" in the first issue of 2001. Eventually, Bastard!! would be joined by JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (via Steel Ball Run) & Ninku (via Second Stage: Etonin-hen) to create a sort of exclusive "Shonen-to-Ultra" club. Unfortunately, after only four issues of consistency, Hagiwara quickly moved Bastard!! into irregular serialization in Ultra Jump, resulting in this new story arc of Bastard!! not actually ending until 2008, 11 years after the manga returned to Weekly Shonen Jump; at the very least, Hagiwara switched over to longer chapters, much like the Seasonal Specials. In other words, it took longer for the chapters of these next eight books, Volumes 19 to 26, to come out than literally everything that had been published in Bastard!! before said story arc even started in early 1997... & that's including the original Wizard!! one-shot published in late 1987! As for the English release in North America, Viz Media sadly stopped releasing Bastard!! after Volume 19's release in July of 2009, though Volume 20 was solicited & scheduled for an early 2010 release. Yes, Viz stopped releasing the manga right as it started a new story arc, and because of that I will be relying on English scanlations for Volumes 20 to 26, which are fine, if hit with the occasional spelling & grammatical error; them's just the breaks, sometimes.

Meanwhile, in regards to what Hagiwara did to combat the loss of his pre-production work, he simply invoked a large time skip, which brings us to the final (completed) story arc of Bastard!!, The Immoral Laws/Defender of the Faith.