Jitsuroku! Shinwakai: Forget the Greek Pantheon, THIS is the Real Deal!

No one should be too proud of themselves, and by that I mean everyone should be able to poke fun at themselves, to some extent. Ego is a natural thing to have, it's just basic human behavior, but having too much of an ego can make one look pompous & arrogant, to the point where it can be seen as abrasive & uncouth to others. Therefore, I think it's important that people should be able to take the piss out of themselves every once in a while, so as to show humility or (at the very least) give off the image that they don't take themselves too seriously. I bring this up because it can relate to mangaka Masami Kurumada, someone who's generally known for his intense, action-filled manga about "real men" proving themselves to not just their foes, but to the world at large, and while there is sometimes comedy here & there in his works it's all still told in a very serious & dramatic fashion.

However, when it comes to portraying himself & his assistants... Kurumada loves taking the Mick, for those who speak the Queen's English.

While I'm not sure when exactly it came about, though I imagine it was in part due to the ongoing success of Ring ni Kakero, Masami Kurumada eventually hired on a group of assistants, comprised of some combination of Jun Tomizawa, Toukichi Ishiyama, Tokumi Kawajiri, Takashi Urakawa, Masayuki Fujimoto, Chuutaro Numoto, Masashi Yamaguchi, & Ken Shiratori over the years. Kurumada would name this group "Shinwakai/The Gathering of Gods", and even listed Shinwakai alongside him for new chapters as they originally ran in Weekly Shonen Jump (as seen via the Ultimate Final Edition of Fuma no Kojirou); at the very least, he did this for both Ring ni Kakero & Fuma no Kojirou. While the concept of assistants that help a main mangaka out getting a collective name can arguably date back to Tokiwa-sou, the Tokyo apartment building that in the 1950s housed Osamu Tezuka & other legendary mangaka (some of which even initially worked as assistants to Tezuka, introducing the very concept), Shinwakai can be seen as the precursor to arguably the most well-known named group of assistants in Jump history: The Watsuki-gumi from the 90s who assisted Nobuhiro Watsuki on Rurouni Kenshin, which was comprised of Eiichiro Oda (One Piece), Hiroyuki Takei (Shaman King), Shin'ya Suzuki (Mr. Fullswing), the late Gin Shinga (who passed away in 2002 at only age 29), & Mikio Itou (who's probably most known for cameoing in his fellow Watsuki-gumi's works, like One Piece, as a travelling merchant).

However, as legendary/notorious as the Watsuki-gumi were back then, & (some) still are now, they never got to star in their own manga!

30 Years of Neo Mechanical Romance: Why B't X Might Be Masami Kurumada's Strongest Overall Narrative

Even as someone who proclaims Masami Kurumada as his all-time favorite mangaka, there's no denying one thing: The man isn't always the strongest storyteller. From an overall perspective his best works are powerful, both in the force of the blows dealt between combatants in his various action manga as well as the strong, Romantic-styled themes & plot progression. It's also easy to consider the various story arcs seen in many of his manga & think of how damn good they each can be, overall. However, there's no doubt that, when you dig into the weeds, you can easily find some notable & undeniable flaws, from a storytelling perspective, and even some story arcs might not be as good as others. Not just that, but I don't think it's unfair to say that most of Kurumada's longer works tend to have slow starts, and while that's not inherently a bad thing (slow burn storytelling can be outstanding, after all) it does mean that titles like Ring ni Kakero, Fuma no Kojirou, & Saint Seiya (especially if you're watching the Seiya TV anime) can also be described with a line that can make some shirk at the thought of starting them: "Just stick with it; it gets better!"

B't X, in my opinion, doesn't suffer from most of these situations. In fact, it might just be Masami Kurumada's strongest overall narrative.

This remains one of the coolest logos I've ever seen.

Running from (roughly) late 1994 to early 2000 for 16 volumes, B't X (pronounced "Beat X") was the first manga Masami Kurumada ever made outside of Shueisha, after more or less getting tired with the harsh & competitive grind of making manga for Weekly Shonen Jump; it also (just barely) managed to count as Masami Kurumada's 20th Anniversary work. Instead, B't X ran in the then-brand new Monthly Shonen Ace by Kadokawa Shoten (it even got the cover for the very first issue), a magazine focused more on serializing manga based on anime & video games, like Gundam, Macross, The King of Fighters, Martian Successor Nadesico, Record of Lodoss War, & Neon Genesis Evangelion, though there has also been the occasional original property throughout its history (MPD Psycho, Sgt. Frog, Eden's Bowy, Nyankees, Guyver, etc.). While Ring ni Kakero & Saint Seiya more or less defined Masami Kurumada during the (late) 70s & 80s, respectively, B't X was what defined him during the 90s, receiving a TV anime adaptation by TMS in 1996, followed by an OVA continuation titled B't X Neo in 1997, & altogether the anime adapted the first half of the manga before heading into its own original ending, as the manga was still running; that said, Neo & the manga both feature similar final acts, in numerous ways. It's a series that I have reviewed in the past, both in its original manga form as well as for both halves of the anime. However, I feel specific focus should be given to the narrative of B't X itself, both in its overall structure as well as specific details, because when compared to his other works I do feel that it succeeds in ways that none of the others do and, because of that, it actually might be a far better starting point for newcomers to Kurumada than the more obvious (& overwhelming) Saint Seiya.

Trust me, my first Kurumada series ever was the B't X anime.

[Note: This will naturally go into spoilers to explain some details, and I fully recommend that you read either review for B't X, manga or anime, as linked above first, as I will not be giving a traditional introduction for the series this time around.]

Obscusion B-Side: Takara's Legacy of "Fierce Fighting" on Game Boy: The Nettou "Deadheat Fighters" Series, 30 Years Later

Today, "handheld gaming" more or less means "console (or even PC) hardware, but on the go", and that was also true to some extent back in the 2010s & even 2000s. However, back in the 90s handheld gaming was mostly defined by the likes of Nintendo's Game Boy or Sega's Game Gear; there was also the Atari Lynx, but that was a distant third. Because of that the kinds of experiences that people would come to expect on handhelds were ones that made the most sense for the hardware, i.e. puzzle games, RPGs, platformers, etc. One genre that tended to feel a bit awkward for handhelds was fighting games, and by that I mean "post-Street Fighter II" (i.e. what some would call a "tournament fighter"), because they had that extra depth that made them work from a competitive point of view. However, handhelds at the time had literally just two face buttons (not including Start and/or Select), so proper fighting games weren't really what these devices were designed around. That sure didn't stop companies from trying though, as handheld ports of games like Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Hiryu no Ken, Virtua Fighter, Pit-Fighter, & even Rise of the Robots were attempted throughout the decade, while original titles like Konami's Raging Fighter & Toei's Fist of the North Star: 10 Big Brawls for the King of Universe tried to make experiences more tailor made for the hardware; general reception towards these ranged from "a decent attempt was at least made" to "kill it with fire". Eventually very good handheld fighting games started becoming more & more common, especially once the Game Boy Color & (especially) SNK's Neo Geo Pocket [Color] hit the scene, but throughout the mid-90s one publisher in Japan seemingly made it a mission to deliver good (if not great) fighting game experiences on the lowly Game Boy... and it was a toy company, of all places.

Each game has its own unique Nettou/Deadheat Fighters logo,
so I just went with the one with the least relation to its game.

While founded solely as a toy company in 1955, come the mid-90s Takara had also found footing in the video game industry as a publisher of various titles, mostly (but not all) that were either adapting a licensed IP (like an anime) or were a home port of an arcade title. In particular, Takara managed to ink a deal with SNK that resulted in Takara hiring various for-hire development studios to produce console versions of Neo Geo games, starting with Fatal Fury in 1992 & 1993, which was a success. With the fighting game genre seeing a massive surge in popularity during that time, Takara seemingly decided to take full advantage of that momentum by releasing portable versions of various fighting games on the Game Boy, all of which would also take advantage of the then-incoming Super Game Boy, a peripheral by Nintendo that allowed people to play GB games on a Super Famicom/SNES, by allowing two players to fight each other via the console & a single cartridge (though, naturally, traditional link cable play was also an option), and Takara managed to leverage its relationship with SNK by having all but one of these releases be based on Neo Geo games.

Tying all of these releases together would be a shared start to their titles: "熱闘/Nettou", or "Fierce Fighting", though Takara would offer its own English name on the covers, "Deadheat Fighters"; ironically enough, that English name would never appear on any of these games outside of Japan. From mid-1994 to early 1998 Takara would release eight Nettou "Deadheat Fighters" games on the Game Boy, though only five would see release outside of Japan (one of which was only in Europe), and today they are generally considered some of the absolute best fighting games ever released on the handheld. With 2024 marking the 30th Anniversary of this series of Game Boy fighting games, let's go over each one in chronological order, see the evolution of the Nettou Series, and figure out which one still reigns supreme over them all.