Obscusion B-Side: Nostradamus (Arcade): Stand Your Ground Till the End, Engage the Enemy, Insert Credit!

Born in December of 1503 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Provence in the the Kingdom of France, Michel de Nostradame was an astrologer, apothecary, & physician who today is best known more for being an alleged seer who went by the Latinized mononym Nostradamus. While he initially worked shortly in medicine to help deal with outbreaks of the plague, he eventually switched over to the occult & in 1550 published an almanac that sold extremely well for the time. The success of this almanac led to Nostradamus becoming recognized as a "psychic" advisor by the likes of nobility & royalty, even becoming Counselor and Physician-in-Ordinary to Charles IX, though Nostradamus' ability at this on his own was later found by historians to be rather poor. In fact, Nostradamus was afraid that he'd be persecuted by the Inquisition, but since he never practiced magic he was considered fine. What's most associated with Nostradamus, to this very day, is his 1555 publication Les Prophéties, which contained hundreds of poetic quatrains that, in the centuries since his passing in 1566, have often been looked at as prophesizing future events, with most quatrains detailing disasters of some sort. Many people have, in retrospect, tried to associate Nostradamus' almost purposefully vague, randomly ordered, & multi-language-written "predictions" to various people & historical events, like the French Revolution, the rises of both Napoleon & Hitler, the atomic bomb, & 9/11, among others.

Unsurprisingly, this involves either misreading what Nostradamus actually wrote, ignoring his penchant for simply projecting past events into the future, or not taking into consideration his history as an astrologer. However, this makes Nostradamus a great source for fictional & semi-historical stories, including video games!

Existing roughly from 1988 to 1998, though its last games would continue to come out up through 2001, the Japanese company Face was one of many different publishers in video game history that managed to stick around for a while but never truly became notable throughout its lifetime. If you were to look through Face's catalog you'd find mostly forgotten fare, though the quality of said fare was apparently more decent than you'd think from such a no-name company, and arguably Face became most notable during its last few years when it was a supporter of SNK's Neo Geo arcade hardware. Namely, Face was responsible (in some part) for the games Gururin, ZuPaPa! (which was finished in 1994 but not released until SNK bought the rights to it after Face's dissolution & published it as one of its last games before going bankrupt itself in 2001), & Money Puzzle/Idol Exchanger. That last one has easily become Face's most famous release, having since achieved cult classic status & is still played competitively in Japan to this day, most recently making news when a literal high school girl went to EVO Japan this year & absolutely destroyed all her competition in mirror matches. Ironically, it's rumored that Face's most popular game is what killed the company, due to Data East allegedly suing Face over similarities to the Magical Drop series... and apparently won, with Face suffering financially because of it; to be fair, the two games do play extremely similar, with only slight differences. Today, if Hamster's ACA Neo Geo re-release of Money Puzzle Exchanger is any indication (plus Gururin, too), Face's catalog now belongs to Excel, an "electronic device trading company" that's owned by Kaga Electronics, which itself has a history in video games via its now-defunct Naxat Soft/Kaga Create & Taxan subsidiaries; in fact, Kaga's own modern-day web address even uses the Taxan moniker, which is kind of quaint.

So, what does Face have to do with Nostradamus? Simply put, as you can see from the title screen above, in 1993 Face released an arcade shoot-em-up simply titled Nostradamus. In more detail, Face released a game that used Nostradamus' prophecy that "in 1999 and seven months" a "great and terrifying leader would come out of the sky", and in this game's case Face allegedly went with the standard idea for a shooter to represent the "great leader out of the sky": An alien invasion. Beyond that...Face's game really has no connection with Nostradamus outside of the title screen featuring a portrait of the man himself that looks to be based on the portrait that his son Cesar made in 1614, nearly 50 years after his father's death, only with it flipped & Nostradamus himself looking much, much older on the title screen. Still, just the idea of an arcade sci-fi shooter named Nostradamus has always caught my interest, & one thing I have yet to cover for the yearly Halloween piece is a good-ol' alien invasion; also, Nostradamus' prophecies are sometimes utilized in horror productions. Therefore, I want celebrate Halloween this year by going over what is easily the most bizarre thing to ever be associated with the legendary (not really a) seer.

Yes, even more bizarre that that time in the 2010s Marvel Comics had a seemingly-immortal Sir Isaac Newton keep Nostradamus alive in order for him to prophesize events for the Brotherhood of the Shield; at least that one actually involved the man himself directly!

Obscusion B-Side: Atypical Alchemists Associate, NEC Home Electronics' Last Stand (& UFO Interactive's First)

In June of 1953 electronics company NEC Corporation split off its radio division as its own company & named it Shin NEC, where it'd manufacture & sell things like vacuum tubes, CRTs, tape records, & later on radio receivers & "white goods"; i.e. major home appliances. In 1981 Shin NEC would debut its first ever personal computers, namely the PC-6000 & PC-8800 series, the latter of which eventually becoming the most popular PC line in Japan during that decade. In 1983 Shin NEC would change its name to NEC Home Electronics (or NEC-HE, for short), expanding into products like CD players. In 1987 NEC-HE would enter the video game market with the PC-Engine (alongside Hudson Soft), which would become the closest competitor to Nintendo's Famicom & Super Famicom in Japan during the 16-bit generation & even introduce the idea of games being released on CD; outside of Japan the "TurboGrafx-16" was another story entirely. NEC-HE would continue seeing success into the 90s with the PC-Engine Super CD-ROM² upgrade as well as the later models in the PC-9800 series of computers, but eventually the good times would come to an end.

That started with the launch of the PC-FX in 1994, the Japan-only successor to the PC-Engine that simply failed to deliver & would sell only around 300,000 units before being discontinued in February 1998 & becoming NEC's final console; still sold better than the Atari Jaguar, at least. Meanwhile, the PC-98 eventually lost momentum to Windows 95 PCs, though NEC did later make PC-98s that supported all the way up to Windows 2000 up through 2003. Still, this resulted in NEC-HE now being a third-party video game company, for all intents & purposes, but by this point that seemed kind of redundant as there was already a video game development & publishing division with NEC Interchannel, itself the successor to the music division NEC Avenue, which had already expanded out into publishing games on non-NEC hardware a couple of years prior. Think of this like how Sony Computer Entertainment Japan & Sony Music Entertainment Japan were both publishing video games between 1994 & 2004, i.e. two separate entities under the same overall corporate umbrella.

However, NEC-HE seemingly still wanted to remain relevant in the video game industry so it would enter the third-party business itself, deciding to work with partner developers to put out titles that would be completely different from Interchannel's output. For those wondering about market confusion, NEC-HE had full rights to use the iconic blue-lettered NEC logo on the covers of its releases, whereas Interchannel had its own unique logo for its releases, so there was no way to confuse which division released which game. Unfortunately, outside of a PS1 port of PC-FX game Wakusei Koukitai Little Cats (which itself was published by FamilySoft, not NEC-HE) in June 1998 & Dead of the Brain 1 & 2 for PC-Engine CD in June 1999 (the final official release for that console), NEC-HE would only release four original games before getting shut down in early 2000, all of which came out on the Sega Dreamcast. However, these four games all booted up showing the above image of something called "Atypical Alchemists Associate", with Sega Retro calling it "an internal development group" within NEC-HE. However, I think this was meant to be more of a collective branding than an actual development studio & that's because, aside from NEC-HE having never really developed a game in-house, these titles share a common central goal that was 100% true to the brand's name: Being anything, & I mean ANYTHING, other than "typical".

Seeing as 2024 marks 25 years since the launch of the Sega Dreamcast in North America, & two of these games did see release outside of Japan, let's go over the quartet of games released under the Atypical Alchemists Associate branding & see how NEC Home Electronics, the division that gave us the legendary PC-88, PC-98, & co-created the PC-Engine, went down swinging as a third-party publisher.

Akane-Iro no Kaze -Shinsengumi Keppu-ki-: This Sword is No Bazooka, & It Doesn't Play MP3s, But I Guess It'll Do

After Japan was forced to open trade with the west in 1854 the Tokugawa shogunate saw more political instability due to rebellion against working with "barbarians". This eventually resulted in the formation of the Roshigumi in late 1862, made up of various ronin commissioned by the bakufu, but when it was discovered that the leader actually planned on working with the imperialists instead of the shogunate, the Roshigumi were disbanded in early 1863. The few who remained loyal to the shogunate were initially reformed as the Mibu Roshigumi, before getting renamed on August 18, 1863 to the Shinsengumi. This group of swordsmen would patrol about then-capital Kyoto & protect bakufu representatives during the final years of the Bakumatsu, before getting involved in the Boshin War as part of the anti-Imperial Ezo Republic. In the end, the Shinsengumi would surrender to Emperor Meiji's forces on June 23, 1869, mere days before the Boshin War ended with the Ezo Republic's surrender. Nearly a century later, from May to December of 1962, author Ryotaro Shiba published 15 short stories about the Shinsengumi in the literary magazine Chuo Koron, which were extremely popular & would be collected into a single book in 1964 titled Shinsengumi Keppuroku/The Shinsengumi's Bloody Wind Records. While the Shinsengumi were initially not looked at fondly for decades after their dissolution, it was through authors like Shiba (& Kan Shimozawa before him, in the 1920s) that the Japanese populace started to look more fondly at the Shinsengumi in retrospect, though that was also in part due to some embellishments & purely fictional stories that showed the group in a positive light, including some by Shiba, seemingly being taken as historical fact.

Regardless, today the Shinsengumi are a common subject for all manner of jidaigeki that take place during the Bakumatsu, not to mention various fictional stories that feature groups plainly inspired by the Shinsengumi, more often than not portraying the group more as heroes than villains.

Thirty years after Ryotaro Shiba's short stories, after Silent Knight Sho got cancelled in late 1992, Masami Kurumada decided that he was done with Shonen Jump & wanted nothing more to do with the magazine. Likely in an attempt to prevent him from going to another publisher, Shueisha seemingly managed to convince Kurumada to move over to (the now defunct) seinen magazine Super Jump, a move previously seen with the likes of Buichi Terasawa, Shinji Hiramatsu, Tatsuya Egawa, Izumi Matsumoto, Kurumada's idol Hiroshi Motomiya, & even Kurumada's former assistant Jun Tomizawa. While not exclusively so, especially after some editorial shake-ups that moved a lot of mangaka to Business Jump & Young Jump, Super Jump was generally treated as the magazine Shonen Jump's readers would "grow up" into. The end result was Akane-Iro no Kaze -Shinsengumi Keppu-ki-/Crimson Wind -The Shinsengumi's Bloody Wind Chronicles-, a manga about the early days of the Shinsengumi which debuted in mid-1993 & whose subtitle definitely looks to be a direct reference to Ryotaro Shiba's stories, only replacing the kanji "録/roku" for "記/ki", i.e. a "chronicle" instead of a "record"; in other words, this wasn't a direct adaptation. In fact, many Japanese sources online, including Wikipedia, erroneously state that the subtitle in Japanese ends with "記録/kiroku", or "written record" (as in sports or official events, like a trial), combing the two kanji... despite the literal manga, in all of its printings, only using "記/ki" in its title & logo. Even the copyright section at the end of my physical copy has furigana that read "Keppu-ki"; technically it's "Keppuu-ki", but I'm using only one "u" purely for visual convenience, a la "shonen" or "shojo".

However, despite being given a new home, Kurumada never made Akane-Iro no Kaze on a consistent basis, only appearing in Issues 17 & 24 of 1993, followed by Issues 5, 9, 21, & 22 of 1994, totaling just six chapters. Since Super Jump was biweekly (i.e. only 26 issues/year) that meant that the last chapter was published right as Kurumada was about to debut B't X for Kadokawa Shoten's Monthly Shonen Ace... or possibly even being published AFTER B't X had already debuted, since exact dates can be tricky with manga magazines; regardless, it was damn close. Yeah, it's easy to see that Kurumada wasn't pleased with simply being shuffled over to Super Jump, at least at this point, so he eventually took Kadokawa's offer & left his Shinsengumi manga unfinished, possibly even taking some of the hiatuses between chapters to plan out his departure from Shueisha. A compiled released of Akane-Iro no Kaze listed as "Volume 1", despite there being no plans to continue it, was released by Shueisha on January 16, 1995, and on December 12, 2001 (after Kurumada had fully returned to Shueisha, & Super Jump, with Ring ni Kakero 2) two bunkoban books were released titled Never End Heroes, indicating works that Kurumada seemingly had no plans of ever returning to. Never End Heroes 1 contained Raimei no Zaji (which Kurumada did eventually return to in 2014, if only for a handful of pages) & Aoi Tori no Shinwa, while Never End Heroes 2 contained Akane-Iro no Kaze & Evil Crusher Maya. I've previously reviewed the other three manga that were re-released via the Never End Heroes books years ago, so as part of this blog's year-long celebration of Masami Kurumada's 50th Anniversary it's time to finally cover Kurumada's first ever seinen manga, & his final manga from his original 20-year run with Shueisha, Akane-Iro no Kaze.