Make no mistake: I'm not bereft of stuff to write about here at The Land of Obscusion. It's simply a case of whether or not I feel that it's still worth going forward, considering how few actually do read 99% of the stuff I write here. But enough of that talk, let's see what else from the past two years I feel shined the brightest.
A Complete Overview of the PS2's GunCon 2 Rail Shooter Decet (November 9, 2023)
Being born in 1986 I think I managed to be lucky when it came to technology, because I grew up during a time when tech itself was advancing very quickly, sometimes by what felt like leaps & bounds, but at the same time I was able to fully grow up with & appreciate the tech & products that came before. Rotary phones were something I still used a few times early on, major TV networks were still airing decades old cartoons and B&W programming alongside the then-new stuff, VHS was still the standard home video format before DVD truly took hold in the early 00s, computers & the internet were still establishing themselves as required for society throughout the 90s... and the TVs everyone used were made using cathode-ray tubes, a.k.a. CRTs. That last one is important here because once TVs that didn't use CRT tech (LED, plasma, OLED, etc.) starting becoming ubiquitous in the 00s it meant that a specific genre of video game became effectively lost to time: the light-gun rail shooter. The PlayStation 2, by technically still being designed primarily for display on CRTs, would become the final console to really see something resembling "regular" support for light-gun games, though even then it was only 16 games, in total. In 2021 I did an overview of Capcom's Gun Survivor series, something I could only properly cover due to me luckily having a mid-00s CRT TV to play the PS2 games with via the GunCon 2. However, I still wanted to cover the remaining light-gun rail shooters that supported the GunCon 2 at some point, and in 2023 I finally took the time to do just that.
The end result were 10 games left to cover, and the course of a few months I occasionally played each & every one of them, collecting my thoughts on each into a single piece published in November. The end result was, by far, some of the most pure, unadulterated fun I've had in writing a piece, simply because the vast majority of these 10 rail shooters remain tons of fun to boot up & play, especially on a CRT & with the GunCon 2, as they were intended to be played with. Time Crisis II, Time Crisis 3, & Time Crisis: Crisis Zone are three of the absolute best ones on the PS2. Vampire Night isn't as great but is still a lot of cheesy fun in its own right. Endgame is, in my opinion, the worst of the lot, but still not abjectly terrible; it's just terribly boring. Virtua Cop Re-Birth (a.k.a. Elite Edition, in Europe) is an excellent remaster of two iconic Sega AM2 rail shooters, so it's awesome. Ninja Assault is outstanding & has lots of replay value via its multiple campaigns. Gunvari Collection+Time Crisis is a collection of four great PS1 rail shooters, which makes it easily the most "feature-rich" release. Death Crimson OX+, despite it being part of a notoriously terrible franchise, is still a wild & fun ride of a rail shooter, and easily the best Death Crimson game, i.e. it's actually legit good! Finally, Gunfighter II: Revenge of Jesse James is better than Endgame but still near the bottom, though the fact that I was playing a PAL-exclusive on an NTSC TV might have messed with my overall enjoyment. Regardless, the PS2's catalog of GunCon 2-compatible games, on the whole, is an extremely solid one & it brings to an end an era of light gun-supported games (on a CRT, at least) in a very strong fashion.
Saint Seiya (Manga) (May 6, 2024)
"Let me say this right away, though: I most likely will not cover Saint Seiya... [it's] is a little too well-known to really cover in detail on this blog..."
This was what I wrote at the start of my review of the Fuma no Kojirou: Yasha-hen OVA in December of 2010, my very first review of a Masami Kurumada work of any sort. When I started this blog 14 years ago I wanted to avoid covering anything that was even remotely close to "popular" or even "well known", but obviously that's a concept that I've broken every now & then, and even when it came to Saint Seiya I quickly went against what I said a mere four months later when I started reviewing the Seiya movies. Still, while I eventually made an exception for parts of the Seiya anime behemoth one thing that I wanted to delay as long as I possibly could was to review the original Saint Seiya manga itself. When it came to Masami Kurumada I wanted to showcase that there was more to the man than just Saint Seiya, that he was already known as a successful & popular mangaka prior to that series & that he had absolutely worthwhile stuff after that series had ended. Therefore, while I knew that there would eventually come a time where I'd have no choice but to finally review Saint Seiya, I at least wanted to cover everything else (serialized) that I possibly could first. Sukeban Arashi? Covered via Demo Disc in 2018. Ring ni Kakero? Reviewed in 2013. Fuma no Kojirou? Reviewed in 2015. Raimei no Zaji? Reviewed in 2016. Otoko Zaka's original Shonen Jump run? Reviewed in 2015. Aoi Tori no Shinwa? Reviewed in 2012. B't X? Reviewed in 2014. Evil Crusher Maya? Reviewed in 2016. Ring ni Kakero 2? Reviewed in 2021. Otoko Zaka's initial revival run in Weekly PlayNews? Reviewed in 2018. Hell, Ai no Jidai?! Reviewed in 2016. Come 2024 the only real "collected" works left for me to cover from Masami Kurumada were Jitsuroku! Shinwakai, "The Shonen Jump+ Run" of Otoko Zaka, Silent Knight Sho, Akane-Iro no Kaze... and Saint Seiya (both the OG series & Next Dimension). Without a doubt, I had to finally re-read & review Masami Kurumada's most popular manga in this year.
As mentioned in Part 1, I initially planned on covering these manga in exact chronological order (at least in regards to when each of them had their first "chapter" published), but a delay in Otoko Zaka's 11th & final volume kind of messed that up. Still, when it came to the standard reviews themselves I actually kind of stuck true to that, with the only exception being that Otoko Zaka's third & final review came out after Seiya & Sho had already been covered. Anyway, I feel like I'm making it sound as though I had been dreading re-reading Saint Seiya for all this time, but in reality that's not really true. It's just that, outside of it being Kurumada's most iconic work... it's 28 freakin' volumes long, so it not only takes a while to read through but it also results in there being A LOT to write about. At 8,923 words my Seiya manga review is, by far, the longest Kurumada review of any sort I have ever done, managing to beat out my 2021 re-review of the Ring ni Kakero 1 anime's 8,423 by a literal 500 words. To put it simply, I had a lot that I wanted to say about Saint Seiya & that's because I had great fun in reading the manga all the way through again, the first time I had read any of the manga since Viz released the final volume in English in 2010. Yes, the first two or three volumes remain a bit of a rough spot to get through, as Kurumada did not plan out the beginning well (if even at all, honestly), but once it starts to find its groove it still hooked me like it did back in the mid-00s, and even with the DiC-enforced name & terminology changes in Viz's translation I had a blast with it all over again.
Saint Seiya is Masami Kurumada's most iconic work for good reason, and that's because its pure audaciousness makes it a manga that demands your attention. Yes, it's storytelling can be a bit wild & loose at points, with its lore only truly making pure comprehensive sense by the climax of the Poseidon Chapter (once Kurumada manages to tie everything that's happened together in a way that makes full sense), and its imagery can be pure "up to 11" madness, but it's also utterly unforgettable. It's not my personal favorite Kurumada manga, that remains Ring ni Kakero (1), but there's good reason why Saint Seiya remains in an eternal tie for second place for me, alongside B't X & Otoko Zaka.
Another one of those "have wanted to do this for years" entry, and I'm sad that it literally took the original creator's death to finally get me to get to covering these anime. Born in late 1949, the late Yuki Hijiri first made his name in manga when he got his first doujin starring the mysterious esper Locke the Superman in 1967, and after going pro in 1977 would continue to make new Locke manga all the way until 2020, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson's, with only three years where Hijiri didn't publish at least one new Locke story, the last of which only happening because the man himself nearly died from a combination of sinus infection, cardiac arrest, & a coma in 2018! Unfortunately, Yuki Hijiri would pass away from pneumonia on October 30, 2022 at the age of 72, though in June of 2023 one of his former assistants, Sakura Sasakura, finished up the Doukei story that Hijiri had started before his death, relying on Hijiri's storyboards & plot. Anyway, with the kind of longevity it's only natural that there would be anime adaptations of Locke the Superman, and those came in the form of a theatrically-released movie & three OVAs (plus a fan-made "pilot" before any of those by Takeshi Hirota, who would later work on some of the official adaptations).
The "first" anime adaptation was the 1984 movie, which adapted the Millennium of the Witch story (same as the 1979 fan "pilot", in fact), where Locke is recruited to put a stop to a maniacal esper's plan to raise an esper army that will allow her to take over the galaxy through force. This is a great starting point for newcomers, as it introduces the idea of Locke himself very well, while also simply telling a great story with a likeable cast, the occasional cool esper battle, & a slow but always engaging pacing throughout it all. After that came 1989's Lord Leon, a three-episode OVA where Locke is hired to hunt after a space pirate who's been terrorizing a notable business magnate & his family, though Locke himself mainly takes the job because the eponymous Leon looks to be the older brother of Locke's blind neighbor. Compared to the movie, this OVA is more "traditional" as it features more esper battles & more of a standard villain, though Leon himself is simultaneously about as much the main character here as Locke is, and it also acts as a bit of a direct continuation to the Millennium of the Witch story, in some ways. Third up was 1991's New World Command, a two-episode OVA that sees Locke join a group of espers (who all have their memories blocked off, including Locke's) who are commanded to "Kill Tsar", with little to no information beyond that. Compared to the prior two anime, New World Command is focused more on being a mystery to everything Locke & his squad are doing, all with a heavy sense of unease throughout it all; definitely the most unique of all the Locke anime. Finally, in 2000 there was Mirror Ring, a one-off OVA that is essentially a direct sequel to New World Command by focusing on characters first seen there & acts as a proper epilogue to those events, though this time around Locke plays more of a secondary role until the climax. Where the other three Locke anime could technically be watched in any order, as their connections are more in lore & history than direct story, Mirror Ring absolutely makes no sense if watched without having seen New World Command first.
Overall, though, the Locke the Superman anime productions are a great experience that honestly do work best when watched in production order, as they create a bit of through line that rewards familiarity with what happened previously, though in the grand scheme of things they're only a drop in the bucket that is Yuki Hijiri's Locke output. While the movie has seen a couple of English re-releases in more recent times I do hope that, one day, the remaining three will be given either a second chance (in Lord Leon's case) or for the first time (in the last two's cases).
This was yet another idea I had in mind to cover for years, but the overall length & time I would need to watch all of it (65 episodes, in total) made it something tricky to really slot in, should I also have other anime in mind to cover. Luckily, this year was focused primarily around manga due to the whole "celebrating Kurumada's 50th" idea, so it opened up space & time for me to able to do this (I started on January 31, so it took a little over four months to watch all of them), and 2024 also marked the 20th Anniversary year for all three shows, so this was an ideal year to cover them. The impetus for this becoming a subject I wanted to write about was really a basic one: Each one had a title starting with the word "Samurai", and all three debuted in 2004. That was really it, as I found it amusing that this even happened, and the fact that all three shows were notably different from each other made for, what I felt, was a neat concept. That being said, though, this subject really did push the boundaries of this blog's primary focus, which is to shine a light on the obscure & forgotten, because while Samurai Gun certainly fit that bill just fine (&, in fact, was something I had considered doing a traditional review for ever since I started the blog back in late 2010), Samurai Champloo & Samurai 7 are both neither "obscure" nor "forgotten", and that's especially true for the former.
That being said, though, I think 20 years is long enough of a time span to allow for the occasional exception to the rule, and doing this piece was a great excuse to rewatch all three of these shows. Samurai Champloo is, without a doubt, an absolute classic in every sense of the word, being Shinichiro Watanabe's spiritual follow up to Cowboy Bebop (though, just this year, Watanabe himself admitted that he treats all of his original works as taking place in the same universe), only with the wild fusion of aesthetics here being chanbara with hip hop. Simply put, everything about Champloo is amazing, whether it's the memorable main trio, the fun & often outrageous adventures and/or hijinks they find themselves in (with the occasional dip into their own tragic pasts, for good measure), or the masterful soundtrack that mixes together R&B & rap in a way that feels natural for the samurai style. Then there's Samurai 7, which reimagines Akira Kurosawa's iconic film Seven Samurai into more of a semi-cyberpunk/sci-fi style, while also expanding the story to involve the titular samurai needing to save more than just a single village for the final third of the show's plot. This show is just a very well told & engaging interpretation of a true classic film, one that both pays homage & direct adaptation to the film in fun ways while also making sure to tell its own story, in the long run. As for Samurai Gun, it's definitely the "weakest" of the three "samurai", especially since it only adapts up to around the halfway point of Kazuhiro Kumagai's manga, but it's still a very enjoyable series in its own right, mixing together the Bakumatsu period with more of an espionage flavor & purposefully anachronistic elements, like the usage of slightly more modern firearms than what should have existed at the time; plus, a more than decent amount of exploitation, for flavor.
In the end, 2004's Inadvertent Samurai Trilogy was a fun little trio of shows for me to make my way through & see how they all (accidentally) may have flowed together well from a shared take on the "samurai". It definitely was a larger project for me from the year, but I'm happy to have finally gotten to it, just in time for all of their 20th Anniversaries.
Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog: 1995 (Part 2) & 1997 to 2001 (June 5, 2023 & December 2, 2024)
In 2021 I decided to do something a bit crazy: Make an 11-part series where I slowly make my way through the entire 50-title official cartridge catalog of the Atari Jaguar, giving my general thoughts on each game while I also make note of notable moments in the video game industry during the life of Atari Corporation's final console. When I started this endeavor I wasn't fully sure if I'd necessarily actually get to the end, but every few months (at least, that's how I tried to pace it) I'd work on the next part of the series, which I titled "Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog". I got two parts done in 2021, followed by another three in 2022, and then in 2023 I knocked out another three parts; by this point new release date information had come out, so now it had become a 12-part series. That left only four remaining come the start of 2024, and I decided that if I could pace this at around once every three months then I could actually finish this series by the end of the year. I didn't get it exactly right, but at the start of this month I made it to the 12th & final part, having now covered all 50 games (plus a bonus game that, for all intents & purposes, should have been official), and detailing the wild journey the Jag (& the Atari brand itself) went on between 1993 & 2001. More or less, for that reason alone, I had to include the "1997 to 2001" entry in this list, as it brought it all to an end.
However, as I've said before, I don't like to include December "posts" in these lists, at least on their own. Luckily, there was a specific part of this series that I also really wanted to include: Part 2 of 1995 from mid-2023. The reason for that is simply because that part featured the absolute overall best selection of games in the entire Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog series, with all five games featured in it being absolute standouts. Hover Strike is a really cool evolution of Atari's iconic Battlezone, & since that IP got sold to Rebellion in 2013 the current Atari could easily revive Hover Strike, in place of it. Telegames' release of International Sensible Soccer is a solid port of a cult classic title, and though I honestly kind of sucked at it I was still able to tell why people still go crazy over its straightforward, fast, & kinetic gameplay to this very day. Pinball Fantasies is a great example of the then-standard overhead view style of digital pinball, with four tables that each offer a different type of goal & pinball style, and it's easily the better pinball game on the Jag when compared to the later Ruiner Pinball. However, the absolute best of the bunch were the last two games in this part, the racing game pair of Power Drive Rally & Super Burnout. Both offer their own style of racing (overhead rallying for PDR, Hang-On-esque motorcycling for SB), but each one is a truly excellent title and are two of the absolute best games ever released on the Jaguar... and they're both console-exclusives, at that!
Without a doubt, doing this series has given me a greater appreciation for the Atari Jaguar, and I'm glad to have made it through the entire endeavor with only minimal delays. Now I can only hope to do the same for the similarly ambitious IF Neverland Reportage series I began in 2022... I've been slowly working on the next entry for that for around half a year by now, so hopefully I can get that out early next year, at least.
As usual, the final pick for this kind of list should be one that has some sort of strong personal connection, and since 2024 not only marked Masami Kurumada's 50th Anniversary in manga but also my own 20th Anniversary of me truly getting into anime & manga there really was only one choice to go with. As I mentioned in my recollection my time as a "Masami Kurumada fan" this past November I live in the United States, i.e. the place where Kurumada has never really made inroads towards, in part because we got Saint Seiya really late, i.e. the early 00s. Because of this I didn't get my start into Kurumada's works via his most iconic series, but rather I got started via old fansubs of the B't X anime, which was also one of the earliest anime I watched once I started getting into the fandom in the second half of 2004. Eventually I then also started buying TokyoPop's English release of the manga, back when it was still easy to do so & new volumes were still coming out, and as I started checking out more of Kurumada's catalog I started to notice a few things about B't X. This became more obvious when I re-read the manga in preparation for the final volume's release in late 2010, which came out roughly two years after TokyoPop released the penultimate volume, and while I did bring up some of these aspects eventually when I reviewed both the anime & manga over time I still wanted to one day write something a bit more focused on these elements... and Kurumada's 50th Anniversary was the perfect timeframe to do so.
With Otoko Zaka's final volume delayed a few months, due to Kurumada initially deciding to quote the not-in-the-public-domain-yet song "Imagine" by John Lennon for the penultimate chapter, I decided that the first Kurumada manga I'd cover for the year would be B't X. So I re-read all 16 volumes for the first time in over a decade, and while doing so I aimed to see if those things I noticed way back when were truly still there, or if maybe I was simply seeing things that I wanted to see. What I noticed during this most recent re-read, then, was that I was still more or less right about how I felt when it came to B't X's narrative, and I still fully believe that this may just in fact be Kurumada's strongest manga, at least when it comes to overall narrative. Being Kurumada's first manga away from Shueisha it really does feel like he took this chance to look back at the kind of manga he made for Shonen Jump, and in particular its lead character template, and (for lack of a better term) deconstruct Teppei Takamiya's initial bullheaded nature & "Fight first, ask questions later... if possible" attitude by showing just how destructive it can truly be, if not to his own self but especially to the ally he made in his mission to rescue his brother, the legendary B't X; also, Kurumada directly avoiding the old reliable "Defeat=Friendship" trope. There's also just the especially strong usage of the three-act structure (or kishontenketsu), not just in regards to the overall series itself, which goes against most Kurumada manga by telling just a single story arc, but also in establishing three distinct "acts" in the manga itself, with each "act" itself following said structure, in & of itself. I also went into more depth in regards to the overall themes of the manga, especially its message of individual redemption & embracing peace over irredeemable war & violence.
Starting off my year-long celebration of Masami Kurumada's 50th Anniversary by re-reading B't X & giving it more of a "deep dive" truly was the best way for me to start 2024 off, because it just reaffirmed not just why I still love this specific series, but it also helped make me more resolute in going through with this understandably overindulgent year-long celebration concept.
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And with that it's the end of 2024 here at The Land of Obscusion! 2025 will mark my 15th year doing this, and while I don't really have anything necessarily planned to celebrate that milestone in particular I may or may not be able to FINALLY make it to Review #300, depending on how many traditional reviews I get to; aside from the stuff I do plan to review I still need three more to hit 300. Regardless, I hope you all have a Happy New Year, & let's all do out best to make 2025 as good as possible for each of us.
As always, thank you for reading, whether it's for the very first time or if you've been keeping up for a while.
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