Doing It "The Wrong Way": My History with Masami Kurumada's Works as an English-Speaking American Fan

Unlike (seemingly) most English-speaking anime fans, of any generation apparently, I kind of got into anime a little bit later in life. Sure, I watched some anime that aired for kids growing up in the late 90s & early 00s, like Pokémon & Digimon, I do vaguely remember seeing the likes of Voltron & Transformers via reruns in the early 90s, etc., & that era of both FoxKids & Kids WB was filled with anime, as it's how I first saw stuff like Ultimate Muscle, Shaman King, & even Escaflowne. But I didn't even know about Toonami on Cartoon Network until 2002 or so (i.e. my first Gundam was G Gundam, not Gundam Wing, Gundam Seed, or the UC-era stuff between all of those), and it wasn't until 2004 that I decided to really get into anime more in-depth, despite already owning a handful of official DVD releases by that point. Entering into mid-2004 I was already 17-going-on-18 & a senior in high school, about to graduate & go to college, a far cry from the young teens (or younger, even) that I tend to see most anime fans reminisce about how they got into the fandom, & I hadn't watched stuff like Sailor Moon growing up, rented anime VHS tapes or DVDs that rental stores really shouldn't have been renting out to kids, seen other anime-focused programming blocks like Anime on Sci-fi in the 90s or Anime Unleashed in the 00s, or engaged in tape trading & the like. For me, my start into anime was as someone who was entering young adulthood & discovering digital fansubs, while also buying official releases as well. Also, I live & have grown up in the United States of America all my life, having only traveled outside of the country a handful of times (namely Hungary & Canada, both to visit family).

In that case, it's kind of all the more bizarre that I became such a massive fan of Masami Kurumada & his works... because, from all indications, I shouldn't be.

Effectively the way "North of Mexico"
sees Masami Kurumada, as proven by history.

Honestly, I don't like to write about my personal life here, mainly because I don't think there's really all that much to say. I've done it before, sure, but that was because they were related to the only real times I had anything interesting to tell the story of, like that time I got published on GameStop at age 17, or that one year I made next-to-no-effort YouTube videos (relatively) early on in the site's life, or that "Proto-Blog" I did before starting The Land of Obscusion. I really don't consider myself all that special, so I don't find much point in writing about my past as a fan of stuff, because (in the grand scheme of things) I'm not really all that different from most people. My love of writing about obscure & forgotten stuff isn't all that different from stuff other people love doing; it's just a difference in specificity of the subject itself. However, this is one of those exceptions, because this is truly something that's honestly rather unique about me, when compared to other English-speaking anime fans. Considering where I live, how long I've been into anime as an earnest fan, & how little anyone really cares about him in English-speaking fandom, there should be no feasible reason why I am such a fan of Masami Kurumada. And, indeed, it often feels like I am utterly alone in that regard, because while there are English-speaking "Saint Seiya fans" who have been anime fans for much longer than me (& are much more notable & cooler than me, in every way)... I did not become a fan like they did, it's why I have always referred to myself as a "Masami Kurumada fan", and it's why I went as far as dedicate an entire year of this blog to a single mangaka for his 50th Anniversary.

Obscusion B-List: Video Game Ports That Shouldn't Have Been Possible... But Actually Happened... STILL Yet Again

Complete transparency here for this piece: This was not originally planned in any way. I had hoped for something else to be ready for the first half of November that's (to some extent) out of my control, and it unfortunately didn't come to pass. I'm under no obligation to provide new writings every week or two... but I like to try. Therefore, instead of the usual introduction I would give this kind of Obscusion B-List article, I've decided to be 100% honest & admit that this was literally started on the prior Wednesday; for stuff like this I try to give myself at least a week, just to think things out & take my time. Also, let's face it, after three prior entries of this subject it's honestly just getting hard to make an intro that's somewhat unique from the prior ones. At least it's been around two years since the previous version of this B-List, which just happened to be how I wound up pacing these, completely by accident. Finally, I just like making these lists, because this is a really fun subject to look into.

Anyway, let's go over still yet another six video games that were ported to hardware that, in essence, really had no reasonable right or reason to be playing them!

In theory, every new piece of gaming hardware needs a handful game types at launch, and I don't necessarily mean specific genres. What I mean is that a good hardware launch should have at least one killer app that makes people want to buy it, at least one title that'll keep people coming back for more over & over, & at least one title that can showcase what the hardware is capable of. For that last example a common direction used to be releasing a port of some sort, something that wasn't capable at all on prior hardware (at least, not without major changes) to show people that this truly was "next-gen". Both the ColecoVision & NES had Donkey Kong, the Genesis had Altered Beast, the SNES had Final Fight & Gradius III, and the Dreamcast & PS2 had SoulCalibur & Tekken Tag Tournament, respectively, among other examples. The Game Boy Advance had a bunch of hardware spectacles for its launch in 2001, showcasing the handheld's ability to handle things that the Game Boy & Game Boy Color never could, and there were also ports of older games. Most of these were ports of 16-bit classics, like Earthworm Jim, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, & the SNES remake of Super Mario Bros. 2/USA, but there was one GBA launch title (for North America & Europe, at least) that dared to go even further & show that the GBA was truly a 32-bit handheld: Rayman Advance.

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.

Saint Seiya: Saintia Sho (Manga): Even All Young Ladies Can Be Tomorrow's Braves... Ooh Yeah!

Oftentimes a series can become so big, so utterly popular & iconic, that people simply want more of it in a way that the original creators themselves aren't able to fulfill that demand on their own. When it comes to anime & manga that often results in spin-off works being produced that, at the very least, are signed off & approved by the original creator (& they get credited in some way for that) but otherwise are done by completely different people. Think of any major Japanese franchise & you can easily find spin-offs, especially when it comes to manga, and the same is true of Masami Kurumada, but specifically Saint Seiya. When Kurumada returned to Shueisha with Ring ni Kakero 2 in 2000 it also gave new life to Kurumada's most successful work. It started off slow, with 2002 seeing the release of Saint Seiya: Gigantomachia, a two-volume novel written by Tatsuya Hamazaki (best known for his One Piece & .hack novelizations) that detailed the Bronze Saints' (& as well as some novel-only new characters) battle against the Gigas of Greek myth that wish to revive their king, Typhon. This was then followed up with Saint Seiya Hades Sanctuary, the first of three OVA series that would eventually adapt the Hades Chapter of the original manga that the TV anime never got to do. After those, though, the floodgates would truly open up & the Seiya spin-offs would start to come out in full force.

The first was 2003's Saint Seiya: Episode.G by Megumu Okada, of Shadow Skill fame, which was a prequel starring Leo Aiolia & has since become a massive franchise of its own, with two sequels (Assassin & Requiem) totaling 43 volumes across all three parts (as of this review, at least) & even a couple of drama CDs. Then in 2006 came Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas by Shiori Teshirogi, a former assistant for Kozue Amano during Aria's serialization, which detailed an alternate universe version of the Holy War between Athena & Hades' forces in the 1700s (due to Saint Seiya: Next Dimension telling its own story in that same time period that supersedes LC) & would become the most recognizable of the Seiya spin-offs, running until 2011 for 25 volumes before immediately getting a side-story Gaiden series of its own that'd run until 2016 for another 16 volumes (41, in total), & from 2009 to 2011 would even get a 24-episode OVA adaptation by TMS that adapted up to just shy of the halfway point. There was also a short-lived manga version of Saint Seiya Omega by Bau in 2013 that only made it to one volume before the magazine it ran in (Kerokero Ace) got canned. Then there's 2020's Saint Seiya: Dark Wing by Kenji Saito (writer) & Shinsu Ueda (artist), which is an isekai story where a high school student & his classmates & teachers get reincarnated as the forces of Athena & Hades in a completely original plot from the OG series. Most recent of them all is the 2022 duo of Saint Seiya: Rerise of Poseidon by Tsunakan Suda, a midquel taking place during the Hades Chapter's latter half & sees Poseidon & his revived Mariners needing to protect the world from the forces of Nemesis, & Saint Seiya: Time Odyssey by Jérôme Alquié (writer/artist) & Arnaud Dollen (co-writer), which sees the OG cast take on the forces of Chronos. However, there's one spin-off manga that I didn't mention here, and that's because it's the only one to have received a complete official English release (since Ablaze is still currently releasing Time Odyssey, which itself it still ongoing).

Debuting in the pages of Akita Shoten's Champion Red magazine in mid-2013 (specifically two issues after Episode.G had ended), Saint Seiya: Saintia Sho was done by Chimaki Kuori, who at the time was known primarily for being the illustrator for a variety of light novels (Parsley Legend, Rumble Fish, Ambition Waltz, Mobile Suit Gundam: High Streamer, etc.) & for making the manga Gundam Seed Destiny: The Edge, which retold the events of the 2004 anime from the perspective of Athrun Zala. Not just that, but Saintia Sho itself was notably different from other Seiya spin-off manga of the time because it actively took place during the main plot of the original manga, instead of taking place either before the OG manga or in its own separate timeline; again, Rerise of Poseidon & Time Odyssey came later on. Not just that, but this was also a female-focused series, introducing the concept of Saintia, which acted as Athena's personal guard of handmaidens. Finally, though admittedly the most minor of all, the title itself (& the name of the main character) was a direct reference to Silent Knight Sho (right down the literal kanji for "翔/Sho"), the short-lived failure of a 1992 manga Kurumada made after Saint Seiya. Saintia Sho would run until mid-2021 & total 16 volumes (as well as receive a 10-episode ONA adaptation in late 2018 that was generally not liked by fans), but in 2017 Seven Seas announced that it had licensed the manga, the first time a manga with Masami Kurumada's name on it would receive an official English release since Viz & TokyoPop both finished their releases of Saint Seiya & B't X, respectively, in 2010.

Unfortunately, despite trying to initially market it to fans of Sailor Moon, Seven Seas' release of Saintia Sho seemed to bomb just as hard as Viz & TokyoPop's attempts at releasing Kurumada manga in English did back in the 00s. While there are no sales numbers to reflect this, it is telling that Seven Seas stopped printing the opening splash pages in color after Volume 9's release (i.e. it was no longer worth the extra cost to do that, though these pages were actually B&W in the original Japanese tankouban), the release schedule was admittedly never all that consistent to begin with (even when there was no worry about catching up to Japan early on), and Volume 15's physical release kept getting delayed after its digital release that once it finally came out the final volume would come out literally just a week later(!); also Seven Seas doesn't even bother to sell it on their own webstore, which I think says it all. Regardless, Seven Seas still managed to release all of Saint Seiya: Saintia Sho, releasing the final volume in January of 2023 (five years, faster than Viz or TokyoPop!), so as part of this blog's year-long celebration of Masami Kurumada's 50th Anniversary let's see if this spin-off was truly the right one to release in English for newcomers and if it's a good series, in & of itself.

Obscusion B-Side: Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog: 1996 (Part 2)

Previously on Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog:

"When you look at everything surrounding these four games released on the Atari Jaguar in the first three months of 1996 it's really only natural to wind up thinking negatively... Luckily, the titles that Atari Corp. were putting out in these final days are honestly really good to solid games...for as much flak that the Atari Jaguar has gotten in the decades since its release back in late 1993 the actual official catalog of games that came out on it has surprisingly veered more on the side of 'good-to-great' than being absolute crud, and even this late into the console's short life (officially) this remains true."

We finally made it, people. No, this isn't the final part of Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog (though this 11th entry was originally intended to be the end, before a much better release order was discovered), but we have made it to a true milestone when it comes to the life of the Jag itself: The End of Atari Corporation. As mentioned last time, barely a month after making an appearance at Winter CES in January of 1996 Atari Corp. announced that it would be entering a reverse merger with JT Storage, effectively resulting in the death of one of the two companies formed by the splitting of the original Atari, Inc. back in 1984. While we're not quite at that point juuuuuuust yet, we will be hitting it during this penultimate part of the series. Before we get there, though, we have April 1996 to go over, because in this month two things happen regarding the "Atari" brand. First, ironically enough, was the revival of Atari Games after Time Warner sold off its entire video game business to WMS Industries, which at the time owned Bally, Williams, & Midway's arcade games & brands; this was after Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell had put in an unsuccessful bid to buy Atari Games.

Meanwhile, right as Atari Games was coming back from the dead, Atari Corp. would release its final video game... one that simply added fuel to the ironic blaze with its very title.

Truly, it's only fitting that the final game Atari Corporation ever released on the Jaguar (& the company's final game, in general) would be titled Fight for Life, released on April 19. Like some other games for the console, this 3D fighter originally started development back in May 1994 & was designed & directed by Francois Yves Bertrand, who most notably was one of the first two non-Japanese employees for Sega's iconic AM2 team, with Bertrand handling the camera & collision system for the original Virtua Fighter. Bertrand eventually moved to the US, which is where he got hired by Atari to make Fight for Life, & he even got a friend of his, Silvio Porretta, a job at Atari to handle the texture artwork for the game. Unfortunately, Fight for Life's very development was its own "fight for life", as while Bertrand's actual development was going by fine it had a rotation of various people acting as producer, with one of them even making the higher ups believe that it'd redefine the entire genre! Later, when Atari sent preview copies out to video game magazines it accidentally labeled the cartridges as "For Review Only", which resulted in some mags actually reviewing the unfinished build as though it was complete!! Finally, while Bertrand had finished the overall development of Fight for Life by December 1995, he still felt that it needed more time for some extra polish. However, by this point Atari Corp. was already starting talks with JT Storage about the merger, which had resulted in Bertrand even getting fired from Atari, so Bertrand actually tried to hold off on giving Atari his final build for as long as he could, so as to give the game those last little touches. In the end, Bertrand would later admit that the version of Fight for Life that saw release was "in an almost finished state", and though there are rumors of a 100% finished build there's been no evidence of such a thing existing. Still, Bertrand enjoyed his time developing on the Jag, calling it an interesting piece of hardware, & felt that owners at the time respected the effort he put in, especially since it would be Atari's final hurrah for the console. However, does that really mean anything when it comes to how good or bad the actual final release is?

Twelve Short-Lived Musical Acts That Hit Hard with Their Only Anime Part 2

In music there's the concept of the "one-hit wonder", which is a musical act that is known primarily for only one song that wound up becoming a big hit in a major region (usually North America), but it's a concept that really is purely regional. Many "one-hit wonders" are, in fact, simply acts that were big in the region they came from (mostly Europe, in these examples) & remained relatively popular there, but only had that one fleeting moment of being a true worldwide smash. In the cases of these "one-hit anime wonders", as I called them at the end of Part 1, I wanted to make sure I avoided that technicality, as there are Japanese musical acts that have been around for a long time but only ever had their music officially matched to an anime a single time, or maybe they only had one anime for a long time but eventually wound up getting a second one. Examples of the latter would be Masatoshi Ono & Diamond Yukai, both of which had songs attached to the Rokudenashi Blues movies Toei made back in the early 90s, only to never get another anime attached to their name until the 2010s, namely with the Hunter x Hunter anime reboot & Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal II, respectively; Ono would later perform other anime theme songs. Even if they only had one anime to their respective names, though, I still wouldn't consider either Ono or Yukai for this list due to their longevity.

No, this is a list about those musical acts that truly had short lives, and only one anime to their respective names, so let's see what examples from the first decade of the 21st Century I could find.

When it comes to something like the music industry, it's sometimes just as important to have a memorable name as it is to produce memorable music, and it's arguably even more so when it's not a solo act. Group names are imperative, and there have been some especially unique & memorable ones throughout history. I bring this up because we start off with a duo who went with a name whose readability depends on how good someone is at reading phonetics. Formed in 1999, the duo of vocalist Kyou Kodama & guitarist/producer Rei Kimura decided to name their group "Exceed"... but not in that simplistic fashion. Sure, in Japanese the group's name is written in katakana (イクシード), but officially the proper spelling was [iksí:d], which is technically the way the word is written phonetically... maybe. According to the Cambridge dictionary the phonetic spelling for the word "exceed" is "/ɪkˈsiːd/", but at this point I think that'd be splitting hairs, so let's get to the actual musical duo.

Twelve Short-Lived Musical Acts That Hit Hard with Their Only Anime Part 1

Prior to the mid-80s, theme songs for anime were what were known as "anison", which was shorthand for "anime song". In other words, they were songs made precisely for the anime they were associated with & mostly performed by singers who essentially made their careers via performing anison. However, with anime becoming more & more prevalent in Japan, eventually music labels wanted to play larger roles in anime production, and an easy way to do so was to use a new anime, especially one that would air weekly on TV, to help promote a new music act. It's often cited that the City Hunter TV anime that debuted in 1987 is what popularized the concept, as it was the first anime where both of its initial OP & ED themes would enter the Oricon Top 10, but it was by no means the first TV anime to also act as blatant (& somewhat unrelated) music promotion. In fact, while I can't verify if it was the first one either, 1985's Blue Comet SPT Layzner was another show that did the same thing with its OP theme, "Melos no You ni -Lonely Way-" by Airmail from Nagasaki, & it's two ED themes by Seiko Tomizawa... only in Layzner's case neither of its promoted musical acts went on to achieve the continued success that both Kahoru Kohiruimaki & TM Network would go on to see via & after City Hunter, and both acts would break up or leave the music industry after only a handful of years of activity.

However, I would still argue that while Airmail from Nagasaki would break up shortly after Layzner finished airing, "Melos no You ni -Lonely Way-" is a stellar song, so while the band itself was only around for a handful of years they still hit hard. So I gathered together 12 other examples of musical acts that were only officially around for no more than five to seven years & only have a literal single anime to their names... but they all more than made up for that lack of physical longevity as a musical act by truly hitting hard with the one anime opportunity they each had.

While I am in the middle of a year-long celebration of Masami Kurumada's 50th Anniversary in manga, this starting the list is entirely coincidental, since I decided to simply organize this in chronological order, based on when each musical act was originally founded. Therefore, we start off with arguably one of the most iconic short-lived musical acts in anime theme song history: Make-Up. Originally founded in 1983, Make-Up was a rock band that, technically, was an off-shoot of iconic J-metal band Loudness. Originally, the name "Make-Up" was used for a band featuring Loudness' guitarist Akira Takasaki & drummer Munetaka Higuchi, before an old high school classmate of theirs named Hiroaki Matsuzawa took over, after Matsuzawa played guitar for Higuchi's 1983 solo album, Destruction ~Hakai Gaisenroku~. Also contributing to Higuchi's solo album was singer Nobuo "NoB" Yamada, who later joined Matsuzawa to be the vocalist for this new version of Make-Up, alongside keyboardist Yougo Kouno, bassist Yausyoshi Ikeda, & drummer Yoshihiro Toyokawa. With Higuchi acting as producer, Make-Up would finally make its official debut on April 4, 1984 with the album Howling Will, followed by three more albums (& three singles) up through mid-1986. Roughly a month after their third single, though, the TV anime adaptation of Masami Kurumada's newest manga Saint Seiya debuted... and with it was a duo of songs that would define Make-Up forevermore.

Oh Me, Oh My, OVA! ζ: Deus ex Rota II (Summer Lovin')

We've reached another third entry of this series where I look at a quarter of short OVA productions (i.e. no more than two episodes long), so just as we did in late 2022 with the third volume of OM, OM, OVA! this sixth volume has once again been chosen by a randomized virtual prize wheel! Last time this happened the results were a quartet that had no real shared theme between them (a toned-down adaptation of female erotica, a seemingly "impossible" anime sequel to a cult classic manga, a two-episode OVA solely meant to promote a fantasy manga, & Tatsunoko's 50th Anniversary production), and that's more or less what I kind of expect out of these prize wheel-determined volumes of OM, OM, OVA! that I plan on doing every third time around; a fun little grab bag that comes with no expectations beforehand. However, sometimes even random chance can have an overall theme to it, and that's the case here as The Almighty Wheel has chosen four OVAs that actually DO share an overall theme: Romance!

Specifically, The Wheel has picked two romantic comedies & two romantic dramas, so let's see how these OVAs fare for a guy who has had absolutely ZERO personal experience with romance! Still, the dog days of summer have already passed us by, so before I believe in a sign of zeta (or hope that better days are coming) I think I should have a blast, even if it happened so fast... Well-a well-a well-a huh!

"Tell me more, tell me more; did you get very far?" "Tell me more, tell me more; like does he have a car?"

We start off with a one-off that's actually a bit of an old cult-classic in English-speaking anime fandom, and also has a slightly more complex history behind it than you'd think: Outlanders. Released in late 1986, this ~45-minute OVA is based on the 1985-1987 manga of the same name by Johji Manabe than ran in Hakusensha's Monthly ComiComi for eight volumes & was actually Manabe's first serialized manga. Out of the four titles in this volume this is the least "romantic" of them all, as the manga is primarily a space opera, but there's still a focus on romantic comedy to be found, especially due in part to Manabe's love of drawing tough-yet-beautiful women; to no surprise, Manabe has made roughly as much adult manga & doujin as he's made other manga. As for Outlanders' history in English, it was actually one of the very first manga Dark Horse ever brought over (by way of the late Toren Smith & Studio Proteus), after being unable to license Akira, and while it certainly took a while all eight volumes would eventually see release in English between 1989 & 2000. As for the OVA, U.S. Renditions first licensed & released it via the Dark Image label in 1993 solely via dubbed VHS, with it being notable for featuring the only time legendary translator Trish Ledoux ever voiced a major character in a dub. In the mid-00s, though, Central Park Media would license rescue the OVA for a dual-audio DVD release (one of the company's final releases, in general), deciding to make a brand new dub in place of including the original one & even putting the casting of the four major roles to a fan poll; the OG dub was done by Animaze, while TripWire Productions handled the CPM dub. However, I'll just be going off of the original Japanese in this case, but let's see if Outlanders is still good enough to maintain that cult-favorite status.

Earth is suddenly invaded by an alien warship, and the military is more or less helpless against it. Japanese photographer Tetsuya Wakatsuki finds himself in the middle of an utterly one-sided fight with a humanoid woman wielding a sword, and when she goes for him he manages to parry her with his camera, before holding her back against a wall. Impressed, the woman kisses Tetsuya & knocks him out during his confusion. Tetsuya awakens inside the warship & finds out that the woman, Kahm, is the princess of the Evascurazen Empire, which feels that humanity has invaded their "sacred planet" & must be destroyed. Kahm, however, has become smitten with Tetsuya & wants to marry him, partially to save Earth & partially because she doesn't want her Emperor father to decide who she will marry, since her eventual child would be the heir of the Empire itself. Upon their arrival at the Evascurazen home planet, though, the Emperor instantly declares that Tetsuya must be executed, so it's up to Kahm & two friends, catgirl Battia & her wolfman boyfriend Geobaldy, to rescue Tetsuya & escape from the Empire so that they can elope.

Saint Seiya: Sanctuary Battle: "Seiya May Cry"? "Saint Gaiden"? How About "Sanctuary Musou"?

Being an iconic manga to come from Weekly Shonen Jump's "Golden Age", it's only natural that Saint Seiya has seen its fair share of video game adaptations, & when it comes to Masami Kurumada all but one video game adapted from his works is based on Saint Seiya; that outlier would be the Ring ni Kakero game for the Super Famicom, which I covered back in 2011. When it comes to Seiya, though, there actually isn't too much variety between the various video game adaptations. The very first would be 1987 & 1988's Saint Seiya: Ougon Densetsu/Golden Legend, a two-part Famicom RPG/action-platformer that together adapt the entire Sanctuary Chapter, & in 2003 the two games would be fused together & remade on the WonderSwan Color as Saint Seiya: Ougon Densetsu-hen Perfect Edition; these games are also generally considered quite trash. After a card battler RPG for the Game Boy in 1992 & a typing game for PC in 2002, the majority of the remaining Seiya video games that have been made all fit a single genre: Fighting games. In fact, even if you include the various mobile games based on Saint Seiya made in the past decade, you'd still get almost nothing but card games, RPGs, & fighting games, plus the single requisite slot machine & pachinko title. Out of the entire catalog of Saint Seiya video games, there's only one of them that released on a home console that is neither an RPG, card battler, nor fighting game.

Well, OK, it does involve fighting, but it's instead more of a beat-em-up or "character action" game.

Founded in 2000 by the legendary Takashi Nishiyama (creator of Moon Patrol, Kung-Fu Master, Street Fighter, & Fatal Fury), Dimps Corporation is an Osaka-based game studio that, true to its founder, quickly became known for its prowess in making fighting games; that said, Dimps does also develop in other genres, too. In particular, Dimps would become especially reliable for making fighting games based on various anime & manga, like Digimon, Shaman King, InuYasha, One Piece, Dragon Ball, etc., so it's only natural that Dimps would eventually be handed the job of making a Saint Seiya fighting game. That would come about in 2005 with Saint Seiya: The Sanctuary for the PlayStation 2, a 2.5D fighter (with sidestepping) based on the Sanctuary Chapter, specifically the battles with the Gold Saints, and in 2007 a sequel would be released on the PS2 titled Saint Seiya: The Hades, which obviously was a similar fighter based on the Hades Chapter, specifically the first portion taking place in Sanctuary; seeing as the series is super popular in Europe these two games did see English release in PAL regions. This duo of games was essentially the basis for two full 3D arena fighters later developed by Dimps, 2013's Saint Seiya: Brave Soldiers & 2015's Saint Seiya: Soldiers' Soul, which both came out for the PS3 (as well as PS4 & PC for the latter) & opened up the roster to the entirety of the manga/anime's plot; also, since digital-only releases were now more of a thing, these two games did in fact see release in North America. However, in between these two pairs of fighting games (& taking aside the Saint Seiya Omega PSP fighting game & Saint Seiya Online, neither of which came from Dimps), there's one more Dimps-developed Seiya game to bring up... and it's the aforementioned "character action" game.

Released in Japan on November 23, 2011, Saint Seiya Senki/Record of Saint Seiya War was the first Saint Seiya video game released for an HD-compatible console, specifically the PlayStation 3. Unlike its prior two efforts, Dimps did NOT make a fighter & instead developed a stage-based 3D action game, with the game split up between stages where players took on large swaths of foes at once, a la the Musou Series, & stages where players took on a single powerful boss. That being said, though, this game was still only adapting the Sanctuary Chapter, specifically the battles with the Gold Saints; iconography & all, you know? Just as with the prior two games on the PS2, though, Saint Seiya's popularity in certain other regions did result in the game getting an English translation & release in Europe (& even South America, this time!) in 2012, now under the title Saint Seiya: Sanctuary Battle. In fact, Europe even received two different special edition releases of Sanctuary Battle, one that came with a Myth Coth figure & one that came with a life-size plastic replica of the Gold Sagittarius Cloth's headpiece(!), complete with a stand to display it. Compared to the two arena fighters that came before it, Saint Seiya: Sanctuary Battle was generally received a little bit more warmly than its precursors, though the reception was still mixed overall. However, I remember playing the game back in the day & enjoying it, and since this year is (mostly) about celebrating Masami Kurumada's 50th Anniversary in manga I think it's time I give Sanctuary Battle another go & see how it holds up, especially as in the ~13 years since its original release it remains a true outlier amongst Saint Seiya video game adaptations.

Masami Kurumada 50th Anniversary Trivia Track: Six Neat, Important, or Interesting Factoids

On "August 12, 1974" (or thereabouts) Issue #33 of Weekly Shonen Jump for that year saw the appearance of a one-shot manga in the third-to-last spot. This one-shot was titled Sukeban Arashi/Delinquent Storm & was made by a 19-year old newbie named Masami Kurumada, a resident of Tsukushima, Chuo, Tokyo (the alleged birthplace of monjayaki) who had previously worked as an assistant for artist Ko Inoue for the baseball manga Samurai Giants, which itself would end just nine issues later. It is now exactly 50 years since that date, and over the course of those five decades Masami Kurumada went from a simple delinquent-turned-"mangaya" to an iconic & influential mangaka who focuses primarily on making action-packed manga for male readers, but with a goal of also attracting a female readership by way of his art style, which by his own words (though the website that had it has unfortunately gone away) tries to "find a way to simultaneously express the dynamics & power of shonen manga with the elegance & fantasy of shojo manga".

"My characters will kick ass & bleed buckets,
but they'll also look utterly FABULOUS while doing so!"

While Sukeban Arashi wound up not becoming a hit by any means, Kurumada would go on to find great success with some of his later manga, namely Ring ni Kakero (1976-1981), Fuma no Kojirou (1982-1983), Saint Seiya (1986-1990), & B't X (1994-2000), becoming a mangaka who would later inspire others to become managka themselves, like Takehiko Inoue, CLAMP, Yun Kouga, & Tite Kubo, or influence his contemporaries to follow in his lead, like Yudetamago, Yoichi Takahashi, Tetsuo Hara, & Akira Toriyama. A ton of what makes shonen action manga such a popular & beloved genre around the world is owed, in part, to Masami Kurumada setting so much of it in stone with Ring ni Kakero, so much so that in 2014 Shueisha even promoted it for its digital re-release as the "Hot-Blooded Fighting Manga Bible", despite it technically being a boxing manga. Throughout this entire year I've been writing reviews & other pieces related to Kurumada's various manga to celebrate his 50th Anniversary year. However, for the literal day of the 50th Anniversary itself, let's take a look at six bits of fun and/or cool trivia I've managed to dig up regarding the man himself.

Otoko Zaka (The Shonen Jump+ Run): 未完 No More

Previously on the Otoko Zaka Review:

"Masami Kurumada has so far taken his second chance at making Otoko Zaka, and given it the love & care he always planned for...After roughly 24 years, Masami Kurumada has finally returned home..."

'He's coming home, he's coming home; tell the world he's coming home.

Let the rain wash away all the pain of cancelling.

He knows Shonen Jump awaits, & he's forgiven their mistakes.

He's coming home, he's coming home; tell the world he's coming...home.'

On "November 16, 1992" (or thereabouts) the final weekly chapter of Silent Knight Sho was serialized in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump, & with it marked the end of Masami Kurumada's 18-year run with the magazine. Aside from an irregular run in Super Jump for Akane-Iro no Kaze through 1993 & 1994, Kurumada wouldn't publish another new manga with Shueisha until 2000 with Ring ni Kakero 2, also through Super Jump. While he still allowed Shueisha to re-publish his old works throughout all this it seemed as though Kurumada was done with Shonen Jump & its "Jump Comics" label... until 2014. As part of his 40th Anniversary celebration Masami Kurumada decide to revive Otoko Zaka, the 1984 manga he intended to be his magnum opus but wound up seeing cancellation in 1985 after 30 weekly chapters, infamously using the kanji "未完/mikan", or "Incomplete", on the final page to emphasize his dissatisfaction at the time. While this revival would be serialized in the digital pages of Weekly PlayNews, the new physical tankouban for Otoko Zaka would still be published under the "Jump Comics" label, to maintain continuity with the initial three volumes that collected the original Shonen Jump run; similar treatment had previously been given to Bastard!!, Ninku, & JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

However, the revival of Otoko Zaka would only be serialized through Weekly PlayNews from 2014 to 2016 across three chunks, which made up Volumes 4 to 6. That's because shortly after Otoko Zaka's return Shueisha debuted a new digital manga platform, and eventually it was seemingly decided that since Otoko Zaka debuted in "Shonen Jump" then it should end in "Shonen Jump".

Yeah, it's weird to make the literal final page the opening image...
But for a manga with history like this, it's only fitting.

Launched on September 22, 2014, Shonen Jump+ was created to replace Jump LIVE, a short-lived digital manga platform from Shueisha, and not only offered a digital version of each new issue of Weekly Shonen Jump for a fee but would also be the home of various manga serializations that were exclusive to Jump+, ones that would be allowed more relaxed restrictions than over at the magazine itself, similar to titles that run in Jump's monthly magazine counterpart, Jump Square. This is where titles like Spy x Family, Astra Lost in Space, Summer Time Rendering, Kaiju No. 8, Kindergarten Wars, Fire Punch, & the current run of Chainsaw Man all come from, and in 2023 Shueisha promised to simulpublish almost every new manga that debuts in Shonen Jump+ in English via its Manga Plus app; the only exceptions are manga based on licensed IP & ones labeled "Indies". Eventually it was decided that the revival of Otoko Zaka would get moved over to Shonen Jump+, and on July 14, 2017 the first chapter of what would later become Volume 7 of Otoko Zaka was published digitally on Jump+, marking the first time in roughly 25 years that a "new" Masami Kurumada manga was being serialized in "Shonen Jump"; however, all future volumes would continue to use the "Jump Comics" brand, instead of the "Jump Comics+" brand Jump+-exclusives use. After all this time, it felt as though Masami Kurumada had truly returned "home".

Masami Kurumada would publish Otoko Zaka via Shonen Jump+ across six chunks (in 2017, 2018, twice in 2020, & twice in 2023), and on November 11, 2023 the true final chapter of Otoko Zaka, fittingly titled Farewell, Jingi, was published on Jump+, bringing a definitive end to a manga Kurumada had first started back in July of 1984. It took Kurumada nearly 40 years, but the story of Jingi Kikukawa had finally come to an end, totaling 72 chapters (90, if you go off the original run's weekly chapter count) across 11 volumes, 60 of which came from the revival's eight new volumes of content between 2014 & 2023. I first reviewed Otoko Zaka back in 2015, where I covered "The Original Run", & then returned to it in 2018, where I covered "The Weekly PlayNews Run", so now it's finally time that I do like Kurumada & finish what I started. As part of this blog's year-long celebration of Masami Kurumada's 50th Anniversary in manga, let's go over Volumes 7 to 11 of Otoko Zaka, i.e. "The Shonen Jump+ Run".

Obscusion B-Side: Not-Quite-Limitless Potential: Playing Half-Life 1 & 2 on Comparative "Potato" Consoles

Normally, something like Half-Life would be the furthest thing from a subject I'd cover over here. After all, this series from Valve is one of the most influential video games of all time, both for the first-person shooter genre itself as well as gaming as a whole due to its revolutionary storytelling techniques via the exclusive usage of scripted sequences instead of cutscenes, its excellent gameplay that mixes together traditional FPS gameplay with a heavier focus on environmental puzzle solving & the like, and its habit of being on the cutting edge of technology via its game engines, whether it was GoldSrc for Half-Life in 1998, Source (& Havok, for the physics) for Half-Life 2 in 2004, or Source 2 (& VR, in general) for Half-Life: Alyx in 2020. Without a doubt, Half-Life is one of the most important video game franchises of all time, and the games themselves are some of the best I've ever played. These games have been picked apart to no end by countless other people online, so what can I possibly provide in that regard?

Well, as Stephen Colbert will sometimes joke on The Late Show, the answer... "is potato".

In tech speak, a "potato" is a piece of hardware that has much-too-low specs compared to what someone is trying to utilize it for. In terms of gaming that would equate to trying to play a game on a computer using hardware that likely isn't even quite up to snuff with the minimum requirements, but you're still curious about just what'll happen if you boot the game up regardless; I mean, there's a mod for Doom 3 that lets it run on Windows 98 & a Voodoo2 card... and it's amazing. This is because PC hardware is an ever-evolving thing, while their console brethren are (for the most part) fixed architecture, and it wasn't until the seventh generation in the mid-00s (at the very earliest) that the gap between the two truly lessened, as console manufacturers started to simply rely primarily on PC-based hardware to power their machines. Therefore, when a PC game from the 90s got ported to console at the time it was often a case of having it play on a comparative "potato" when put against the PC tech it was designed to work with. In that regard, Valve has been rather conservative when it comes to releasing its games on console, & that's doubly so when it comes to Half-Life, as the first game only saw one official console port released (for the PlayStation 2), while Half-Life 2 only saw "two" (for the Xbox, & later Xbox 360/PS3 via The Orange Box). Therefore, on this 20th Anniversary year of Half-Life 2's original release on PC, I want to see how well these amazing games still hold up when played in their most potato-y of forms.

For Half-Life 2 that means revisiting it on the original Xbox, which is actually how I first played the game back in the day, but before that we should revisit the original Half-Life & for that it means playing something that wasn't actually released... at least officially.

Obscusion B-Side: Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog: 1996 (Part 1)

Previously on Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog:

"While 1995 was easily the Jaguar's most prolific year in terms of releases, and in all honesty most of it was either excellent, good, or even just decent, the final four games released for Atari's flagging console in this year wound up being a pretty lackluster send off... but there's still another 12 games left to cover, and while 1996 won't exactly be anywhere near as prolific as 1995 was, it's going to be a bumpy ride, nonetheless."

The original Atari, Inc. was founded on June 27, 1972 by Nolan Bushnell & Ted Dabney. On May 17, 1984, ex-Commodore co-founder Jack Tramiel founded Tramiel Technology solely for the purpose of buying the home console & computer division of Atari, Inc. from current owner Warner Communications, renaming the company Atari Corporation on July 1. Over the course of the next 12 years Atari Corp. tried its best to stay relevant in the gaming industry, whether it was the various Atari 8-bit computers during most of the 80s, the Atari 7800 to combat the NES & Sega Master System (plus reviving the iconic 2600 as a budget-priced alternative), the Atari Lynx to combat Nintendo's Game Boy, and finally the Atari Jaguar to combat the Super Nintendo & Sega Genesis. It is now the start of 1996, and Atari Corp. is finally making its first public showing that it's leaving hardware behind entirely. Namely, during Winter CES, Atari Corp. announced the formation of Atari Interactive, a division which would focus on PC software, with ports of Tempest 2000, Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods, Baldies (an RTS game by Creative Edge Software that actually first launched on the Jaguar CD on January 3, the day after this announcement) and FlipOut! planned as the first releases from the division, while further releases were planned to include Missile Command 3D, Return to Crystal Castles, Interactive Rocky Horror Show, and Virtual War, the last three of which were games that had not been previously released before. Unfortunately, due to a certain event that we'll get to in a bit, Atari Interactive never actually released anything, though the name of the division itself would see actual use a couple of years later.

But none of this is about the Atari Jaguar, which still has some games scheduled for release, despite Atari Corp. being essentially done with the console by this point! Luckily, a week after Winter CES happened two new Jag games would see release... and, believe it or not, they're both ports of good games!

There are only two pairs of games released for the Jaguar left that saw release on the same day, and both happened in 1996. The first pair came out on January 10, so let's start with the obvious bigger name of the two: NBA Jam: Tournament Edition. Released in April of 1993, NBA Jam was an arcade cabinet developed & distributed by Midway that acted as a spiritual successor to 1989's Arch Rivals. Both were 2-on-2 full-court basketball games that emphasized rough play & wild action, but Jam differed by being a properly licensed NBA product, so it featured all of the teams seen in the 1992-1993 NBA season, though some major names were not included due to licensing rights, namely Michael Jordan & Gary Peyton (though Midway produced special cabs for those two that featured them as their own team), and after the initial arcade release Shaquille O'Neal, Dražen Petrović & Reggie Lewis were also removed, the former due to Shaq following Jordan's lead with licensing, while the latter two sadly passed away after the initial arcade cabs went out. NBA Jam would go on to be a massive success, becoming the most popular arcade machine that year & even outperforming Jurassic Park's box office. The game also singlehandedly turned voice actor Tim Kitzrow into a legend through his iconic announcing heard throughout. In February 1995 Midway released NBA Jam: T.E., which added in updated rosters & new ballers (including five "rookies" from the 1994 NBA draft, including future legends Jason Kidd & Grant Hill), some minor new mechanics (substitutions & more baller attributes), & the titular "Tournament Mode", among other things; I can't even go into any detail regarding the hidden characters, because it's just insane. Jam saw release on pretty much any console hardware it could at the time (with few exceptions, like the 3DO & Neo Geo), with the Jaguar port by High Voltage Software (the studio's final Jaguar game to see release) being one of the very last, alongside the PC port. How does it hold up, and does it at least start off the Jag's 1996 on a good note?

Silent Knight Sho: Never Say Never Again... Unless It's "NEVER END"

In Issue #49 of Weekly Shonen Jump in 1990 the final weekly chapter of Masami Kurumada's Saint Seiya was serialized, bringing an end to a 246-week run across a solid five years; the actual finale to the manga would appear in the December issue of V Jump the following month. Despite it being the biggest success in his entire career, becoming the first of his works to both get adapted to anime & released internationally, it still eventually suffered a loss in popularity & found itself cancelled before Kurumada could fully tell the entire story he had planned, though he was at least allowed to finish the story arc he was on. However, this now also meant that his past two works for Jump, Otoko Zaka & Saint Seiya, had both gotten cancelled, and with a career that dated back to the mid-70s it's arguable that Masami Kurumada was possibly feeling a bit outdated to the then-current Jump reader base.  After all, by the time Seiya got cancelled the only Weekly Jump mangaka still around in 1990 that dated back to the 70s, alongside Kurumada, were Osamu Akimoto, Akira Miyashita, & Yudetamago, and the latter two only just barely, as both made their serialized debuts in mid-1979. Therefore, instead of jumping straight into a new series Kurumada decided to instead take advantage of Jump's Seasonal Specials, publishing a baseball one-shot titled Aoi Tori no Shinwa in the 1991 Spring Special, before following it up three specials later with a continuation in the 1992 Winter Special. Despite seemingly wanting to make it into a proper serialization, Aoi Tori no Shinwa never went beyond those two connected one-shots... and here's where hearsay comes into play.

If you look around online, the general rumor is that after putting the kibosh on Saint Seiya Shueisha told Masami Kurumada to simply recreate Saint Seiya's success by making something like it, despite having just cancelled the series the publisher seemingly wanted Kurumada to replicate. However, that's generally worded as though Kurumada's next manga came right after Seiya, ignoring Aoi Tori no Shinwa's two-off existence & instead wanting to portray Shueisha as being incompetent. But, like any good rumor, there may still be a nugget of truth behind it, because Kurumada's next serialized manga would very much look immensely similar to his biggest hit. Therefore, it is entirely possible that Shueisha (or, at least, his editor at Jump) did request that Kurumada try to create a "new Saint Seiya", but instead of coming off like pure incompetence it likely would have been due to the fact that Kurumada was nearing a solid 1.75 years without any real/proper serialization, which would surpass his prior record of just slightly over a full year, that being the gap between Sukeban Arashi & Ring ni Kakero. This was close to the roughly two whole years between the end of Fuma no Kojirou (late 1983) & the start of Saint Seiya (early 1986), so it's entirely possible that Shueisha was thinking that a new generation of Jump readers would be around to enjoy a new take on what Kurumada had hit big with previously & make it their own, similar to how Kurumada had Saint Seiya reuse ideas, names, & terminology from his older works for that then-new generation. I mean, by mid-1992 Shonen Jump was filled with a new breed of manga that didn't even exist when Saint Seiya's final weekly chapter first appeared, with the only remnants of the 80s & earlier being Kochikame, Dragon Ball, Rokudenashi Blues, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, & Magical Taruruuto-kun, and that last one was only five weeks from ending; Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai did debut in the tail end of 1989, but that's more a technicality. To be perfectly honest, if "Just make a new Saint Seiya for the 90s" truly was Shueisha's idea for Kurumada by mid-1992, I can actually see the logic in it.

Ring ni Kakero, in Masami Kurumada & Others' Words: The Author's Notes & Afterwords (feat. shumpulations) Part 2: Volumes 10-18

It's been a while, but shumpulations & I are finally back with the second round of author's notes & afterwords from the original 25-volume tankouban release of Ring ni Kakero, which came out between 1978 & 1983 in Japan. In the first round back in January we checked out what came with the first nine volumes, which included some of Masami Kurumada's earliest short messages to his readers & longer messages written mostly by professional boxers of the time, all of which had been WBC and/or WBA champions for their respective weight classes at one point or another, with three of Kurumada's fellow Jump mangaka pulling up the rear for that chunk. This time around, though, we'll be seeing the inverse as Volumes 10 to 18 will mostly be featuring Jump mangaka writing the afterwords, with only three being written by those from outside of the industry (& one of them isn't even a boxer!).

So let's not dawdle about any further & see what messages we have in store for this second chunk of volumes! Which mangaka will poke fun at Kurumada? Which boxers will get to tell their personal stories? Will Masami Kurumada himself retroactively put his foot in his mouth due to now-old-fashioned ideals?!

Volume 10 of Ring ni Kakero came out on February 15, 1980, right as the World Tournament had ended in Weekly Shonen Jump, which saw Kurumada essentially "kill off" all five members of Golden Japan Jr., despite the final page of that arc literally telling readers to look forward to a new chapter the following issue; weekly serialization can be a hoot. As for the author's note for the first double-digit volume of the manga, Kurumada thinks back to when Guts Ishimatsu (who wrote Volume 3's afterword) won the WBC Lightweight Championship in 1974 & something he had heard Ishimatsu did the moment he became champion: Telling off everyone who didn't believe in him:

"It's an old story, but I heard that when Guts Ishimatsu won the World Title, he turned to the audience and yelled, 'You idiots!'. It was his way of paying back the world for not recognizing him. For a young man with no money, no education, and no parental support, such a moment where one can say that to the whole world must come rarely, if at all. Incidentally, I think a manga artist is one of the few professions where you get to say 'You Idiots!'"

As for Volume 10's afterword we have mangaka Mitsuyuki Takashina, better known in Japan by his pen name, Kontaro. While not really known at all abroad, Kontaro is known in Japan most for his gag manga, particularly his first big hit from Shonen Jump, 1975's 1・2 no Ahho!!, which was a nonsensical comedic baseball series. By early 1980 Kontaro was actually more or less done with Shonen Jump, as neither of his later works (1978's Ruse! Ruse! & 1979's Kuroki Taka) made it beyond short runs, and in 1981 he'd debut his other well known work, the salaryman manga Isshokenmei Hajime-kun, in Young Jump. Kontaro is also known in Japan for being the man that Tadashi Sato (Moeru! Onii-san) & Tomokazu Sato (Ghost Mama Sousasen), no seeming relation, were assistants for, & Kontaro is also the uncle to modern-day J-pop/rock singer Saasa. Kontaro is still making manga to this day, most recently reviving his first hit in 2020 with Kaettekita 1・2 no Ahho!! as an online serialization for Comic Gakuen. For Volume 10 of RnK Kontaro, as a member of the "Daimanzoku" baseball team he, Kurumada, Osamu Akimoto, & Satoshi Ikezawa formed (see Part 1 for more details), recalls when he first met Kurumada back in 1975, how Kurumada's physical demeanor shattered his preconceptions of what a mangaka looked like, and how Kurumada himself slowly achieved the "major" success he was experiencing come 1980... as well as making a playful jab at Kurumada's own physical stature, or slight lack thereof; this actually isn't the only time we'll see that last one, too: