Ring ni Kakero, in Masami Kurumada & Others' Words: The Author's Notes & Afterwords (feat. shmuplations) Part 1: Volumes 1-9

As part of this overall celebration of Masami Kurumada for his 50th Anniversary I figured that I'd try to include as many of his biggest hits in some way or another, but that brought about a problem: I've long covered more or less everything I really can when it comes to Ring ni Kakero. As it's my favorite manga from Kurumada I kind of exhausted every real aspect of it that I can think of, whether it's reviewing the manga, reviewing the anime (twice, in full, at that!), reviewing the video game, reviewing the next-gen sequel, reviewing the Manga DVD, reviewing the image album (primarily composed by a pre-Nausicaä Joe Hisaishi!), creating a fun little "trivia track", covering what I felt were the "best bouts", covering my personal favorite superblows, doing a four-part recap of the early portion of the manga that the anime (mostly) skipped over, & even buying the original tankouban version of the manga so that I could see what exactly the "Deluxe Edition" re-release in 2001 & 2002 changed up. However, seeing as I still own those 25 tankouban (yes, it's technically "tankoubon/standalone book" in Japanese, but it's not as though "standalone edition" is exactly wrong, either), there is one last aspect of Ring ni Kakero that I can cover, & truly bring an end to my ability to cover this series that I absolute love: The Author's Notes & Afterwords.

I got nothing better to use for an intro image, so here's the
rarely seen English logo from Déclic Images' old DVD release of Season 1.

If you've read a manga before, especially those from Shonen Jump, then you know what these two things are, especially the first. At the start of each volume of a manga there's usually a short paragraph (at most) from the mangaka, either discussing some aspect of the content seen in that volume of the story or simply bringing up whatever random thought came to mind at that moment. Meanwhile, sometimes at the end of a volume there can be a message from the mangaka in regards to the series itself, though this is usually most often seen at the end of the final volume, where the mangaka can reminisce on the creation & serialization of the manga & what the advancement of that time meant to them. These would be the author's note & afterword, respectively, and while the original 25-volume tankouban release of Ring ni Kakero naturally has the former, it also has the latter... in each & every volume. You see, when Shueisha started releasing the RnK tankouban it decided to have a guest write a two-page afterword at the end of each volume, and while professional boxers initially handled the honors, since it's technically a boxing manga, as the series went into a more spectacle-focused execution & became a massive hit Shueisha decided to change focus & have other mangaka then working for Jump write the afterwords, & they focused more on Masami Kurumada himself & what he meant to them. Of these there is one that is actually a little well known now online, Akira Toriyama's afterword in Volume 23, but there are 24 other volumes of RnK & I was curious to see what these all said. However, while I can do a little minor translation for myself when in a pinch, the amount of work needed for these are well beyond my abilities.

Therefore, I wound up hiring shmuplations, the "repository of Japanese game developer translations", to translate each author's note & afterword found in all 25 volumes of Ring ni Kakero's original tankouban release, as they've never been included in any other release of the manga (bunkoban, wideban, or the RnK1 Deluxe Edition), & let's see for our own eyes what Masami Kurumada & others had to say about RnK (& Kurumada) as the manga itself was coming out back in the late 70s & early 80s. Since this is a lot of content this will be spread out across three parts throughout the year, & let's start with Volumes 1 to 9.

50 Years of Masami Kurumada's (Mostly) Hot-Blooded Manga: A Career Overview

[Please Note: This is a piece that will continually be updated as I gradually cover more titles on the blog & fill in gaps. If anything, this likely won't truly be considered "complete" until Masami Kurumada truly retires from making manga or passes away.]

"That manga drawer on that day, even now, continues to run down the unmarked road"

- Masami Kurumada 23th Anniversary Illustrated Collection: Burning Blood, Page 5

Born on December 6, 1953 in Tsukishima, Chuo, Tokyo to a family of tobishoku (a Japanese variant to a steeplejack, but not quite a 1:1 equivalent), Masami Kurumada has always been someone who's been attracted to fighting. As a child he was a bit of a delinquent, often getting into fights, and while he was naturally a fan of reading manga he always felt that such an occupation was beyond him, as he was under the impression that only those with notable accomplishments could enter that career, like Osamu Tezuka having an actual medical doctorate. However, that all changed when he first read Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump, a manga about a delinquent who becomes the leader of a gang of delinquents & heads to Tokyo to tackle societal issues, usually by beating people up, if need be. While Kurumada loved the manga itself, he was also enthralled by its creator, a young man named Hiroshi Motomiya... who himself was a relatively normal guy who had a history of delinquency & getting into fights as a child, just like Kurumada. Now with the assurance that you didn't need to be someone special to get into manga, Kurumada started practicing & honing his skills as an artist, and during his third year of high school submitted a one-shot to Shonen Jump, with hopes of winning the Young Jump Award for newcomers (now currently known as the Jump New World Manga Award). He didn't win the Award, nor was he even selected for an honorable mention, but instead of simply accepting defeat Kurumada did something a bit brazen: He went to publisher Shueisha's offices in Tokyo (since it was local), found the Shonen Jump Editorial Department, & straight up asked why he wasn't selected.

Masami Kurumada in the 70s vs. 2023,
via photos on his own website.

Seemingly impressed with the gumption he showed in doing this, Kurumada was offered the chance to work as an assistant to Ko Inoue, who at the time was drawing the baseball manga Samurai Giants for Weekly Shonen Jump, which was written by the legendary Ikki Kajiwara, author of instant classics like Star of the Giants & Ashita no Joe, two of Kurumada's favorites. There's also mention online of Kurumada working as an assistant for Hiroshi Motomiya & even Yoshihiro Takahashi at one point or another, but there's never been anything proving (or even disproving, to be fair) that either actually happened.  With newfound experience working under Inoue, Kurumada would eventually make his professional debut in mid-1974 in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump with Sukeban Arashi, and 2024 marks the 50th Anniversary of Masami Kurumada's debut as a professional mangaka. If you've been reading this blog for the past 13+ years (or at least look at the Master List section) you'll see that I've covered Masami Kurumada's works a decent amount, and that's simply because he is my favorite mangaka of all time. Therefore, to celebrate Kurumada's Golden Anniversary in manga, I have decided to make all of 2024 dedicated to the man's works, primarily his manga. Every month this year will feature at least one piece about Masami Kurumada, and while the majority of those will be manga reviews (to fill in as many gaps in his catalog that I haven't previously reviewed) there will also be non-review pieces dedicated to Kurumada's career & works, and of course the year will include various pieces (reviews, B-Sides/Lists, etc.) that won't be about Kurumada at all.

Starting things off, then, will be this overview of Masami Kurumada's career & the various manga that he himself has drawn (i.e. spin-offs by other artists will be acknowledged, but not focused on), so that those who maybe have only heard of the name but aren't all that familiar with his catalog can at least get a general idea of what Kurumada brought to manga, why he's so important to the industry as a whole, & why I feel he's worth dedicating an entire year to for his Golden Anniversary. So let's get started, shall we? Trust me, there's A LOT to go over...

Obscusion B-Side: Hydrophobia (Pure & Prophecy): Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Founded in 1998, Blade Interactive was an English development studio formed from the collapse of Mirage Technologies (Multimedia), the studio best known for the legendarily infamous Rise of the Robots, and at first Blade made its name developing billiards & snooker games, most notably the World Championship Snooker series. Aside from the occasional racing game, namely Room Zoom & G-Surfers/HSX: Hypersonic.Xtreme, billiards/snooker was really all that Blade Interactive worked on, but one of its staff (Huw Lloyd) was also working on something interesting: The Hydro Engine. As the name says, the Hydro Engine was all about allowing water to be treated like a realistic & dynamic fluid in a video game environment, including being able to both fill enclosed spaces & drain out of openings in said spaces. Understandably, this sounded like an awesome bit of tech to work with, so it was decided to create a game that could take full advantage of the Hydro Engine, but at the same time Blade Interactive technically didn't want its name associated with this. Instead, this game was developed by a studio called Dark Energy Digital, and while it was never outright stated it looks as though Blade simply outright changed its name to Dark Energy, as according to the Wayback Machine Blade's website more or less stopped existing after 2008, while Dark Energy's website started up in 2009; also, Dark Energy did make at least one snooker game, continuing Blade's legacy.

First revealed at the start of 2007, Hydrophobia would eventually be announced for release in March 2009 as a traditional retail release, but wound up getting hit with various delays before getting changed to a timed exclusive for Xbox 360 that Microsoft Studios even published itself via Xbox Live Arcade on September 29, 2010. Though what was released was actually just the first part of a three-episode series (which was a common way of releasing digital games, at the time), initial critical reception towards Hydrophobia was only mixed at best, and while creative director/designer Pete Jones, who was also part of Dark Energy's PR team & even credited as creating the original story of the game's narrative, admitted that it was difficult to accept the negative reception, he said that everyone at Dark Energy would do everything they could to improve the game; again, this guy was a producer for Rise of the Robots, so he certainly had experience with this kind of reaction. To Dark Energy's credit, three months later the game received an update on December 21, 2010 dubbed Hydrophobia Pure (though it's never stated as such in-game) which featured all manner of fixes & changes, including ones to the controls, physics, mechanics, camera & map systems, & it even removed superfluous dialogue in some cutscenes. Not content with just that, Dark Energy would then release a third version of the game, titled Hydrophobia Prophecy, for PlayStation 3 & Windows (via Steam), which the studio considered a "Version 1.5" that included a bunch of brand new additions & changes that weren't in Pure; the Windows version first saw release on May 9, 2011, while the PS3 version wouldn't come out until November 1, 2011. Unfortunately, all of this hard work wouldn't pay off, as Dark Energy Digital would close its doors on March 19, 2012. While sales numbers were never revealed for any version of Hydrophobia, leaderboards revealed only 24,532 people ever completed the game on 360 by January 2011, just four months after the initial release & roughly one month after the Pure update. Checking the leaderboards nowadays show just over 205,000 people overall on Xbox & just over 100,000 on PS3, but that's after another decade+ of sales; still, those aren't exactly the numbers Dark Energy was hoping for, I imagine.

However, & most interestingly enough, Hydrophobia has managed to not disappear into the ether & become delisted, as the 360 version is not only still available for sale (for $9.99, though it's gone on sale once in a while) but was even added to the backwards compatibility list for Xbox One (& later Xbox Series) on February 26, 2019, meaning that you can play it with improved performance & the like when compared to playing it on the 360. Meanwhile, the Windows version of Prophecy is also still available for sale over on Steam (for just $4.99), though the PS3 version has since been delisted from the PS Store, though I did purchase it long ago. In fact, the leaderboards show that four other people besides me have played the game on PS3 over the past week of me playing this for review... & I only got second place for the entire campaign; curse you, PolarPhantom! The rights to Hydrophobia are now with Cherry Pop Games, a Manchester-based studio (just like Blade & Dark Energy) that has some of the same staff, like Pete Jones; Cherry Pop even makes billiards & snooker games! So let's go over Hydrophobia (Pure) & Hydrophobia Prophecy, see how they differ (& which one is arguably better), & decide if this game is more deservedly unfinished tech demo or if it's actually better than expected.

Obscusion B-Side: Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog: 1995 (Part 4)

Previously on Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog:

"While the chances of this next batch of releases for the Atari Jaguar actually matching up to the sheer quality we had last time were slim, what we got in this third part of 1995 actually wasn't terrible, on the whole... Regardless, Atari Corporation still couldn't really take advantage of the opening that Sega's poor launch of the Saturn had given them, effectively pulling a Shaq or Wilt Chamberlain & throwing bricks when given free throws (fitting metaphor, for this part). Now it's Sony's time to enter the North American video game market as a first-party hardware provider..."

Before we begin, I should give an update. For the past seven parts of this series I had simply relied on Wikipedia for the (loose) order of releases for the Atari Jaguar's official catalog, mainly because there was nothing even remotely close to "official" & "definitive". That all changed on Halloween of this year, when a Twitter user named Pimpeaux unleashed a highly researched & much more accurate release schedule for the Jag's official catalog, not dissimilar to what a place like the Atari Archive has done for pre-NES console catalogs; this is likely as close to "definitive" as we'll ever get. Looking over Pimpeaux's list I was overall not too far off, but as the list went on there were some notable changes in order, but what's done is done; I won't go back & change what I've done already. However, from this point on, I will be relying on Pimpeaux's list, and doing so now means that this series will be changing from 11 parts to 12, as 1996 will now be split into two parts due to some (then-thought) late 1995 games actually coming out the following year. Also, instead of always featuring four or five games, some future parts (like this one) will only feature three; however, to make up for that I'll try to include more general overviews of what was happening around the releases of the included games.

So... where did we leave off? Oh, that's right! U R NOT E

Talk about overshadowing...

On September 9, 1995, Sony Computer Entertainment of America released the PlayStation in North America at an MSRP of $299, a price that head of development Steve Race legendarily announced succinctly at the very first E3 earlier that same year in response to Sega's surprise launch of the Saturn (& to rousing applause). Though the low price point would result in SCEA's President & CEO Olaf Olafsson being forced to resign (as he pushed it through, despite resistance from higher ups in Japan), it also was all SCEA needed to instantly cut Sega of America off at the knees, and the decision to have the console focus primarily on polygonal graphics from the very beginning helped make the PlayStation (I'll mostly use the term "PS1" from here on out, despite it being anachronistic at this point) truly feel like it was the start of a new generation. In just two days the PS1 would sell more consoles than the Saturn was able to muster in five months, nearly selling out of the initial batch of 100,000 units produced. Despite some attempts at making a comeback being planned, Sega of America & the Saturn was already on life support & instantly became a distant second place to the seemingly overnight success of the PS1.

Oh, wait... wasn't this supposed to be about the Atari Jaguar?

Needless to say, Atari Corporation was more or less boned with the launch of the PlayStation, and in those same initial two days of it being on sale in North America the PS1 had sold more or less the same amount of consoles that the Jaguar had sold in two years! Atari Corp. (kind-of-sort-of) responded to the PS1's North American launch, though, with the long-promised release of the Atari Jaguar CD add-on on September 21, 1995, complete with two pack-in games, Blue Lightning (a remake of the Atari Lynx's pack-in game) & Vid Grid (a port of a year-old music video puzzle game for Windows); the PS1, notably, had no pack-in title. I'll bring up Jag CD games as they release during this series, but they won't get covered here; maybe after I finish this main series (& all CD games become fully playable via the Jaguar Game Drive). Needless to say, though, the Jag CD was literally nothing more than a CD-ROM drive so that the console could play games released on that medium, plus Jeff Minter's cool Virtual Light Machine tech, with absolutely no extra hardware to boost the Jag's capabilities; in short, it was more TurboGrafx-CD than Sega CD. Also, the Jaguar CD literally made the console look like a small black toilet when attached (especially once the Memory Track cartridge was inserted in the back end, for saving), which definitely didn't help matters any. However, games still would come out on cartridge for the Atari Jaguar, and while the PS1 was wowing everyone as the "new hotness", including Europe once it launched over there on September 29, the Jag was eventually paid a visit in mid-October by an old (& "busted"?) friend of its great-grandfather, the 2600.

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light: All the Japanese with Their Yen Pay for the Additional Footage

Looking back, it's kind of a miracle that the late Kazuo "Kazuki" Takahashi wound up being not just a successful mangaka, but created one of the most enduring trading card games of all time. His first manga one-shot was published back in 1981, he wouldn't have a serialized manga until he was picked to adapt the TV anime Go-Q-Choji Ikkiman in 1986, and his first few series in Weekly Shonen Jump in the 90s were all (by his own admission) "total flops". In fact, even when Takahashi first debuted Yu-Gi-Oh!/The King of Games! in late 1996 it, too, was also on the verge of cancellation after just over a year in; according to mangaka Yasuaki Kita, it was down to either his Makuhari or Yu-Gi-Oh!, & Makuhari lost. Luckily, there was reader interest in a card game Takahashi had featured on two occasions during this early run, so it was decided that Takahashi would move focus solely to that game for the manga moving forward... and the rest is history. To be fair, Toei Animation's "Season 0" TV anime was also likely already in pre-production by the time the manga was on the verge of cancellation, so that may have played a factor in the manga being given a lifeline, too.

Regardless, Yu-Gi-Oh! would go on to run until early 2004 for 343 chapters across 38 volumes (making it Jump's 20th longest manga of all time), and that card game Takahashi showcased early on (first named Magic & Wizards, later renamed Duel Monsters) would go on to inspire the real life Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game in 1999 (2002 abroad), which in 2009 was named the top selling TCG in the world & is still going strong to this day. In fact, after the finale of the second YGO! anime produced in 2004 (the one that was done by Studio Gallop & did see international release), the franchise has continued on telling original stories, all with the direct intent to promote the TCG & the various new rules, gimmicks, & cards that each new series introduces; currently the franchise is on its seventh such spin-off (& ninth TV anime, overall), 2022's Yu-Gi-Oh! Go Rush!!. Also, it can't be stated just how instantly popular Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters was when 4Kids debuted its localized adaptation on Kids' WB on September 29, 2001, becoming such a smash hit that it was decided to create a theatrical anime... made for North America first.

In July of 2003 Warner Bros. announced that it got distribution rights for a movie based on Yu-Gi-Oh!, to follow up the success the first three Pokémon movies had previously been, & on August 13, 2004 Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie debuted in American theaters, earning over $9.4 million in its first weekend alone (though that only got it 4th place in the box office), before eventually earning a total of ~$29.2 million worldwide; until Dragon Ball Super: Broly in 2018, this was the third-highest grossing anime film in North America (with over $19.7 million). However, the movie allegedly cost ~$20 million to produce, so it was considered a box office bomb, and the critical reception wasn't any better, quickly becoming one of the worst received animated films of all time in North America. Afterwards, the film saw release in Japan, now renamed Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters: Hikari no Pyramid/Pyramid of Light (the subtitle is technically in the English version too, but is almost never actually referred to when the title is stated), and though English Wikipedia cites a theatrical release on November 3, 2004, Japanese Wikipedia says that such a screening was done only once via invite. Instead, Pyramid of Light was widely shown in Japan as a TV special on January 2, 2005 (by this point Yu-Gi-Oh! GX was airing in Japan), and to help make the film fit within the two-hour time slot it was given (including commercials) an additional 13 minutes of animation was produced exclusively for the Japanese version, bumping the run time up from 89 minutes to 102. Now, to be fair, this technically wasn't the first Yu-Gi-Oh! movie, as "Season 0" did have a movie in 1999, but that was just a half-hour production shown as part of a triple-feature, alongside the original Digimon Adventure movie & the 10th Dr. Slump movie.

While Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie has since seen a handful of re-releases in its original English form, even getting a two-night remastered theatrical release in March of 2018 by Fathom Events, the longer Pyramid of Light version has remained exclusive to Japan, even though the OG Duel Monsters anime has long since been made officially available with English subtitles via streaming. So, since I'm on a bit of a toy/game-based theatrical anime kick after that Beyblade "Double Feature", let's lay down some monster, spell, & trap cards before ending our turns & check out this now infamous entry in the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise. While this review will primarily be about its lesser known extended Japanese form, I'll also go over the more widely known original English form to some extent later on, mainly for comparison's sake.

"Ore no Turn! DRAW!!" (Sorry, but I couldn't help myself)