Categoria: Manga

Fist Of The North Star: Ken’s Rage 2 X360 [REVIEW] | You Should Have Left The Bronx

The first Ken’s Rage sold relatively well, and it’s Koei, so we got a sequel 3 years later.

Which would be fine, until you realize what it actually implies in this case, and i don’t mean it simply being released to coincide with the series 30th anniversary.

That is something else entirely that ultimately condemns Ken’s Rage 2, but the main issue is that you just can’t do what Dynasty Warriors does with Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, as the source material for that leaves it open to the real historical characters being reinvented or changed, on what of the many events (historical or pure fiction like the many uses of magic) focus more the narrative, while keeping focus on the essential battles and significant achievements of the warring factions, and their part in the path to the unification of China after the fall of the Han dynasty.

You can’t just re-imagine Kenshiro, his friends and foes, as they have all distinct personalities, distinct character designs, signature moves and Fist Of The North Star’s popularity never really waned in 30 and plus years, so people still are quite well aware of it. On the other hand, you could hardly justify making a sequel when the first game stopped at the end of the Raoh’s story arc.

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R.I.P. Kentaro Miura

Just woke up to this horrible news.

We all joked about the endless hiatuses and how it looked like Miura could more easily die of old age before finishing the series due to very slow release of new chapters.

Even he did.

But apparently an aneurism at the aorta took him last night, at 54.

While i salute him and i do the notes of Susumu Hirasawa’s works based on Miura’s crowning achievement, i do HAVE to point out how the manga industry shouldn’t treat people like it does, like printing machines, and how sick is that fans themselves would rather drum up conspiracies or joke about them “wasting time” on a videogame or another series (in Miura’s case, The Idolmaster), instead of accepting that these slow release schedules it’s because manga authors are worked to burnout.

I mean, do i really have to bring up Hunter X Hunter and Togashi’s health, how he basically almost broke before finishing Yu Yu Hakusho, and that he basically has to fight his own humungous mental burden to make new chapters, before snapping back into a distressed, burnout state. Because you can’t “unburn” yourself easily, jesus.

So, maybe instead of just sharing how sad it makes to see your favourite author passing away, you can try NOT to side with the very industry that breaks them to the point of burnout of death. Or lament yourself how having to wait for new chapters is worse than 5 murders, and call people worked to the bone “lazy”.

Fist Of The North Star: Ken’s Rage X360 [REVIEW] | Ai Wo Torimodose!!

I’ve been wanting to revisit the Ken’s Rage series for a while, especially because it seems like a no-brainer to make a Warriors style game about one of the most beloved shonen series of the 80s, Fist Of The North Star, with Kenshiro and his cast of powerful, larger than life foes, with more post-apocalyptic muscle mountains and the array of martial arts that explode people from the inside, cure them from all ailments, and do whatever insane mystical, awesome bullshit they do.

Not that Fist Of The North Star lacks videogames based upon it, but aside from the first NES game (released without the FOTNS license as Black Belt), most of them never left Japan, or did reworked due to licensing into something else. In either case, here in Europe we almost got nothing of that for decades, so Ken’s Rage was actually a nice treat for starving fans that wanted to experience Kenshiro’s post-apocaliptic odyssey in videogame form on their modern consoles.

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[EXPRESSO] Homunculus (2021) | A Man In Your Head

Did you know they made a live-action adaptation of Hideo Yamamoto’s beloved cult manga … no, not Ichi The Killer, Homunculus, directed by Ju-On/The Grudge creator Takashi Shimizu, and it just released internationally at the end of april as a Netflix esclusive?

I didn’t, had to find out via good ol’ FreddyInSpace via twitter, and he himself didn’t notice earlier, because this is indeed one of the downsides of the “content machine” streaming service model.

Homunculus is about Susumu Nakoshi, an amnesiac and emotionally stunted clochard who decides to be the guinea pig for the rich medical student Manabu Ito, interested in experimenting to see if drilling the skull of a man could awaken otherwise unaccessible or dormant senses, as well as recoving memories or activate esp powers.

The experiment goes well, too well, as Susumu is now able to see – while covering his right eye – the titular homonculi, possibly physical manifestations of the human mind’s most intimate and recondite desires, traumas and symbolic projections of selves (a man split in two halves walking side by side, a sand girl, etc).

While it retains most elements from manga and for the first half it’s fairly faithful adaptation, halfway through it strays further and further, as things take a twist for the mundane, squandering the potential given by the source material on generic drama, making for less interesting characters and events. Even the borrowed odd visuals feel underwhelming or underused.

It’s not a bad movie or a complete failure, but it’s a really disappointing adaptation (especially because this could actually have worked in a live-action context), and worse, even taken on its own it’s just a movie unable to do or properly develop pretty much anything of substance in its 2 hours run, leading to a fittingly unsatisfactory ending.

EX-ARM anime (2021) [REVIEW] | Make the bad guys cry like….

I knew of Ex-Arm before the series was announced, as in i red the first volume of the manga, and thought that was.. alright.

Then in early november 2020 i discovered there was an anime planned for it, and apparently it was supposed to launch earlier, but got delayed a couple of times, post-poned until its January 2021 release on Crunchyroll, as one of their “Crunchyroll Originals” exclusive projects.

I heard about it on Twitter, alongside many baffled comments on why the hell is a live-action director with no experience in anime directing a 3D CG anime and also tasking a production company that also has no experience in anime… and i immediatly knew i would just “have” to review it, to witness the monstrum and write a report about what could be found in its wretched bowels.

Get confortable, as this autopsy-review will examine all the guts and decomposed organs, and there’s a LOT of those to rifle through with this one!

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Yuru Camp/Laid Back Camp (Season Two) (2021) [REVIEW] | A Comf Supreme

I’ve been waiting for a second season of Yuru Camp for 3 years, like most fans of the series, and i was ready to “jump on it” as soon it was announced, Room Camp was nice and served its purpose, but my lust for more comforting camping and anime girls being cozy in a world where you still can.

Not that i was gonna go camping anyway even without the pandemic thing, at least not in the japanese mountains, probably i would have stayed at home and catched up with the episodes late at night after work, with a blanket and hot cocoa, just to enhance the experience. 🙂

Given the nature of the show and the fact i “recently” reviewed the first season and the short spin-off series, i won’t be going over what the series is about in detail or attempt a plot summary because i would need to describe what happens in every single episodes, and still, it wouldn’t work because it’s a slice of life about camping, with 5 young girls going around and “relax to the max” with said outdoor activity and all that it entails.

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Cells At Work – BLACK (2021) [REVIEW] | Defective Form

I planned to review this TV adaptation of the Cell At Work spin-off series Black Code, as i heard the second season was delayed to summer 2021…. but clearly i was wrong, as both the oddly short second season of the main series AND the spin-off series started airing back to back in early January… so that threw me a curveball, as i was planning to revisit the first season of Cells At Work before the second one hit, but still, i’m reviewing this in detail, i’ll get to the main series eventually.

Regardless, it’s even better, since using anime to guilt-trip people into having a more healthy lifestyle is a proper “thing”, and it’s beautiful.

I loved the first season, it was absurd but also a very fun way to combine the old french edutaiment series “Once Upon A Life…Time” (or Micro Patrol, if you lived in an European country in the 90s you mostly likely have seen or heard of it at some point, it’s quite famous even in Italy) into a shonen manga format, so your body is basically a city-temple where every cell exists for a purpose, be it carrying packages of oxygen to the lungs, keeping track of information, and each episode it faces a new treat, usually viruses that are quite stabbable by the white blood cells, as they lunge with knives at the bacteria like a fuckin Hellsing villain. Gotta love how the violence is basically pardoned by the educational facts about cells, how the body deals with extraneous material, etc.

And how you basically have plenty of antrophormic Amazon delivery people taking drinks from the vending machines that are inside of you. Lucky bastards?

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Azur Lane: Slow Ahead (2021) [REVIEW] | Slice O’ Boat

Might as well, since that second season or second adaptation of the Kancolle anime is still nowhere to be seen, so once again Azur Lane will outright “eat its lunch”.

And i did already review the previous Azur Lane anime adaptation, so i feel kinda obliged to cover this one as well. Not that it shares a direct connection, as it adapts an on-going Azur Lane 4-koma slice of life manga, Slow Ahead, which omits the whole “kriegsmarine” (and annexed wave ruling) aspect of the franchise and just focuses on the daily lives of the shipgirls living in the Azur Lane base, taking as main characters the girls’ quartet of Laffey, Z23, Ayanami and Javelin.

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