When I was just getting into watching anime on a heavy routine (and when I could afford to pay for it with my own allowance) there some titles that I thought could have made for a great video game. Bio Booster Armour Guyver, released under Manga Entertainment, was one of the first anime titles I bought with my own money, and it was some great, old-school, Japanimation-styled action; super violent and gory, loads of profanity, a really catchy, localized soundtrack. It was everything a 12 year old should not have been watching, but I loved every minute of it. I also loved to play video games, and something me and my friends always talked about was how great some of our cartoons would make awesome action titles on the SNES, Genesis, and Playstation. It wasn't uncommon for corporations to slap a label on some mediocre product, print Toy Story on a SNES cartridge, and throw it in my local KayBee Toys store, and watch the masses eat it up. But this never stopped me from imagining the seemingly endless possibilities, especially with anime, about how great one of your favorite titles could translate into a captivating, if not great, video game. Something like the Guyver had the foundation for a really cool side scrolling beat-em-up, like Final Fight or Streets of Rage. It's my theory that this could've been a possibility, but developers did research on The Guyver and found the Mark Hamill film, thinking "Yeah, we can't do anything with this garbage.".
In the late 90's, anime hit it big in this country, thanks to titles like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, and the two hour Toonami block on Cartoon Network, that blended older shows like Voltron and Sailor Moon with (relatively) newer, repackaged titles like Dragonball Z for the viewing audience. This explosion created lots of money-making options out there, and soon enough, I was seeing anime tiles available on my PSX, like the Gundam Battle Assault series, Dragonball GT Final Bout, and Power Stone for the Sega Dreamcast.
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A handful of anime titles came out for the SNES, like Mystical Ninja and Ranma Hard Battle, but those were released to an unwitting audience, so I got the feeling that someone was ahead of their time.
Throughout most of the PS2's tenure saw a great deal of games that were capitalizing of this cross promotion, for lack of a better term, and these games were literally coming out of nowhere. A Full Metal Alchemist series, two Eureka Seven games that have a pretty good original story that loosely coincides with the TV show, Hajime No Ippo (dubbed Victorious Boxers), Orphen: Scion of Sorcery, and the list goes on!! I played a lot of these games early on, but trailed off a little bit, and from what I remember, some of these games were not very good, or at the very least hollow.
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Robotech for the PS2, for instance, is a pretty serviceable game, but something that by all means should have been a lot more satisfying from a gameplay perspective. The Vector Units are capable of three different forms for combat, but it's only fun to play as one of them (jet mode), since you don't feel like a sitting target with no agilty!! Made even worse is that for some missions, you need to use the Guardian mode for escort duties!! Unplayable? No, but certainly is a bit lackluster and fails to leave any kind of impression on you once you are done with it. And keep in mind, that's one of the good ones!
This has become a recurring trend in some of these games, and it becomes more apparent that more I play them since I have started to review games. In some instances, it feels like there is a good deal of effort put into the game mechanics (The Naruto Ultimate Ninja Series and some of the Dragonball Z Budakai and Tenkaiichi games) and lots of extras to keep you interested, while being a user friendly game that isn't too advanced given it's target audience. But why dumb down the play style to the point that the characters don't feel all that different? It always feels like these anime-based games could be something more, perhaps something that could be on par with bigger games within the same genre. Maybe a Bleach game can hold a candle to a veteran series like Tekken. Or is it that much more important to usher these games before their fleeting popularity wanes? Do you feel satisfied when completing a chapter in Shaman King Power Of Spirit, or do you feel a little bit short-changed that you weren't truly challenged enough? Do these games really feel like video games, or are the simply novelty items masquerading as video games? Seeing as how most of these titles, at full price, were generally 15% cheaper than, say, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, leads me to believe that there was a period that these developers didn't care what kind of product they were putting out, so as long as it's target audience bought it.
This has become an interesting endeavor for me to look into more in depth. No, I don't intend of burying anyone's particular favorites, and while my opinions regarding certain anime titles are biased, I look at these entries from a gamer's mentality. Some of my other posts seemed to go nowhere, mostly because of some drastic changes I had to make in life, but I'm for realz about wanting to do this regularly.
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