Video Game Tuesday: Musou Games are Great

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’ve got an opinion piece on a very specific game type. It’s all about why I think Musou Games are Great!

Musou Games?: Musou is the Japanese word for the Dynasty Warriors franchise and it’s variou spin-offs. It’s also the type of game the series has come to represent. An endless hack and slash where you take over territories on a map as a “Hero” of some sort against hordes of unending waves of trash mobs that often die in one or two hits. There have been tons of various spin-offs and “crossovers” from the Zelda series to One Piece. They typically are really repetitive games to play as well, and the story you experience isn’t all that great. It’s either told in a terrible way, or it just has a really crappy story over all.

Wait so how are Musou Games Great than?!?: Well they are really good at one thing. Stress testing hardware. If you want to really test your hardware, be it console or PC, a Musou game is a great way to do it. The unending waves of trash mobs are great to really test how your GPU, CPU and RAM handle them. For instance I could pop in the Gundam Musou game I got for my Xbox 360 on a whim for incredibly cheap during a game store’s store closing sale, and let a ton of enemies spawn in a territory. How long would it take my Xbox 360 to start lagging? How long does it take for it to crash? How long, and no I obviously never tested this far I am rather poor and wasting a perfectly good console is just stupid, till it fries my system completely? These are all answers you can get from playing a Musou game. Well I assume that’s the case for the last one, as I remember learning once the hard way about making damn sure how many polygons I’m adding to a 3D model. See if you accidentally add 10,000 instead of 100 or 1,000 polys to a model it could, at the time which was admittedly a decade ago, utterly ruin someone’s graphics card or entire motherboard from overworking it. So I learned really quick, and thankfully didn’t destroy my computer. However it’s the same principal, all those enemies have polygons, even if just a small amount to save on processing power. Musou games are programmed so that you have endlessly spawning enemies until you claim an area. This isn’t even accounting for the same amount spawning in your already claimed areas to attack enemy ones.

That’s what makes Musou games great. That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.

Anime Sunday: Long Running Series’ Issues

This week for Anime Sunday I’m covering an topic I find amusing and disappointing at the same time. It’s Long Running Series’ Issues!

What do I mean long running series?: I mean any series that airs weekly (minus any holidays that would preclude them airing) and has been doing so for more than half a year. This may mean that they have been running since they first aired, or it’s just a full years worth of episodes. Either way they often run into the same problems, although the latter is less likely to have one of them.

Filler: As any diehard Anime fan will tell you, filler is the bane of all long running shows and is the reason why One Piece is consistently at the top in terms of suggestions. That isn’t to mean One Piece isn’t without it’s faults, but it doesn’t do filler anymore and those arcs it did were short and sweet and weren’t bad. One Piece has another issue entirely which is almost the complete opposite of filler, it has a Chapter to Episode ratio of 1:1 which leads to episodes taking things cut from the Manga which leads to a slowdown in terms of action and plot pacing which leads to people feeling it takes forever.

Animation Gaffs: Pictured above is one of the more well known animation gaffs from Naruto, a show which has tons of them. One Piece does as well, if you compare the Manga to the Anime the quality in backgrounds is generally very noticeably different with the Manga having much crisper and more quality backgrounds. Bleach when it aired had it’s shares of gaffs as well. Any Anime will probably have a gaff or two, but they aren’t nearly as frequent or bad as long running series.

That’s it for this week’s Anime Sunday? What are some of your favorite Animation Gaffs or most hated filler arcs? Leave a comment below!

 

Manga Monday: How Come It’s Not Out This Week? An Explanation

I’m back with an answer to a question I hear asked all the time in person and on the internet for this week’s Manga Monday! It’s all about why your favorite series are not out yet!

Golden Week: First off this is the one most people don’t understand, Golden Week is a series of Holidays that all take place in the space of a single week in Japan. Almost no one works and it’s essentially a week long break for just about everyone. So magazines and publications that are published weekly aren’t published that week. Golden Week takes place at the end of April and beginning of May.

(Insert Publisher Name)’s Annual Break: Lots of companies have a single week where they and their company take a break from their weekly publications. This isn’t any big issue and stuff hasn’t happened to your series, it just is a weekly break for the Mangaka (Manga authors/artists) who work themselves to the point of exhaustion the rest of the  year. 

Hiatuses: That all being said some series just aren’t being serialized at the moment anymore, but they aren’t axed either. Some notable series that this has happened to are Hunter x Hunter and D. Gray Man, who have been on Indefinite Hiatus for years as of this writing (I don’t count the one chapter that D. Gray Man had released earlier this year as being re-serialized.) Most times this is due to the poor health of the Mangaka. Other times it’s because their Mangaka need time to do some research or need to come up with so many new things to draw that they don’t have the time to keep being published while keeping their quality up. Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece have all done this before and are probably the easiest and most notable examples.

Axed?: It’s a slang term for being discontinued due to poor sales, it most frequently happens to series published by Shueisha because of their incredibly hard and difficult requirements for staying serialized. Things like Iron Knight, which I personally enjoyed, were axed due to being unpopular.

That’s it for this week’s Manga Monday! I hope that answers some questions you may have had!

Retro Game Friday: Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne [Spoilers for Reign of Chaos]

This week on Retro Game Friday I’m going to talk about one of my favorite all time PC/Mac games ever, Warcraft III The Frozen Throne.  Spoilers after the jump

Manga Monday: One Piece by Eiichiro Oda

 

So for my first real post on this site I figured I’d talk about my all time favorite Manga/Anime Series ever, One Piece by Eiichiro Oda. One Piece is a Shounen series, meaning its aimed at for young male teens. However just because it’s a Shounen series don’t let that make you think its a typical kiddie series.

Summary: A story following a young man named Luffy and his crew on a journey to become King of the Pirates.

 

If you were like me and grew up in the age of after-school anime on Cartoon Network you might remember watching One Piece on TV and thinking it was stupid. You’d have been right, because it was being dubbed by 4Kids Entertainment, a company who I thoroughly hate for its rampant use of Censorship. 

On the left is the 4Kids version of One Piece. On the right is the original uncensored version. I mean come on what the fuck is he using? A shower head to threaten someone?

 

Despite that when I went to college many years later and was dealing with a bout of Depression I went back and watched the first few episodes of One Piece in the original Japanese with Subs. Needless to say I was hooked, like I am for any story once I start it. 

The series starts off a little slow, something to be expected from a series that started over 17 years ago. However if you can get to the Arlong Arc, which is about 40 episodes into the series, you will get to the real meat of the series.  

For those who like: Shounen series, comedy, drama, epic battles, AMAZING Characters, an author who never forgets anything and uses Chekovs gun like a boss.

Not for those who don’t like: A slow starting series, comedy, stuff that isn’t in HD at the very beginning. 

Suggested Viewing Language: Japanese with English subtitles.