Chow Yun Fat is Master Roshi

From Anime News Network.

This DBZ movie is getting really weird.

Dragon Ball Z MMO

I would have thought this happened already, but perhaps that’s my fond memories of my brief stint with Bid for Power some years back.

BFP is the first thing I thought of when I saw this, but this is an entirely different (and entirely avec Toryiama legit) project. You can create your character as a child from either the Saiyan, Namek or Human races, and the child will grow up as the game progresses.

Seems interesting, but I’ll probably never play it. Chances of it coming to the US are slim, but not impossible. DBZ is still pretty popular in the west, but it’s nowhere near popular enough to make a dent in WoW in the MMO space–or even FFXI for that matter. I won’t be spending money to import it either, despite my efforts to be learning Japanese.

It’s coming!

I’ll explain.

Animation has changed my life on more than one occasion.

I honestly can’t remember the first time I saw a Disney movie, but whatever it was it was the beginning spark of my creativity. Disney movies back then were so different from the stuff that was on TV it was mindblowing at the time. Ninja Turtles was my first exposure to an action show, and Inspector Gadget is another of my childhood favourites.

After I got a little older and entered high school at 11, this was around the time when the internet was starting to become mainstream. I was exposed to Dragon Ball Z. I had never seen the show before then, but friends of mine would always talk about it. In later years, my friends and I would go on to download every single Dragonball/Z/GT episode onto the school’s computers, and we watched every one of them.

Soon after graduating and starting college, I was exposed to fansubs. And this really expanded my animation horizons to a much wider range of what’s out there. RahXephon was one of the first few anime I was into on fansubs, but up until that point I was just under the impression that anime was ‘cool’. After all, all I had seen up until then was Cartoon Network/kid’s WB stuff. When I got into college, a new friend exposed me to fansubs, and I started out with RahXephon, Zone of the Enders and another show I can’t remember. RahXephon in particular blasted open my view and appreciation of anime, and remains at the top of my all-time favourite list. I have a gorgeous box set that contains all the DVDs and the movie, possibly my most prized DVDs.

So my growing-by-the-gigabyte anime collection, and even some of the non-Japanese animated shows on TV are really fascinating with their quality and the range of emotions/genres they stretch across. If I didn’t have the exposure that I had now, I would probably think that animation could never be as deep or emotionally involving as watching real people or reading something, but I know from experience that is not the case at all.

Another anime horizon broadened

So I have these two games for the Nintendo DS: Jump! Super Stars and Jump! Ultimate Stars. The game being entirely Japanese, I went straight to Gamefaqs.com to look up some guides for them.

I was quite surprised to see how many different manga were represented in the game. At this point, I knew Shonen Jump was responsible for the likes of Dragon Ball Z and Naruto, but I discovered that some other properties like Ruroni Kenshin and Yu Gi Oh were part of it as well. Not only that, but there were *tons* of different things I had never even heard about.

I was never much into comics or manga, but these games piqued my interest. After all, with so many characters in a fighting game that I knew nothing about, it would do good to do some research on them. So I browsed the ‘net, managed to find a few scanslations of some manga and was pretty impressed. Not impressed enough to keep reading, but I knew the most basic elements each manga and its characters.

What this also did was expose me to some new anime that had just started in Japan. The anime Black Cat–which was also a Shonen Jump manga and is coming out on US DVD soon–was just starting at that time, so I followed that through to the end and it was very enjoyable. Right now, I’m downloading Busou Renkin, Gintama and Death Note (highly reccomended), all which are quite entertaining in their own right.

I also learned of the ‘purpose’ of Shonen Jump, and I have a greater tolerance of their sometimes simple themes. Most, if not all of the manga properties are based on the values of Friendship, Effort, and Victory. Basically if you try hard, keep good friends, you will win. This is fairly obvious in DBZ and most other properties, as the heroes always get into the predictable flow that I’m sure you’re familiar with. It all serves to reinforce these values, and after all the “Shonen” in Shonen Jump means “young boy”. It’s like inspirational stuff to install these values into the young boys.

So, these two games have expanded my anime knowledge and viewing range. and if I see any more new anime that I recognise from these games I’ll be sure to give them a shot. If you have a DS and are looking to import a title, Jump! Ultimate Stars (the newer one) is one of the best you can go for.

Trix is here.

I’m just a guy living in the middle of nowhere (Bermuda), who loves video games and anime. I’m also into technology related stuff, but games and anime are more of my expertise.

It was in late 2001 when I really started getting deep into video games and anime: I had some income so I bought a Gamecube, and I started downloading unlicensed fansubs of some anime. I’ve actually missed most things gaming-and-anime-related that happened before 2001.

Gaming-wise, I like to say that the NES came out the same year I did. My dad got one a few months after I was born, for himself, and that was the only console I had up until 2001, when I bought myself a Gamecube. I have had all of the gameboys, but no SNES, Genesis, PS1… you get the deal. So this means I had never played any Final Fantasy, never played Zelda, or most other big old-school games.

On the anime front, I had *seen* anime before, but didn’t know what exactly it was. There was a religious program called ‘Superbook’, that was probably my first anime. My parents didn’t let me get into Transformers, because at the time there was a big stink about Evolution and religion, and Transformers were the devil. Later on in life, I saw Dragon Ball Z on Cartoon Network, and that is what sparked my true interest in anime. It wasn’t until 2001 that my world was blasted open by the internet, and digital fansubs became a part of my life.

Still, before 2001 all I had was what was on Cartoon Network. To put into perspective how much stuff I missed, I only watched Evangelion for the first time in November of 2006.

My game/anime fandom is stronger than ever now. I actually went to Japan, by myself, in September 2006. I participated in the Tokyo Game Show (there were more people in those 3 warehouses than there were in my entire country), watched some raw anime on local TV, and took in a few of the historical sites in and around Tokyo. A few highlights were: visiting Toshogu Shrine, meeting Hideo Kojima, and beating some Japanese people in Virtua Fighter 5.
So there’s a brief history of my history. Please pardon any future comments on stuff that I may think is the newest, most innovative best-thing-ever, but has actually been around for a long time. Because I probably missed it. Your comments will definitely be appreciated, and will aid in my own education in these fields as well.