Category: September

Discussing The Exciting But Not Straightforward Nvidia Games Leaks

Published September 30, 2021

I was perusing some gaming websites, in particular PC Gamer, and I came across a news story that momentarily got me incredibly excited. It turned out that a developer named Ighor July managed to find a complete list of games within the GeForce Now database which included some games that were recently announced and, much more interestingly, numerous games that have never been announced! The sheer number of games that were potentially leaked is unbelievable and near unprecedented. However, several details have since surfaced that have both confirmed the validity of these leaks as well as how some of these games may not actually be in development. Therefore, I thought it worth discussing the exciting but not straightforward Nvidia games leaks.

First, I should give some background on these leaks. GeForce Now is a cloud gaming service run by Nvidia allowing users to play a variety of games for a subscription as well as some games you own under a “bring your own games” system. According to Ighor’s own blog post on Medium, he accessed the console.log when you download GeForce Now, found app configurations and used them to fetch “the list of all of the games from GFN servers”. This resulted in a list of over 18,000 games which included a lot of game development applications but, more importantly for this article, also included numerous games that haven’t been announced yet.

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The Incredible Importance of the Year 24 Group

Published September 27, 2021

Having recently spoken about the history of the medium of manga as well as the gekiga movement, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the incredible importance of the Year 24 Group, whom I’ve spoken about before in plenty of articles but have never dedicated an article to.

Let’s begin by discussing their name as well as how it’s also a bit of a misnomer. The name “Year 24 Group” refers to the year Shōwa 24 which is equivalent to 1949 in the Gregorian calendar. The implication here is that the women who made up the Year 24 Group were all born in 1949, something that only applied to a few of them. The name also makes you think that they were a collective who all worked together but, in reality, the term merely categorises a group of women who were born around the same time that would go on to reinterpret what shojo manga was.

Various characters drawn by the Year 24 Group. — A collage of characters from Year 24 Group manga.

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An Overview Of The Ghost In The Shell Franchise

Published September 23, 2021

I’ve recently been reviewing the Ghost in the Shell manga on my YouTube channel and it has truly surprised me how different the Ghost in the Shell manga can be compared to the anime films and TV series that I’ve watched. Whereas I tended to think of Ghost in the Shell predominantly as an anime franchise, which in many ways it is, this experience has made me think about the Ghost in the Shell series as a whole and I recently decided that it was time that I provide an overview of the Ghost in the Shell franchise.

Of course, the most logical place to start with an overview of the Ghost in the Shell franchise is the original manga that started it all. Originally serialised from 1989-1991, Ghost in the Shell was written by Shirow Masamune, who previously got his start by drawing an original doujinshi story. The manga is set in the near future and follows Section 9, a special division of the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs that deals with cyberterrorism and cybercrime. While Section 9 is made up of many members, we predominantly follow Motoko Kusanagi, often simply referred to as “The Major”, as she investigates a series of seemingly unrelated events that are not what they first appear to be.

The cover for the first manga volume of Ghost in the Shell.

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Japanese Words That Are Used Surprisingly Differently In Other Languages

Published September 20, 2021

I’ve always found the differences between the Japanese language and other languages to be particularly fascinating. I’ve touched on this before when I discussed “Literal Vs Adaptive Translation: Which Is Better?” and brought up the fact that English and Japanese are from two completely differently language families, meaning that many Japanese sentences can be translated in multiple ways and still be “correct”. However, something that I’ve wanted to discuss for a while are Japanese words that are used surprisingly differently in other languages.

The first word I would like to take a look at is a word that I’m sure many of you are intimately familiar with, anime. Written as アニメ in Japanese, notably in katakana to denote that it’s a foreign word, the word anime is an abbreviation of the Japanese word for animation, アニメーション, which in and of itself is a loanword from English. However, what I find quite interesting is the difference in the use of the word anime between Japanese and other languages. Outside of Japan, the term anime is used specifically to refer to animation that is produced in Japan, albeit with some entities trying to change that definition, while in Japan, the term anime actually refers to any and all forms of animation. I’ve noticed that some people struggle with this concept, the idea of anime referring to anything animated probably seems preposterous, but that doesn’t change the fact that that is what the word means in Japan.

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Compilation Of Final Fantasy VII: An Unusual And Weird Subseries

Published September 16, 2021

When it comes to the Final Fantasy franchise, there can be no doubt the success and impact that Final Fantasy VII has had. Credited with popularising role-playing video games on consoles in the Western market, the game has also proven to be the bestselling in the series with an estimated 12.8 million copies sold as of 2020. While I’m not quite as fanatical about Final Fantasy VII as some people, I still acknowledge how important it was and have ranked it as my fourth favourite main Final Fantasy game. Despite the Final Fantasy franchise being an anthology series with each entry featuring a new world, characters and story bound together by similar themes and gameplay, Square Enix couldn’t let the success of Final Fantasy VII go and decided to create a subseries called “Compilation of Final Fantasy VII” which has included a variety of unusual and weird spin-offs.

Despite the original Final Fantasy VII being released in 1997, it took 7 years for the first entry in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII to be produced with the release of Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII in 2004. Produced for mobile devices, specifically FOMA (Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access), Before Crisis takes place before the events of Final Fantasy VII and follows the Turks, a group that works as intel and investigative operatives for Shinra, and follows their conflicts with Avalanche. The game proved to be highly successful in Japan but was never released in the West, making it the only major entry in Compilation of Final Fantasy VII to not be released outside of Japan.

The logo for Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII.

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The Interesting History Of The Gekiga Movement

Published September 13, 2021

I recently wrote an article titled “The Amazing History Of The Medium Of Manga” and during that article, I decided to devote a paragraph to the gekiga movement. However, when I was perusing my older articles, I realised that, despite mentioning them several times, I’d never written an entire article devoted to gekiga. Therefore, I decided that it was important that I quickly rectify this and write about the interesting history of the gekiga movement.

In order to explain the gekiga movement, I first need to explain the reason why they came about in the first place. Prior to the rise of gekiga, manga was predominantly aimed at children and avoided topics and themes that would be considered too adult. One of the first mangaka to express his disapproval of this was the legendary Yoshihiro Tatsumi who would go on to coin the term “Gekiga” in 1957 which replaced the character 漫 in the word 漫画 (manga which literally translates as whimsical pictures) with the character 劇 to create 劇画 (gekiga which literally translates as dramatic pictures).

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the man most credited with founding the gekiga movement.

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The Fascinating Career Of The Legendary Hideaki Anno

Published September 9, 2021

I recently wrote about Hideaki Anno and his passion for Japanese popular culture and I mentioned the possibility of discussing his filmography someday. Considering how positively that article has been received, I’ve decided to take a look at the legendary Hideaki Anno, his fascinating career and his impact on the anime industry.

While I’m going to be focusing predominantly on series and films that Hideaki Anno directed, I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss his career prior to directing. Ever since Hideaki Anno was a child, he’d always been interested in art and film, to the point of being considered a “problem child“. He later attended the Osaka University of Arts and ended up working as an animator on Super Dimension Fortress Macross. He was eventually kicked out of the Osaka University of Arts for not paying his tuition but not before he teamed up with a number of other students to create “Daicon III and IV Opening Animations”, short anime films that were made on a shoestring budget in a friend’s house. He eventually went to work on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind under Hayao Miyazaki where he was assigned the task of working on the God Warrior, a very complicated scene that ended up becoming an impressive set piece in the movie. He, along with the other students who had worked on Daicon III and IV, founded Daicon Film in 1984 which was later renamed as Gainax.

The cover for the Daicon IV Opening Animation.

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Some Of The Most Important Kaiju Films And Franchises

Published September 6, 2021

If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you’ll probably know that I’ve been on something of a kaiju kick, recently watching the 15 Showa Godzilla movies and Shin Godzilla and recently starting the Gamera franchise. While I’ve talked about the Godzilla franchise before as well as touching on tokusatsu, the genre of which kaiju is a subgenre of, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the most important kaiju films and franchises within the genre. However, I should clarify that I’ll only be specifically talking about Japanese kaiju films and franchises. The term is sometimes used to describe non-Japanese giant monster movies such as King Kong and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms so I believe that the clarification is necessary.

Understandably, one of the most noteworthy franchises when it comes to kaiju has to be the Godzilla franchise. However, having already discussed the franchise in its own article, I thought I might use the Godzilla franchise as a jumping off point to discuss various kaiju that initially started out in their own movies before becoming incorporated into the franchise. The earliest example of this would be the 1964 film “Mothra Vs. Godzilla”, a film that pitted Mothra, the star of her own film “Mothra” which was released in 1961, against Godzilla. Within the same year, the film “Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster” not only introduced the brand new King Ghidorah to the franchise but also introduced Rodan who had previously starred in his own film “Rodan” in 1956. Despite both Mothra and Rodan becoming incredibly popular monsters within the Godzilla franchise, Mothra would only get three more of her own films, the “Rebirth of Mothra” trilogy that were released between 1996 and 1998, while Rodan has yet to get another solo film, appearing pretty much exclusively in the Godzilla franchise.

A picture of various kaiju in the 1968 film “Destroy All Monsters”.

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Genres of Video Games Best Played On PC

Published September 2, 2021

I was recently perusing some video game news sites when I heard that Crusader Kings III is being ported to both PS5 and Xbox Series. While I’m not opposed to such a move, allowing video game developers to make more money by releasing their games on other platforms can only be good, I confess that I’m rather confused by how they’ll have the player interact with the game using only a controller. Based on my personal experiences with Paradox games, it’s extremely difficult for me to see how this can be accomplished in a way comparable to the PC version which uses a keyboard and mouse to interact. Taking this into account, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a few genres of video games that I believe are best played on a PC.

Of course, as usual with these articles, I feel that it’s important that I give a disclaimer that the genres of video games that I believe are best played on PC are my own personal opinions. I play all of my games exclusively on PC and I personally consider PC to be the best gaming platform. However, I understand that many people prefer to play on consoles, mobile, etc. and I am not trying to discredit those platforms if those are what you like to use to play video games. However, I do genuinely believe that there are certain video game genres that are a better experience on PC due to the control scheme and I simply wish to share that information.

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